Robert Abel & Associates

Robert Abel & Associates, or RA&A for short, was the first visual effects company that was hired to work on the visual photographic effects for the movie, directly after the television production Star Trek: Phase II was upgraded to a movie project, for it to eventually to become The Motion Picture over the course of 1978. Design and construction work for the company was handled by Art Director Richard Taylor.

The founder of the firm, Robert J. Abel, was considered a pioneer in motion control photography, 2D and 3D visual effects. It was on the strength of the work they had done on the groundbreaking visual effects of period commercials, that they were hired, though they, "(...) really had no more feature film experience than Magicam.", as Model Painter Paul Olsen pointed out later. (Star Trek: Creating the Enterprise, p. 46) That shortcoming came to the fore when, according to Olsen, conflicts with Paramount Pictures arose at the end of 1978 about the shooting of the studio models, resulting that Abel & Associates were unable to deliver effects footage acceptable to the film's producers and the firm was ultimately released. Some consider Abel's work on this film to be a "failed experiment"; others in the industry have cited conflicts between the effects team and the production staff. 

Former employee Richard Edlund has, years later, shed some more light on the issue. Edlund explained that Abel at the time was spending far too much of the studios time and money designing and building a massive, interlinked and centrally-controlled camera and optical printer combo unit, while trying to re-invent the process as he did so, running massively over budget and over time in the process. Edlund repeatedly tried to make his former employer Abel aware of this, "I admonished him to keep it as simple as possible, because when the release date's breathing down your neck something's going to happen – it always does – and the more complex the system the more difficult it's going to be to fix and keep shooting. I don't know if Bob misinterpreted my meaning, but the end result was so overcomplicated it couldn't respond to changes without two days of re-programming, even though the problem might be something as simple as the magazine on the camera needing more clearance to avoid hitting the spacedock model." Edlund's admonishments fell on deaf ears though, and when the studio executives came sizing up the situation, Abel had only a single completed visual effects shot to show for all the time and money spent. Abel was fired on the spot. 

During their involvement with The Motion Picture, RA&A operated its own physical visual effects company, at the time located on Seward St, Los Angeles, under the name Astra Image Corporation, especially created for the Star Trek production and also headed by Abel, it closely cooperating with Paramount's studio model shop, Magicam, conveniently located nearby on North Las Palmas Avenue. Although the company is usually referenced to as "RA&A" in common usage in most print publications, it was therefore Astra that was legally the official production company for the Star Trek production. All production art for example, was stamped with the Astra logo. "Astra", according to Olsen, was an acronym for "A Star Trek Robert Abel". (Star Trek: Creating the Enterprise, p. 46), also being the Latin word for "stars" (plural).

Douglas Trumbull's company, Future General Corporation, was subsequently given responsibility for the effects work in. (The Making of Star Trek The Motion Picture) Several key staffers, initially employed at Abel, moved over to that company, among others Scott Farrar, Mark Stetson and Andrew Probert, whereas Richard Taylor stayed with the company, only to leave later that year.

General history
Founded in 1971 by Abel, together with his friend Con Pederson, RA&A was a pioneering company that employed the newest techniques in creating visual effects, including, a technique Pederson picked up while working for Trumbull on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the earliest computer generated imagery (CGI). Initially the company employed these kind of techniques for producing groundbreaking commercials, among others for the beverage 7-Up and the clothing brand Levis, before branching out to motion picture productions. In those years the company experimented with the use of the Evans & Sutherland vector graphic computer in order to previsualize effects shots, called "animatics", digitally, an innovative approach at the time. Eventually, it enabled employee Bill Kovacs (the later founder of Wavefront Technologies, a company developing CGI software) to shoot imagery right off the E&S screen, which yielded unprecedented "pseudo-3D" CGI. Abel was tinkering with this technique at the time of Star Trek movie, but it proved to be too far ahead of its time for practical application in motion picture productions, contributing to the problems described above. Nevertheless, Abel succeeded in making the technique work a few years later for TRON. One of the first motion picture projects they worked on was Disney's The Black Hole (1979), for which they produced promotional materials and the opening sequence, before they were contracted to provide the special effects for The Motion Picture.

After the ill-fated project, the company worked on High Fidelity (1982), Disney's critically acclaimed TRON (1982), Breakin' (1984), the LaserDisc videogame Cube Quest (1983), and Steven Spielberg's television series Amazing Stories (1985-1986).

In 1986 RA&A entered into a merger with Toronto-based Omnibus Computer Graphics, Inc., but went out of business the following year as Omnibus defaulted on its investment. Many former, predominantly post-Motion Picture, employees went on to found their own companies to continue the pioneering work in CGI, and other techniques, which were among others, Rhythm and Hues, Metrolight, Sony Imageworks, Video Image/VIFX (by employee Richard Hollander), Santa Barbara Studios (by later employee John Grower), Boss Film Studios (by the above mentioned Richard Edlund), Kroyer Films, and others. Apart from the already mentioned Star Trek alumni, others who have at one time or another worked for the company included, John Dykstra and Robert Legato.

Robert Abel himself passed away in late September 2001, at the age of 64.

The Motion Picture staff

 * Robert Abel - CEO
 * Tom Barron
 * Scott Farrar - Effects Cameraman
 * Pete Gerard - Model Maker
 * Richard Hollander - Electronic and mechanical design
 * Gil Keppler
 * Con Pederson - CEO/Effects Director
 * Andrew Probert - Concept designer/Illustrator
 * Mark Stetson - Model Handler
 * Michael Sterling
 * Richard Taylor - Effects Designer