The following is *not* a shot, I repeat, the following is NOT a shot,
okay? It's just...last night, I got in from the stage late, and the last 15
minutes of the latest TNG effort was on, about the destructive warp engines.
And I watched, astonished, as the Enterprise was buffetted by rift forces,
damaged, another ship was damaged, the rift grew, the other ship was
destroyed...and *all of it* until the very end, at which point they interfaced
some stock footage with a bit of new stuff, ALL of that other material was off-
camera, we saw *NONE* of it! It was just like radio drama...we *hear* about
the ship getting hit, the rift doing this, ships blowing up, but we never see
ANY of it.

This came to mind today when I saw some of the new CGI footage from "Mind
War," which is starting to look quite extraordinary. About every four-five
episodes, we seem to take a jump in what we can do, how much we can do, and
how good it looks. The latest batch of stuff is absolutely breathtaking. And
in addition to everything else, the one thing that I come away with, the one
thing that *no one* is doing, is the absolute SCALE of the show. In addition
to sets and CGI as standalones, we're doing some groundbreaking work in
composites, mattes, virtual sets and other stuff.

There are moments when I can't *wait* to get this show on the air to show
people what we've done, and what we're doing.

jms