Herman Zimmerman was Production Designer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the last four Star Trek films.

Question: What do you like best about your job.
isaac

HZ: I like the freedom that one has to create in the Star Trek universe. There's the entire gamut of design possibilities in creating new environments for alien cultures and starship interiors, imagining the future by examining interesting things about our own past and putting dissimilar things together to make what seem to be new objects or venues.

Q: what is the worst part of your job?
isaac

HZ: There's really no down side to this job. It gets a little hectic sometimes because it is a TV series (DS9) and we do a new show every 7 days, if we finish on Tuesday, a new episode starts on Wednesday. If we finish on Friday the next starts on Monday. There's no time in between. The scripts are often in need of page one rewrites after the first production meeting. It takes about a day to write an act and get it delivered to all the production people. So, if we're lucky, we'll get a completed script two days before we shoot. Sometimes we don't get it until the night before we shoot. So without criticizing the writers for not working faster, it still makes it difficult to be consistently creative without having much time to think about what your problems are. Design in general is problem solving, after all, and we get wonderful problems to solve. It would be nice if we had more time to think about them.

Q: Will there be a seventh season of Deep Space Nine?
Sunrise

HZ: Yes. All the actors have been signed for a 7th season and we're all looking forward to it.

Q: what is your favorite DS9 character
isaac

HZ: I don't think I have a single favorite because I really like this cast enormously. I liked the cast of ST:TNG equally, but I've had more personal experience with the members of the DS9 cast... and remember - I didn't stay with ST:TNG as I have with the DS9 people, so I didn't have the history. I'm just starting to get re-acquainted with the cast of ST:TNG by working on the features.

Q: What is the role of a Production Designer? How is it different from an Art Director?
MovieBuff

HZ: This is a political thing. An Art Director is a Production Designer and a Production Designer is an Art Director. The society of Motion Picture and TV art directors will tell you that the production designer has more responsibilities with respect to coordinating with other department heads, in a more significant way than the art director. For instance, coordinating with Make-up and costumes, the director of photography, the special effects department, etc., in other words, adding a creative element to those departments, particularly from the point of view of creating the total environment of the picture. A good art director will find a way to do that whether or not they get the title production designer.

Q: Can you say anything about new designs coming up on the new Star Trek 9 movie?
Mr. Question

HZ: I'm not at liberty to divulge anything about the new Star Trek Film. I do know we'll have to go a long way to do a better film than First Contact. However, having said that, Michael Pillar is working with Richard Berman on the script. Michael, as you may know is the co-creator of DS9, and a fine science fiction writer. I'm looking forward to seeing a script. I'm told that I may see one in November and we may start pre-production early November or mid November (1997). The picture is scheduled to be released Thanksgiving of 1998.

Q: How do you like the series Voyager?
Rebecca

HZ: Voyager is a good series. I think they cut off a big hunk of the universe to explore... it's a difficult series to make because they can't go back to too many places they've been and they're always looking for a way home so they're always looking for new life and new civilizations. Certainly, 7 of 9 has added a bit of spice to the mix and I hope the fans like her as well as the cast and crew do. She certainly seems to be an asset to the show. Voyager will also probably be around for those 7 seasons.

Q: Being that the Star Trek genre uses computers for it's special effects, how do you incorporate computer technology into your artistic skills on the series and movies? Also, how do you make a set or design look "Trek" and not like other science fiction?
Brian

HZ: We don't use very much CGI composition for our visual effects. We still do it the old fashioned way with models and blue screen photography and motion control and expensive film. Rarely, when it won't compromise the quality of the screen image, we do CGI ships or asteroids or small objects in the distance, but never to the extent that a show like Babylon 5 uses the CGI images. We spend 75% more optical dollars than Babylon 5 does, to obtain that quality. If CGI images get better, and I'm sure they will, sooner or later, we may find that we can use more computer programming.

With regard to computers in our everyday work, we manufacture the backlit graphics that we call electronic wallpaper... in the art department, under the direction of Mike Okuda and his staff. As a matter of fact, Mike does all the graphics for both shows, as he did for ST:TNG and as he has done for the last 5 Star Trek films. The first season of TNG, the producers didn't feel the need to use television images at all, because the computer wasn't sophisticated enough in 1987...\ and it's come a long way in that 10 years, to the point that we now use video images almost exclusively for our back-lit graphics. This is a good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer.

Mike Westmore, Mike Okuda, Rick Sternbach... we now do this almost second nature. Certainly we were all influenced by the illustrator Sid Mead... We had a good deal of inspiration from Andrew Probert from the beginning in ST:TNG... The design of any Science Fiction... or any show for that matter, comes from the printed page. Comes from the writers' imagination... and what we do is try to put visual images to those words. Star Trek is an extension of the Admiral Hornblower series of books of the 1950s that influenced Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future as a military organization similar to the English maritime tradition. If you examine the sets, you'll see a lot of nautical themes followed through, rounded edges at the corners of the doors, rounded window edges... double-glazing... the whole reference to a starship... the captain, the first mate, etc., etc..... All the ranks from Captain to Ensign are from the English Maritime tradition transferred to space. What we call high-tech is constructivist architecture where you're looking at girders and gears and polished metal surfaces, often put together ... in very mechanical ways, and that's very appealing. It probably occurred as the result of efficiency in the use of materials... rather than the desire to create an art form. High-tech is not Star Trek.

Q: What is the best set you ever designed? What is the worst one you designed?
ghgh

HZ: I have some favorite sets. I guess my all time favorite starship set is 10 forward. Partly because it's a comfortable place and serves the needs of the writers to get the officers and the enlisted men and women together in an informal atmosphere in an otherwise militarily structured ship... and also because it was a challenge to get a starfield below the windows on a moderately small stage and make it believable.

One of my favorite sets is the Klingon courtroom from ST: The Undiscovered Country. We had a total of 85 Klingons and the challenge was to make the courtroom look like there were 3000 Klingons watching this trial. We got about 15 Klingons every two hours so it was mid-afternoon, even starting at 5 am before all 85 were made up and available to us. So we conceived the courtroom as a bear pit, the first ten feet was walls and above the walls were two rows of VIP Klingons, including Azetbur the acting Klingon chancellor and daughter of the murdered Gorkon. So until noon we did all the close work and after all 85 Klingons were made up we moved them about the other tiers and manufactures an audience much larger than was available to us. On an artistic level, the courtroom was ancient, built of large stones, so old they were cracked and probably open to the weather and the patina of age had added a great deal of character to them... and the thing just looked wonderful. Much better than I expected and it was photographed well and is a fond memory.

Q: Do you draw sketches or storyboards for a design? Do you do them yourself?
M.Angelo

HZ: Fortunately I don't have to do all the drawing on the show. I have at the moment a marvelous Illustrator working with me named John Eaves. I can and have done renderings but the more responsibilities a production designer acquires, the less time he has to spend on personal renderings. I do personally do the floor plans for every set because that is where everything begins and if that isn't right, nothing works. I most often look over the shoulder of the illustrator, and getting and giving inspiration as necessary. The illustrator's work is often un-buildable, too imaginative in the sense that it might be too expensive to create, but there's always something that works. Something that you find is indispensable to making a background for a scene. Sometimes I take an illustrator's work and turn it upside down. When we did DS9, Ricardo Delgado, a fantastic illustrator, drew a laboratory set which when we built it was upside down from the way he drew it. All of the illustrations do not make it to the screen. But I like to think that all the good ideas eventually get used and become images that you, the audience, will remember.

Q: What's the difference between doing production design on a TV show versus a movie? What factors do you have to consider differently in the two media?
BiCap

HZ: A TV show is done on a tight budget and in a short period of time. Luckily, a feature generally has a larger budget and a protracted period of time for pre-production and a generous production schedule. That, coupled with the fact that it pays better, makes it an altogether more pleasant experience. Doing television keeps you on your toes, doing features allows you to spread your wings. I like going back and forth between the media and luckily have been able to do so. The other consideration is the media itself. The television format is smaller because the screen is smaller. The resolution is lower than film... and you can get away with less attention to detail. Conversely, instead of a 19" diagonal or even a 35" screen, the cinemascope screen can be 30' tall and 70' wide. And the images on it magnified hundreds of times more than the images on your television screen. In a sense, it is unforgiving. So you really must pay attention to every detail, every color, every texture, every interface between your work and the work of other production artists. There's more pressure to do a good job. More incentive to do a good job. And more rewards for doing a good job.

Q: Where do you look for inspiration when designing a new set for an alien race or a Federation starship?
CouchSpud

HZ: I always look to the past for inspiration. If you stop and think, you can't imagine anything that you haven't some familiarity with. The trick is to take things that are familiar, combine them, change the color, turn them upside down, look at them a different way and create or seem to create something new. That old adage "There's nothing new under the sun" is really correct. It's still an enormous challenge because there's a world of design elements, pictures, historical data, architectural examples, etc... to call on. We like to think that the Ferengi race is probably a bit of an Oriental race. The Klingons were patterned after the Russians. The Bajorans are a little like Zen Buddists. And none of them are nail on the head kind of copies. There's a flavor here, a line or a form there. It actually becomes intuitive after awhile if you give yourself some limitations.

Nick Meyer taught me, quite a while ago, that if you're looking for something to represent the future, don't overlook the fact that in the future much of what you see around you today will still be with you. For instance, your likely to need 8 hours of rest on a bed at night. And beds are the size for one or two human beings and probably won't change in the next several hundred years. As they haven't in the last several hundred years. The same is true of chairs, tables, doors and windows. All those things that we use every day or see every day and are a part of our lives because of our physical structure. So you can take a room and know that the openings can be people-sized if the alien culture is a humanoid culture. And if they're giants, you can expand proportionately. And if they're smaller or not human, you can imagine what it must be like for them to eat, sleep, go through doorways, live their lives on their terms. So it's a problem to be solved philosophically as well as artistically.

Q: Do you watch the episode when it airs? Or the movie? How do you feel when you see your work on the screen as part of the story?
Rush

HZ: I do watch every episode that I can when it airs. However, before that, I watch every daily that is produced the day after filming. I know the story pretty well before its shot because I've read the script many times and I pay particular attention to how the environments that we've created are photographed - partially out of a sense of pride and accomplishment and partially to see if there's a way to do anything better or differently that might better serve the story. I like to go to bad movies. I learn a lot watching for mistakes. I think a designer is a person that is driven to a certain kind of criticism of everything around him or her. You drive down the street and see a building and admire something about it and think, how can I use that? Or how can I make it better? Wouldn't it work just as well if it were made out of another material? Could it be combined with a building I saw last week and create an impression of a culture? A culture that isn't familiar. It's a blessing and a curse because you probably enjoy the story less and watch for the inspiration more. But it's not something you can stop, again, it's an intuitive, natural thing for a designer to do.

I think production design is one of the most interesting jobs you can have. You're allowed into a lot of places doing motion picture and television design that many people don't get a chance to see. I've been in mineral mines in Nevada, I've been on a glacier in Alaska, I've seen the inside of a carpet mill, a record pressing plant... you name it and somebody's made or is going to make a movie in some exotic location that as the designer you're going to be invited to see. And not only to see, you may be able to work there, change it into something else for the purpose of the movie and all on somebody else's nickel. I've found a great deal of satisfaction in working on films and TV shows. The actors, the writers, the producers are always interesting people to hang out with. You almost never do anything exactly the same way twice, and because you're the designer you don't have to spend all day or the long hours with the shooting company.

Q: Have you done other things we might have seen that are not Star Trek?
GetALife

HZ: I've done everything in television. I've done game shows like "Let's make a deal." When I worked at NBC Burbank I did soap operas, as a matter of fact I started a show called, "The Days of Our Lives" as an assistant art director in 1965. I did a lot of movies for TV... the most well-known might be "The Burning Bed" with Farrah Fawcett, "Silence of the Heart", a mini-series "A Rumor of War", another mini-series called "The Word"... I did a piece on Jan and Dean called "Dead Man's Curve". I've done two cult movies that Internet users may remember called "Better Off Dead" and "One Crazy Summer", both Savage Steve Holland movies. I did the pilot for his TV series, the name of which I can't remember, but I didn't do the series. I did a Christmas pictures called "All I Want for Christmas" for Brandon Tartikoff and they seem to play that every Christmas for the last five years. I was the art director for a picture called "Black Rain", but for the last 10 years, Star Trek has occupied almost all my time. I did sitcoms including "Cheers", "Webster", "Brothers", "Down and Out in Beverly Hills", "Marblehead Manor", "The New Odd Couple", "Joanie Loves Chachi" and the last 20 episodes of "Happy Days". I designed a war room for the defense department about seven years ago. They sold it to the Navy, I believe, and it's still in operation in Arlington, VA somewhere. I've designed beauty parlor interiors and ice cream stores and my avocation is designing vacation houses. (They don't look anything like Star Trek)

Q: How did you get into Production Design? What education did you have to prepare yourself for this job?
Student47

HZ: I wanted to be an actor and I particularly wanted to be a musical comedy actor. I went to Northwestern University on a half tuition scholarship and worked my way through school... in the drama department. I took basic set design and theatre technical courses, set construction and lighting and Theatre management... to satisfy degree requirements. When I graduated, I wanted to go for a master's degree and the only assistant-ship open was in technical Theatre. So I changed my major to scene design, which I was vaguely interested in, to justify getting the assistant-ship. I was very much a child of the Theatre and I said I'd never work in television. Ironically I've hardly made a dollar that wasn't in television or in film. So be careful what you say. You may have to eat those words. I became an art director and then a production designer as a means to an end. In other words, to support my desire to be an actor. Somewhere along the line, and I did do some acting, the means became the end. I've never regretted it and I think I was destined to do this all along, I just didn't know it for awhile.