Gallery: Featured Artists:
Roberto Baldassari
Space1999.org talked with Roberto Baldassari in March 2000 about his influential (and inspirational) Space: 1999-based illustrations. Part Two of Three.
Continuing the Eagle cutaway poster discussion...
I want to add that I am very proud to have this work of art hanging in my home office, above my computer workstations. I picked it up at the Breakaway Convention back in September 1999. It is a magnificient creation. I wish I had it back in 1975. ;^)
I wish I had them, too ;-)
What gave you to idea to do the poster?
Well,
that was actually my original goal. When I bought that wonderful cutaway
poster of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek: The Motion Picture
by David Kimble back in the '80s I knew I had to produce something similar
for my favorite spacecraft, the Eagle deserved it. The UEBs were just
a study for the color poster.
How do you go about making a poster like this, designing it, coloring it, printing it, licensing it, etc.)
As for the printing side, there are many good printing houses where I live but I decided to print them away in a printing house which is famous for high quality art books, posters and cataloques. They used a technology called Agfa CristalRaster. It takes a radically different approach to traditional halftone reproduction methods. CristalRaster uses uniform microdots, randomly arranged for each color separation. Because there are no line screens or screen angles, images are reproduced without any artifacts. Iím very proud of the final result.
Did you base it from your blueprints?
Sure. As I said, the UEB were the "blueprint" for the poster. I decided to locate the Eagle on a lauch pad because I thoght this would be more interesting. I did not want to make just the four sheet from the blueprints set in color.
Who all was involved in creating the poster?
I credited three people as Technical Advisiors for the poster. They are Shane Johnson, author of "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise," who at the time was working on his own Eagle blueprints and was kind enough to discuss some of his technical speculations about the Eagle with me; Christopher Trice, the Eagle model guru I mentioned who gave me tons of little infos about the original models used in the series; and finally Keith Young, author of the most comprehensive work on Moonbase Alpha and all the hardware seen (or never before seen) in the series. His work has been a constant inspiration for me during the making of the color poster. Particularly the flight terminal interiors are deeply based on his work.
I also have to thank several other people who helped me in a way or another, first of all the incredible Robert Ashley Ruiz whose now-defunct Space: 1999 Cybrary (Cybrary1999.com) has been the best Space: 1999 web site one can ever dream of. He was always supportive and just wonderful.
I totally agree. In making the poster, what software tools did you use? And how long did it take to create the final product?
The poster was made in Adobe Illustrator 6 with some help from Photoshop for the beak and all the spherical parts which are difficult to make in Illustrator. I made it in the arc of one year. Of course I did not worked on it all the time.
That's dedication. What was the most challenging aspect of putting together this project?
You know I'm a graphic designer, not a technical illustrator. The hardest thing for me was to find I technique which allowed me to make such an illustration within the computer but without looking too much like computer graphics. I wanted an airbrush quality for it. Also, I needed a technique which allowed me to make the drawing in small bits because a single file should have been to heavy in terms of megabytes to work with.
The final poster was assembled at the end in Illustrator, but was made in different parts with both Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm quite proud of this. You can't easily say where vector based graphics (Illustrator) ends and bitmap based graphics begins (Photoshop). The drawing is completely coherent, even if the two programs I used are so different.
I understand that you've hidden something within the poster. Can you give us any clues?
There is a single in-joke in the poster. Sorry I can't give you any clues. You can torture me but you'll only obtain my name and Eagle pilot code from me. All I can say is that it ís a quote taken from a movie. I'll offer a hydroponic beer to the first who discover it. You'll never find it, hehe!
One of the things I enjoyed is the explanation of where the moon buggy was stored. During the original series, we didn't see the Alphans unpack the buggy. Did you guess how this was done, or did you get feedback from someone?
There is one single episode ("Testament of Arkadia") in the series where they showed a moon buggy on a Eagle. They placed is in the aft section just in front of where the lavatory is, according to my blueprints -- and to Geoffrey Mandel's Starlog ones. Not a comformable place to put it, if you ask me. I preferred to place the buggies in those areas on the prow side of the Recon Pod where the walls close up to form a kind of corridor. The two six-wheeled yellow moon buggies could come in and out from hatches in the prow wall, when the Recon Pod is detached from the superstructure and lowered.
Can people still order the poster? (If not, will it be offered again?)
I have not decided yet if I will reprint the poster and the UEB set. Anyway, the blueprints are still available in the USA from Sci Fi Matters. I also sold the last 100 posters to Intergalactic Trading Co.
What feedback have you received about it?
I received about a dozen of requests from the beginning of the year.
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