Jason Zimmerman is the Visual Effects Supervisor on the new Star Trek shows coming from CBS All Access. Following on from our interview last year regarding Discovery, Paul Simpson caught up with Zimmerman during lockdown to discuss the first season of Star Trek: Picard.

 

 

Did shutdown actually affect you on Picard? Or had you finished?

No. It got really close – the week that we delivered the finale of Picard we went into quarantine. So it was like delivery, day off, quarantine. We immediately started the work from home protocol. I think we finished a week before it aired – we were up against it.

What’s the feedback been like?

I think it’s been pretty positive overall. The fans seem pretty content with everything. The execs were happy, I know that, and the episode was well received which is sort of the whole point.

That’s the final arbiter isn’t it, if people actually watch it and enjoy it.

Exactly

Let’s go back to the start of Picard. You’d been working on Discovery but when did the idea of Picard first reach you in terms of having to give input on it?

I knew about Picard coming up when it was an idea. I think within the first four or five episodes of Discovery Alex Kurtzman had mentioned it to me. He said one of the next shows coming up is going to be this Picard thing, which he had mentioned off and on. He said, “It’s going to be a different show, tonally, it’s not going to be the same as Discovery.”

Then a Saturday in Toronto in July (2018) when I was going to get my hair cut, because I hadn’t had time to do any of that stuff while we were shooting, I got a notification from ComicCon that Patrick [Stewart] and Alex had gone up on stage and announced the show. Then I got a barrage of texts from different friends and co-workers who knew I was working on it.

I texted Alex and said, “I guess we’re getting going”, and he said, “Yup, get ready.” That was the start of everything. They started immediately in the writers room and as always they shared things with me along the way – here’s what we’re thinking, here’s how we’re going to handle things – and then we got into preproduction.

Did you go back to look what Star Trek had been doing before in the 24th century or was the 20 year gap between Nemesis and Picard enough that you could just say, “Starfleet’s moved on a lot.”

The Borg Cube from Star Trek: First Contact

I don’t think there’s ever enough of a gap in Star Trek that you can ignore canon or what’s come before you. I think that you have to always pay homage to, and always keep an eye on what canon did before you, what episodes were before you, what movies were before you, how those things set up where you are now.

So I definitely went back and re-watched a lot of episodes, I went back and watched the movies. I did some reading and scoured the internet to see what the different feelings were about the different things that had happened before so that I had at least a base education of what we were getting into with Picard.

Sort of acclimatising yourself almost with it.

Exactly, and also I’d been under the hood of Discovery for so long that when [executive producers] Alex and Akiva [Goldsman] and Michael [Chabon] and everybody mentioned this was going to be a different show, I knew that I needed to not just take the same approach over from one show, try to apply it to another one, because it’s a different show with completely different characters and different tone, different story, different everything. I knew that it would be bad for me to assume I knew what I was getting myself into, so I wanted to educate myself as best I could.

What were the first things that you worked on?

We started working with the art department early on. Todd Cherniawsky, who did the first few episodes of Discovery season 1, was the production designer for Picard and I have a good relationship with Todd. We’ve worked together, he’s very very versed in what we do in visual effects, and very understanding and very helpful as well. He and I sat down and had different conversations about what was the plan, how we could work together, and what did we learn from Discovery and what can we do better – that sort of thing.

I think the first things we started really early on, getting the modelers going, would have been the hero ships that we knew were going to be a part of the show, so [Rios’ ship] La Sirena was probably the first thing through the door with the Borg Cube not too far behind.

We knew that Cube and the scale of it was going to take a long time to get right and build. We had modelers at the production office working with production; Todd would do daily check ins with them, I would check in with them a few times a week just to make sure what was going on, and then Todd and I would check in as well together just so we knew what was coming up. Every time he had a new design or something that had been approved by the executives he would let us know and then we could plan to start building those things.

We had the assets that we knew we were going to see in the first three or four episodes to start work on, just to get ahead of the curve.

The Borg Cube has been well established, but this is on a much bigger scale. Did you have to throw a lot of the old out to get the scale?

Yes and no. Again, there’s a wealth of reference for the Borg Cube obviously already. I went back and watched all of that and looked at any behind the scenes stuff I could find, any of the models and miniature work that had been done, just to see what this thing looked like and how had it been represented in the past. In Trek you want to take the tools you have in the modern day and hopefully push things forward, but at the same time you have to pay respect to what came before you and make sure that you’re treating it the right way.

We did the research; we definitely wanted it to be recognisable as the Borg Cube but we had our tools that we could use to make it a little bit easier to work with in a digital environment. We looked at that and we started building the Cube and then as the sets were being built, we realised it was a great opportunity to display the scale of this Borg Cube from the interior as well. With something that big and it being a cube and it being in space, it can be tricky to demonstrate scale because the only way you know how big something is is when something is next to it that you can identify.

If you have a person standing next to La Sirena you’d go, “That’s big enough to hold X amount of people” but with the Borg Cube if you stand a person next to it you’re not going to see him because he’s too small and the thing’s like two kilometres. So, it became, how are we going to display the scale both inside and out in a way that makes sense compositionally, that doesn’t take away from the story, but at the same time make sure and Identify that this is a massive thing on the screen, whether that’s the exterior or the interior.

That was one of the fun things about the interior as well: there were a lot of cool opportunities throughout the season, whether it was a hero moment where Picard looks over the railing and sees all the way down and all the Borg, or just something in the background, to help them tell the story that they’re in this massive environment.

That closing shot in episode 1, as we pull back out and back out and back out…

I’ve probably seen that thing too many times to say anything constructive about it. That shot had well over 100 versions. It was the first time we were going to see the Cube.

Talking about the scale of things, pulling back from the inside to the outside, that’s something you have to be careful with as well because if you do it very fast a) you don’t see anything along the way and b) it feels small because you’re going so fast and you’re covering so much ground, which is not even possible with a real camera, that it starts to feel cartoon-y and it starts to cheat the scale a little bit.

There was a lot of back and forth with myself and with the executives to try and come up with a way to do that shot that felt fast enough to tell the story in under 45 minutes for one shot but at the same time, slow enough to get the sense of scale and get to see everything. Because as you are pulling back, you want to look around, you want to see what you’re seeing in there. There was definitely a lot of previs and work done on textures and animation just to sell that shot.

Was it ever actually consciously thought of as marrying the tracking shot at the start of First Contact?

Yes; there like a conscious ‘OK, that was the last time, let’s do this’ but when it’s the same Trek universe you can’t help but have the same influences, right? I think we all had talked about that shot and many other shots and just in general how the Borg Cube had been portrayed in the past. Going into that there’s a certain visual language that lends itself to the Cube and that was definitely in the back of our minds, at the very least.

What were the challenges of creating La Sirena?

If you compare Rios’ ship to the other ships in the Trek-verse it’s one of the mid- to smaller ships, so after spending a couple of years on Discovery with these massive battleships that were so big and moved slower and more methodically, this was a ship that could be more manoeuvrable, that could fly a little bit differently than the Federation ships we’d seen – at least in iterations in Discovery. We had an opportunity to have a different attitude, if you will, about how the ship was manoeuvred, how it flew – and also the fact that it was piloted by holograms is a little bit different. Less screens, more about what’s up here in front of the pilot.

I think there was definitely the challenge of “This is a new ship, it’s not like I’m inheriting another Federation ship and we know what that is. This is a brand new ship that has a brand new way of expressing itself in space and in the world.” We definitely did some back and forth about how is this going to fly, how is it going to interact with other ships? In dogfights and things like that, how fast does it go? How quickly can it turn? All those things that you take for granted when you watch the show. When you get a new asset like that, you have to look at it and go, “In Star Trek the ships are characters, everything is a character; just like the people are characters the ships are characters. So how does this new character work in the Trek-verse?”

And there was Narek’s ship…

The little Snakehead.

Between the two of them it did feel as if you were taking the visuals into a different area.

Yes and that was tricky too. If they were saying La Sirena’s small to mid, Narek’s was a one person ship.

It’s very much a fighter ship and so it would be faster and be more manoeuvrable in the way that it approached things. Again, seeing how those ships related to one another was a bit of a challenge because although in the finale of Discovery season 2 there were some smaller ships in the grand battle, this was a little bit different because it was something that we knew we were going to see in several episodes.

We built just the interior of the cockpit for the snakehead for Narek’s ship. The textures had to be heroed out because at one point he walks down and we see him get into the Snakehead. It was something we had to be able to get right up in front of, so you’d look at the textures and go, “That’s a real thing.”

Each way that the ships are used and how they interact with the characters was definitely taken into consideration. The Snakehead’s a character just like Narek is a character and we had to establish that in those scenes where they were chasing and dogfights.

Now this is effectively your third season of Trek, does it get any easier doing that sort of creation? (laughs)

No

From all the chats we’ve had in the past, I was pretty sure I knew what the answer was going to be! Is that because each ships has got its own different challenges or is it because you need to challenge yourself as well?

I think it’s a couple things. Number one: season 1 of any show is going to have its challenges because you’re setting up a world, worldbuilding.

The beauty of this is it’s Star Trek and it’s Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard and all that, so it’s an amazing sand box to play around in. Does the experience of Discovery help along the way? For sure, because I think you have been through so many different things and you really have experienced different challenges along the way that when a new challenge comes up you go, “I haven’t done this particular thing yet but we’ve been through a lot, we’ve learned a lot, we know we can do this.”

It doesn’t get easier. I think that you get more knowledgeable about the different challenges, so you have a larger arsenal of ways to attack things. But you know every script is different and what the scripts are calling for are going to be different so I think you’re always going to have a unique challenge or some new thing come up. It’s a new wrinkle, it’s a new approach to something where you go, “How are we going to do that? How are we going to approach that?”

But at the same time, I look at it and I go, “I have the best team in the world so I’m not worried about it. We’ve done this, I’ve got the best vendors so we’re going to get it done, let’s just talk through it and work through it.”

It becomes a job to get finished – just get it done.

Yes, you have to. There’s always the initial fanboy in me comes out and I go, “Oh my God, it’s a Borg Cube” or “it’s Patrick Stewart” or whatever, but now I’ve got to make it a job and I’ve got to get it done. There’s actually a delivery date associated with this.

You take two approaches: you take the fan approach – this is amazing, how do we do the greatest thing possible? And then you take the approach that there’s also components of time; you have to get it done and it has to be held to a certain standard. All those things are taken into consideration along the way.

You mention the final battle at the end of Discovery season 2, and in Picard we’ve the great moment where Will Riker’s Starfleet commission is reactivated and he’s built this great big armada, that seemed different from anything we’ve seen before. What was the thinking behind the fleet that he was bringing?

It had been written that he was coming in the most advanced thing that Starfleet had ever had and that there was going to be a lot of heavy cruisers that were going to come and show up, so that’s what we did.

There were differences between the ships, you have to look at them closely, which fortunately for us Star Trek fans will do, but at the same time it was a fleet and it was meant to be imposing and I think that’s the way we approached it.

Given in-universe there’s been the whole destruction of the shipyards on Mars 15 years before, were they consciously new vessels because a lot of ships were destroyed or were you using older ones?

No, they were new designs. Did they relate specifically to the shipyards? Not necessarily but I know the Zheng He, which is what Riker was piloting, was meant to be this incredible ship, so I definitely think it was a step forward from what we had seen in the past.

The final section of the story, we have the almost-Lovecraftian tentacles coming through when the signal is sent. What was the description given to you of those? Did the script say much more than “something comes through” and it was left to discussion to work it out? Or was it quite specific?

No it actually didn’t. Fortunately Akiva Goldsman directed the last two episodes and was very collaborative about the whole thing. Michael Chabon wrote it and we approached it like we always do: we sat down and we had conversations early on about the script. I asked a lot of questions – probably a lot of stupid questions but they humoured me like they always do – just to get a sense of what they were thinking about. Then as we went through the process with Akiva, he did storyboards and then he handed it to me and asked for some previs.

We started the previs process, pitched some ideas to him, he came back with some really helpful feedback then I sent them to Michael and Alex. And then we just started putting it together.

We knew there needed to be a portal, we knew there needed to be shapes and something beyond this dimension, but I think right off the bat Akiva had an idea it should be something that’s almost like a tentacle but there’s definitely a sentience to it. There’s more to it than writhing for the sake of writhing. We just collaborated with Akiva along the way, he had some good ideas and I think that pushed us to that finale.

If we see them again, do you know what was behind those tentacles? Did you work it out that far back, if they got through?

Yes. Even when you don’t see something of everything, I think you have to know what’s behind it in the way that you present it, in the way that you animate it, in the way that you build it. You have to know, what is this thing?

If the script had called for “an alien tentacle waves itself in the foreground”, that’s one thing, but with our writers and with our Star Trek universe, everything has to be thought out. You have to have the answers to those questions. It helps when you’re doing the work, both when you’re shooting it and when you’re doing the animation because you have an idea, just as I would assume when an actor’s playing a part, there’s things that their character would and would not do.

It’s similar to what we’re doing with CG. You have to understand – what is this thing that we’re seeing? Why wouldn’t it just shoot out and immediately go down to the planet? All those things are going to be questions that need to be answered. You have to be able to answer those questions and you have to have your why, because when you start working on it that’s going to help you inform the vendor: here’s what we need and here’s the reason for it.

Also, if I don’t ask that question there’s a good chance that one of my vendors or one of my team is going to ask it. You’re going to have to know. (laughs)

So what was the trickiest element to work on for Picard across the whole season?

I think the Borg Cube was tremendously challenging just because of its scale and, like I alluded to before, trying to show that and demonstrate it in a way that is meaningful to the audience, and at the same time doesn’t take 45 minutes for one shot or otherwise take away from the story, is very tricky. And it’s canon: just like when we first got to do the Enterprise, the Borg Cube is again very very beloved in Star Trek. It’s something that everybody will scrutinise. There was definitely a desire to get it right, and again like I said before, every time you inherit something from the Star Trek universe and you start to incorporate it into the modern tools, it’s like it’s a new toy. It’s something new to play with and you have to learn it just like you do anything else.

I think that over the course of the season, if you watch the progression, I think it definitely grows. The shot composition grows, the way we display the Cube definitely starts to grow and it builds on itself. What you learn in episode 1 you’re employing in episode 10 to do a better version of what you saw in episode 1.

So I think the Cube was definitely one of the largest challenges both physically but also just from the standpoint that you know it’s a massive asset. It’s probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, asset we’ve ever built. And how do you display that? How do you compose shots of that? How does it work? And I think that’s something that we definitely learned a lot over the course of the season.

What was the most fun bit?

I think the nostalgia of Patrick and Brent Spiner. I always have that moment every season: Discovery season 1 it was seeing the Enterprise for the first time.

Picard, I think it was being in the vineyard. There’s a behind the scenes picture of Patrick and Brent sitting in lawn chairs in the vineyard waiting for that flashback scene and I can remember that day. I get up early, throw on all my gear and trudge out there. wearing boots because I’m in a vineyard and it’s cold. And then I look up and I’m like, “There’s Data and Picard under a tree – cool.”

There’s always this realisation of “I’m on the set of Picard and I’m shooting.” I think working with those guys was awesome. Working with Jonathan Frakes directing Patrick and working together was an amazing dynamic on set. That was a lot of fun to see.

When I look at Star Trek, every year it seems like you get to one up what we did the year before so I’m truly fortunate to be where I’m at.

Did Jonathan come in with some very clear ideas of things that he wanted to do that hadn’t been feasible before?

Jonathan is a great director who is very very well prepared. So he always comes in – whether it’s Trek or anything else – with a very clear idea of what he would like to do. But he’s also very open to collaboration, so I think he comes in with some ideas but he likes to work with other people.

When I’m working with him sometimes I’ll get a text at 9 o’clock at night and he’s like ‘What about if we did this?’ or ‘How are we going to handle this?’ or ‘Did you read this update to the script?’ He’s very engaged which I think is very cool.

Not that other directors aren’t but there’s something about Jonathan that having his finger on the pulse of Star Trek for so long, being a part of it in so many different ways, he brings a certain energy to it that I think is a little bit different than other people. and it’s certainly something that’s been a lot of fun. Does he come in with ideas? Definitely but if you pitch him an idea, he’s all ears for that and I think that’s part of what’s fun about it.

I think, in the case of him and Patrick for instance, one of the cool parts of it was the collaboration and seeing their relationship. They’re really good friends, and seeing the way they talk to each other is just unlike anything you’ve experienced before. You’ve never seen a director and an actor have that bond, at least I have not. It was a really cool thing: he’d be like, ‘Patrick how do you want to handle this?’ And they’d go talk and it was really quite an experience to see those two work together.

Jonathan brings an energy to set and to a show that is so positive and so much fun that you don’t’ feel like you’re working. Anybody who works with him – the crew will tell you this, anybody you ask will tell you the same thing – they just have so much fun with Jonathan.

He and I were talking one time, and I had relayed some story to him about meeting somebody who was a Star Trek fan – I think this girl had a tattoo on her forearm of the Discovery. And I was like, “Man I couldn’t believe that this girl had a tattoo, how cool is that?” And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said “Welcome to the family”. And I can truly say that Trek is a family and he treats it that way; he treats every person on set, every actor, everybody that he interacts with as his family.

So when you bring that attitude to a project, to creativity, I think you’re going to get the best out of everybody.

Always.

Finally, looking forward, obviously Picard 2 is on hold until we know what is going on with the virus but what sort of takeaways have you got from working on series 1 that you’ll take forward into 2?

I think early on with Picard there was an idea that it may or may not be as big as Discovery visual effects-wise. The finale was the biggest episode we’d done in any Trek! I think definitely going into it knowing the degree to which production will engage with us and interact with us is great. I’m in the perfect place in that we have the support of our executives, we have the support of our studio and they want to do good work.

What I’ll bring to it is that we survived season 1 and if we can do that finale, we can do anything. And so we’re looking forward to it, and just like Discovery, we have a very capable team at the production level, at the post level, for visual effects and every other department. It’s a show that’s up and running. and we’re very excited for what season 2 can be.

What I take away from it is we’ve done another great show and so we’re really looking forward to what’s next.

Star Trek Picard is available on CBS All Access in the US, Space in Canada, and Amazon Prime worldwide