Page "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" Paragraph 48

The majority of the visual effects were created by Industrial Light & Magic ( ILM ) under the supervision of Scott Farrar ( who served as visual effects cameraman on the first three Star Trek films ).

After receiving the script, ILM created storyboards for the effects sequences before meeting Meyer and producers Winter and Steven-Charles Jaffe to discuss the planned scenes.

These discussions began before the film was greenlit.

ILM's initial cost estimates were over Paramount's budget, so to save money the filmmakers redesigned some shots and outsourced some to other companies.

Elements of the zero gravity scenes were handled by Pacific Data Images, while phaser beams and transporter effects were generated by Visual Concept Engineering, an offshoot of ILM that had contributed to The Wrath of Khan and The Final Frontier.

Despite the overall count of effects shots being dropped from over 100 to 51, the project was still large, and required virtually the entire ILM staff to complete.

Farrar's goal was to economize the remaining effects ; if three shots were similar, they would try to tell the story with only one.

Cheap animatics provided Meyer with placeholders to cut into the film and avoid costly surprises.

Stock footage from previous films were used whenever possible, but it was often infeasible to do so ; as the original USS Enterprise had been destroyed in The Search for Spock, all shots of the USS Enterprise-A had to feature the updated ship registry.