We’re still in the early days of the long wait for Star Trek: Picard Season 2, but things aren’t all quiet on that front as the production team behind the series has been slowly ramping up the publicity machine as part of a campaign for 2020’s Emmy Awards.
Along with virtually every member of the Picard cast and crew in their own respective categories, CBS has begun to push for Patrick Stewart’s nomination in the Outstanding Lead Actor field for his return as Jean-Luc Picard, as the studio launched their 2020 FYC campaign earlier this month.
Also going for gold are Star Trek: Short Treks, which are being promoted as a candidate for the Outstanding Short Form Drama Series category, along with Captain Pike himself – actor Anson Mount – who CBS is pushing for Oustanding Lead Actor in the category as well.
Notably, young Kyrie McAlpin is also being promoted for the Oustanding Character Voiceover Performance category for her work voicing young Michael Burnham in “The Girl Who Made the Stars.”
The official 2020 Emmy Award nominations will be announced July 28.
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A number of behind-the-scenes looks into Picard Season 1 have also beamed down in recent days, as the visual effects, makeup, and other production-based teams are also ramping up their awards-season promotion.
First up is series visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman, who shared with Before and Afters some of the work that went into creating the complicated “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1” space-orchid sequence.
“The script said, ‘A giant orchid comes into the atmosphere and takes down the cube’. I was like, how are we going to do this? What does this look like? I started asking people and they said, ‘Well, it’s a big flower.’
I was concerned about this moment a lot. Everybody knows what an orchid looks like, but what does it look like when it’s big enough to take down the Borg cube, and how does it behave and how does it move in space? We had a lot to figure out.”
Zimmerman also offered some insights into the creation of the massive Borg cube, first introduced in “Remembrance.”
“Whenever you read in a script something like ‘Borg cube’ or ‘Enterprise’, you really do freak out at first. Luckily, our production designer was Todd Cherniawsky and he’s very, very well-versed in visual effects, and he knows what we need. He and concept artist Johnny Eaves got started on the cube, and we also had our CG modelers in the art department right there with production.
What’s nice about models and miniatures is that they have real practical textures which look so great. So we started there and we really wanted to pay homage to what came before us and look at what they had done. I can’t tell you how many times I googled ‘Borg cube.’
[The] challenge was how compose an image to convey that this cube is kilometers long, and how to compare that to other ships… It was basically a lot of, well, let’s put a ship in the foreground and we see a person in the ship – great – and now let’s put another ship halfway between us. Slowing things down and using scale cues really helped.”
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Before the spring of shutdowns landed on Planet Earth, plans were in place to get Star Trek: Picard back in front of cameras this summer for production on Season 2 — but as has been expected, we know that like pretty much all other film sets these days, the series has been put on hold pending a lift of pandemic restrictions.
Speaking with Collider, series executive producer Akiva Goldsman shared that the original return-to-set plan for June 2020 has shifted until “the world opens” again, and how the current climate has been actually beneficial to the show’s writing team.
“It is, fundamentally, a gift to be able to do all [the episodes] if you can [before filming]. Because unlike previous iterations of television, this serialized ten-hour narrative has setups and payoffs that require a thoughtful view of the object once it is completed. It’s very funny — in the first season of ‘Picard,’ there were all these reviews of the beginning, ‘Oh it’s so dark, it’s so dark, it’s so dark.’
And I kept saying, ‘They’re reviewing the first act of a movie.’ The first act of a movie is always dark. If you stopped ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ at the bridge, it’s a really dark movie! Because fundamentally in a long-form narrative, it’s a redemption story, it’s a healing story, it has to be bad at the beginning so it gets good at the end, otherwise there’s nothing to fix.
So we’re in this weird world now where we create one narrative object but we dole it out bit by bit, which is fascinating. And can be kind of fun. But what you really want is to be able to refine your setups once you’ve written your payoffs… if in fact you could have the time to write 10 hours first, that would be amazing. And maybe we will.”
Goldsman also commented on how much life Star Trek: Picard may still have in front of it; during the show’s development period Patrick Stewart indicated the series may have “three years” to it, Goldsman seems to view the show as a much more open-ended project than we may have thought previously.
“I think we have discussed it as both a three-season show, a five-season show, a ‘let’s just keep going forever’ show…
‘Star Trek: Picard’ in my view will go as long as Patrick Stewart wants to do it… As I’m sure you know, he was not interested in coming back. And we did a lot of… really good collaborative story breaking and talking and you know and I think he’s particularly delighted in a good way about having come back.
And we will rely on that good will until he feels he’s done.”
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Lastly, a behind-the-scenes look at the Narek vs. Synths fight scene from “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” was released online this week, showcasing much of the stunt work from that climactic battle.
Keep your sensors locked here for all the latest Star Trek: Picard news!
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