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STREAMING SERIES www.postmagazine.com 19 POST MAR/APR 2020 O nline platform are luring viewers with an impressive array of shows to choose from — many of which feature visual effects that can compete with their broadcast counterparts. We recently sampled a number of series from CBS All Access, DC Universe and Apple TV+. Here, the shows' VFX supervisors share insight into their respective workflows and creative challenges. CBS All Access: Star Trek: Picard Star Trek: Picard is a new series available on the CBS All Access streaming platform. The hour-long sci-fi program stars Sir Patrick Stewart, who repris- es his iconic role as Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, which he played for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Picard follows the iconic character into the next chapter of his life. Now retired from the Star Fleet, Jean-Luc spends his latter years over- seeing a vineyard in France, along with his dog, Number One. And while his retirement is supposed to be relaxing, he has nagging memories about the way he handled a galactic event and its subse- quent repercussions. Paul Ghezzo is creative director/VFX supervi- sor at Technicolor VFX in Los Angeles and says the studio got lucky when the show brought its post work to Southern California in order to take advantage of tax credits. The studio has worked on the series since Episode 5, and contributed to all of the following episodes in Season 1, concluding with Episode 10. Multiple vendors provide visual effects for the series, including Pixomondo, Dneg (all 10 episodes) and Crafty Apes (1,200 shots — 140 on the pilot alone). Ghezzo is one of two VFX supervisors that over- see the show for Technicolor. "We're doing a lot of set extension work," he notes. "We've done some props — bringing practi- cal props to life, because that's still not easily done in the real world. We're able to essentially create a digital version of it and have it animate, or create an effect from it." Ghezzo calls attention to Episode 5, which features a puzzle box that emits a toxic gas, as a complex effect created by the studio. "[For that], we got to animate and kind of come up with the design, the functionality, how it opens and how it emits everything. Beyond that, a lot of what we've been doing is either digital matte painting or full 3D set extensions, along with some additional prop work and some of the graphics work as well." Much of Technicolor's set extension work is based around inside the 'Borg Cube'. Borgs are an alien race that were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and later appeared in movies as well as the TV show. The Cube is an incredi- bly-large spaceship — square in shape — measur- ing miles in diameter. "A lot of our work goes into extrapolating on the Much of Technicolor VFX's work on Picard involves set extensions. The studio also created the series' puzzle box. Typically, six weeks goes into completing an episode of Picard.