The fun thing about Trek is there's a new challenge
in every episode.
It's not doing the same thing repetitively.
I think we definitely spend a lot of time to try
and find a new way of showing things.
And also in the case of Picard, there's a very, like,
serious legacy associated with that.
And that's part of the visual language of Season 3.
Constructing the full CG shots, whether it's the Borg cube
or the Titan or the Enterprise-D,
it starts in the storyboard process
and then we put it into the pre-vis stage.
And the pre-vis is, you know, sort of a very rough CG.
It doesn't have any textures.
It looks like a very old video game.
And then from there we start to actually build the shot.
And so the, the CG is rendered
and there's multiple passes that go into that, but it starts
with like the gray shade and there's shadows, reflections,
you know, spec, textures, and they just sort of layer those
on independently so you can control them.
And then we'll add atmosphere over the top
and then we'll add lens effects and imperfections
on the lens, things like that once in a while to
sort of make it mimic what a real camera would do.
And that's sort of the last part of it.
And so when you're seeing a shot being built from scratch,
we've looked at it in a lot
of those iterative moments to make sure
that each thing will work as it's built upon.
And so by the end, there's many, many layers
that have gone into sort of make it photo-real.
The Borg cube in Jupiter's red spot was a fun one for us.
We started with the storyboards of course
and then we got it into pre-vis
and started to place different lenses
and to sort of see how the cube looked best.
We, we really tried to lean into giving it
some cinematic lighting, some backlighting,
some, you know, very dramatic sort of looks.
Having the clouds was very helpful
because it gave us a sense of scale
without having to dress anything else in as well.
The Borg cube is, I think,
one of our biggest assets, digital assets by far.
I mean it's massive and we get really,
really close and personal with the Borg cube.
And so we needed to dress in much,
much higher res details in the textures and geometry
and all the sorts of stuff that you're gonna notice.
You know, especially on big TVs these days,
which everybody has.
The render times are huge.
And of course when it blows up, I mean,
that's just a massive, massive shot.
But it's an interesting one because again,
scale and space is very, very hard
because you don't have like a person standing next
to it that indicates how big this thing is.
And so you spend a lot of time, again,
with camera moves and trying to dress
in things like clouds or whatever, lights,
different details in order to give the viewer an idea
of how big it is against the surrounding space.
And so, it's always a challenge, but it's, you know,
we found that when it almost kind of breaks frame
it's so big that the camera can't quite contain it
was a good way of doing it.
And then also playing with lighting and making sure
that we had very dramatic lighting to sort of
pay off all the details that went into it.
I mean, in general in Star Trek,
I think the ships,
maybe more than in other sci-fi properties,
are almost characters, right?
Like they almost have their own personality
and people know them for years and from canon and all that.
And so anytime you introduce a new ship,
you have to answer a bunch of questions.
"How does it move?"
"How does it," you know, "How fast is it?"
"How, what, what are its," you know, "skills?"
"What are its drawbacks?"
All all those sorts of things.
The Shrike, because of the unique shape of it,
placing the lens and the camera closer
to it was really kind of cool at times
'cause you had those sort of imposing wing claw type things
at the front, and you have that a lot with Trek.
Like, you look at a ship
from a million different angles to say like,
"How's it gonna look best and most cinematic?"
And then you bring it into 3D space
and you start to play with the movement of things.
"How fast is it?"
You know, "How quickly can it turn?"
"How does the throwing a ship
at another ship work, how does that look?"
And just sort of, you know,
define the parameters of the ship itself.
And, and in the case of the Titan, I mean,
it's an epic, big, big ship.
There's a few shots where we get pretty close
to it or it very slowly passes camera.
We kind of tilt up with it.
I think those are always really fun
because you get to really sit there and stare at the detail
and the work that the artists did to bring it to life.
It's fun to kind of, you know, show that if we can.
And the Space Babies I think was something very unique that
that we had not quite done in any of the other shows before.
You know, seeing that sort of like, you know,
creatures floating around the ship and it was a very like,
kind of beautiful shot, but yet in space with the ship.
So I think we had a lot of fun with that one.
As far as my career is concerned, I mean,
when I was a kid, TNG was the thing
and I had these very close friends, a guy and his brother
and every time I would go over there, we would watch that.
They took me to conventions a few times.
So it started there and that's when I started
to really, like, pay attention to Star Trek.
And then, you know, as I got older
and became a visual effects artist, all the guys that were
up above me had worked on previous iterations of Trek
and they were rock stars to us, like, literally rock stars.
So, I always wanted to do that, you know,
and I thought one day if I can work on a shot
on Star Trek as an artist, that would be amazing.
And so to be here now
and be able to work on multiple seasons
of the shows and be a part of that family is just,
it's an incredible honor for sure.