Top SFX shots No.2: Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan

Martin Anderson

Published on Dec 29, 2008

While TRON (see #9) was going for the low-res marathon at the box-office, the first of Nick Meyer's very popular Star Trek entries was wowing cinema-goers with some truly advanced CGI sprint-work from ILM showing the effect of the life-giving 'genesis device' on a planetary scale. When the lengthy rendering process was well-advanced, someone spotted that the virtual camera was about to crash into one of the randomly created mountain ranges. So much time and work would have been lost starting from scratch that it was decided to magically introduce a valley to let the camera through (visible about 39 seconds into the clip). This extraordinary sequence showed the future both of ILM and visual effects, even if there was yet a long wait for the hardware bottlenecks to clear up.