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Doug Drexler, Computer Animator September, 2006

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As a kid, I was smitten by Star Trek and Gene Roddenberrys' vision of the world.

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It's more an optimistic future where people got it together.

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And one night I was sitting on the couch, watching Discovery Channel,

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and there was a, I guess it was Extreme Machines or engineering,

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or something like that.

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And here was this guy, this Jacque Fresco guy [laughs],

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and, here he was talking about the world of tomorrow 

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like I hadn't heard anyone talk about since I was a kid.

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And it just blew me away.

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What Jacque was doing, is basically what interested me all along,

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that I liked about, the optimistic, you know, future.

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I called him on the phone, and I mean, to know Jacque is to love him.

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And Roxanne, Roxanne Meadows, they're family to me.

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We hit it off instantly.

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I think I flew down to Venus, to see Jacque and Roxanne, within a month.

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I went down there and it,

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for anyone who's interested in an optimistic future, it's like Disneyland.

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You can often meet people and they don't turn out to be everything they're cracked up to be.

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Or, the passion really isn't there, you've kind of embossed it from a distance, you know.

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I mean, watching Jacque on television, you could get a larger than life idea of...

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We all know how you can get a larger than life idea of somebody.

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And then you meet them and, you know, they're not really everything you hoped.

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Well, they're the real McCoy, let me tell you. l mean they are the real thing.

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For me to have gotten involved with Jacque was to have a chance

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to make a contribution to the world of tomorrow.

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For a good number of my years on Star Trek I worked in the visual effects department.

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So, basically, I had this knowhow on computer animation,

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and I love the models that they make, they're really fantastic, architectural models, 

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but I said, "Hey Jacque and Roxanne, I would love, and I mean I'm not kidding,

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I would love to take some of these things and turn them into three-dimensional images."

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The native visual effects program that we used on Star Trek and on Galactica was LightWave 3D.

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You have a movie studio in a box, and you can create anything, anything you can imagine.

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And you can make as real as you want, depending on how much time you have.

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As much as I love working on the science fiction shows, and I said it to Jacque and Roxanne,

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If I had an oportunity to work with them,

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on whether it be a real life project or TV show, 

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or something about what it is they're dreaming,

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I would, I think I would go there, I'd run there to help them, and to be a part of it.

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To help iluminate the world of tomorrow is for me,

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and I don't know why,

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it's the biggest role there is.

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And when you're doing it for something that you believe in,

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 like Jacque and Roxanne's ideas,

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it's just kick ass, you know, there's nothing like it.

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And it's also because I know the effect that it has on people,

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 from my years and years working on Star Trek,

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that you can change people's lives. I know it sounds silly but it's really true.

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They could see something, like Jacque and his cities, his self-erecting buildings and stuff,

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and say, "I want to be an engineer. I want to be a scientist," 

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or "It's cool to be smart," you know.

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To be a part of that, I know that that is what is going to make or break tomorrow,

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how kids feel about that.

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When I worked on Star Trek, over 18 years,

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I met astronauts and scientists and Stephen Hawking [laughs],

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the guys who drove the rovers around mars,

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all came to visit Star Trek and said in no uncertain terms 

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that was Star Trek that made them want to be a scientist,

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or an explorer, or an astronaut,

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or even Stephen Hawking wanted to sit in the captain's chair.

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For me I realize that at times I felt like we were doing something frivolous doing science fiction,

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but I saw that it had a profound impact on people.

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It's kind of an epiphany really, to realize that you can have a profound impact,

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even though you're working on something that some people think is kid stuff.

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Jacque has ideas and plans of a different way that the world would work.

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And sometimes when people see that,

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 they're a little taken back because it seems too fanciful.

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But, maybe it isn't. The thing is if you don't dream about it, you're not going to do it.

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Jacque provides the dream and to meet him is to, it really gives you a lot of faith.

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He's kind of a twenty first century Moses, you know, lead his people well.

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He's a citizen of the human race.

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You know, he's not american, and he's not an english man, he's not a french man,

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he's a human being.

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We'd go for walks out on their reclaimed area,

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that they turned back into, basically it's almost like primal forest.

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I can barely keep up with this guy!

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You know I'm like "Jacque, slow down!"

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We'd go back to his house

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and we'd go through sketches and drawings and he'd talk about his ideas.

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You know, nothing he does, no matter how fanciful it looks, it's not frivolous.

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He has a plan for everything, there's a reason for everything.

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All you've got to do is, you know, wind him up and let him go,

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he will just pour ideas out at a rate that is unbelievable.

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He knows how everything works, he will draw you sketches,

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he will make you models.

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Everytime I did an animation, he sent me reams of sketches.

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Think about it, a ninety year old man,

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and he can't stop thinking about the world of tomorrow.

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It's all about the world of tomorrow,

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and it wouldn't matter whether he had one minute more to live,

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or he had another, he had 300 years more to live,

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the fire for that is just as bright as can possibly be,

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and that is what's so inspiring.

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Jeez, I love going down there,

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they've got their model shops and their video dome and everything,

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and you go in there and all those, you know, futuristic ideas and...

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That is the energy that comes off of those things

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that will propel us into tomorrow.

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We all can help make the future a great place, 

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and the idea of a wonderful tomorrow is not naive.

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When you talk about faith, 

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if you want to have faith, have faith in yourselves,

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and have faith that we can create a more optimistic tomorrow.