Wednesday 27 May 2020

Picard behind the scenes: Cinematography, visual effects, and storyboards

I've gathered some of the latest behind the scenes insights from the nitty gritty production side of Picard today, including a look at the cinematography, visual effects, and storyboards. Continue below for a look at how the series was brought to life:

First up is this amazing video shared on Facebook by cinematographer Carlos Gonzalez, showing how a remarkable tracking crane and gimbal setup was used to capture that long meandering shot around La Sirena at the end of the series. What an incredible camera move!



The Nación Trek posted a nice little gif showing how this translates into the final shot:



Even much more simple shots have pretty elaborate set ups, check out this behind the scenes look at a stack of cameras shooting different angles, shared by grip Dave Leite:


And another setup here shared by CBS All Access Star Trek Twitter account:


This CBS behind the scenes video is mainly showing off the stunt work and choreography in a fight scene with Narek, but also highlights the camera operators. Note the ginormous crane, but also a camera-person sat on a swivel chair! (The video is also on StarTrek.com and Instagram if you're geolocked out of YouTube below):



Storyboard artist Aaron Sowd has also shared a lot of work from the scenes on Coppelius, neatly showing how his storyboards translated into the final shots. Here's a detailed look at the decoy football reveal:




And several frames of Soji's reaction to that appearing:





Sowd also shared these storyboards of the La Sirena returning to space:



And of course Picard himself:



And finally from the storyboards, there's this moment from the arrival of Starfleet. Note the fleet in the storyboard seems to be a bunch of Nova class ships, plus a few interesting looking four nacelled ships:


To bring those shots to life required loads of visual effects work, and the CBS Star Trek Twitter account has released a whole load of little video showing of lots of different shots were built up:









A couple more clips like this were released to Befores and Afters, who did a nice piece on visual effects in the series. Visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman describes how they detailed out the Borg Cube, and brought the orchids to life - Both shown in the clip below. Check out the full article for more stories of bringing them to life.



Picard is available now on CBS All Access in the US, Bell Media services in Canada, and Amazon Prime Video in most of the rest of the world. To keep track of all the latest Picard news, have a look back through my Picard tag, for previews, behind the scenes, tie-in fiction, and other merchandise updates. For more behind the scenes coverage from all of Trek, see my behind the scenes tag.



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