The Wrath of the Son'a For interior scenes, Leonetti selected Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 stock because "it's got better resolution and better blacks [than EXR 5298], but the latitude is just as good and it actually has less grain." The new emulsion didn't impact the moody lighting he had devised for the Enterprise interiors on First Contact, which had a look that Frakes described as a "Das Boot style." This time around, while lighting the Bridge, the Engineering section, and the ship's corridors, the cameraman positioned multiple open-faced 407 babies at 90-degree angles behind grilled grates, allowing the Starfleet principals to pass through highlights of geometric patterns.
Practical lighting was carefully integrated into the sets. Instrument panels were brightened from behind with MR-16s. The crew built 3200°K fluorescents into the walls, but Leonetti sometimes substituted them with daylight-balanced Kino Flos to create a bluish effect. The steps beneath the Bridge had an outline of dimmer-controlled neon piping, which gave off a slight electric-blue cast. This tubing had to be refit with electronic ballasts both for dimming purposes and to avoid flicker problems provoked by changes in frame rate. Gaffer Pat Blymer adds, "Above the Bridge set, there were 12 pie-shaped ceiling pieces made out of muslin, and we had a 5K senior hitting into each one of them — this gave us about 12 footcandles of ambient light throughout the entire set. We then hung lights as needed to accentuate the actors, usually tweenies with special diffusion cones on them. Jordan Cronenweth [ASC], who shot Blade Runner, had these devices he called 'Croney cones.' They were 5' long and made out of tinfoil, and he put them on the front of seniors and 10Ks. The paper diffusion on the front, either 216 or 250, softened up the light. Through the years, we made our own version of them out of showcard, which we call 'phoney cones.'"
Leonetti also had to produce the aftermath of an extended battle between the Federation flagship and Son'a space vessels. When the Enterprise is on "red alert" status, the window paneling which lines the set flickers intermittently in a scarlet shade. The cameraman augmented the set's pre-existing flashing system with tweenies and 1K babies (gelled primary red) that created winking crimson rimlights all around the set. He also lowered the overall light level so that the Bridge was illuminated mainly by bright shafts produced by 30- and 50-watt MR-16 lights. "By this point in the script, there had been some damage to the Enterprise," says Blymer. "A lot of the lights had gone off [due to a power drain on the ship], and we were in a much more 'down' mode. We just had those MR-16 sources on the ground, because all of the toplights were off. The red illumination in the scene became much deeper due to the fact that there wasn't that much white light."
The mood of crisis was intensified by flooding the set with layers of smoke, seemingly emanating from explosions and fried instrument components. During detonations, Leonetti sometimes overcranked the camera to 48 fps to accentuate the action — particularly in the Engineering Room, where energy discharges set crewmembers ablaze, causing them to plummet from elevated platforms and careen into bulkheads.
In addition to these in-camera effects, Leonetti shook his Panavision camera by hand to simulate the effect of the Enterprise's hull being pelted with phaser fire. As all Trek fans know, this tried-and-true method was a staple of the original 1960s series, when directors of photography Gerald Perry Finnerman, ASC and A.C. Francis, ASC often employed it to famous effect, in conjunction with visual illusions created by ASC greats Linwood Dunn and Howard A. Anderson II.
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