Making Models

Fon Davis worked at ILM as a chief model maker on Galaxy Quest, where his main role was overseeing the fabrication of Sarris’ ship. He also worked on the Protector paint job, and the shuttle that launches from the ship at the end of the film.

The look of the Protector took advantage of experience ILM had garnered on various Star Trek films, particularly in adding interesting detail, says Davis.

“It actually has a very, very busy pattern on it, but because it’s a curved shape, you can only see the panels that line up with the light just right. So as you’re going around a Star Trek ship, or the Protector, you just get these little glints of color from these little tiny panels. It’s alluding to a greater level of construction under all the white paint. That was a fascinating process to take part in.”

Meanwhile, the Sarris ship, which looked completely different from the Protector, was, recalls Davis, “one of the first miniature spacecraft that I’m aware of that was a sculpture. It was very organic in its design. We sculpted all the pieces and then mold and cast them out of fiberglass.”

The alien ship also had a unique paint job, in that underneath each of the ‘scales’ of the craft, it appeared to be like a living thing. “Right before it gets ready to take on some action, such as launching missiles, there are lights coming out from under each scale that light up,” describes Davis. “That’s not a CG effect, it was actually done practically.

“To do that,” Davis says, “we painted the whole ship brown, green and Earth tones. Then we took the ship into a paint booth and turned on a blacklight, and we painted florescent yellow and green paint where we wanted all the glowing to happen. So when it went to the stage, they could shoot it with or without those lights on. The neon paint was completely transparent – you could have everything from no light, to turning on all the blacklight to ramp up the pulsing and the ‘living light’ feature of that ship.”