xBs?
Former Borg. It's what we call ourselves.
One of the biggest carrots of the show
were the Borg. From a design point of view,
I just so wanted that opportunity.
To my chagrin, it was xB versus the Borg that we all know
because I was like, "Aw, I have such a vision of what the head-to-toe
new Borg could be." But instead we're doing
the stripped-down version of the Borg, and that's when
my chagrin turned to delight because I love a challenge that
it's not obvious to me what I'm gonna do.
My propensity as a designer,
is I try and make sense of things.
So when you get to the Borg,
there's tubes coming from places that I have no idea why.
It's an alien assimilation process.
So, who are we to say that we need to know what it is,
but as a designer it's like, but I need to know!
And that's when you kind of have to let go
and then channel Michael Westmore and try and imagine
him coming up with the design back in the day.
And that's kind of a fun thing to do, is to play in his
sandbox and riff off of his aesthetic,
and try and get the essence of it.
What made it really, really exciting was working with
Vincent Van Dyke and seeing what they can do.
But you'll have silicone pieces like this with 3D-printed
tech. So, these were designed by Neville,
3D-printed. We would then mold them and generate them
in plastic and glue them into each prosthetic piece.
So anytime you have a piece like this where there's these
little missing cutouts, that tech would get glued in,
little pre-paint around them, and then they would get boxed
with a variety of different face pieces.
[Neville] We wanted to be careful to not have it become
just a monstrous, Frankenstein aesthetic,
yet in a lot of ways it was. And we needed to capture
a sense of empathy in the xBs,
it was really critical. They weren't just the Borg anymore;
they were not to be feared, they were to be empathized with.
And the idea was that it was all very violently taken
away from them.
It was not a finite, plastic surgery, beautiful job,
but that it was much more of a messy process.
So we're trying to create emotion with that as well.
I mean, emotion in a scar can actually say a lot.
We wanted to keep the xBs as modular as possible.
We had a high volume of xBs on any given day and
really didn't know ahead of time who they were gonna go on.
So what we would do is create these boxes that had
choice tech pieces with appliances that felt like
they'd be appropriate.
That would get sent to James MacKinnon on set,
and then James's team has to then create and expand
the world of the Borgs by using all of these components
and mixing and matching all of this so that we have a
distinctive range of xBs on set.
There was a lot of days where there was, you know,
a sea of xBs, and it was amazing to walk through and see
all of these stations, all of these makeup artists
bringing these to life. It was a really beautiful thing.
You know, how makeup works is, on camera it can be
flawless, but in person you can look at it and go,
"Oh, okay, I see where you glued it together.
I see where the actors' skin is and where the prosthetic is."
It took effort, up close, in person, to kind of look at the
actor and see the difference between rubber and flesh.
It was so good.
Thank you for showing me this.
No one could understand it better than you.