The recent third season premiere of “Star Trek: Discovery” boasted a bunch of visual effects shots that maintain the high standard of the previous seasons, in fact they went further in many ways due to the narrative being set in a whole new and much more advanced century.
A new piece at Indiewire has gone into how the series has adapted for the COVID-19 times. Filming on the new season wrapped at the end of February this year, just a few weeks before the pandemic shut down production everywhere.
That meant that a huge chunk of the post production had to be done from home, something that was difficult at first but those involved have since adapted. Producer Alex Kurtzman said during a recent Zoom interview:
“Our editors, miraculously and heroically, took their editing bays into their living rooms. And we cut the entire season, in collaboration, just the way I’m talking to you right now. We also scored the entire season, mixed the entire season, color timed the entire season, all from this laptop.”
Things went much further though. The series boasts a full orchestral score and series composer Jeff Russo apparently sent microphones to each of the orchestra members homes to record their individual parts so they could all be mixed together later on as if playing in unison.
Then there were certain VFX shots that needed actors to appear in them, so those actors were sent motion-capture equipment to finish elements of their performance at home:
“It’s an actual actor at their home motion-capture studio, which then gets rendered in the computer as a living thing. It’s a real person…Each of our actors have been scanned, so we can actually impose their faces on a body, which is quite something.”
Post-production work on the third season is still ongoing, but for the most part those involved are gearing up to start shooting a fourth season with the cast recently traveling to Toronto to begin their quarantine before production starts. Shooting will take place with full COVID safety protocols in place.
