The romulans
when they were tricky
because
they needed to be
as realistic as possible.
When you look at past
romulans, they
evolved
and morphed and changed
through time.
So you kind of have that Liberty
to also morph and change things
a bit,
but there's a cannon
and an expectation with respects to foreheads
shapes and ears
and eyebrows
that you just cannot mess with.
As you start to play with ear length and
eyebrows, it gets Elfin very quickly and you're looking
at the design going what is happening here? And
how do I how do I Wrangle this thing?
So it feels like a Romulan where it landed
was very mindful nuanced shapes of the forehead.
So when I come up with the design of
the shape of the romulans, I give those to
Vincent Van Dyke and that's the direction that we've
all agreed is
The right way to go for a romulans, he
and his team then
do variations on a theme based on the specific
actors that's going to be wearing the Prosthetics
with
the romulans.
We had two different versions We had some that
had full four heads that were full silicone prosthetic
foreheads.
And then we had some that we're going to
be
much more human
but we still needed to change their brow direction.
We still need to give them that classic Romulan
brow.
So with those we had
what we call brought transfers
and those are a transfer piece that will go
on almost like a sticker
over the
Eyebrow and that will get glued down the edges
will get Blended and then we'll get painted into
their skin tone and that will look like they
have a new brow that's completely replacing their Old
Brown
in the past.
You would have eyebrows
that
you just kind of glue on and now you're
taking individual eyebrow hairs one
at a time
for every single prosthetic.
So it's much more tedious complex approach and it's
all comes down to HD cameras.
You will see absolutely everything
every single background performer all the way to the
ground Hero characters
have lace brows.
So anytime you're looking at a Romulan on screen.
None of them are their own brows.
They all have these brand new lace brows that
are
giving them this
very unique identifiable look so with
a lace brow,
you take your piece of lace and put it
over a template every square of that lace.
You would be taking a little needle that has
a hook on it and taking an individual hair
looping it through that lace and tying a small
little knot
and that not would basically be the root of
your hair if you will
so every single Square
Her with every hair has got to be kind
of mapped out to make sure that the direction
of flow
of that hair makes sense when it's tied into
that final brow
working with Vincent Van Dyke what
really needed to
happen? Was
it just the utmost Precision in
the prosthetic
because of where
it terminates, you know where this
brow piece has to stop.
I think the most challenging part of Picard for
us was just the the magnitude of Prosthetics
when you have a day where there's 30 plus
Romulan plane
that amount
Of Prosthetics to go out
was I think the biggest challenge for us?
There's a point when design has to stop
it has nothing to do with me
and now it's all about the execution which they
did an exceptional job
and no wrong notes can be so hot.