Friday, November 21, 2008

Kino Hosts Extraterrestrials

Through a temporal anomaly, the Starship Enterprise mysteriously appeared in the Blue Room sometime before Halloween. On Halloween itself, limited numbers of students and teachers were able to actually enter the main bridge and observe the crew in action.
As it happened, the anomaly coincided with a confrontation with the Q'luthmuth Empire, which did not end well for them. The incident was reported on the front cover of the Arizona Daily Star.

Actually, the whole production was the creation of Thomas McNiece, who designed the replica to scale and built it at home, so it could be assembled in relative secrecy in the week before Halloween. (Thank you Lisa for giving up your room for that week!)
Thomas also made a videotape of everything the crew was to see on the ship's main viewer. He used model spaceships, and computer graphics, and friends for the cast, including Kino alumns Thomas O'Dell, Andrew Davies, and Nick Thorpe.
On Halloween, audiences had the experience of being on the main bridge themselves, in the midst of an unfolding drama involving the live action crew and the action on the ship's main viewer.
The Star photographer was so intrigued by the whole thing that he stayed at Kino for about three hours the day before Halloween, photographing Thomas and his friends as they set up and rehearsed. Then on Halloween, after the article had been printed, he came by just to see the complete performance.
Though the construction was too big to keep up past Halloween, Thomas is now working on editing a movie version of their performance and is thinking about constructing a small scale model.

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