Melonpool – The Motion Picture » Archive

Bridge, Bridge, Bridge

February 11th, 2010

I think I’ve mentioned before that while in high school, most of the cast of “The Melonpool Movie” and I made “Star Trek” movies in my parents garage in our spare time… or maybe I didn’t. That’s a pretty embarrassing thing to admit, isn’t it?

Anyway, while digging through a photo album last night, I came across several pictures of the Bridge set I built for these films — the same set that served as the bridge of “The Steel Duck” a few years later when we made the original puppet movie. I’ve become rather nostalgic for this set as I’ve been working on the new puppet-scaled version. I know that I saved a few of its panels… maybe I’ll include them as Easter Eggs on the new set if I can find them when it comes time to shoot the new film.

In the meantime, enjoy these pictures — including a rather embarrassing picture of me at 16 when I was in the thick of building the set.

: Sulu’s station. His chair never got an upgrade and I never managed to finish all of his controls. What do you expect? It was my brother’s console.

: The viewscreen was painted on a windowshade which could be pulled up to expose a window for filming through. This explains why 95% of our shots were from one angle.

: All of the monitor displays were photocopies from various Star Trek books I had — with the black parts colored in by hand with a Sharpie. That’s what we did before computers.

: Spock’s station at the rear of the set. Plenty of twinkly lights and back-lit displays — a staple of every Troop set (even the one I’m working on now).