Once fully equipped, Shatner explained to his model, Miss May 1998 Deanna Brooks, what he was looking for, and that no wardrobe would be needed. He then proceeded to pose a nude Deanna on a mod white leather couch, draping her this way and that and then coming in to take extreme close-ups. Quiet, calm, determined and focused, Shatner kneeled before Deanna and orchestrated the studio crew to shift the dozen or so lights around the room to get the exact "bodyscape" he wanted.
"Keep this position," Shatner told Deanna, "and then I'll move in and around your body, as if you were a series of hills."
"It's like photographing the landscape of me," Deanna quipped with a wry smile.
Shatner snapped away for about 90 minutes before he felt as if he had captured his artistic vision. "I had never done nudes before, and it was a little intimidating," he said as the set was being torn down. "The first five minutes it's a naked girl, and after that it becomes an object to find those qualities that I was looking for -- the golden hairs on her body, the curve of her breast or thigh....
"I am a Playboy fan, and coming here had a kind of forbidden feel to it, which I enjoyed. But I knew, having had some experience in nude scenes of my own in motion pictures, that it's workaday [for this staff]. At the same time, it was great fun to poke this lens along Deanna's beautiful body."
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