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Robert Bonchune

Revision as of 03:27, 2 June 2013 by 172.251.23.245 (contribs)
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Robert "Rob" Bonchune (born 15 September 1970; age 53) is a digital effects expert who worked on the Star Trek productions, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise while in the employ of consecutively, Foundation Imaging, and Eden FX. He became the Senior CG supervisor for the last 7 years of the Franchise run. No other CG Supervisor has had the honor (or workload) of that position in all of the Trek franchises history. Rob Bonchune was also part of the team that worked on the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Edition DVD.

Bonchune shared Emmy Awards for his CGI work on the Voyager episodes "Dark Frontier" and "Endgame" and the Enterprise pilot, "Broken Bow" with his team as the "CG Supervisor". He also received an additional three Emmy nominations for his CG Supervision on VOY's "Timeless", DS9's "What You Leave Behind", and ENT's "Dead Stop".

Together with Adam Lebowitz, Rob Bonchune conceived the concept of the successful Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar series, on which he served as co-editor and co-illustrator for the first three outings. With Lebowitz he also wrote and illustrated the Star Trek: Starship Spotter reference book.

The Nebula-class vessel, the CGI version of which, he created for Voyager's episode "Message in a Bottle", USS Bonchune was named after him, the registry, NCC-70915, a play on his birth date. (source)

Rob Bonchune, an Original Series fan, was one of the many production staffers who got increasingly frustrated with the chosen visual direction of the producers, while working on Star Trek: Enterprise, which started with the incident surrounding the design of Vorok's battle cruiser in the 2001 Enterprise episode "Unexpected". Eight years later, by 2009, Bonchune's disappointment over that issue had not yet abated, "We all loved it over at Foundation and our friend Koji built it for free. Amazingly, even though it was a freebee for the episode, certain people in production still found a way find fault and refused to ultimately use it until windows were added in certain places. We refused, on principle, as Koji had not slept for days building that on his own and they knew it….so instead of using it, because of, I think 5 windows that you would never see, we ended up using the K'tinga, which was UTTERLY out of place and out of continuity in the “Enterprise” era. I am very saddened by that decision as a fan, because I knew it would ruin continuity, but considering the generous and passionate work Koji did overbuilding in quality a key Klingon ship for free, and then to not even give him a thank you and instead complain and ask for 5 more windows, we could not ask him or anyone to stay late again to change this, so we had to decline and let them go with there original plan. That decision speaks for itself." He did, for a number of years, continue to be one of the more outspoken critics in that respect on several blogs, such as TrekBBS.com and Hobbytalk.com, and as was evidenced by his comment on yet another blog, concerning the decision to remove the bird-of prey graphic from the Romulan Bird-of-Prey (22nd century) in Enterprise's episode "Minefield", "Oh and as for the BOP drawing underneath, it was rejected for no other reason than, once again, contempt for the OS Star Trek, and the fans by ...uh."management"...you know who they are. ;-)

Although these little incidents happened, Rob loved working on the show overall and certainly liked his co-workers and his superiors at Paramount in the Post production Department. "Mitch Suskin, Dan Curry and others where just a great group of truly caring, intelligent, reasonable and fun people to work with. The level of love for the product and the show was evident from every department really. Everyone did there best to make good Star Trek because most where fans as well." Once done with the Trek series and having moved on to the other projects listed below, he has continued working on various Star Trek projects. Rob Bonchune's love of Starships and cool design is what kept and keeps him taking any opportunity that doesn't conflict with other work. Because of his longstanding affiliation and work done rendering beauty and orthographic views of virtually all the Star Trek CG ships for Paramount Publicity, Star Trek Fact files/Star Trek: the Magazine published in England, he was approached by the then editor of the Magazine, Ben Robinson, to do several of the CG renderings for the Haynes book "USS Enterprise, 2151 onwards, Owner's Workshop Manual". He has kept doing illustrations and building ships for Ben to this very day on various projects, many not sold in the US. You can find almost all of Rob Bonchune's Paramount Publicity renders of the great CG models built by Pierre Drolet, Brandon MacDougall and Koji Kuramura (a well as Rob himself) on the Drex Files blog, often uncredited and mistaken for Doug Drexler's work, even though Drexler was not a member of the CG Team, due to the way Drexler labeled the images on his site.

Star Trek contributions

CGI work with:

He was also responsible for many planets, props, anomalies and virtually all the astrometrics 3D graphics. His other contributions include many texture tweaks and painting on ships during filming.

Other work

Hailing from Montreal, Canada, Bonchune moved after graduating college to Los Angeles in order "to change his view", according to his mini biography in Starship Spotter. He first worked as a physical studio model maker for television and movies (even as late as 1995 when he contributed as such to Apollo 13, albeit uncredited), before an opening presented itself on the 1993 science fiction television show SeaQuest DSV at Amblin Imaging, where he taught himself the craft of CGI modeling. As digital artist he proceeded to also work for Foundation on the science fiction series Babylon 5, as well as on the 1997 movie The Jackal. After his tenure on the Star Trek franchise, he worked on the television series Surface, which won him a Visual Effects Society Awards nomination in 2006 (shared with Eric Hance, John Teska and Sean Jackson), before quiting Eden FX and joining NBC to work on Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica and its follow-up Caprica. More recently, after joining Pixomondo Visual Effects (an international VFX house, founded in 2001, that currently employs many former Star Trek visual effects staffers) in 2011, he has worked as CGI senior animator on the television series Hawaii Five-O (2011), and Steven Spielberg's science fiction series Terra Nova (2011), and Perception (2012).

Emmy Awards

Bonchune received the following Emmy Award wins and nominations in the category Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series:

Bibliography

Star Trek interviews

External links

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