Friday 03 September 2010

Designing Deep Space Nine

On the creative side, many of the elements Berman and Piller brought to Deep Space Nine had been established in The Next Generation: the use of Ferengi, Cardassians, Bajorans, and wormholes provided powerful strands of connection to the familiar universe first established by Roddenberry and since enjoyed by millions of viewers. On the technical side, Berman and Piller were able to provide the same important connections in the look and feel of the latest series by drawing their key production people from the pool of talented individuals who had worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Production designer Herman Zimmerman returned to design the dark and alien sets of the Cardassian space station. Michael Okuda led the art department's effort to come up with an entirely new system of Cardassian control surfaces and data displays. Director of photography Marvin Rush brought a rich lushness to the new sets. Costume designer Robert Blackman refined Starfleet uniforms once again and ably met the challenge of a never-ending stream of new alien races. Michael Westmore faced the same challenges in devising more and stranger alien races for Blackman to clothe. Visual-effects that The Next Generation viewers had come to expect would be maintained and surpassed on the new series.

The task of designing the space station Deep Space Nine–which had to be a new, iconic and alien looking image that could be quickly recognized when seen on a small television screen–was a long, involved process that took several different directions before evolving into the final design we now take for granted. It was production designer Herman Zimmerman who was assigned to come up with this fresh and unique look that would be the centerpiece of the new Star Trek.

Early discussions about the look of the station led to a concept that eventually did not work. "It took us a couple of months of going in the wrong direction to find the right direction," Zimmerman explained, "partly because the producers weren't sure exactly how they wanted todirect us with the visual elements. We started out charged with getting a "Tower of Babel" concept of a space station built over a couple thousand years of separate, disparate cultures, so the technology from one part of the station to another would be of various ages and various cultures, not necessarily interfacing one with the other, and there was this sense of confusion because of that."

"The initial take on it was that it was a very old, ancient type of station–maybe not symmetrical in shape," Rick Sternbach, co-creator of the Deep Space Nine station, explained. "[ . . . ] As Berman and Piller continued to refine the concept of Deep Space Nine, we [Sternbach, Zimmerman and Michael Okuda] continued to evolve some of the exterior station drawings. We started with a very large number of sketches and very quick CGI shapes that we could build in our computers. [ . . . ] We could create a lot of shapes, make multiple copies of shapes and kind of put little pieces together and rotate them around and see how they would work. Also we could see if they would provide enough of a strange alien look that would be approved as Deep Space Nine.

Although the team had come up with many possible concepts, none seemed to be appealing. "None of them were, in the last analysis, slick enough or alien enough or unusual enough to satisfy Rick Berman's desire for a show that would not compete with Star Trek: The Next Generation and would not be derivative of any existing features of of the original series," Zimmerman explained. "When we finally arrived at the concept we have now, it was because Berman said, 'forget about the "Tower of Babel", forget about the various cultures; five me the most alien thing that you can create that could be a space station at the edge of the galaxy.' I think we succeeded in doing that."

Berman, however, wanted a recognizable design at the same time. Sternbach remembered that his desire for a simple shape led the team back to one particular concept. "We went back to something Herman [Zimmerman] had offered up initially, which was a series of nested sort of hoop structures, or ring structures, and went back to that concept of a round wheel type of station." This new direction incorporated three separate ideas. "I thought of a gyroscope shape as maybe being a basic form that we could with with. We also vaguely connected the gyroscope shape with the shape of an atom, with all the electons running around the nucleus. So what you see in the Deep Space Nine exterior now is a combination of an atom, a Mercedes emblem, and a gyroscope."

Now Zimmerman and the production team had to get the station built on time. "There was some haste necessary because we had used up two of our three months of preproduction going in the wrong direction, so when we got the right direction we had precious little time left to make it all work." Sternbach added that by then, all the details had been worked out pretty much accurately and the design only changed very subtly. "When the blueprints were delivered, there were very few changes. All the major story point pieces on the station had been detailed out and approved and built into the station." Once the six-foot miniature had been constructed and photographed, it would remain the focal point of the series for the next seven years.

Cardassian design

In designing the Cardassian architecture for the interiors of Deep Space Nine, Zimmerman was inspired by the Cardassian look already established on The Next Generation. Unfortunately, even this was limited, as the interior of the Carassian ships had never been seen. So Zimmerman drew primarily from Robert Blackman's design for Cardassian costuming; an armoured look, somewhat crustacean in appearance. Part of the theory was that the Cardassians were big on structure, and if Cardassians felt structure was of vital importance, they would keep it on the outside. Zimmerman visualised a space station of which the basic framework was not concealed, but where all supports and structures were clearly visible.

Zimmerman elaborated on his idea of Cardassian design: "The Cardassian mind prefers balance to summetry, ellipses to circles, angles to straight lines, and hard metallic surfaces and dark colours. They don't like ninety-degree angles. Cardassians believe in honesty in design and want to see the columns and beams that make up a structure rather than disguising them with some cosmetic treatment." Working with Zimmerman's basic concept, Nathan Cowley and Joe Hodges melded the desired crustacean look with the heavy-handed impressiveness of fascist architecture for the show's sets. As finally realised, the sets are quite imposing, but still maitnain their own unique appeal; a strangly alien sort of streamlining.

As the Cardassians are very militaristic, their Operations centre was placed by Zimmerman in such a fashion that the commander's office can look down on it and see everything that is going on. There are literally windows everywhere in the office, so that the Cardassian commander would have had no blind spots whatsoever.

Another part of Zimmerman's design concept was that the sets and devices on the Cardassian-built station were not as user-friendly as those on the Enterprise. Perhaps most notable are the automatic doors on Deep Space Nine—large, round, and cog-wheeled, the doors roll nosily out of the way and then roll ominously shut. One gets the feeling that, while the smooth, almost soundless doors on board the Enterprise would not, and almost certainly could not, close on you, it seems likely that Cardassian safety features were not so rigorous, and that being caught in the way of one of these portals would really hurt.

An artist who contributed heavily to the look of Deep Space Nine was Ricardo Delgado, an illustrator who designed and storyboarded the opening title sequence for the series and designed many of the essential but unobstructive background details of many of the sets. Much of the Promenade was Delgado's creation, from alien plants to shop designs. The Promenade underwent a heavy facelift after the show's first season. "We wanted more bustle," according to Rick Berman. "[In the first season] we had all these well-dressed Bajoran women browsing around the station as if they beamed up for a little afternoon shopping." For season two, they made "it look more like the part of town where sailors hang out; less like Beverly Center and more like a remote outpost in space."

 

N. Ottens
12 September 2005
Last updated: 10 July 2007

Sources for this article include:


• Reeves-Stevens, J. & G., The Art of Star Trek (1995)
• Van Hise, J. & Schuster, H., The Unauthorized Trek: Deep Space Nine The Voyage Continues (1994)
• “Creating Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Part 3),” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 1, issue 6 (October 1999)