From The Next Gen to Picard: one Producer’s VFX journey through the Star Trek universe

This was the task put before Outpost LA’s VFX Producer Melissa DeLong from early on in her VFX career. 

With a deep connection to the show at an early age, Melissa claims that the franchise is the main reason she sought out a career in VFX. “I grew up with a love of movies, particularly sci-fi from the 1960s. I watched films like Forbidden Planet and other post atomic sci-fi and monster movies, but what grabbed me the most was the original Star Trek.

“It spoke to me at such an early age that I remember, even in pre-school, friends and I would play Star Trek and pretend we were on different planets each of us playing different characters from the series. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I really connected with it,” Melissa continues.

But it wasn’t just the storyline or the characters that inspired Melissa. When Star Trek: The Next Generation was released in 1987, she began to appreciate the show on another level. “I think The Next Generation was the first really great use for all of the technology that was developed over decades for films like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, to be put to use in television. Things like motion control model photography and filming elements on 35mm and then compositing them together,” says Melissa.

“Just the fact that a TV show with 26 episodes a season could do that level of work, and in a tight TV schedule, was incredible to me. The showrunners weren’t afraid to do anything, and they would carefully pick and choose where they spent their money. Even as a kid – I must have been around six then – the innovation on these shows really inspired me, and I think as my interest in film and TV grew, Star Trek was always there, fuelling that passion,” Melissa recalls.

When Melissa came to produce at Outpost two years ago, she had no idea what she would be working on. “I was excited to start this new role and everyone on my team was so friendly, so I was just happy to be here. But then I was handed a couple of projects by their production name, and when I got to see some shots and realised they were both Star Trek, I was so excited and ready to get stuck in!”

“I started producing work on Star Trek: Picard S2 and Star Trek: Discovery S4 concurrently, and the client really loved the work we were doing so our award kept growing; we got to a place where they really trusted us for creative input. The sequences we were working on were real iconic Star Trek elements.”

Within the franchise now there are several different Star Trek shows, each with their own visual identity which Melissa and the team needed to lean into. “What we did in Star Trek: Discovery was very different from the direction we took in Star Trek: Picard, simply because the shows already have a distinguishable visual identity that we wanted to keep intact. And sometimes this can take some real consideration when you’re looking at what you can and can’t do within the parameters of the show. 

“For example, old Discovery and new Discovery, or old Picard and new Picard is still recognisable as the same show, and just because we’re working with the most modern VFX technology doesn’t mean that we completely throw out old visual styles. For instance, the way we move the ships is similar visually to the motion control model work of the early shows, and it comes across,” explains Melissa. 

“It’s also a question of how we light the ships and what materials they are made from; we want it to look modern and cutting edge, but we also want you to look at it and go: Oh, this is Star Trek, this is what we grew up with,” Melissa continues.

“In some cases, this meant we did have to pull back a little bit. We have a lot of tools at our disposal, and we can make these ships do whatever we want. If they’re supposed to zip around and change direction really fast, we can do that, but that’s not Star Trek. These are big, majestic ships that move very deliberately, and even though it’s in space, all ships meet nose to nose. We call it the ‘space lake’. In reality if you were flying around in space you’d be meeting in whatever direction, there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’, but because it’s Star Trek they all meet on the same level, just as they always have done.”

Melissa and her team were sure to gather as much reference as they could to ensure they kept the old visual identities alive. “CG Supervisor, Rommel Calderon, and I compiled a comprehensive internal wiki page with all kinds of references from all kinds of Star Treks that included things like what it looks like when ships go into warp, what a battle looks like, what firing the phasers looks like. We also noted the rules of how the ships behave, how they can manoeuvre, how manoeuvrable they are, how fast they are, etc.”

This wasn’t Melissa’s first professional experience with Star Trek. After starting out in the industry as an animator, Melissa soon moved across to visual effects. “One of my early producing projects, and my first encounter with Star Trek in my career, was the total remaster of the entire fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’re talking the actual original film that was shot! It was my job to identify all of the VFX components and supervise the transfer and digitisation of film and getting everything over to the artists to remaster.

“We worked on around 1,700 VFX shots for a year and a half and it was one of the greatest projects I’ve ever worked on. It was just me and a handful of Inferno artists (now Flame) that really loved the show and took great care and pride in it; it was a real passion project for all of us!

“It can be rare in this industry to work consistently on projects you really enjoy because you’re at the mercy of what show you’re assigned to next when working in a studio, but a few years after The Next Generation remaster, I started producing at a different company on the show The Orville which is a love letter to Star Trek,” Melissa continues. “I produced some of the bigger VFX sequences in season 2 for which our team received an Emmy nomination. It was a lot of really cool work, and it was very much informed by everybody’s love for Star Trek.”

Even now, with a seemingly infinite knowledge of Star Trek, producing shows of the franchise doesn’t come without its challenges. “Everyone has their own personal experience of Star Trek, whether you’re a fan or not. Maybe you only saw the JJ Abrams movies and that’s your reference, or maybe you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every single episode, of every single Star Trek show and that’s your reference,” Melissa says.

“Creatively, the challenge is to wrangle everybody’s different sensibilities into one cohesive vision. And sometimes you have to take a step back; the creative direction on this show gives us a wonderful toybox to play with, but ultimately, it’s not our toybox. The showrunner has specific views on how he wants it to look like Star Trek and creatively wrangling all of those creative ideas can be difficult. For example, what does a photon torpedo look like? Is it a white-hot ball of light with lens flares? Is there a trail behind it? All of these little details need to be worked out.

“At Outpost, lot of us on team are big fans of the Star Trek world but unsurprisingly there are a few on team that aren’t, and sometimes these artists can help bring us back to Earth (pardon the pun). Sometimes it can be easy to get so lost in the world of Star Trek that you can look at things through a skewed lens, and so it’s just as important to have artists who maybe aren’t as familiar with the franchise that can look at things from a purely subjective viewpoint as to what looks good as standalone VFX and what needs a bit of work,” Melissa explains.

This isn’t the only challenge the team are faced with, particularly as they work on more than one Star Trek show. “Each show under the Star Trek umbrella also has the added challenge of being from vastly different time periods,” Melissa continues, “this of course will have an effect on the look of the show and the technology used. For example, Discovery is around 700 years later than Picard and set in the far, far future, and so the rules of the show are different, the look of the ships is different.

“They probably could have saved themselves a lot of creative headaches if each show was made uniform in its look and feel, but they want each show to be individually identifiable,” concludes Melissa. “They want you to be able to switch on a Star Trek show and know immediately what show you’re watching. And that, for me, is a huge part of their creative genius and the success of Star Trek.”

Read more about Outpost’s work on Star Trek: Discovery S4 and Star Trek: Picard S2.