STAR TREK: PICARD

Warp behind the scenes in this exclusive peek at Picard’s design secrets.

THIS IS REGRESSING! I’VE NEVER been busier in my life trying to make deadlines on Star Trek: Picard. So to allow behind-thescenes documentary crews to come in and see us making the process, I just never had the time to do it until we got to the very, very end. And then it was too late to really show a lot of this stuff. So no one’s seen any of these behind-the-scenes photos!”

DATA DRAWER

I knew early on that we needed to do a drawer of B-4’s parts as scripted. They’ve made Data parts in the past and I wanted to get my hands on those as opposed to building all new ones. Especially because Brent Spiner, at the age he is now, it was harder for us to take a mould of his face to make it look like it was 10 to 20 years ago. I originally was reaching out to the people who had the old TNG parts from the ’90s as those were auctioned off, to at least bring in to use as a reference model to then make our own.

Thankfully, John Van Citters [a Vice President at CBS] has archives with all the leftover props that CBS still has from Star Trek. He ended up tracking down Data’s head – which was the most important part to us – in Calgary, bizarrely enough. It had been left in a crate in a warehouse for a couple years, I guess from some travelling Star Trek tour.

It was, more or less, just how it was when we got it out of the box. It had some ageing on it and wrinkles and lines but the [show] creatives were like, “This is even better because we hadn’t really imagined it ageing like this.” That became the kind of standard for the make-up department. They also needed a reference for the Data make-up for the season, so they had that gold paint to use and then this aged Data to build the new parts and skin from.

I was actually building a whole torso for Data because we couldn’t find it, and John miraculously found his torso in Hong Kong at the last second. We quickly had this giant crate shipped over. It was this big robot set-dressing piece, something that they had on the Enterprise from Nemesis. It was holding all the robot parts. And inside of it was this torso just floating around, getting banged up in the middle.

The torso was the hardest part, actually, because they couldn’t settle on Data’s musculature.

Is he ripped? Is he soft? Is he somewhere in between? Once we found the torso it was like, “Well, that’s what they’ve done before. So we’re good. Let’s just do this!”

DRAWER CONCEPT

This concept was by John Eaves, who has a long history with Star Trek. Thirty years, I think – he designed the Enterprise-E. Todd Cherniawsky, the production designer, really liked the idea of us sharing illustrators and designers. I was able to utilise these amazing illustrators to start designing props. John ended up doing all the Federation stuff for me. So he did the phaser rifles, the phaser pistols and this Data drawer, which I assumed would have been from the Enterprise-E.

I’ve never worked like that, I’ve always had a dedicated designer just to the department. But it was really cool to get this variety of everyone’s personal taste. I think what really made all the props and the set dressing and the costumes and everything on the show just all feel of the same world – to me personally – was the fact that we were all just collaborating and sharing these designers in this way. They made everything feel like it was all synced. But the Data drawer I ended up taking on because I knew that with needing to integrate parts into it, I really didn’t want it to just be a setdressing piece.

It was complicated – a part needed to open pneumatically, potentially fog needed to come out of it, smoke lighting sources – and then originally it had like a display inset into it, but eventually we ended up just turning it into a light table, so that it kind of matched all of Daystrom’s setdressing look.

DATA’S PAINTINGS

These are the Photoshop compositions that I used to pitch the painting. These aren’t the oil paintings – these are the paintings as they were created conceptually by Andrea Dopaso, before she started actually oil painting. This is her template.

And it’s not like a printing and transposing and paint by numbers kind of thing – she painted the other ones from scratch. These were just so we could approve what the painting would look like in the end. This took forever. It took one of the first props we started on. It’s one of the things that stuck through almost all the drafts. There were two things early on that stuck as the story was being developed, and that was the idea that Picard would be in a château making wine and the idea that Picard would be visiting his archives – and we would see all his old memorabilia and he would unwrap this painting.

We went through probably 50 different paintings. I moodboarded it out with different paintings that I felt kind of emotively captured what the creatives were talking about.

We didn’t have Isa [Briones] cast until very late in the process. For a long time we just worked on a figure in the shape and landscape, the composition of it, and then at the very end once Isa was cast, she sent me a bunch of photos. We quickly threw them into the composition. Alex Kurtzman approved it and Andrea painted it over a weekend. Thankfully, she can oil-paint that fast! It took 10 weeks all in all to realise that painting.

PICARD’S VISITOR BADGE

I read in a rewrite of the script that Picard was going to have a visitor badge when he goes to visit the Federation. This was the one thing I read in the script where I was like, “Oh my god, are you kidding me? How do I reinterpret that idea for 2399?”

I had actually bought a bunch of old pins, pendants, buttons and stuff off eBay as I was prepping, as well as pips and badges and comms from the past – a collection of things either as reference or to actually use physically in the show. I found this old publicity pin that had this delta cut-out in it. I suddenly was like, “That’s it. It should just be a cut-out”: the form of the delta, it’s like your inverted delta badge. I worked with my graphics illustrator Ashley and it just all came together right there. We threw the “Visitor” on there and it suddenly made sense what a visitor badge would be for Star Trek.

DOG COLLAR

Number One was in the script from the get-go. The dog tag I pitched to Patrick and the writers early, and they liked it, but shortly before we started filming – like the day before – I have a last-minute show and tell and Akiva Goldsman and Michael Chabon are looking at the dog tag and are like, “It needs a ‘No.’.” I don’t comprehend what they’re saying at first but eventually it dawns on me that the number one really did need a “No.” in front of it to really sell that fact. It made all the difference.

DATA COMPUTER

Data was essentially living in the wall of the Coppelius Station, but with me being a prop guy I really wanted there to be a tangible thing that Picard could turn Data off with – like HAL’s eye turning off in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Thankfully the creatives liked that idea and John Eaves was available to design Data’s tombstone, so to speak. Patrick was particularly powerful in that scene, I thought, and in fact it was his idea on set to pull out the isolinear data chips one by one. Thankfully I had the computer prop remotely linked, so we could turn off different parts when we liked.

SOONG’S SPECIMENS

Altan Soong was written as a synth-butterfly collector, so a unique terrarium to hold these specimens needed to be imagined. Instead of glass cages to hold them, I imagined a robotic bug could just park and recharge without the instinctive need to spread its wings. It also became a practical need, as when you’re collecting, storing and moving desiccated butterflies, you need to be careful or they fall apart.

RESSIKAN FLUTE

The Ressikan Flute I asked permission from Patrick Stewart to use. It was so personal to Picard, we ended up putting it in his room instead of his archive. It’s hard to see but it’s in the first shot you see of Picard, when he wakes up from the Data poker dream. This is a newly designed flute case based on the original prop.

ROMULAN GAMES

The Romulan games sort of evolved from the first script to the last. Originally, I knew I was going to see some sort of Romulan Borgs in an insane asylum prison on the Cube, so what were these people doing in their padded cells? I kept thinking of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and all the games on the tables. Evolving Rubik’s Cubes into Romulan seemed like a natural fit; little did I know that I would be tasked with inventing the Impossible Box later.

The Romulan Tarot cards were tough to crack, but incredibly fun to conceive and design. It started with solving what Michael Chabon had poetically written, about them being arranged like a mandala and interlocking labyrinthian symbols on triangle cards. I started with geometry. Shapes of triangles can only be arranged in so many ways. Then my brilliant graphics designer, Ashley Villanes, stated building the layers of the maze and the custom iconography. The tricky part was finding that balance of what you, a 21st century human, considers to be ancient, and what an advanced alien culture from the future considers ancient.

ROMULAN RINGS

Jewellery is not always what a prop guy gets to deal with. Watches and wedding rings, sure, but often it’s more practical to design with the costume. Star Trek is different, as a ring can often conceal a weapon, key or technology. That was the case with the Romulans. Their whole culture is secrecy and deception, and the original impulse was to conceal radiation-type weapons in their rings. This eventually becomes the Impossible Box, but nevertheless Narek and Narissa share what we called Romulan connection rings and Laris and Zhaban have Tal Shiar versions.

ROMULAN IMPOSSIBLE BOX

We knew we couldn’t physically build this box to actually open. This was another one where we knew the effects were going to have to take over, but I really wanted it to open very specifically. We illustrated exactly how this would open, if it could, and built a practical version that Harry/Narek could actually play with on set, and turn and oscillate and move the dials and the tiles around. Then we built an open version that has the little toy statue that you win if you conquer the puzzle.

I knew that because it was going to be ever so delicate, and they’re going to be carrying it, it needed a magnet embedded in the little feet. You have to always remember that the actors will break something! You try and you try to make it as foolproof as possible for them not to. You always make doubles of everything. “If you have one, you have none” is our motto in the props world.

The statue was a custom build, but it was actually based on a Sumerian statue of a woman covering her eyes, which I just thought was a perfect example of what a Romulan symbolically would want to convey. It’s all subterfuge and hidden conspiracies and lies. And that’s a part of their culture. That was the implication there.

ROMULAN TECH

Regretfully, when you work in props not everything you build will get seen or shot – but you’d better make sure you go the extra mile, because if they want to open something up and look inside it, it’s better not to have AA batteries stuck together with duct tape… You’re going to stall production. Throughout the season I was able to evolve a lot of technologies, with certain cultures being focused on, and these bombs Narek holds actually contain three smaller projectiles from the Romulan military bandoliers we custombuilt for a deleted scene.

ROMULAN BLACK-OPS

The night before our first day of shooting in Santa Barbara I was in Sunland, California, waiting for these final fabricated black-ops props to finish so I could bring them up and get final approvals on them. This was the first time getting all the pieces together and it was nice to see how well they all blended.

ROMULAN MILITARY

One of the most important aspects of designing a pistol is remembering to imagine what it’s going to look like holstered, because that’s where it’s going to be 90% of the time. Taking that into account, Lewis Doty at Studio Art and Technology and I came up with a brilliant way to holster the pistols without covering them up. A unique squeeze-peg system enabled quick-draw and holstering of the pistols on all the belts. The other important feature to me was the bottom of the handle, as that would be riding high on the hip, so I snuck a prehistoric Romulan bird skull in the butt.

The bird of prey emblem of the Romulan Star Empire was to be the last-ditch effort of this faction on the Borg Cube to reorganise their shattered empire. Igor Knezevic, one of our leading illustrators, who also redesigned the 2399 Federation delta for me, also remodelled these amazing birds of prey, which I worked into the military bandoliers and belts.