“Unification” Producer Breaks Down OTOY’s Star Trek Short Giving Kirk And Spock A Final Goodbye

Long article explaining the 10m short without dialogue. YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=mgOZFny7F50

https://trekmovie.com/2024/11/27/exclusive-unification-producer-breaks-down-otoys-star-trek-short-giving-kirk-and-spock-a-final-goodbye/

Last week’s Roddenberry Archive release of the short film “Unification” has had Star Trek fans buzzing as it brought together William Shatner’s Kirk with Leonard Nimoy’s Spock for an emotional goodbye. The film was developed by OTOY, who have been technology partners for the Roddenberry Archive since it was first announced as a sort of digital museum back in 2018. The film has accumulated almost 1 million views on the Roddenberry Archive on the web (and via the Apple Vision Pro app) in just over a week.

CEO Jules Urbach describes OTOY as “a company that creates tools to empower artists.” This includes their OctaneRender and LightStage scanning, and “digital doubles” technologies. Their work has helped fuel Oscar-winning feature film visual effects, and is used in Marvel movies and more. Urbach also has a long connection to the Roddenberry family as a childhood friend of Rod Roddenberry, who is also one of the early investors in OTOY.

For “Unification,” they mixed new live-action footage along with computer-generated enhancements that brought Shatner’s Kirk back to life, with actor Sam Witwer playing all the various aged Kirks. It’s OTOY’s “digital makeup” that captured the performance while transforming him to look like the original character, which they also did with Spock, played by Lawrence Selleck. All of this was under the watchful eyes of William Shatner and Susan Nimoy, who served as executive producers.

In addition to their work “preserving Star Trek sets digitally” for the Roddenberry Archive, OTOY also worked on The Roddenberry Vault Blu-ray set released for the 50th anniversary. As they were developing the documentary features for “The Cage,” they began exploring the idea of what Urbach calls “concept videos,” which resulted in the “765874” short film series. “Unification” is actually the fourth of the series, and by far the most ambitious. The new short film was designed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek Generations.