Making of ‘Star Trek: Picard’: Lively roundtable with showrunner Terry Matalas and 4 crafts wizards [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“We’re all blessed in some ways but also cursed to have the amount of legacy on this show because it means that you have almost 56 years of creative material to draw from, but that also means you have a lot of rules and regulations and canon that you have to adhere to. So there’s a kind of pressure to it as well,” notes “Star Trek: Picard” showrunner Terry Matalas about the technical details that have accumulated throughout “Trek” history. We talked to Matalas for our “Making Of” panel series along with costume designer Michael Crow, makeup department head James MacKinnon, prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke and visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman. Watch our roundtable discussion above.
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“Star Trek: Picard” starring Sir Patrick Stewart ended its three-season run this spring by reuniting the cast of “The Next Generation” while also calling back to storylines and conflicts from the past and introducing new allies and enemies in the present. Crow had “a lot of discussions” with Matalas about the returning characters, “where those characters are in their lives now and how we wanted to present them,” including Beverly (Gates McFadden), who had become “this badass action hero,” and Worf (Michael Dorn), who has also evolved and “become his own person” in the years since we last saw him.
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The series also introduced the character of Vadic (Amanda Plummer), who is hunting Jean-Luc Picard’s son Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) for reasons that are unknown at first. “I spent hours talking to Amanda about what she wanted the costume to be able to do function-wise, but also about the character,” Crow explains. “Through the costume I tried to use these organic textures and lots of layering that sort of flows in and out of each other.” MacKinnon adds that Plummer was “very knowledgeable on that character that she wanted to create as well. So working together with her to create that paler face, we got rid of her eyebrows, and obviously Vincent made the brilliant scars on her cheeks.”
About those, Van Dyke explains, “Amanda’s got such a great look herself and … we don’t wanna cover that up completely.” So he created symmetrical scars for her face, “which is not really something you see in nature … We referenced a lot of jellyfish sting injuries and things like that that give you some very organic, very interesting scars that not a lot of people are familiar with, but left us with something very unique and very iconic for her character, I think.”
Vadic’s introduction also meant the creation of her ship, the Shrike. “It starts with production design and Terry and Dave Blass talking about the different ideas and what they want it to look like,” says Zimmerman. “And then once we get our hands on it, we start to take it and make it camera-ready, which means adding photoreal textures,” as well as experimenting with the quality of its movement. “I think we got into some animation tests right away with Terry and started doing some pre-vis to see how this thing would behave as opposed to the other Federation ships.” Finally they’re ready to “drop it into shots” and “see what sort of way we can bring it to life.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the crafts of the Paramount+ series. Watch the video above for even more insights.
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