It meant a great deaI to me
that this not Iook Iike the originaI Star Trek.
To give the show that kind of feature-fiIm science-fiction Iook
on an episodic teIevision budget was our biggest chaIIenge.
I was impressed by the eIegance of the sets.
The Star Trek sets have a grace to them, and a quietness, too.
They don`t shout at you and scream ``high tech``.
It`s the future. The sky`s the Iimit.
You extrapoIate from the most modern architecture that you can deaI with
now in your century.
A beautifuI spaceship is important.
AIso, we`re on a 30-year mission.
If you`re doing that, you want to take your famiIies, chiIdren.
I couId Iive in a home that refIected these quaIities.
The IifestyIe is more than a battIeship in space.
It`s an environment in space.
It`s a substitute for Mother Earth.
Matthew, Pola, you know this area`s off limits. C`mon.
It reaIIy heIps you to suspend your disbeIief
when you waIk in here and spend the day on the ship, or the bridge.
Or when you beam up, or go to the pIanets.
That`s where a Iot of the budget is.
Nothing comes off the sheIf.
You can`t buy furniture from the 24th century, or get this equipment.
You have to manufacture everything.
lt`s a model of the tractor beam our ship uses,
with a few ideas of my own.
I think one reason that Roddenberry`s chosen to go with a syndication
is that he doesn`t have the pressures of the network.
One of the ways this expresses itseIf
is in the money that can be spent on the sets.
So it`s heIped aII of us.
It`s a treat.
We have medicaI equipment, for instance, that we do our designs on.
We have fabricated things that don`t exist.
We imagine what they`II be in the future.
We have to make aII of that.
Lead the way.
When we do a pIanet that is Earth-Iike,
then we can go on Iocation and deaI with normaI vegetation,
that`s normaI for us, and bIue skies.
But when you go to a pIanet which is different,
we must aImost necessariIy shoot it on stage.
We have a Iarge stage compIete with pIanet exterior and surface
which has a sky that we can make any coIour.
If we want to go to an aIien pIanet-scape,
it`s aIways created on Stage 16.
So usuaIIy on, Iike, the fourth day of the episode,
the actors know they`re going to pIanet heII.
That`s where they have to use the smoke effects,
and the dust gets kicked up.
In the earIy days of Next Generation,
we did not have computer digitaI technoIogy as we do today.
Everything had to be created photographicaIIy.
We wouId use materiaIs that were never intended to be used that way
to create new images.
For exampIe, the soIar surface,
Iiquid nitrogen to create time-space anomaIies, wormhoIes...
The fun of that was the creativity of, ``How are we going to do this?``
and never repeating ourseIves.
We reIied on technoIogies we were famiIiar with,
but never used them the same way twice.
Another thing we did
was create a soIar fIare hitting the force fieId around the Enterprise.
What we did to get the feeI of particuIate matter
going around an invisibIe sphere was we took a bowIing baII,
dropped saIt on it.
The saIt wouId bounce off the bowIing baII and then faII down.
We twisted it to Iook Iike it was coming up,
squeezed it in video compositing
so that it Iooked Iike an M&M, and superimposed it over the Enterprise.
The beamings, much Iike the originaI series, are an enhanced dissoIve.
Gene Roddenberry originaIIy came up with the idea of transporting peopIe
up and down from pIanetary surfaces to save time in storyteIIing,
so they wouIdn`t have to show peopIe taking off in a shuttIe
every time they went from a pIanet to a ship.
In the originaI series,
the composites were done on an opticaI printer.
They were basicaIIy gIitter swizzIed in a jar.
Next Generation was simiIar,
but we did more opticaI manipuIation after the originaI photography.
Energise.
The basic sparkIe eIement was gIitter,
with eIements digitaIIy fIipped and cobbIed together in a new way,
so the transporter had four stages.
The transporter had the first stage of the person dissoIving.
Then it had the shower curtain eIement
which initiated the beam in or beam out.
Then the generic fieId of sparkIes, which was gIitter,
and then finaIIy, the power paIette,
which was some residuaI gIitter on the chest of the person being beamed,
or the centre of the object.
I have a young man who`s a graphic genius.
His name is Mike Okuda.
We Iured him away from a job in Hawaii to work with us.
He`s responsibIe for aII of the wonderfuI new concepts,
the design of the controI surfaces in the interior of the Enterprise.
One of the things we did was Iook at things
the Air Force and simiIar organisations are Iooking at.
We went, ``Gee, they`re beyond what we can create on a teIevision budget.``
So rather than try to create something beyond that,
we said, ``OK, we`II go for a specific Iook,``
that we arbitrariIy said was the StarfIeet Iook.
One of the things we do is generate back-Iight photo transparencies
that we use as controI paneIs, read-outs and dispIays.
This particuIar paneI is something I designed for our first season.
It`s supposedIy some futuristic way of showing DNA sequences in the body.
This is a circuit board that gets puIIed out when they repair the ship.
This an isoIinear opticaI chip,
information storage for the 24th century.
I have two very wonderfuI iIIustrators who work for me,
Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach.
Andrew is invoIved with the exterior design of the Enterprise,
and the interior Iayout of the Enterprise.
Gene Roddenberry`s directions for us
was to make things smaIIer, faster, cIeaner,
a Iot Iike what`s going on in reaI technoIogy today.
You see what`s happened in personaI computers
and things Iike these hand-heId devices that peopIe carry around.
Riker to Picard. This is our communicator now.
We don`t have to fIip up a box any Ionger.
We`ve moved, we`ve advanced.
We had to design things Iike the tricorder,
the phasers, the communicators,
aII of which were known objects from the originaI series.
Our job was to update them for The Next Generation.
With the KIingon, it`s one area where I had a Iot of Iicence,
because I was given photos of former KIingons,
and there were no two aIike. They were aII different.
So I had the opportunity to create a new KIingon Iook,
that hadn`t been done yet,
so MichaeI`s make-up reaIIy isn`t one that`s been done before.
Nobody knew who I was for months. I`m there at five in the morning
and I don`t get off untiI eight.
They didn`t knew who I was, peopIe I worked with 14 hours a day.
MichaeI Dorn`s make-up, who pIays Worf,
it`s a reguIar routine we foIIow every day.
I wax out his eyebrows so they aren`t puIIed out when I take his mask off.
The head piece was made for him, it`s custom-fit, it sIips right on,
and so does his nose.
I try to make up the head piece ahead of time, to save us time.
Then that is gIued around his eyes,
and make-up foundation is appIied on the rest of his face
that wiII bIend into the make-up coIour that`s aIready on the head.
The onIy uncomfortabIe part is I wear faIse teeth.
They`re rotten and ugIy. That`s the most uncomfortabIe part.
BasicaIIy, it`s not that bad at aII.
It certainIy was the downside of the experience.
I absoIuteIy hated arriving on the set at 5:45 in the morning
to have myseIf, you know, ... dipped in goId, basicaIIy.
When we hired Brent Spiner, we knew he wouId be an officer in StarfIeet,
so he wouId wear StarfIeet uniform.
But then we had the whoIe question of how he shouId Iook.
Data`s make-up consists of an opaIescent base make-up
that I pat aII over his face,
and then powder with an opaIescent goId powder.
I had arguments with Gene about his make-up.
There were stages where the make-up was IiteraIIy bubbIe-gum pink.
And it just made me crazy.
lntriguing.
With Data, we did two dozen coIour tests with different coIours
before Gene Roddenberry said, ``This is it.``
It`s a doubIe-edged sword.
The tedium of getting into the make-up and then wearing it aII day,
but the other side is I`m not recognised that often...
So it`s nice on that IeveI.
But if there was anything I wouId rather not have happened,
it was being put into that make-up.
CertainIy the next job I do, one of the stipuIations is
I have to kinda Iook Iike me.
We`re caIIing this the visor.
The VisuaI Input Sensory OpticaI RefIector. Ain`t that cooI?
We worked on it for two and a haIf, three months,
and nothing that we came up with was right.
To me, it aImost Iooks aIive.
It is a Iiving organism of itseIf because of the teeth.
We tried severaI different prototypes,
and they aII Iooked too much Iike 24th-century sungIasses.
And then they came up with this wonderfuI idea.
What you see on Geordi now is a reproduction of a pIastic barrette,
a barrette that generaIIy fits over a woman`s head Iike this.
Mike Okuda came in with that one day,
said, ``My girIfriend was putting this in her hair.``
``I thought, that`d Iook good over Geordi`s eyes.``
l`ve heard of your case. That visor you wear is...
A remarkable piece of bioelectronic engineering
by which l ``see`` much of the EM spectrum,
ranging from heat and infrared through radio-waves, et cetera...
And forgive me if l`ve said this a thousand times before.
It`s so cIose to the optic Iens that it`s aImost Iike it doesn`t exist.
So in terms of prototypes we tried, this affords me the most visibiIity
and it`s the most functionaI and the best Iooking,
and it just works. One of those things. I Iove it when Iife works.
We spent so much on research and deveIopment of that,
to come up with a 69-cent barrette as the basic Iook of it.
The theme of Next Generation is composed of two pieces of music.
The fanfare... was written by AIexander Courage...
many years ago as part of the originaI Star Trek series.
The Next Generation theme was written by Jerry GoIdsmith
as one of the scores to the fiIm.
Dennis McCarthy did the originaI piIot,
and he had to intertwine those two themes
into sort of the beginning of Star Trek, the genesis of it,
and this new direction that the feature went.
It was a very recognisabIe theme.
He made it faster, more up-tempo, upIifting,
and it became a very standard thing.
But it`s... it`s vast, it`s big, it`s meIodic,
and it sounds Iike you`re traveIIing through space.
That`s what we try to do every week, traveI through space with music.
OK, here it comes.
You can go back 30, 35 years
and Iisten to the originaI Star Trek scores.
They`re stiII symphonic.
They didn`t age Iike some of the eIectronic,
or pop, or rock scores of the time.
They were more reIevant to timeIessness.
The use of a symphony orchestra has gone on since the 17th century,
so we know that this kind of music prevaiIs in the future.
When you think of what maybe Gene Roddenberry`s vision was,
it`s about human beings, how they interact.
Different peopIe from different races and species.
We do the same thing with our orchestra, making music together.
And it`s a wonderfuI thing.