Thursday 25 August 2016

John Eaves' prop designs for Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek production artist John Eaves has been working on Star Trek productions since The Final Frontier. He is something of a rarity among the the Star Trek old-guard, in having continued to boldly go, in working on all three of the Kelvin timeline movies. For Star Trek Beyond he worked on several prop designs, the artwork for which he has been sharing on Facebook.

His favourite prop for the movie is what I am sure will be a favourite scene for many of us, when Spock the younger finds a photo among the belongings of Spock prime.


Apparently early on they planned to use a TV era image of the crew, but thankfully that changed to the promo image shot for The Final Frontier - Spock seeing his older self and crew has so much more impact on his decision making in the film.

You might find something familiar in the repeating diamond pattern, and that would be because it draws inspiration from the architecture of the Vulcan Science Academy council building seen in the first nuTrek movie. The same motif can be seen in some of the other Vulcan designs done for Beyond, including this cool new take on a Vulcan harp which sadly didn't make it into the film:



Eaves also designed Uhura's (tracker) necklace. The Adventurine have run a nice piece on this, discussing with prop master Andy Siegal how the piece was made, using a synthetic opal.

As you can see, the final piece is more like the diamond motif seen in several of Eaves' Vulcan designs here, while he also played with a cool lirpa-style design.




Eaves also worked on concepts for phasers, including this fun design where the standard hand phaser gets amped up by plugging it into a phaser rifle caddy.


Eaves also designed these really chunky "blasters":


UPDATE: Eaves has posted another design, for Jaylah's staff:


If you enjoy Star Trek concept art, then you must visit John Eaves' website, where you will find galleries of his work from many years of work across various Star Trek productions, and elsewhere.

To keep track of all the latest information on Star Trek Beyond, including more concept art and other behind the scenes coverage, visit my Star Trek Beyond guide page.



4 comments:

mark bernero said...

They should have had him design the SHIPS especially the ENTERPRISE!!!!!

JOE BOSS said...

Yup... I am not going to watch this one because of the ugly heroes ship... dam!

Fox said...

Definitely agree about Eaves being better suited for ship designs than props. Seems silly to hire him in the first place if he's not designing ships. It's crazy.

But skipping the series just because it has an ugly ship? That's a bit much.

Unknown said...

And he is working on Star Trek Discovery. He did design the USS Discovery we see in the teaser.

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