Star Trek: Discovery’s season 3 VFX reel from Pixomondo shows how the show’s stunning effects were created

Still from Pixomondo’s Star Trek: Discovery season 3 VFX reel

APRIL 18, 2021 - Pixomondo, the company responsible for the visual effects in season three of Star Trek: Discovery, released a new video last week, peeling back the layers behind what audiences saw on screen during the season. SYFY WIRE brought us the exclusive debut of the video.

Diving into the 32nd century was certainly no small feat for the Star Trek: Discovery production team. Earlier this year, Co-Showrunner Michelle Paradise posed some of the challenges in the third season, saying, “What does the future look like in 930 years? [...] What are the new things that we see? What are the new technologies?” For the visual effects department working on Discovery, those questions were top priority.

Phil Jones, Discovery’s VFX Supervisor told SYFY WIRE, “Season 3 was a tricky one for us. [...] There were at least 25 new ships that needed to be created, with all new future enhancements, because we jumped 900 years in the future.”

One of those ships belonged to Cleveland Booker, or “Book”, as he is known in the series. If you haven’t watched season three, it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that Book’s ship is somewhat malleable, able to change its configuration to suit the moment at hand. Unfortunately, it couldn’t change enough for the VFX team. Jones said the team “had to come up with another configuration” to dock Book’s ship with the Discovery because there was no way it would fit in the ship’s docking bay. Jones told said, “When we built it, we found that [sometimes] what looks good on paper doesn’t fit anymore.”

Another challenge faced by the VFX team was to design and render multiple layers of artwork to show the U.S.S. Discovery crashing into the surface of an unknown planet in the season’s second episode “Far From Home”, a shot which Jones said his team spent at least a month working on. This type of effect is the basis of the breakdown reel released by Pixomondo, showing how each detail is painstakingly added to provide a sense of realism to the overall product.

As is the way of the filming industry, the world of visual effects is constantly changing. Much of the filming for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery will take place in front of an augmented reality wall. This new filming technology is essentially a virtual backdrop that can replace greenscreen with a computer-generated scene that can move and change with the camera. On the new filming technology, Jones said, “We try to use as much live action as possible but then push it a little bit further.”

To watch the full season three visual effects breakdown reel for yourself, visit the Pixomondo Channel on YouTube.