20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)
5. The Starfleet Training Facility Is Mostly A Model
As Kirk thanks Spock for his birthday present they stop in in a large skylighted room featuring planters and a very large glass celestial globe. But this set isn’t really a set, it’s mostly a model. Specifically, it’s a foreground miniature or “cutting piece,” a carefully designed miniature placed between the camera and the actual set. On screen, it appears to be part of the set, creating a more elaborate setting than is possible, practical, or affordable to build.
In this instance, the only “real” set is the door Kirk stands in front of and the short corridor. Everything around it is a model the camera is shooting through. Art director Joe Jennings explained that artist Mike Minor “went out to several hardware stores and came back with a birdbath, a planter, and a bunch of junk” which he then used to construct the convincing cutting piece and made cinema-scale a set that in reality was very small.
This same technique was employed by Mike Minor in The Motion Picture. The first shots of Spock on Vulcan were filmed on location at the Minerva Terrace of the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. Leonard Nimoy as Spock was on a small terrace of patterned tile and between him and the camera was a foreground miniature of higher terraces with the same tile pattern and the head of one of the giant statues, which appears 10 feet long but was actually 15 times smaller. (Alas, the shot was badly redesigned when it was combined with a matte painting, and almost no one sees either Spock or the clever miniature.)