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DESIGNING THE SHIP
Andrew Probert had worked as a production illustrator on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so when he heard an announcement that a new Star Trek production was being launched, he called the studio. The call paid off, and only days later he found himself sitting in Gene Roddenberry’s office. “The bridge is the most important set,” Probert recalls Roddenberry saying, “so we want to bring someone in early to do bridge designs.” The memory makes Probert smile. “I was the fifth person hired on The Next Generation,” he says. “Although I was brought on to design the bridge, naturally I wanted to design the exterior of the ship if given the opportunity. I was doing little doodles of what I would like to see the new ship look like, and I tacked one of those doodles on the wall in front of me. One day David Gerrold came in to talk, and he glanced up and said, ‘Hey, is that the new ship?’ I said I didn’t know, so he said, ‘Let’s find out,’ and he pulled it off the wall and left. A little while later he came back, slapped it down on my desk and said, ‘Yup. That’s the new ship.’” Gerrold, it turns out, had walked into a meeting with Roddenberry, Robert Justman and co-producer
Herbert Wright and shown them the four inch by six inch drawing (black and white sketch, bottom row). They all liked it. “There were no notes or anything on it,” Probert says with a shrug, “it was just a scribble on a piece of paper.” And so Probert started finessing the design. Originally he planned it to be 2,000 feet long, twice the length of Kirk’s Enterprise in The Motion Picture. “When Gene reviewed the finished drawing, he said, ‘The nacelles look too short—I’m used to the engines of the older ship. Can you lengthen these a bit?’ So I lengthened them as little as I could get away with,” he chuckles. “I extended the nacelles l80 feet. Now the ship is an overall 2,180.” Noting that Probert had created a ship with a bridge located in the center of the saucer, Roddenberry asked for one other change. “He said, ‘I really would like to have the bridge back on top. I feel it gives people an idea of the scale of the ship, because once they see the bridge interior, they will understand the exterior size relationship.’” “Those are the only two changes Gene asked for,” Probert says. “It was pretty mind-blowing.”
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THIS IS A TITLE
the uniforms,’ but they had spent so much money on them that they didn’t want to change them, at least not at that point,” Wood says with a sigh. Her most memorable contributions to the show were in garments she created for new characters, like Guinan, and new aliens. And no new species made a bigger impression on Star Trek’s audience than the Borg. “They were to be the new bad guys of the universe,” Wood recalls. “Typically, we were given a week to work on designs, but the Borg were important enough that we were given two weeks. The producers wanted them to be scary, and part of that scariness was their uniformity, and their asexualness. I was tired of the streamlined, stainless steel concept of ‘scary,’” she says. “And I was influenced by the work of (Swiss surrealist artist) H.R. Giger.” When you’re working on Star Trek, Wood notes, cause and effect guide design. “You have to think in terms of ‘why they look that way’ in addition to ‘how they look.’ With the Borg, the idea was that the drones lived for centuries, and that their body parts would wear out and be replaced with mechanical body parts. I wanted to show that they didn’t wear out uniformly, so some of them had eye patches, and
some had fake legs or arms. I spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” she laughs, “and got a lot of parts there—plastic tubing and odds and ends, little pieces that we could paint and put together. And I found a company that had molds of various body parts, like torso and leg pieces, which they could produce very quickly.” Even though the drones shared a uniform look, Wood created a separate sketch for each one, “because they each had different artificial body parts,” she explains. “I developed a system around a fabric called ‘popcorn spandex’ that Velcro adhered to. We backed the tubes and hardware parts with Velcro so they would stick to the suit. That was great,” she says, “but all the little pieces were separate, so every time we put the costumes together, they had to be reassembled.” Somehow it all worked out. “I had wonderful assistants who were really into it and loved it,” Wood says. “We were trying to do everything that hadn’t been done before!” Right: Wood’s Borg costume sketch, and her hands-on assessment of its realization.
Designing the Borg in “Q Who?” required close interaction between TNG’s makeup and costume departments, with Durinda Wood responsible for most of the drone’s body, and Michael Westmore covering
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THE READY ROOM PAINTING
Picard: “Exactly what kind of historian are you?” Rasmussen: “My focus is on the twenty-second through the twenty-fourth centuries. Early interstellar history. You know, it was always believed this was on your desk, not here. Fascinating. Don’t move it on my account.” Picard: “You can’t expect me to believe that the layout of my ready room can possibly be of interest to future historians”. Rasmussen: “No less so than your legendary modesty, Captain. If I could describe to you what a thrill it is to be here. (He gestures at the painting.) This is the original.” Rasmussen’s awe of the painting over Picard’s sofa was faked, but plenty of viewers experienced the real thing whenever they saw that work of art on camera. But how did it come to be there? For the answer, you’d need to step back in time to 1987… As TNG’s sets were being built, Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach felt inspired. “There was a large blank wall over the couch in Picard’s ready room,” Sternback recalls. “So Andy
and I approached John Dwyer, our wonderful set decorator, and said, ‘Something needs to be put over that couch.’ Then we volunteered to do a painting.” “Typically, captains’ offices have some sort of ship painting,” Probert says. “We thought it’d be fun for Picard to have a picture of his own ship. I did the layout, and then Rick painted this killer background, because he’s an award-winning astronomical artist. After he completed it, I painted the Enterprise.” “Andy did a wonderful rendering of the ship,” Sternback comments. “This was while the model still was being built up at ILM.” “We did it on our own time,” Probert adds. “Each of us took it home to work on. When it was ready, we loaned it to John to put in the captain’s office.” “This was before we had any sort of computers in the office,” says Sternback, “so we did it in traditional media: acrylics, on eighth-inch Masonite.” After the series ended, several companies sold licensed prints of the painting, and General Mills even did a poster to accompany a cereal campaign. “The painting got around,” Sternback says. “But I don’t believe it’s ever been published in a book.” Until now, that is.
Left: Viewers occasionally caught a glimpse of the painting over actors’ shoulders, but this is the only episode where a character actually mentions it.
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THE PERFECT MATE
The Enterprise is sent to transport a beautiful Kriosian woman named Kamala to Valt Minor, a world that has been at war with Krios for many years. As an “empathic metamorph,” a being who can sense her mate’s desires and become exactly what he wishes her to be, Kamala is overwhelmingly attractive to all men. She has been prepared since birth to bond with Alric, Valt Minor’s ruler, in the hopes of bringing peace to their two planets. But it’s a long trip to Valt Minor, and after a conniving Ferengi injures the Kriosian ambassador who was to conduct the ceremony of reconciliation, Picard must step in and take his place, thus forcing him to spend considerable time in Kamala’s tantalizing presence. Right: Dan Curry’s storyboard sequence depicts Kamala’s emergence from her Kriosian chrysalis.
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HAND DOUBLES TO THE STARS
Where would showbiz be without doubles? The stunt double, who performs on-camera feats of physical prowess; the photo double, who fills in as the back of a famous actor’s head for a shot where the face of the actor isn’t going to be seen; and, of course, the stand-in, who’s present only for blocking and lighting purposes while the actor is off doing something else. But what of that other unsung hero: the hand double? Hand doubles most often appear in productions that emphasize an on-screen character’s technical prowess; think about the hands of the guy (or girl) who opens a safe, deactivates a bomb, or repairs a ruptured aorta. On TNG, think about O’Brien sliding his fingers along the transporter controls or Wesley plotting a course on the navigation console. The hand double is the star that shines in the dozens of insert shots required for each episode. But this particular double’s job doesn’t start until after the regular actors are done with principal photography. “Let’s say they already have a shot of Data pointing at a monitor on the bridge, or in engineering,” says Guy Vardaman, who has frequently filled in for Data’s digits. “Now they want a tight insert, showing
the image that’s on the monitor, but with Data’s hand in the frame. They can’t get Brent Spiner to come back—he’s filming the next episode. So they bring in the hand double to shoot those two seconds of footage.” A hand double’s prep generally takes longer than the actual filming. “For Data, they would shave my hands,” says Vardaman, “and then paint them gold, to match Brent’s. I wear a gold uniform, because you can see the sleeves in the shot. We’ll watch the footage with Brent in it, so I can see the position of his hands right before the insert. And then I replicate that position (see left) as they shoot my hands pushing buttons, or pointing at the monitor, whatever he did.” Right: A second unit crew sets up an insert shot of a crewman’s hands in Ten-Forward. “A shot like this goes very quickly once it’s lit,” explains visual effects associate Eric Alba. “It’s the lighting and getting the actions right that’s the hard part. It’s shot very tight, so the actor has to hit his mark very accurately. We use dailies from the show to match the lighting.”