New Testingstan

For the planet's appearance in Star Trek Into Darkness, the filmmakers were inspired by Pripyat, the city abandoned due to the Chernobyl disaster that inspired Praxis in The Undiscovered Country. Roberto Orci commented about the planet, "Maybe its civilization was built on top of the old version of the Klingon civilization, so Scott Chambliss did an amazing job of putting the new on top of, sort of, ruins of a city that may have gone through a Praxis-like event." [4] Chambliss himself explained, "At first, Qo'noS was going to be a super-industrialized place, where the off-product of their industry was so toxic, they basically turned the planet itself into an utter waste zone. In doing that, they altered the environment so much it became a non-stop storming planet. There was only lightning, storm, and crazy wind in the sky. You couldn't even walk the surface of the planet, because it was all oceans of toxicity. They had burrowed down into the planet, as well as built their city on top. They kept building higher and higher because the meth level got higher and higher."

The concept of the highly polluted Klingon homeworld went on to influence the design of the place. "When it came down to dealing with it," recalled Scott Chambliss, "the [battle] sequence wasn't fully fleshed out in the beginning, which is normal [....] Ultimately, that took us to a place of trying all different kinds of environmental pieces of this overall picture of toxified Qo'noS [....] I think I did 14 different versions of the set. Each one had a different specificity of what it was, and why it was the way it was. Nothing really landed with J.J. [Abrams.] It finally got to the point where I needed to do something a lot more abstract." Chambliss also remarked that the area of Qo'noS featured in the battle sequence was "probably a factory" and possibly had been "a munitions factory" or "a place for building space craft." (Star Trek Magazine issue 172, p. 67)

Scott Chambliss took classical influence for the columns in this region. "The quadrant of the city where the action takes place is sort of an interpretation of the Roman Colosseum, the warrens below the Colosseum floor," he said. [5]

The idea of designing the set in an extremely abstract way led Scott Chambliss to propose a particular feature of the site, which he described as a "big, glowing, lensy thing in the background, the big halo." This element was based on the sculptural installation The Weather Project. "That was the thing I kept staring at, and seeing the scale of a human being in front of it," he reflected, "and thought, 'This is so cool. Maybe this is a way into what we're doing, playing with a massive sunburst or light source, or whatever the hell it was going to be, against our villain, who is supposed to be the baddest guy on Earth.' But the epic scale of that glow even makes this huge bad guy look tiny.'" (Star Trek Magazine issue 172, p. 67)

Following the set's construction, the rest of the planet was fleshed out. At Pixomondo, the look of the world was designed by CG Supervisor Enrico Damm and Compositing Supervisor Dan Cobbett. Remembered Pixomondo Visual Effects Supervisor Ben Grossmann, "The way J.J. turned it over to us was as a moody and atmospheric environment [....] For the larger planet and the flying through it, we tried to take as many design cues from the partial, destroyed set that was there as far as textures and design angles, and extrapolate from that what a city, planet and building would look like.” These aspects became a combination of industrial areas and ten-mile-high building spires existing in the dense, polluted air. Pixomondo also developed a toxic atmosphere from which the D4 class ships could appear. Grossmann added, “We took reference from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and from really tall and spire-y buildings [....] What I liked was when you see pictures photographed from up there, the buildings are so tall that they peek through the clouds and you have no real sense of how far you are away from the ground. That gave us the idea to build the planet Kronos in atmospheric layers. We tried to imagine what a planet like Jupiter would be like underneath all these layers of atmosphere."

The upper levels of Qo'noS were based on thinking that, in the upper atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet, there might be occasional clarity amongst the thick clouds. “As we start to descend down through the atmosphere," stated Ben Grossman, "we had the idea to almost give it an underwater feel. We figured that with that much humidity and moisture to create a toxic cloud, you’d imagine there’s a lot of toxic sludge around. We ran a bunch of waterfall simulations and we allowed pretty high amounts of accumulated condensation to create these toxic waterfalls.”

Even lower on the planet surface, the lighting shifted to seem akin to an underwater cave, with shafts of light scattering in the atmosphere and illuminating the environment. “We realized the most effective way to nail this look and make it feel real was by rendering as much as possible the volumes of atmosphere all in one,” Ben Grossmann recounted. “Normally you just render lighting passes and let the compers dial in the balance [....] But when you’re shooting everything through a really heavy atmosphere, that technique doesn’t work anymore. So what you have to do is render the effects volumes properly lit from within and calculating the qualities of the light as they move through varying densities of atmosphere. Needless to say that was quite a render hog but gave us the look we were going for in the end.”

The fluid simulations were done in Naiad, whereas volumetric effects – such as atmospheric swirls from wing tips – were rendered in FumeFX. Ben Grossmann concluded, “To help give a sense of scale to these volumes we ran blowing air debris and bits of ash and detritus as fluid sims rendered out with Thinking Particles. And we used Krakatoa too [....] Buildings [were] rendered in V-Ray.” Minor CGI was involved even in the area used for the battle sequence, such as tattered pieces of fabric which were included as ground elements and were created as cloth sims. [6]