As his Twitter handle and the photo above suggest, Olatunde Osunsanmi is at the centre of all that goes on on the Star Trek Discovery set in Toronto. He’s helmed more episodes of the most recent Star Trek show than any other director, including the two-part second season finale, Such Sweet Sorrow. Shortly before the concluding part aired, Tunde chatted with Paul Simpson about the many challenges involved with the last season… NB Spoilers for the whole season!

The finale looks stunning – it really does feel like a movie.

Thank you, man. That is obviously a combination of a lot of things, starting with [switching to] anamorphic in 201, and evolving the look and ending up where we ended up there in 214. A big part of that finale, certainly 214, is JZ [Jason Zimmerman] on the visual effects, what he brings to it – there was quite the competition between physical effects and just what we were doing in the real world compared with what JZ was doing in the digital world. What I mean by that – we knew he was going to bring it, so we had to make sure that in the physical environment, from what we were shooting practically, that that had the same energy and the same physical pizzazz that we knew JZ was going to bring to the effects.

You had some very dramatic moments – the scenes with Pike and Admiral Cornwell had me thinking, Are they really going to go there with it? Taking a huge bite out of the Enterprise with the photon torpedo explosion: it looks like someone has chewed a section of the saucer section!

It’s wild. When we saw those animatics start to pour in, we were like, “Wow! Enterprise hasn’t ever looked that beat up”, at least that specifically beat up with that much of the disc missing. It does look pretty cool, and very dramatic.

For those who don’t know the behind the scenes roles, can you explain what your role is on Discovery?

I’m executive producer/director – what we call that in our world is the producing director. I am a guide for the directors, help them get their sea legs at the beginning of the process in prep, get them to the point by the time they reach the floor they understand our world, understand the types of ways we like to shoot, and can take off like a rocket. That said, we give our directors a lot of leeway, and we want them to do amazing stuff that both excites us and scares us a little bit!

On a global scale, within Discovery, I’m pretty much the creative satellite for the showrunners: Alex [Kurtzman] and Michelle [Paradise] have a particular vision of what they’d like to do with the show, and of course I have a bunch of ideas as well, but I’m pretty much there to make sure their vision is executed all the way up in Toronto.

Are you based there the majority of the time?

That’s right – I’m based in Toronto 99% of the time and Alex and Michelle are down in Los Angeles.

When a director is prepping for an episode, are they up there or do they start in LA and come up nearer the time of the shoot?

When the directors are prepping they come straight to Toronto, and they prep with us there. They head back to LA when they get into post, for editing and that kind of thing.

The “look” of Star Trek, in terms of directing, has changed a bit – there was a certain uniformity under executive producer Rick Berman, then there’s a very different look with the JJ movies which obviously Alex was key involved with… How much has the look you’ve brought to Discovery built on those, and how much are you looking at it as its own thing?

I think we like to look at it as its own thing. The look has evolved from season 1 – we were using spherical lenses, and we were moving the camera a little bit, but we weren’t as aggressive as we were in Season 2. Season 2, we decided let’s go anamorphic and let’s go 2.39:1, and do everything we can that really make this a movie.

So instead of having the camera be stationary, let’s pretend the new static camera is the moving camera. For years, in film, the camera usually doesn’t move, then of course there’s been camera movement as we go through the decades of filmmaking, but what if the de facto default position of the camera was to always move? Then when it didn’t move was when we could punctuate certain things and emotion that way. What if we could find a way to move the camera in a way that always spoke to the characters and to the emotion and to the spine of the scene?

We really pushed that to the max in season 2, and really pushed the anamorphic framing, the 2.39 framing, so that for close ups you can also pack other characters in the background, so we’re speaking more to the character that way.

We started there and Alex came in [as director] on 201 and wanted to have a lot of movement in the background too and in the foreground – so always have atmosphere moving by, always have lights that are active. If we’re near windows, the idea is that we’re not always travelling in straight lines, so have the rays coming in through the windows be moving. He’s very big on movement, so there’s movement of the camera and movement of the backgrounds and foregrounds.

That constant movement in the foreground and background adds to a 3-D effect and makes it more realistic.

Absolutely. It’s all about transparence and parallax; we constantly struggle with making the flat screen, the 2-D screen, feel like it’s not there any more. The more you move the camera, the more you move the background and foreground and the actors within that space, the more the screen feels like you can just put your hand through it and touch what’s going on there. The more you feel it’s real, the more it emotionally impacts you. That’s why usually an audience member, or even me when I’m watching, might not notice the camera’s moving if it’s done right but in certain moments, when a character is experiencing a particular emotion and the camera moves in to that particular character, just seeing subtle stuff like that impacts you in a stronger way than if the camera were to be particularly still.

Are there particular moves connected to a particular character – so Burnham would be shot differently from say Stamets or Saru? Or is it what the requirements of that specific scene require?

It’s usually about what the specific drama of that scene requires. We can break the rules – for instance if Burnham is going through something very subjective and personal to her in a particular episode, there’s a scenario where you can adjust the camera design just to her, but usually it’s about what the scene is and what the character is going through in that particular moment as opposed to sticking to a specific style all the way through.

This season, particularly towards the end, we’ve had scenes on Discovery and scenes on Enterprise; did you shoot the two ships differently? Or are they Starfleet bridges, therefore they have similar requirements?

That’s a great question – one of the directives that Alex gave about the Enterprise was that he wanted it to be a happy place, he wanted it to be a safe place, he wanted it to be a place where good things happen. For that first moment in 213 where Pike walks on and he’s loving being back home, Alex wanted to make sure that those emotions came across. Of course as we progressed to 214, and getting to the battle, it’s not as safe a place – there’s a Red Alert, a lot of shaky camera, and we put in filtration, and liquid filters in front of the lens. We’re really trying to unsettle the audience, because that’s the way battles feel, we’re showing them subtly.

To answer your question: yes, when the opportunity presents itself, we like to give each bridge a character, but it still goes back to what’s going on specifically with the story at that moment of time.

When did you know that the finale was going to get an extra episode – was it early on in the process, or nearer the time when you thought you were going to be packing that whole story into one episode?

It was pretty late on in the process! I think we were about two or three weeks out from shooting, and I got a phone call from Alex saying, “Where are you right now?” I said, “I’m walking round the office right now.” He said, “You should sit down.” I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “You should sit down.” So I did. Then he said, “The finale’s too big to put into one episode – I have to split it into two.” And I said, “That’s great. More Star Trek!” I’ll never forget that – I was literally walking around in the Toronto office (I like to walk when I talk on the phone) (laughs).

It was pretty exciting because we kicked it into high gear. What it meant was that if you’re spinning an episode into two, the writers have to turn around two episodes’ worth of material in the time that they would have to turn around one. So Michelle, Alex and Jenny [Lumet] really kicked it into high gear and got it to us pretty quickly.

The communication between us and them was really good. Even before it’s written, they can tell us what they think is going to happen, we can pitch stuff back to them, and we can start prepping ahead of time with confidence that what’s been discussed is what’s going to be written into the screenplay. That is really hard for a writer to do, to understand production to that level, that degree, and understand what they need to do with enough specificity in order to deliver so it dovetails into the story.

The only area that I felt in 214 that stood out having extra time to play with was the number of flashbacks to Michael going through as the Red Angel…

Very true. Really you would have had to lean in more on the emotion side, on the character side and then had a much smaller battle. As you know, the battle doesn’t mean nearly as much if you don’t have the characters set up and it’s not tied into what they’re experiencing.

I wonder also if we’d have had as long an epilogue with Starfleet Command (the “we will never talk of this again” scenes) and then Pike taking Enterprise out as the end of this season of Discovery! Was that something added quite late in the process?

No, it’s what Alex always wanted to do. It was something that he talked about quite frequently to make sure that Discovery re-entered canon. He executed it there.

But you do wonder how that would have fit in if we’d been doing one episode – 214 was 65 minutes long, and 213 was 48. Clearly something would have had to give, and I’m curious if we could go back in time and live in a parallel timeline, what that would have been. I suspect some of the things you were touching on would have gone.

Did you regard it as one big episode when you were working on it, or did each episode have its own identity?

We did block shooting for it – we shot all the scenes on one location for 213 and 214, so yes it was one big movie, but I was very conscious that I needed to shoot the two episodes with completely different styles of filmmaking. I knew that in 213, I was dealing with the drama, and I had to lean into the drama, and sure, there were quick pops of action here and there but really this was about making sure I got into the characters, and their emotions and what they were feeling. 214, I was very aware that was a war movie, a battle movie, and I needed to make sure I leaned into that, and it had that kind of heightened energy.

So when we were on set and we were doing two different scenes back to back, we were very aware that we had to switch up camera styles between scenes.

Can you give me a specific example?

Sure. When we first arrive on the Enterprise bridge, Pike steps out of the lift and he walks in and there’s a nice big epic wide shot that starts in a close focus and pulls back to a wide shot. That’s the first time we’ve seen the bridge. After that, all the shots of Pike on the bridge, and when the crew are talking to each other, they’re on dollies, and nice and smooth. Juxtapose that the same day with the battle beginning [in 214], the shot sequence for that, so suddenly I realise I’ve got to get off the dollies and go handheld for a lot of this, and I want to put liquid filters – which are just crushed up water bottles with water in them that slosh around as you move the camera around – in front of the lens so the camera’s more herky-jerky. On top of that, 213 was shot on a 180 degree shutter, and 214 was shot on a 90 degree shutter. For the 180 degree shutter you’ll see the smooth frame rate that is normal to cinema. However at a 90 degree shutter, you get more of the staccato Saving Private Ryan effect. Though Spielberg went down to 45 for battle sequences, I only went halfway to 90 degrees. With all the shaking and camera moves, I felt 45 would be too extreme. So 214 feels a little bit choppier, a little bit edgier, the frame rate as it’s going through is not as languid and smooth as it is in 213. All those types of micro-adjustments just make it feel a little bit different between the two.

With 214, you’ve got the flashbacks which Jason was saying was the original footage, just slightly filtered – did you have to change the way it looked so it matched the episode, or did you consider the option of just inserting the footage?

We certainly had to change the flashback footage a little bit because we wanted it to be from Burnham’s point of view when she’s jumping back. Let’s say when she goes to Terralysium and she’s in space there, we kind of bent the sides and gave an 8mm effect to it. When she goes down to the Hiawatha, the first place in the series in 201, again we bent those a little bit on the edges to give her a POV feel. When she goes to the ship when they’re at Kaminar, same thing, we bent it a little bit. We tried to keep the colour similar and not change that too much just so you had the feeling of being where we were when we were jumping at the time.

We also added in new visual effects to understand that we were jumping to these different areas and understanding how she got there.

The final scene we see of the Discovery crew as they leap into season 3, there are multiple effects on the crew which reminded me of Star Trek: The Motion Picture [right]. Was that the inspiration?

That was absolutely the inspiration. We shot it, we edited it, Alex was looking at it and we were talking about different effects – what would it look like? What would it feel like to time travel? And he started talking about the original movie, and that moment where we saw that effect and he said, “You know what? We should do exactly that – that’s what it should be.” That’s what JZ did: he put it in there, and I think it was version 2 was approved. Version 1, it had a little bit; version 2, just that bit more – and there it was. It just felt right.

There feels like there’s been more visual links to the earlier iterations of the 23rd Century this season? Season 1 felt like a different sort of Star Trek, whereas Season 2 feels far more like earlier versions.

There absolutely has been a concerted effort to make it feel more Trek-like. There’s always a constant struggle. We have the old, we all love the old – the audiences love the old, we the filmmakers love the old – yet we’re living in these new times and synthesizing the two is almost impossible. It’s a really difficult task. You constantly have the audience on or the other shoulder telling us this is what they want. We always want to deliver because we do it for them. We do it for us too but we do it for them, we do it for history and for what’s to come in the future.

It’s a pressure, so we’re constantly trying to make it new and fresh and also more like Trek. It’s something we talk about every single day, in every one of these meetings – “That’s not Trek, that’s another science fiction series.” And we get better at it.

Is it something you develop a gut feeling for – you look at something and know it’s not quite right but if you just tweak one thing, it will be?

That’s exactly right. It’s that at every level – at the dialogue level, although to be honest the writers at this point are really locked into what everybody’s saying and how they’re saying it, but also at the props level, the production design level, and of course at the visual effects level. JZ has been masterful at honing that in and getting it just right. All the department heads are struggling with this exact thing.

Is there a moment in 214 that you’d like people to spot that they might overlook otherwise?

That’s a great question because often as a filmmaker there is always that one thing you hope everybody saw but they didn’t see it! (laughs) There’s a lot in 214 so it’s difficult to hone on that one thing but I would say, the rotisserie…

There’s a scene where they’re running on walls, fighting on walls – Leland, Michelle and Nahn – and there’s a lot happening there, it’s action packed. They’re literally fighting on the walls, and the ceiling. It was a real team effort between special effects and visual effects to make that happen, and the shooting crew, and the lighting – how do you not get all the cords twisted up when it’s turning?

So that scene was done practically?

It was done practically and the rocks were done practically but there were a few rocks that weren’t, that transition across the corridor.

The VisFX panellists at WonderCon 2019: Stephen Pavelski, Olatunde Osunsanmi, Jason Zimmerman, Ante Dekovic

The space battles are amazing in 214, they are phenomenal. JZ and his crew, when you’re working with talent like that, you have confidence that it’s all going to work out and it’s great. But then when you see what they’ve done, it’s mind blowing! Those are the obvious effects that people are going to see and appreciate how awe-inspiring they are.

But it’s the little things, the little dust that’s going across the corridor from one side to the other, the pebbles that are going from one side… they’re not just rolling around on the outside, but actually transversing from one wall to the other and directly across – they’re the icing on the cake that I don’t think anyone would notice. I think that’s really cool!

 

 

Thanks to Arpi Ketendjian, Bonnie Kim and Rachel Voter in their assistance in setting up and preparing for this interview, and to Lorna Osunsanmi for the picture from WonderCon

Star Trek Discovery is available on CBS All Access in the US, Space in Canada, and Netflix in the rest of the world. 

Click here for our interview with Jason Zimmerman about the effects of Season 2 and here for our review of the finale