SFX

DESIGNING STAR TREK PICARD

“THIS IS REGRESSING! I’VE NEVER been busier in my life trying to make deadlines on Star Trek: Picard. So to allow behind-the-scenes 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

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