No doubt that the new Star Trek movie has some fantastic special effects, not only the explosions in space but on the Bridge of the new Enterprise. The company behind the work, ooo-ii, has revealed some of how they built the computer interfaces you see in the movie.
On a technical level, the live visual effects office OOOii created a complete Flash / ActionScript 3 framework for compositing and sequencing various effects that was used live on the set during filming. An AIR application was used for authoring the various sequences and also to control them as the actors manipulated them. The resulting architecture thatutilized many computers, dynamic content rendering, and broadcasted meta data, to create what appears to be a contiguous world into which all of the screens act as windows.
I’ld love to get my hands on the “virtual interface” they created in AIR. If you go to ooo-ii’s site they also have an interactive 360 of the Enterprise Bridge.
wicked stuff. Lee Brimelow has a great interview with the guys over at OOOii – check out the video here http://theflashblog.com/?p=1023