'Star Trek Discovery': Building the sets and more

Building the rich and complex sets for “Star Trek Discovery” is not an easy task. In a recent interview, Production Designer Tamara Deverell shared her insights about what it was like to work on this project. Meanwhile, Nicholas Meyer is working on more stories for the franchise.

Deverell is the first female production designer in the franchise. In an interview with Indie Wire, she talked about what it was like to come up with some of the sets that were featured on the show.

One of the most beautiful worlds that was created for the show was the planet Pahvo. The network wanted the plot to take some of the crew members off the ship in one of the episodes to explore a planet, which may have been done for some change in scenery. “In 10 minutes I came up with the idea of a membrane structure like a yurt, which was something I thought we could build [quickly].Then we picked a place in a forest because it was supposed to be very idyllic. We ended up just VFXing our structure, which was built on stage, into a forest,” Deverell said.

While building the set was done quickly, creating the creature of the plant was a huge task. In the end, the producers decided to use computer graphics for the alien creature.

When building the membrane of Pahvo, Deverell based it on a repeated mathematical form. The form was later tilted, to make it not seem too perfect. All of this was done using a 3D program. The team had similar challenges while building the Mirror Universe sets and the Klingon World.

Meanwhile, “Star Trek” veteran Meyer, who has directed “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Undiscovered Country” is working on new stories for the franchise. The director confirmed the news, but didn’t share too many details about his new project, Trek Core reports. The new project is trilogy, but it isn’t clear if this is a TV series or movies for online streaming.