O seguinte é roubado ( emprestado, eu gostaria de acreditar ) no Star Trek BBS :
Citando Howard A. Anderson, ASC de " Efeitos especiais de Out-of-this-world para 'Star Trek' " no Cinematographer americano de outubro de 1967:
One of our most difficult assignments for the series was to create the impression that the Enterprise was racing through space at an incredible speed--faster than the speed of light, which is 6,000,000,000,000 miles a year.
Other space shows have shown spacecraft more or less "drifting" through space. We wanted to avoid that cliche. The solution did not come easily or quickly. We experimented with dozens of ideas before we hit on an effective solution.
The principal elements in our solution are a space sky and the use of an Oxberry optical printer. To make the space sky, we painted black stars on a white background about 2 1/2 feet by 3 feet, arriving at a suitable design. We then made a series of black-out mattes that we could use later with the sky in the optical printer.
The advanced Oxberry printer was unique at the time. It is capable of making a 5-to-1 reduction through a 4-to-1 enlargement with continued automatic focusing. The space sky was photographed and a still frame used on the optical printer. We tracked the space sky to the left, to the right, to the top and to the bottom, using a different black-out matte on each pass and superimposed these various moves at different speeds. We were able to create the illusion that the Enterprise was racing through space at an incredible speed. We start with a space sky filled with some 500 stars and finish with perhaps 30 on each pass. In the automatic focusing process, we got from a 3-foot scope down to about 10 inches.
Embora seja assim que Anderson fez isso. Os efeitos do ST foram produzidos por várias casas de efeitos diferentes. Do mesmo artigo, Linwood Dunn discute como sua empresa Film Effects de Hollywood criou seus efeitos de estrelas:
The background star fields were created by punching holes of various sizes, in proper scale and location, in large sheets of black paper, backed up by special diffusion screens and color filters to create the desired effect. By combining scenes made at varying camera distances and travel speeds, a realistic illusion of depth was created. This was particularly important in star fields which tied-in with forward or reverse travel of the ship, and seen on its forward viewing screen.
Então, basicamente, ambos fotografaram múltiplas camadas de estrelas que se moviam em velocidades diferentes em relação à câmera. Sobrepondo-os, criou-se o efeito do movimento em 3-D, estrelas mais próximas movendo-se mais rapidamente que as mais distantes.