Riverside Ship Yards Art
2 min readIllustrator John Eaves has posted some of his early designs for the Riverside ship yards from Star Trek XI.
As reported atEaves’ blog,the ship yards in San Francisco were the inspiration for the Riverside ship yards. “I was still working on the Perpetual ST online when I started on the new Trek movie and during the ship phase of the project, Todd Ramon, Ryan Denning, and I were contemplating the designs for the Earthbound San Francisco ship yards,” said Eaves.When work on Star Trek XI began, Eaves was assigned the task of creating the Riverside, Iowa ship yards where the Enterprise would be built. “Based on an old train engine turntable idea came the first layout of what the ship yards could be,” Eaves explained. “An incredibly large construction facility that housed various material and electronic manufacturing facilities that were easily accessed from every dock. My friend Mike Hamby works in the US navy sub yards back East and he helped me with a lot of research with those construction yards, and so the Hamby complex was named in his honor shown here in the turntable illustration.”
Over time, the Riverside ship yards became a single dock scenario. “The first couple of passes have the ship somewhat below ground level and for the film the ship was pulled out of the semi-subterranean dock and set elevated off the ground,” said Eaves. “By doing so the effect would be a much grander view of this massive starship against an Earthbound setting which really has not been seen before.
To see the photos which inspired the Riverside ship yards as well as the early sketches from Eaves, head to the article located here.
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