How long, on average, do you get to create an effect?

Force Fieldssubhead : Cheerleaders, M&Ms and special effects body : This is the material for a cheerleader�s pom pom. I stumbled upon this in a dry goods store. And this was in just about every episode of Star Trek � the Next Generation, and many episodes of the subsequent series. One of its greatest uses is the Federation Force Field, and it�s around Federation ships. By shaking it and having a forty-five degree angle mirror underneath, so you can see its kind of random patterns, it gives a wonderful, non-repetitive organic sparkle to it.

So we take that and stretch it over an M&M to create force fields around the ships. Tweaked out of focus it was a wonderful galaxy in one show. We�ve also used it as hordes of sparkling little light bulb entities in an episode called Power Play... the individuals were created with this, which is a day-glo mitten.

To save animation time, instead of doing traditional animation frame-by-frame, I decided that we needed this little floating creatures to enter the bodies and take over the minds of our intrepid crewmen. So, by putting this on with the black sweatsuit and a little black hood over my face, and being able to see the original scenes with the actors, I was able to, using tai chi motions, just kind of float this thing around. It worked out very well, and I could do all the animation in a morning rather than over a period of weeks.