Hi!
Can I teach you a lesson?
Aw! Well, who's this little guy?
This is Badgey.
He's a virtual tutor
who can walk you through any Starfleet exercise
you can imagine.
Hi, I'm Mike McMahan,
creator and showrunner of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
I'm not an animator, and I can't draw,
but I work with a lot of amazing people,
a lot of amazing artists,
who can not only draw
but just make amazing, magic stuff come to life.
I've been around it a lot,
and even though I can't draw,
I think I can walk you through some of the stuff we do
that takes us from nothing
to a full Star Trek animated episode.
So, the writing process of Lower Decks
usually starts with a discussion of our ensign characters.
What do they want?
What do they think they want?
What are challenges in their lives?
And when we've come up with a couple emotional stories,
then we start talking about
what sci-fi can illuminate that.
For Badgey, I remember one of the first things I did was
I drew the character of Badgey
on one of our glass doors in the writer's room.
And they were like, "What's he like?"
And I was like, "Eh, I think he's like a
Moriarty on the holodeck."
And then we started talking about
what role does Moriarty fill in TNG,
and what job could Badgey,
you know, what kind of stories
could revolve around this character.
[Badgey] Can I teach you a lesson?
Rutherford is great at Starfleet tech,
but he's not exactly perfect.
So he's created this Badgey character
that he's been working on on the holodeck,
that he's trying to use as a training program,
and it's not quite working out.
Once we have the Badgey episode written and cast,
we record the voice actors,
and a audio engineer stitches together their audio
into basically like an old-timey radio play version
of the episode,
to kind of visualize it in your head
while you're listening to it.
[Badgey] Looks like you wanna recover lost cargo.
Did I get that right?
[Rutherford] Oh, yeah, almost forgot-
[Badgey] Coming right up!
That radio play goes to the board teams,
which is a group of artists who,
in black and white,
do a rough version of what you see on screen at the end,
except it's very low detail.
Eventually, it all comes together into an animatic.
Come on, you stupid glitch!
[electronic ding]
We're back in business!
The animatic is kind of the template
that we work off of,
to, individually, shot by shot,
add the character designs
and the color backgrounds and everything.
When we get the rough color in,
the episode's almost ready for air.
But that's when everything has to be refined.
That is where we go through
and we add beaming effects.
We add reflective light.
We're also going in and we're adding special sound effects.
We have one sound engineer whose whole job is to make sure
that the soundscape and the footsteps,
the way the computer's responding to somebody saying,
Computer, load Bajoran marketplace!
Then on top of that,
our composer is creating an all-new, original score for us
that sounds like Star Trek,
but fits into this 20-something minute,
you know, super fast-paced comedic version of it.
And then after all of that is done,
we take it to a mixer,
we make sure that all the levels are right,
that you can hear everything.
It really takes an army to put one of these things together.
You just want to make sure it's exactly right
before it ends up on somebody's screen.
So, when LA went into lockdown
we were still in the middle of working on Season 1
of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
And it took us about a day to make sure
that we got everybody moved into remote workspaces
in their homes.
The nice thing about animation is
we don't have a live-action set.
Our biggest challenges have been
how do we safely record our actors.
Now, luckily, a voiceover actor can work in a closet,
if it's correctly set up.
In addition to animating and recording
our voice actors remotely,
Lower Decks has a live orchestra for its amazing music.
And originally, that was supposed to be 60 people
in an orchestra playing in a room,
but because of LA's lockdown
we had to come up with a way to have our composer
record the musicians individually
and then stitch everything together.
I think it sounds great.
Not only have we finished doing post on Season 1 remotely,
but we have written the entirety of Season 2
with the writer's room over Zoom while we've been doing it.
Some of our new writers have never met in person
some of the writers from the first season.
But, hopefully, this world is getting back
to a state of normalcy soon enough,
and we'll be able to see you at a Star Trek convention,
and we all will be able to talk about
where did Dr. T'Ana's tail go,
and what's the deal with Boimler's purple hair
and all the stuff that we like to talk about too.