Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Starship Enterprise Redesigned

All throughout “Star Trek’s”Starship Enterprise has a 56-year history. The Starship Enterprise was designed, redesigned and reimagined many times.

For the prequel series, however “Strange New Worlds,”Jonathan Lee, Production Designer, was not spared the responsibility of getting the Enterprise right after its first season. This Enterprise was actually commanded by Captain Christopher Pike (played here by Anson Mount), who was the direct predecessor to the Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk made famous in 1966. “The Original Series.”

“We were all of the mind that the Enterprise is a star of the show,”Lee explains. “It’s a major player. It’s an actor, really. It’s not a weapon of war. It’s one when it has to be, but that’s not its function. It’s a scientific research vessel. It’s also a sanctuary. We discussed the Enterprise in that very creative way before we got into the detail of how we were going to deal with the individual elements of it.”

These elements began with the Bridge, which made its debut in the second season. “Star Trek: Discovery.” But now that Pike’s Enterprise was getting its own show – one that will hopefully (and boldly) go the distance with a five-year mission – that called for significant revisions to the nerve center of the Enterprise.

“We’ve taken the set that we’ve inherited, but we did a great deal of work,”Lee stated. “[Executive Producer] Akiva Goldsman briefed me to bring it back to ‘The Original Series.’ We had to move things around a little bit. We moved the captain’s chair around so that Captain Pike could throw a look to helm and navigations really easily, and that would work with the camera.”And the viewscreen that was viewed in “Discovery”was shown using visual effects. A physical representation of the viewscreen was created and added to the Bridge set. “Strange New Worlds.”

Lee also changed the language of color from the “Discovery”Version of Enterprise “It was quite cool with blues and greens and cool yellows. I said, the Bridge must feel warmer, particularly the motion graphics on all the monitors. When you see the before and after, it’s pretty dramatically different, but it’s much more intimate, and it feels more like our show.”

Lee began with a Bridge design, but he created the Sickbay set entirely from scratch to allow for more ambitious photography. “Our little mantra for our show is ‘scope and scale,’ and one of the influences for the whole thing generally is ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”Lee reasons “That’s what drove the whole scale of Sickbay. You can take the camera on a dolly; you can go all over that set without stopping, and we can bring a crane in to shoot straight through it.”

Where are the beds? “The Original Series”Lee placed the beds against the wall. “Strange New Worlds”The camera was placed in the middle, so that the cameras could move around the room and capture every angle. “Sickbay follows the true radius of the ship, so the beds are set on a radius, the walls are set on a radius, and you really feel like you’re in the circular shape of the saucer section of the ship.”

But perhaps Lee’s biggest challenge came with the design of Engineering, which had to look powerful enough to propel the Enterprise to Warp 9 and beyond. “I wanted to see this amazing structure of the ship, so I thought of what we call the Intermix Chamber, which is a big feature in the middle of Engineering. And in the middle of it is this piece that looks like the Sun boiling away, and we can see the Warp Core at work doing its thing.”

To achieve that effect, Lee used cutting-edge new technology called Augmented Reality, or an AR studio, in which a digital wall that’s 25 feet high, 70 feet wide and 100 feet deep is wrapped around the physical set like a horseshoe and contained a 3-D image of the virtual portion on its LED screen.

The Engineering group needed an AR studio. It was built at the last moment. “We only had to build the foreground element where the actors would work, and the handrail around the elevated area where the actors are becomes the handoff between the physical set and the digital AR extension. And that was a phenomenal decision because it then allowed us to make the scale of the Warp Core look even bigger.”

Lee and his 60-member team designed ten Enterprise sets. “Strange New Worlds,”This included the Transporter Room and two corridors, crew quarters as well as the interior of the shuttlecraft, the Mess Hall, and the Cargo Bay. And there’s more where that came from for the Enterprise in Season Two (which recently wrapped shooting), such as the Port Galley, a science lab, the Nacelle Room and the Shuttle Bay.