JEFF LOMBARDI, PROPERTY MASTER IN THE ART DEPARTMENT ON STAR TREK: PICARD, TAKES SFX ON AN ALL-ACCESS TOUR OF THE 24TH CENTURY

WORDS: DARREN SCOTT

SIRENA ARMOURY

Two weeks before we started shooting the second block of episodes, after the Sirena set had more or less finally been built, we realised that the transporter room needed an armoury or kit-up room for away missions. Not only that, but it should be a collection of weapons from alien cultures and times throughout the galaxy, not just our new guns. Oh well, jeez, no big deal! Well, it is a big deal because all these past Star Trek props don’t exist any more, and on a CBS show I can’t use props from the Paramount movies, so I would have to build everything from scratch - which I don’t have time to do. I called up my friend Mario Moreira, prop master from Star Trek: Discovery, and he thankfully had some guns he could let us borrow, which made all the difference in the world. That kind of collaboration is what’s really nice about walking into a created universe like this, and something there will only be more of as they keep developing more overlapping shows. The rest of the alien guns I scoured from prop rental houses across town. I surprisingly found Klingon death sting pistols and Ferengi disruptors tossed aside in old bins. I just had to repaint them, and thankfully Jonathan Frakes was able to shoot around the transporter room to give me a little more time to put it together.

SIRENA COMMS BADGE

Daren Dochterman, my brilliant prop illustrator, painstakingly reworked symbol after symbol until we found something Michael Chabon liked for the La Sirena. It being named after a siren or mermaid seemed the logical place to start, but how to interpret that in a masculine way for Rios was challenging. I think what we settled on in the end worked beautifully, and, interpreted as a comms badge, became even better. For the crew all getting together in the final shot of the season, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon wanted me to come up with a new style for the comms badge that united the characters. So I quickly did a material study using abalone shells as a guide, and variation C was selected. Those badges came out nice and I wish I had done that from the start, but hindsight is 20/20.