Samuli Torssonen's Star Wreck

Running time: 43 minutes

The Potkustart fighting against the Korg, P-Fleet's deadly nemesis.

As Star Wreck V: Lost Contact was actually made before SW4½, it was the first time we used real, live actors instead of animated cartoons.

The 3d modelling used is far more advanced than in the previous episodes, especially in respect to lighting and particle effects. This, combined with higher, TV-standard resolution, allowed for some pretty amazing visual scenes. Star Wreck: Lost Contact was probably the most visually stunning movie made back in those days with such a low budget :-)

The producer and creator of Star Wreck V, Samuli Torssonen posing in front of the "huge" bluescreen.

The Korg cutting beam in action.

The story was adapted from Star Trek: First Contact. The Korg send a ship back in time to strike at humanity before their technology poses any real threat. The Potkustart, being the only functioning P-fleet ship around, has to follow.

The Korg's devious plot is to assassinate rockstar Jeffrey Cochbrane & his band Dethdestro before their concert can attract the attention of a nearby Vulgar patrolcraft. This would stop humanity's first contact with an advanced alien race.

The Korg manage to disrupt the concert, but Jeff survives. It is then up to the Potkustart landing party to find adequate amplification for the guitar hero. Oh, and deal with a few hundred Korg rampant on 20th century Earth as well .

Jeffrey Cochbrane (right) & his band. From right: Rudi Airisto, Petri Lehtinen, Lauri Lepokorpi.

Captain Pirk, sharp as ever. Will blind luck be enough to save humanity's future once again? Because blind luck is certainly all Pirk has on his side... The indecisive captain goes through starships like most people do with socks. Played by Samuli Torssonen.

Commander Dwarf, ready to take on the 20th century. The ever-vigilant tactical officer kicks some mechanical butt, in space as well as on land. Played by Timo Vuorensola and a fake beard.

Mr. Info, our mechanical science officer. He's got the answer for everything, but irritates the hell out of his crewmates. Played by Antti Satama.

Rockstar Jeff Cochbrane. All he wanted was to play loud and drink too much, now they're forcing him to save the world... Played by Rudi Airisto and a pair of cheap sunglasses.

The evil Korg queen, who develops a personal vendetta against Pirk. Played by Nina Karppinen.

Almost every friend of mine took part in the acting. Because none of us had any acting training or experience, the end results varied a lot... Sometimes we just had to make do with smiling Korg drones etc. :-)

Anybody can pick up a 3d model off the internet and do a bit of rendering. However, making a more complex scene with proper flight paths takes a lot more than that. Many of the flics on the net go for the easy option and contain straight-line flight paths, video explosions that look glued-on and "unrealistic" behaviour of familiar ships.

Often you'll see heavy cruisers explode after a single hit, which isn't very faithful to either Star Trek or Babylon 5. I try to avoid these pitfalls in my movies - everything should be as accurate as possible. The visual effects in Star Wreck V no longer meet my expectations so those will be re-rendered some day.

One light P-Fleet attack cruiser tries to save the remote outpost Deep Space 6 from the Korg attack.

Creating a space scene begins with defining the flight paths. First you make a rough version, which is then fine-tuned. It's not uncommon to spend hours on the path of a single spacecraft if the path is complex. Once all these are done, just add some beams, explosions etc. and if necessary, adjust the paths to react to explosions etc.

..and fails miserably.

This is one of the few scenes which were re-rendered on Lightwave 5.6. My initial goal was to re-render every scene for the special edition but due to time constrains I decided to postpone it.

In Star Wreck V: Lost Contact, the effects could be rendered directly into the scene using 3D Studio Max. The beams were Direct Lights with the volumetric option turned on. The lightballs and Korg weaponry were particles with a large glow radius.

As you can see, those beams in Lost Contact should have contained lens flare, but using lens flare was much more complicated in 3D Studio Max 1.2 than in Lightwave. They should have been done in post-production, but it seems that I was too lazy then.

This explosion scene is from Lost Contact, as the Korg cube is destroyed. I used particles to create the explosions. You cannot see any particles, because they are so small, and there's about 2000-5000 particles per explosion.

For the glow I used a free 3DS Max plugin called Super Glow. In my opinion, 3DSMax beats Lightwave in glow effects, because there are many more options to play with and you can assign different kinds of glows to the same scene. Well, Lightwave's glow is good enough, but I still miss some of the 3DSMax's glow options.

By changing the glow options, you can make a different kind of explosion. In this scene a P-Fleet cruiser explodes into pieces. In 3DSMax you can easily explode objects into pieces, although in this scene I used too small chunks.

In 3DSMax you can also use a built-in plugin called "Combustion" to create explosions. It's quite easy to use, but the quality isn't amazing, and other 3d experts will always recognize the "combustion explosion".

Adding some particles to a combustion explosion is a good way to combine the best of the both techniques. By the way, that Korg-cube is just a cube with a texture map. 3DSMax had real trouble rendering a more complicated cube. I rendered SW5 scenes on a P200, 32MB RAM

A scene from Lost Contact; the top floor of a skyscraper is blown to pieces. Again, a particle explosion, this time with gravity turned on. The skyscraper The Phoenix Foundation building from MacGyver :-)

Particles were used in almost every Lost Contact special effect; fire, flames, glow, weapons, you name it. You could say that without the particles there would be no Star Wreck: Lost Contact....

Star Wreck: Lost Contact was also the first Wreck to use real actors, so we needed either real bridge sets, or "virtual" sets. Building good looking real sets would have cost too much, and we didn't even have the space for it. So we decided to try bluescreen, just for fun. Our expectations weren't high, because of the cheap gear we had. But the cheap blue bed-sheet and Adobe Premiere compositor surprised us. Today the quality is quite shocking :)

We borrowed the background images from the Star Trek Techical Manual. The problem was the low resolution of the images, about 320x200 or something. The bluescreen technique requires that the blue bed-sheet is lighted correctly. It must be bright blue, and there must be no dark shadows. If the background image has a blue color tone also, the errors of the cheap bluescreen disappears well, as you can see from this image [left].

The hard reality... In the movies our hand twinklers may look quite good, but they are actually Super Soakers that were painted black, and our P-signs were made of paper. Well, the budget of the movie was quite minimal...