Watch Wing Commander's Pioneering Special Effect

The Wing Commander movie was full of exciting special effects, but one of them was especially cutting edge in 1999. The Time Slice scene was conducted to show the jump effect as the Tiger's Claw passed through Charybdis. Their website has a page describing the project, and a 1.5 meg .mov of the scene is available here.

The 'Josephine' Rig
This camera gives a five-metre long 90 degree circular tracking shot in time-slice®, live-action, long exposure, high-speed shutter or any combination. The camera performs like a compact motion-control rig. The optics are multi-coated, allowing the camera to perform to wide screen feature film standards. Again the construction is robust, enabling the camera to travel to far flung locations and work under the harshest conditions (as has proven the case with natural history work).

One of the most innovative of these effects is the Time Slice sequence, which involves a series of 60 cameras placed in a 120-arc around the subject, allowing the crew to take two seconds worth of footage moving around the action that's essentially frozen in space. Though a similar effect has been seen in TV commercials, it hasn't been successfully utilized yet in a theatrical feature. "When I was in pre-production, you didn't see it everywhere, and I haven't seen it in features yet," says Roberts. "There was a bad attempt in Lost in Space, but that's very different from what we're doing."

"There are about three points in this movie where people go through jump points. In the Wing Commander Universe, you can't go faster than light. You go through faults in space called jump points, and as you go through a fault in space, everyone freezes in time, and so at the time we started pre-production, it seemed like a really great effect. The sequence itself works quite well -- the closer they get to the jump, everything is shaky and it's all going to hell in a handbasket. Then as soon as they breach the jump, bam! It's like everyone is frozen and it's sort of serene."

WCU Needs A Splashy Artist

The new screen will be displayed at the beginning of the standalone installer process, as well as every time the game loads. Since WCU is attempting to encompass the entire Wing Commander mythos, a good splash screen should have some of the following:

A space background
A fighter-class ship (Confed, Kilrathi, or both)
A capital-class sihp (Confed, Kilrathi, or both)
'Wing Commander Universe' in a font that compliments the WC games and the other items on the screen.