STAR TREK: PICARD

JEFF LOMBARDI, PROPERTY MASTER IN THE ART DEPARTMENT ON STAR TREK: PICARD, TAKES SFX ON AN ALL-ACCESS TOUR OF THE 24TH CENTURY

Part two of our celebration of 24th century design. Engage!

SIRENA ARMOURY

Two weeks before we started shooting the second block of episodes, after the Sirena set had more or less finally been built, we realised that the transporter room needed an armoury or kit-up room for away missions. Not only that, but it should be a collection of weapons from alien cultures and times throughout the galaxy, not just our new guns. Oh well, jeez, no big deal! Well, it is a big deal because all these past Star Trek props don’t exist any more, and on a CBS show I can’t use props from the Paramount movies, so I would have to build everything from scratch – which I don’t have time to do. I called up my friend Mario Moreira, prop master from Star Trek: Discovery, and he thankfully had some guns he could let us borrow, which made all the difference in the world. That kind of collaboration is what’s really nice about walking into a created universe like this, and something there will only be more of as they keep developing more overlapping shows. The rest of the alien guns I scoured from prop rental houses across town. I surprisingly found Klingon death sting pistols and Ferengi disruptors tossed aside in old bins. I just had to repaint them, and thankfully Jonathan Frakes was able to shoot around the transporter room to give me a little more time to put it together.

SIRENA COMMS BADGE

Daren Dochterman, my brilliant prop illustrator, painstakingly reworked symbol after symbol until we found something Michael Chabon liked for the La Sirena. It being named after a siren or mermaid seemed the logical place to start, but how to interpret that in a masculine way for Rios was challenging. I think what we settled on in the end worked beautifully, and, interpreted as a comms badge, became even better. For the crew all getting together in the final shot of the season, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon wanted me to come up with a new style for the comms badge that united the characters. So I quickly did a material study using abalone shells as a guide, and variation C was selected. Those badges came out nice and I wish I had done that from the start, but hindsight is 20/20.

SIRENA PHASERS

These hard-shell cases on the Sirena phasers are kind of my homage to the phaser holsters from TNG. The slits down the side showing some of the gun detail was important so they didn’t feel too flat to me. We developed a way these can quickly and magnetically attach to your belt, but often we just used the regular clip-on versions.

SIRENA MEDICAL

The idea of an IV cuff is not necessarily new to Star Trek, but I had been seeing a lot of new laser etching in strange materials with my fabricators, so I thought it was a cost-effective way to show a futuristic IV for Bruce Maddox. My son was coming and going from the hospital at the time, and the worst part for him was having that nasty needle stuck in his arm. If indeed Star Trek inspires tomorrow’s generations, laser-etched sensor chips in a translucent stick-on latex pad is just me wanting something medically better for my children’s children. The dermal regenerators are funny, if only because every script called for somebody getting bandaged, and I had to keep reminding people that Band-Aids are unnecessary in a world where you can paint skin on…

OLD TNG TRICORDERS

The tricorder was something I was really eager to tackle, as it was certainly a prop I remember vividly from childhood. It was also something I didn’t really think I was going to be able to redesign until the very end. The general feeling was that an iPhone – or in our world of Picard, a holo PADD – could do everything a tricorder could at this point. This could be true, but to me there was still a need for ruggedised equipment, and that’s what I pitched. So you’ll notice everything that would have come off a Next Generation Starfleet ship in the show is not exactly what they used in that show, but maybe from a time before or shortly after – and certainly built for a very specific purpose and environment. The old TNG props are a product of their time. I had them physically in hand in my office, but I could never put any of them on screen. They just weren’t at our level of quality today, regretfully. I wanted to put an old tricorder in, but I had to redesign it. The minute you put it on camera, with blinking lights… our iPhone is far more advanced than that already.

FEDERATION BADGES

There was a future badge that was used in “All Good Things” and some of the future episodes in Voyager: a hollow delta with two gold ribbons behind. That was actually John Eaves’s design – he had done, like, 10 different comms badges when they were originally upgrading from The Next Generation to the movie Generations at the time, and they wanted to do a new comms badge for the movies, which eventually became the comms badge on DS9 and Voyager. Whoever took that and used it as a future badge, to me kind of established it in canon. Across the board, especially with costumes, we didn’t want it to be too far out there that it wasn’t instantly recognisable. So the Federation uniforms all feel like TNG, and similarly we wanted the comms badge to feel like The Next Generation as well. Not a new type of tech.

You see all these different colours in there – Alex thought the gold was too Discoverylike. So much gold in Discovery – he really wanted to stay away from it.

OLD PADDS

I loved working alongside Martin Garner, our video playback guru and his crew. Occasionally there was an opportunity for us to geek out on all things TNG, and as they were busy designing updated holo interfaces I got to sneak in programmed iPads or iPhones.

With the 2380s, like the Mars attack, we could conceivably return to technology closer to what the audience remembered these characters having in the past, like PADDs and tricorders. Props you can hide tablets and phones inside, with programs that the actors can interface with, is always a plus, and saves production a lot of money in VFX later – but building to existing parameters certainly has its limitations.

HOLO PADDS

This was our concept for the holo PADD in the prop department. I came up with this telescoping wand tech. Essentially this was like your cellphone, carrying around this thing – it telescopes out to project holographic imagery at a larger size. You could set it on the table, or you can hand-hold it. It’s still in the show, but as the show evolved and Michael Chabon was writing and getting more involved, he didn’t like this any more. This all became older – what holo tech would have been a decade before our show. The new holo PADDs became these credit-card-size crystal pieces.

I wanted to build something that was a physical thing, like a tricorder, that was your holographic interface. A prop that you see and it functions – it works and lights up. So that’s where Chabon and I had to balance it out. He thought the future tech should all be very sleek, very small. But I just had to make sure that he was aware that small and slim just doesn’t always translate to something visual for this medium. I feel like we found a nice hybrid. I really liked what we ended up doing with the holo PADDs. And I agree completely.

FREECLOUD

This was an early rough example of the Freecloud poster. Michael Chabon had this great idea as we were coming up with set-dressing ideas of having a music festival poster for Freecloud. That got him and I talking about music and David Bowie, and Yes album artwork and stuff that we liked.

The imagery I got to create, but all the names are straight from him. So Bewlay Island is a “Bewlay Brothers” reference from “Hunky Dory”. Stardust City: “Ziggy Stardust”. Freecloud: [b-side] “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud”. So Freecloud already had some David Bowie reference to it. I really wanted to do a kind of very androgynous, not quite David Bowie but like a David Bowie of the future 400 years – an alien David Bowie. The glasses were Yoko Ono’s, from one of her album covers. The image itself was based off Tilda Swinton doing David Bowie.

FREECLOUD BOTTLES

The first picture is actually product placement liquor from Star Trek marketing. Those are real bottles you can buy. So there’s the Montgomery Scott Scotch, James T Kirk bourbon and Ten-Forward vodka. I reached out to some of my product placement people and they were willing to lend us their name brands and give us products, but I had to upgrade their label to 400 years in the future and they’d need to be okay with that.

My graphic designer, who I personally think should have been a liquor bottle designer, went through and did these amazing upgrades to their stuff. Every single one of these companies I sent this new artwork out to would go, “This is great, oh my god, absolutely”. The alien stuff, that was working with reference imagery from a lot of DS9. There’s an awesome website called Quarks Bar [quarksbarb.com]. Someone has detailed all the glassware, the bottles, the shot glasses, whisky glasses, cutlery and plates from all the Star Treks. It was a great reference to see what they’ve done in the past. Then I took those elements and then we would upgrade them. What was great about that site was they would detail where they found this stuff too, so I had that reference to go online searching, buy them, put the graphics on them – and then we’ve recreated relatively cheaply the same alien models that had been done back then.

MODEL SHIPS

This photo was an update status report from the brilliant guys at Anovos, a replicas company in Florida. They were suggested to me by [production company] Secret Hideout, as they had done some beautiful models of the Discovery ships that are in the office. I called them up and indeed they were enthusiastic about the project – they jumped right onboard. It was fairly easy for them to replicate the Enterprise D and E as those are very popular models already, but the Stargazer and Cousteau had never been done before and that was exciting. The funny or sad part of all this for me was I really wanted to play with them and absorb the ship’s details, and I really only got to uncrate them in my office for 10 minutes before they were dressed on set and then subsequently shipped out to Comic-Con and various other sneak peeks. I’m still waiting for them to come back!

SOCCER BOMB

This one is hard to explain as it’s a long evolution of ideas, props, writer and character choices throughout the season. I will say it was the last prop I delivered on set for the season and that was a monumental relief for me. It will make a stunning mantelpiece one day for some Trekkie football fan.