20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)

The very expensive and beautifully detailed Enterprise miniature from Star Trek—The Motion Picture was of course going to be re-used in the vastly cheaper Star Trek II. But the effects for the sequel were contracted out to George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. For the first film, the Enterprise was shot at the studio of VFX master Doug Trumbull, who disliked using bluescreens for matte work, preferring a technique called hi-con matting where the models are shot against black, which he also used on Blade Runner (1982).

But ILM worked mostly with bluescreen matte photography, and the trouble began as soon as they put the Enterprise before the camera. The model’s intricate, beautiful, expensive, pearlescent, and highly reflective paint job reflected the glowing blue of the screen—known as bluescreen spill—and would cause matte errors resulting in apparent holes in the starship.

Repainting the entire model was too big a task for such a tightly budgeted feature, so they assigned a newcomer named Bill George to kill any reflections that showed up. The high-tech technique used? Wherever a reflection was a problem Bill sprayed the area with “Dullcote” and a powder puff was used to pat talcum powder in to eliminate the shine.

You can actually see this in the film. Notice how much shinier the Enterprise is when it first approaches the Reliant than it is later in the film. Since they applied battle damage to the models, their scenes were shot roughly in sequence. As a result, the ship got duller and duller as more and more shiny hot spots were tamped down.