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Robert Bonchune

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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. 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". He also received an additional three Emmy nominations for VOY's "Timeless", DS9's "What You Leave Behind", and ENT's "Dead Stop".

Together with Adam Lebowitz, 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)

Bonchune, an Original Series fan, was one of the production staffers who got increasingly frustrated with the chosen visual direction of the producers, while working on Star Trek: Enterprise, which started with the altercations surrounding the design of Vorok's battle cruiser in "Unexpected". He has been one of the most outspoken critics in that respect, as was evidenced by his comment on the decision to remove the bird-of prey graphic from the Romulan Bird-of-Prey (22nd century) in "Minefield", "Oh and as for the BOP drawing underneath, it was rejected for no other reason than, once again, contempt for the Trek, the fans and the Original Series by ...uh."management"...you know who they are. ;-) (Oh and it wasn’t there idea, that didn’t help...)" [1]

Star Trek contributions

CGI work with:

He was also responsible for many planets, props, anomalies and 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).

Star Trek interviews

Emmy Awards

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

Bibliography

External links

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