Three months at Expo '93 in South Korea, eating kimchee and programming both this ride and the Kia Motors Simulator in the pavilion right next door, all during the height of the North Korean nuclear arms dispute. (Did you know the Korean War never officially ended? Everybody just stopped shooting... so far.)

The StarQuest Pavilion at the Taejon Expo.

Scout ship - model by DreamQuest

The "vampire binary"

Watch for: Blatant product placement - the umbrella-shaped "Colony ship" has a Samsung logo.

Trivia: Shortly after completing this film, DreamQuest made another ridefilm entitled Asteroid Adventure, reusing many of the StarQuest miniatures.

Even more Trivial Trivia:
How I ended up on television in green plaid shorts ...

If there's one thing most people recognize me from, it's the appearance I made on the Discovery Channel show Movie Magic, which devoted an entire episode to the making of StarQuest.

Although the small measure of notoriety is nice, that appearance has always been a bit of an embarrassment to me, for two reasons. One - I usually don't look like that, and two, I usually don't talk like that.

The StarQuest "mockup" base was located in a warehouse just down the road from DreamQuest in Simi Valley, California. Whenever DreamQuest made an update to the film, I would go out to the mockup building and adjust the ride program to the new scenes. One particular morning in the midst of a very hot summer, I got a call asking me to go out and do a few hours' work so the production crew could come by the following day and ride the mockup.

It was looking like another hot day, and I knew the mockup building had no air conditioning. So, since I would be working all alone and didn't expect to see another human being that day, I left the house wearing green plaid shorts and a green T-shirt which read "Save the Burrowing Sloth" - a ensemble no one would want to be seen wearing, believe me. (I'm not actually a supporter of the burrowing sloth - if there is such an animal, which I rather doubt. It was a gag crew shirt from the film Freaked)

Not long after I arrived at the warehouse, the front door flew open and to my surprise an entire video crew stormed in, turned on their lights and began taping everything in sight. Eventually they worked their way around to my programming station and began taping ME - without having spoken a word to me.

Finally, one of them said "So, can you tell us what you're doing?"

"Can you tell me what you're doing?" I replied.

They explained they were shooting an episode of a series called Movie Magic. (The show hadn't premiered yet, so I'd never heard of it.) The producers of the StarQuest film had given them permission to document the project - they'd just neglected to tell me a camera crew might show up that day.

So I put the motion base through its paces and demonstrated the waveform editor while they taped. Then they asked if I would answer a few questions on-camera. I gamely stood in front of the motion base, and they asked "So - what do you do?", which is a difficult question to answer even in more relaxed circumstances.

And so, I ended up on the Discovery Channel in my "Save the Burrowing Sloth" shirt and plaid shorts, saying something brilliant and insightful like "I take this base and make it do what the film does." Clever, eh?

On the plus side, they put a title under me reading "Trey Stokes, Motion Base Programmer", giving the TV audience the impression that there really is such a job.

The episode is still rerun from time to time. And every time it airs, I hear about it - because somebody invariably says "Hey! Saw you on TV last night!"

Save the Burrowing Sloth!

Videos:

StarQuest Adventure appears on the SIGGRAPH Video Review #99 tape, available by mail order.