Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The Enterprise A You Need To Know

For the refit Enterprise's first appearance in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the film's production designers conceived of a complicated series of interlocking panels dubbed "Atec patterning" which was applied to the ship by a skilled airbrush artist named Zuzana Swansea. Using metallic paints, Swansea gave the Enterprise a polished pearlescent sheen which reflected different colors depending on the lighting.

Unfortunately, the reflectivity of the model created difficulties for the VFX team, causing the edges of the ship to be obscured and making matting her into space backgrounds nearly impossible. Because of this issue, the ship was often photographed in low light, muting the complex paint scheme in most of the shots used in the finished film.

Over the course of her appearances in three subsequent films, the Enterprise's paint scheme was further dulled down, either by outright repainting or with faux-damage applied to her hull for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. However, following the production of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the refit Enterprise (now the Enterprise-A)'s entire paint job was completely ruined.

On loan from Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios used the Enterprise-A miniature for its theme park attraction Star Trek Adventure. Creating a few special effects shots of the Enterprise-A just for the attraction, the Universal Studios VFX team avoided the difficulties created by the ship's bright white paint scheme by just covering one whole side of the model in gray paint. To make matters worse, Universal Studios failed to return the ship to its former glory, leaving the damage to be discovered by the producers of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, who had to rush to repair the ship under already crippling time and budget constraints.