"It meant a great deal to me that this not look like the original Star Trek." "To give the show that kind of feature-film science-fiction look on an episodic television budget was our biggest challenge." "I was impressed by the elegance 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 limit." "You extrapolate from the most modern architecture that you can deal with now in your century." "A beautiful spaceship is important." "Also, we're on a 30-year mission." "If you're doing that, you want to take your families, children." "I could live in a home that reflected these qualities." "The lifestyle is more than a battleship 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 really helps you to suspend your disbelief when you walk in here and spend the day on the ship, or the bridge." "Or when you beam up, or go to the planets." "That's where a lot of the budget is." "Nothing comes off the shelf." "You can't buy furniture from the 24th century, or get this equipment." "You have to manufacture everything." "It'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 itself is in the money that can be spent on the sets." "So it's helped all of us." "It's a treat." "We have medical equipment, for instance, that we do our designs on." "We have fabricated things that don't exist." "We imagine what they'll be in the future." "We have to make all of that." "Lead the way." "When we do a planet that is Earth-like, then we can go on location and deal with normal vegetation, that's normal for us, and blue skies." "But when you go to a planet which is different, we must almost necessarily shoot it on stage." "We have a large stage complete with planet exterior and surface which has a sky that we can make any colour." "If we want to go to an alien planet-scape, it's always created on Stage 1 6." "So usually on, like, the fourth day of the episode, the actors know they're going to planet hell." "That's where they have to use the smoke effects, and the dust gets kicked up." "In the early days of Next Generation, we did not have computer digital technology as we do today." "Everything had to be created photographically." "We would use materials that were never intended to be used that way to create new images." "For example, the solar surface," "liquid nitrogen to create time-space anomalies, wormholes..." "The fun of that was the creativity of, "How are we going to do this?"" "and never repeating ourselves." "We relied on technologies we were familiar with, but never used them the same way twice." "Another thing we did was create a solar flare hitting the force field around the Enterprise." "What we did to get the feel of particulate matter going around an invisible sphere was we took a bowling ball, dropped salt on it." "The salt would bounce off the bowling ball and then fall down." "We twisted it to look like it was coming up, squeezed it in video compositing so that it looked like an MM, and superimposed it over the Enterprise." "The beamings, much like the original series, are an enhanced dissolve." "Gene Roddenberry originally came up with the idea of transporting people up and down from planetary surfaces to save time in storytelling, so they wouldn't have to show people taking off in a shuttle every time they went from a planet to a ship." "In the original series, the composites were done on an optical printer." "They were basically glitter swizzled in a jar." "Next Generation was similar, but we did more optical manipulation after the original photography." "Energise." "The basic sparkle element was glitter, with elements digitally flipped and cobbled together in a new way, so the transporter had four stages." "The transporter had the first stage of the person dissolving." "Then it had the shower curtain element which initiated the beam in or beam out." "Then the generic field of sparkles, which was glitter, and then finally, the power palette, which was some residual glitter 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 lured him away from a job in Hawaii to work with us." "He's responsible for all of the wonderful new concepts, the design of the control surfaces in the interior of the Enterprise." "One of the things we did was look at things the Air Force and similar organisations are looking at." "We went, "Gee, they're beyond what we can create on a television budget."" "So rather than try to create something beyond that, we said, "OK, we'll go for a specific look,"" "that we arbitrarily said was the Starfleet look." "One of the things we do is generate back-light photo transparencies that we use as control panels, read-outs and displays." "This particular panel is something I designed for our first season." "It's supposedly some futuristic way of showing DNA sequences in the body." "This is a circuit board that gets pulled out when they repair the ship." "This an isolinear optical chip, information storage for the 24th century." "I have two very wonderful illustrators who work for me," "Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach." "Andrew is involved with the exterior design of the Enterprise, and the interior layout of the Enterprise." "Gene Roddenberry's directions for us was to make things smaller, faster, cleaner, a lot like what's going on in real technology today." "You see what's happened in personal computers and things like these hand-held devices that people carry around." "Riker to Picard." "This is our communicator now." "We don't have to flip up a box any longer." "We've moved, we've advanced." "We had to design things like the tricorder, the phasers, the communicators, all of which were known objects from the original series." "Our job was to update them for The Next Generation." "With the Klingon, it's one area where I had a lot of licence, because I was given photos of former Klingons, and there were no two alike." "They were all different." "So I had the opportunity to create a new Klingon look, that hadn't been done yet, so Michael's make-up really 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 until eight." "They didn't knew who I was, people I worked with 1 4 hours a day." "Michael Dorn's make-up, who plays Worf, it's a regular routine we follow every day." "I wax out his eyebrows so they aren't pulled out when I take his mask off." "The head piece was made for him, it's custom-fit, it slips 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 glued around his eyes, and make-up foundation is applied on the rest of his face that will blend into the make-up colour that's already on the head." "The only uncomfortable part is I wear false teeth." "They're rotten and ugly." "That's the most uncomfortable part." "Basically, it's not that bad at all." "It certainly was the downside of the experience." "I absolutely hated arriving on the set at 5:.45 in the morning to have myself, you know,..." "dipped in gold, basically." "When we hired Brent Spiner, we knew he would be an officer in Starfleet, so he would wear Starfleet uniform." "But then we had the whole question of how he should look." "Data's make-up consists of an opalescent base make-up that I pat all over his face, and then powder with an opalescent gold powder." "I had arguments with Gene about his make-up." "There were stages where the make-up was literally bubble-gum pink." "And it just made me crazy." "Intriguing." "With Data, we did two dozen colour tests with different colours before Gene Roddenberry said, "This is it."" "It's a double-edged sword." "The tedium of getting into the make-up and then wearing it all day, but the other side is I'm not recognised that often..." "So it's nice on that level." "But if there was anything I would rather not have happened, it was being put into that make-up." "Certainly the next job I do, one of the stipulations is" "I have to kinda look like me." "We're calling this the visor." "The Visual Input Sensory Optical Reflector." "Ain't that cool?" "We worked on it for two and a half, three months, and nothing that we came up with was right." "To me, it almost looks alive." "It is a living organism of itself because of the teeth." "We tried several different prototypes, and they all looked too much like 24th-century sunglasses." "And then they came up with this wonderful idea." "What you see on Geordi now is a reproduction of a plastic barrette, a barrette that generally fits over a woman's head like this." "Mike Okuda came in with that one day, said, "My girlfriend was putting this in her hair."" ""I thought, that'd look good over Geordi's eyes."" "I've heard of your case." "That visor you wear is..." "A remarkable piece of bioelectronic engineering by which I "see" much of the EM spectrum, ranging from heat and infrared through radio-waves, et cetera..." "And forgive me if I've said this a thousand times before." "It's so close to the optic lens that it's almost like it doesn't exist." "So in terms of prototypes we tried, this affords me the most visibility and it's the most functional and the best looking, and it just works." "One of those things." "I love it when life works." "We spent so much on research and development of that, to come up with a 69-cent barrette as the basic look of it." "The theme of Next Generation is composed of two pieces of music." "The fanfare..." "was written by Alexander Courage... many years ago as part of the original Star Trek series." "The Next Generation theme was written by Jerry Goldsmith as one of the scores to the film." "Dennis McCarthy did the original pilot, 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 recognisable theme." "He made it faster, more up-tempo, uplifting, and it became a very standard thing." "But it's..." "it's vast, it's big, it's melodic, and it sounds like you're travelling through space." "That's what we try to do every week, travel through space with music." "OK, here it comes." "You can go back 30, 35 years and listen to the original Star Trek scores." "They're still symphonic." "They didn't age like some of the electronic, or pop, or rock scores of the time." "They were more relevant to timelessness." "The use of a symphony orchestra has gone on since the 1 7th century, so we know that this kind of music prevails in the future." "When you think of what maybe Gene Roddenberry's vision was, it's about human beings, how they interact." "Different people from different races and species." "We do the same thing with our orchestra, making music together." "And it's a wonderful thing."