American visual effects supervisor who joined The Next Generation in its sixth season and went on to supervise episodes of Voyager and Deep Space Nine, championing the move to computer-generated starships.
David Stipes is an American visual effects artist whose earlier television work included Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the miniseries V. He came to Star Trek in the sixth season of The Next Generation, supervising alternate episodes for the final two years of the series.
He then worked on the early seasons of Voyager before moving to Deep Space Nine, where he stayed until the series ended in 1999.
Stipes was a prominent advocate within the effects department for replacing motion-control model photography with computer-generated imagery, a change that made the large fleet battles of the Dominion War practical on a television schedule.