Star Trek: Lower Decks director Barry Kelly on his influences from Star Trek and that other “star” franchise

Eugene Cordero as Ensign Rutherford and Jack Quaid as Ensign Brad Boimler of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS. Photo Cr: Best Possible Screen Grab CBS ©2020 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

As the supervising director for Star Trek: Lower Decks, the job falls on Barry Kelly to work with each department in the animation studios at Titmouse to create the best series possible. In a recent interview with Trek Report, Kelly shared some of the details of his position and how Star Trek - and that other “Star” franchise - informed his skills as a director.

“In the supervising director role, I’m working with writers to nail down the vision for the story,” Kelly said in the interview. “The writers give us a blueprint with the script and I break down that script with directors, board artists, designers and animators to make the best version of the show possible.” Kelly’s job doesn’t stop there, however. On any given day, he’ll be working with the writers, reviewing storyboards or character designs and looking at, as he says, “new batches of animation, straight from the oven.”

Growing up with older siblings in the 80’s, Kelly said he would “absorb” whatever his brother and sister were watching. For a young Barry Kelly, that meant a healthy dose of Star Trek: The Next Generation along with the original Star Wars trilogy. Kelly gave credit to both franchises for teaching him different aspects of filmmaking, skills he would go on to use working on both Lower Decks and Star Wars Galaxy of Adventure, a series of animated shorts.

“If I was to compare [the 80’s era] of ’Trek and ’Wars, they’re both ‘film school in a can’ for different reasons,” Kelly said. “Star Wars taught me […] how you can execute a sci-fi adventure with the most groundbreaking of filmmaking techniques, what you can do with excess. Star Trek taught me about restraint, how to make a compelling show about exploring, that actually relied on limited locations with only actors and a script. It’s ambitious, takes place in space, but the beautiful space shots are actually sparse; the real special effects are the actors and the story.”

Part of that early influence comes through on Star Trek: Lower Decks in the form of the USS Cerritos. In the interview, Kelly said that shots of the Cerritos are handled, more or less, like a filming model would be back in the days of TNG. While some shots are painted stills and others done in 3D, Kelly described the process, saying, “The layers we use are the same passes they would have had to make for the model photography. Light emissions pass, matte pass, the window light pass, and the ship color pass […] Like I said, those shows and [movies] are like ‘film school in a can’. The ships are going to look better and better every time you see them.”

You can read the full interview with Barry Kelly at Trek.Report and be sure to catch up with the first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, streaming now on CBS All Access.