VFXWorld has posted a superb peice on the visual effects work of the new Star Trek movie, which includes interview material with director J.J. Abrams and ILM's visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett.

Abrams told VFX he chose Industrial Light & Magic to boldly go where no Star Trek had gone before and deliver a whole new approach to space battles, explosions, black holes and planetary destruction, as well as cool upgrades for vfx involving the phaser, the transporter and warp speed. Along with it came some new wrinkles, including a new fracture program along with improved procedural rendering and volumetric shader tools.

"We [definitely] wanted to take it in a new direction -- we wanted to make a harder kind of space movie," says Guyett, ILM's visual effects supervisor, who previously worked with Abrams on Mission:Impossible III "And what I mean by harder is slightly more realistic and make it more about space exploration and making you feel more like you were going on this great adventure, and there's a certain amount of fear [involved] and really playing more with space, which would be lit more naturalistically. I looked at 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I still think is incredibly well done. And I really enjoyed Sunshine for the way they tackled their version of space."

In total, ILM handled 797 out of the 1,005 vfx shots for the new film (with additional support from Digital Domain, Lola, Svengali and others), which has now taken over $148 million at the US box office alone.

• In something of a real world piece of impressive high tech, the Star Trek film was beamed aboard the International Space Station this week. Paramount Pictures helped uplink the film to the space station, so there's no question that the ISS astronauts will be arrested on their return for illegal... uploading. NASA astronaut Michael Barratt was among those who watched the film and said he remembered "watching the original Star Trek series and, like many of my NASA co-workers, was inspired by the idea of people from all nations coming together to explore space."

• Read how ILM was tasked with putting Star Trek on VFX steroids for J.J. Abrams' bold re-imagining

• The site also has an inteview with the film's Creature Designer Neville Page, who also discusses coming up with the monster, Big Red, along with a few other surprises.