Star Trek: Klingon!

by Dean Wesley Smith

  And what is Klingon’s appeal for linguists? “Natural languages generally have a certain degree of symmetry in their sound structures. Klingon’s is twisted. It’s warped. Distorted. Marc Okrand [the linguist who created the Klingon language] had a lot of fun building it,” Mandel remarked humorously.

  Production

  With preproduction completed—except for the script, which would continue to undergo revision during shooting—and the technological foundation firmly in place, producers Halper and Braswell entrusted the reins to director Jonathan Frakes.

  Frakes, best known as Commander William Riker of Star Trek: The Next Generation, also is an experienced director, and one whom the producers felt was the logical choice for this ambitious foray into interactive media. Frakes’s decision to direct the product was motivated by two simple factors: curiosity and opportunity.

  “It was something new I’d never done before. I was offered the job, and that was it,” Frakes quipped.

  Robert O’Reilly reprised the role of Gowron, leader of the Klingon High Council, which he created in numerous appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and production commenced.

  Frakes soon found that directing an interactive CD-ROM differed in many ways from directing for film or television. “There’s no ‘coverage,’ which means you have to do the point of view in a continuous shot,” he said. “It’s linear, as opposed to shooting a master shot and then cutting in for close-ups, which is confusing to a player. So you have to design shots that don’t cut. You don’t want to break the flow. We fell out of that a couple of times and took some dramatic license, but as a whole, that point of view needed to be maintained through the whole game. It was tough.”

  A testament to Frakes’s uniquely well-suited talent for directing interactive products was that he realized that the new medium would have its own technical considerations as well as logistical needs.

  “I had to go to Tokyo over the summer,” recalled Duck Corps’ Marder. “While I was in Tokyo I checked in with my office and found I got a call from Keith [Halper]. I called Keith from Tokyo and he told me that Jonathan Frakes wanted to know if I could send one of my engineers to Paramount to be there when they set up their lighting and start the shooting process so that Jonathan could get some test compression done on the soundstage, so that he could see what final results were going to be.”

  “We were concerned about the lighting,” Frakes explained, “because Klingons’ costumes are dark, their sets are dark, and the feel of them is dark. We were afraid because a lot of CD-ROMs look dark anyway. And we were right, we had to use brighter light. Later it was transferred and compressed down to a color we liked.”

  “This was the first time that I’ve had a director say that’s what he wants to do,” Marder said admiringly of Frakes. “And it was so important, because he realized this wasn’t going to be seen on television, it wasn’t going to be in a movie theater, it’s a new medium.”

  Although Frakes found directing interactive to be different from his work in film and TV, actor O’Reilly felt right at home in the new medium. “It’s really not that different,” the actor confessed. “It really doesn’t make that much of a difference to an actor. I’ve even filmed different endings to TV shows or films. It happens in our business. It happened even before the CD-ROM came on the scene. Producers might not like an ending or they might feel unsure of an ending so they’ll film it twice. It’s a rarity but it does occur. In television and film you really have to learn how to turn on a dime with what’s going on, so CD-ROM is nothing unusual. You’ve got three or four different answers and you know you have to do the work, so it’s just like life. You do it.”

  Even once shooting had started, the merry chaos was far from over. Many of those who were on the soundstage have vivid memories of the more absurd moments.

  “There was one day of shooting when we had a crew come in from Entertainment Tonight, and they were shooting during lunch hour,” Halper divulged conspiratorially. “Since they were shooting during lunch hour, we kept the soundstage doors shut. Now, what happens when you’re using smoke and have lights on all day is the temperature in the place goes way up, and you open up the doors during lunch to cool the place down. Well, we never did that. So when they came in the afternoon, it had to have been 115 degrees in there. And then it kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and there was poor Robert O’Reilly with his Klingon mask melting right off of his face.”

  O’Reilly and his fellow Klingons enjoyed their share of laughs as well over at the Paramount Commissary. “You get a lot of looks,” he said matter-of-factly. “Certainly, when you walk down the street, eyes turn, and there was one time when we were filming for the CD-ROM, we were walking by and some Paramount executives had some people from the network affiliates as guests. And they were fascinated by it, because most of them had never seen Klingons up close, and there were about six of us. And it’s unusual to see that many Klingons at once, anyway, except in a dream, and I’m not sure if that would be a good dream.”

  Perhaps the most memorable moment during the filming of the Klingon! CD-ROM was the inaugural performance of the Klingon National Anthem.

  “There’s just something wonderfully absurd about working with a room full of Klingons, aside from the olfactory pleasure,” Frakes joked. “The night that we constructed the Klingon National Anthem, [the Klingons]rising to sing on the bridge of the warbird, is a night that we will all remember for a long time. Complete, total absurdity…. I think it’s the high point of the piece.”

  “Magic,” was how Halper described the moment that the anthem became reality. “All the Klingons are sitting on the bridge of the Bird of Prey and they’ve just … found a big clue on their great quest. So now they feel like they’re not wandering around aimlessly, but instead they have a purpose. There’s nothing more stirring than a Klingon with a purpose, so all of a sudden, Gowron beats his hands against his chair—Bam! Bam! Bam!—and then the gunner stands up, because she knows the song that he’s beating the time to—it’s the Klingon National Anthem. And she begins to sing this very moving song—‘HoY, Kahless PuKLod….’—and everybody jumps in…. I felt like I had participated in Star Trek history at that moment.

  “The way that was written was that Hilary wrote something in English, then she faxed it out to Marc Okrand,” Halper continued. “Then Okrand translated it to Klingon and put his literal translation below the Klingon verses. The literal translation is always skewed at bit, so if you send him ‘Row, row, row your boat,’ you’ll get back ‘Propel, propel, propel your craft.’”

  Bader recalled her own slice of surrealism from the two-week shoot. “During much of the shoot, there were a few actors who were in almost every day,” she said. “The poor actors, Kahless bless them, would come in at some horrendous hour, like around four A.M., and get Klingonized. By the time I arrived at a reasonable eight or nine A.M., there was a studio filled with nothing but Klingons.

  “During the filming of any movie, there is a lot of downtime for the actors. One of the actors, his name was Paul, would come over and hang with us. After two weeks of long days, I got to be quite friendly with him.

  “One day we were staying late to shoot some scene involving only one actor, probably Robert [O’Reilly]. The other actors were released to costuming and makeup to be de-Klingonized. As we’re shooting, this nice-looking guy comes up to me and starts talking to me. As if he knows me. Very friendly, very chummy. I thought, ‘Who the heck is this guy?’ I was growing uncomfortable.

  “Finally—he must have sensed my discomfort—he said to me, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you? I’m Paul.’ I was shocked. This was my Klingon bud. The guy I’d spent the last two weeks with for hours every day, and I didn’t recognize him. In fact, even after he told me who he was I still felt weird talking to him.”

  Postproduction

  By the time shooting was finished, the final phase of the Klingon! CD-ROM already was well under way. Like a film or TV epi
sode, the CD-ROM needed to be edited and its various software components assembled in their proper sequence.

  Being a producer of interactive CD-ROM is “somewhat similar to being a television producer,” Halper said, “with the one caveat that you have this whole other element TV producers don’t have to worry about, which is programming. And the people who are programming have as much creative input as anybody else in the process.”

  “Once the raw Klingon CD footage was shot, Keith passed it all—all this video, all this music, all this audio—into my hands to finish up the technological side,” Braswell remarked. “I act as the contact with the developers—Dragon Systems and Touchscreen—and I make sure this project goes from being just video to being not just a game, but a true interactive experience.”

  The edited and enhanced video and audio materials from the production team at Paramount, the speech-recognition protocols from Dragon Systems, and the TrueMotion software from Duck Corp. were then delivered to the technical wizards at Touchscreen, who assembled it into a digital product. The step-by-step process of how that transpires was provided by Touchscreen’s Cheryl Meollenbeck.

  “The traditional media gets delivered to us in some kind of videotape format, DAT tape format, or audio CD-type format,” Meollenbeck explained. “We receive all of the media from whoever has done pieces of this project, digitize it, or we compress it—if it’s video footage it gets both digitized and compressed—and then we take care of all the synching-up of the audio to the video in a digital format. And that would be media preparation—converting all the assets into a digital format.

  “Once they’re in that format,” Meollenbeck continued, “we have to have a staff of programmers work to build an ‘engine.’ For Star Trek: Klingon! there were two engines needed—one to support the interactive episode, and the other one was a gaming engine to support the Language Lab.

  “My partner, Dennis McCole, has a strong television background,” Meollenbeck added. “He was the technical director on the shoot, working with Jonathan Frakes to ensure that the point-of-view perspective was portrayed properly, that from a user interaction standpoint the scenes would work. Jonathan’s kind of a traditional film director, but this product was shot in full point of view, which is not a typical way to shoot a film. So adherence to the core design was our responsibility—during preproduction, throughout the shooting, and again in postproduction.”

  Once the early working prototypes were delivered to Simon and Schuster Interactive by Touchscreen executive producer Halper paused to reflect on the nearly two years he had devoted to bringing this project to fruition, and the roles various people played in making it happen.

  “I was showing the beta version off at the Paramount lot, and a lot of people were very surprised that we were able to do something like this on a computer,” Halper said proudly. “I am really appreciative of the work that Duck did. They have something which is truly revolutionary.”

  But while Halper was pleased with the final result of his labors, he mused that the personal cost was higher than he had expected. “I was on the Paramount lot for the whole prep, the shoot, and all of the editing,” he said. “I got involved in this to a degree that I don’t want to repeat. At one point I was listening to all the sound effects and evaluating the Foley and saying, ‘Oh, no, so-and-so’s footsteps would be much heavier than that.’ I’ve been told that Rick Berman gets involved like this, gets his hands in every single detail because he feels it’s critical to ensuring the quality of his show…. It’s inspirational.”

  “Inspirational” is a word that might be applied to the reason for all this work and invention, the Klingons themselves. Undoubtedly, their popularity motivated the Klingon! CD-ROM’s genesis, and its creators are hopeful that it also will spur the three-CD-ROM set on to record sales. But what do the people behind its creation think makes these ridgepated, easily provoked disciples of honor so popular with the fans?

  “They’re a cultural archetype,” Braswell offered as a possible explanation. “They’re the Vikings, the samurai, the Native Americans. They’re a pure warrior society, the likes of which America hasn’t ever really known. We may be striving toward that Star Trek: The Next Generation sort of peaceful coexistence, but there is something in us all which really longs for simple, pure animal release, the Spartan lifestyle, the notion that honor is what’s important, not remembering to set your VCR to tape Frasier or get your taxes done on time. Klingons represent a simpler way of being which we don’t have now.

  “And in Klingon society if you don’t like your boss you challenge him to a duel,” Braswell remarked wistfully. “If you kill him, you get to take his job, which is the American dream.”

  “Klingons, ya gotta love ’em…. Because if you don’t, they’ll kill you,” Bader quipped. “Seriously? I feel like it’s not for me to say. I love them. The fact that honor is what drives them, yet they keep room in their lives for art, poetry, song.”

  “They smell. As a breed, they stink,” Frakes declared without hesitation. “But they have a primal connection. They are warriors, they are direct, they don’t seem to work with much of a hidden agenda. And they wear turtles on their heads.”

  “Because they’re sort of straight-on people and they’re uncomplicated,” O’Reilly said with the conviction of one who knows. “They have honor, which they prize above all else, and I think that’s what humans really want more than anything else, but we get a little bit convoluted in our lives…. Everything is either right or wrong for them…. In some ways, they’re almost like the knights of King Arthur’s court before them fall. Plus, they know how to have fun.”

  And in the end equation, fun is what it’s all about.

  Qapla’.