WARP FIVE: Barry Kelly Dishes on Designing the Main Title, Klingon Opening Title, and Data on Lower Decks

Welcome to Warp Five, StarTrek.com's five question post-mortem with your favorite featured talent from the latest Star Trek episodes.

Star Trek: Lower Decks has been pulling out all the stops for its fifth season, which sees the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos tasked with addressing with subspace rifts popping all over the Alpha Quadrant.

With its big swings, we've seen more about , , , and glimpses into the day-to-day for the Upper Decks bridge crew.

StarTrek.com had the opportunity to chat with the series' animator and supervising producer Barry Kelly on the main opening title, Easter Eggs, getting Brent Spiner onto Star Trek: Lower Decks, and more!

On the Return of Brent Spiner

In "," after the U.S.S. Cerritos had its third run-in with a dimension fissure, they discover a Starfleet power signature left behind on Dilmer III. To prevent disrupting the technological evolution of this pre-warp civilization, officers Mariner, Tendi, and T'Lyn are sent down donning disguises to fit in. Not only that, our officers will experience a time dilation once they're down on Dilmer III as there's a space-time differential due to the planet's core. Every second on the Cerritos equates to one week on the planet's surface. Upon investigation, they discover the purple U.S.S. Enterprise had left behind their Commander Data's head!

How did Barry Kelly react upon seeing Brent Spiner's return to the Star Trek universe? He shares, "I was so happy to read that script and see that we have a Data head in there. It's funny, I know it's not the real Data, it's an alternate dimension, Purple Data, but that was a way we can show the classic TNG-era ship and have Data without it infringing [on anything]. That's kind of like the good and evil of alternate reality stuff, we can actually do this and get away with brining him in. All the history still happened; he's acknowledges that he was a head before, just a head, and it was pretty fun."

"It was a dream, because out of TNG, Data and Geordi grow to be my favorite characters," shares Kelly. "So getting one of them, I'd love to have both of them, but getting just one of them is amazing. Data is one of the original reasons I got into Star Trek as a little kid. Spock also always stood out to me. It's just there's the one kind of straight-faced, weird person on the bridge. And it's like a Vulcan who's stoic, and then on TNG, it's like there's a pale, green man who doesn't laugh at anything or doesn't know how to act in front of people. And I remember seeing him as a kid, and maybe I'm just a sucker for makeup effects or something, and he always stood out. So I always was a huge fan."

"Data and Geordi, they're such good buddies," he add. "I don't know if that was ever the intent of TNG, for them to become such a good like bromance between the two, but they were both so competent at their jobs and so eager to be of service to the ship and the crew and to their duty. And having Data on was super funny. It was fun to have Brent Spiner in the booth. I don't normally get to go to all the records, because this was our last season, I found myself with a little bit more free time, so I could piggyback on the records this time. And I got to go to the Brent Spiner record, and it was super fun, because Mike [McMahan] was there. And every once in a while Mike would just be like, you know, they wrote it a certain way, like a certain line in the script in here, and he would be like, 'If you were back on the set and Data was going to say something, what would you say? Does it feel wrong?' Brent Spiner kind of switched on his Data brain, he got back into it, and would help us add a real authenticity to Data in Data's dialogue and how he acts"

Kelly does tease to keep an eye out for additional returns, "I keep forgetting about the cameos. I'm like, 'This is a big one. This one's a big one,' and then I remember, 'Oh my gosh, that one is insane. That one is actually way more than we've ever had before."

On Designing the Alternate Dimension Purple Data

What is the series' approach when it comes to designing existing characters?

"It's hard because we're not a show that is super realistic," details Kelly. "We don't really hit likenesses too closely, but we've got to find a right kind of generic, iconic feel for Data. And there's always little things we catch at the end, like we had a design for Data. It was a purple head, but we realized something small like the eyebrows were too dark. When you look at the old show, he's got the brown hair, but actually his eyebrows are kind of painted the white too, like the face makeup."

"We were like, 'Why doesn't it feel like him?'' he continues. "One of our animators was like, 'I think it's because his eyebrows are too dark.' So we actually did a whole pass on him towards the end there just to lighten up his eyebrows, and it works. It was like, oh, there's Data, like you kind of see through it."

"And again, like a Vulcan, Data is a little tricky to animate in that he can't emote really, so we do have to pull back on him," says Kelly. "So sometimes he's saying something that's pretty extreme or would normally be very expressive, and we have to be like, 'Don't make his eyes get big. Keep the eyelids down. Don't make the eyebrows go up. Get that smile off.' Every once in a while, an animator would make him smile, and like, 'No, no, no, no. He can't smile.' That's a constant note, actually, like with Vulcans, and it applies to Data too, where it's like, 'They're expressing too much. Tone it back like 50%, just less, less, less,' just to nail it."

On the Season 5 Main Title Sequence and How Easter Eggs Are Chosen

The team at Titmouse has evolved the opening main title treatment for Star Trek: Lower Decks with new additions and Easter eggs added every season.

For the fifth season, we see the addition of V'ger from and the Borg Cube gripped by Apollo's hand, in connection with ' "," which also saw a connection in this season's "" with Ensign Olly being a descendent of an alien who once presented itself to the people of ancient Earth as Zeus.

Speaking on the Easter eggs peppered throughout, Kelly divulges, "The main title is its own animal in that I have a sheet, I made it back in Season 2, that was like a 10-year plan, like here's all the ships we've made. It's very infested now with all the Easter eggs in that one shot, in the Borg battle shot. It's like Where's Waldo, where it's like every little space of frame is crammed with some ship or some Easter egg or someone."

"Every season, I ask Mike, 'What are you thinking this time?'" he continues. "That one shot, we've thought about it every season, but every new season we have, there's a previous season where we've come up with new ships. Do we want to add anything from our show or do we want to add anything from the previous shows? But [Apollo's] Hand was a great one. That was actually our animation supervisor, Mike Rousch, who photographed his hand and made it so it's almost like stop motion. He kind of like stop-motioned his hand and made little poses and stuff like that, and he cut it up and made it green."

"And then V'ger, that's been on the sheet that I have since like since Season 2," explains Kelly. "But it's always just been sitting there in the background, because the scope and scale of everything in that shot, it's impossible. As for the other Easter eggs, there's some always written in the script. Every phase of production, there's the script, there's storyboards, there's design, then there's animation, I feel like every phase we go through, usually someone usually pipes in, 'Oh, we could add that or we could add this. We could add that.' The script gives us some, but in an episode where they're in the Collector's gallery [''], for instance. We lift some in the script, but then they don't know how big the room is when they write the script. And then we make this big room, and we're like, 'Oh my god, we have 80 more displays to fill up.' And our art director will throw in some ideas."

On the Klingon Homeworld Title Sequence

In "," in lieu of the main title sequence, we're treated to a beautiful sequence showcasing Ma'ah and his brother Malor on their family bloodwine farm on Qo'noS.

Kelly notes they had only done this once before, not using the main opening title sequence, in the third season Peanut Hamper episode, "."

Kelly shares when it comes to these deviations, they aim to "make it just a little bit more extra special" by showing what's not written in the script. "We wanted to show what [Ma'ah's] life is in a way. I'm always trying to get our story artists to not just look at the script, to think about what the story is between the lines of the script, and think about what needs to happen that the script isn't exactly telling you, but that the art needs to set up correctly."

"The title sequence of getting Ma'ah's day-to-day life, I don't remember if it was written or if we kind of pitched it. We're never sure if it's going to work or not because it also requires a new score. That little extra bit. Our composer Chris Westlake made it sound beautiful when he finished it. I didn't even realize we had a Klingon theme until I saw that opening title scored. We went to the actual orchestral record for that, and seeing it up on a big, projected screen for all musicians, and to hear it on an amazing soundstage at Sony, it was beautiful. And I loved being able to do that, like the little slow moment, a slow little vignette on what life is like on Qo'noS."

Giving more insight, Kelly notes, "One thing Mike always said to us, 'Even though he's definitely cooler than Boimler, [Ma'ah's] a Klingon Boimler. So Boimler is on the raisin farm. We'd see the wine, we saw the Raisinette girls. They would be squishing the raisins with Boimler. Boimler is trying the taste of the raisin and the grapes and stuff like that. And that's where we mirror that with Ma'ah, except it's the bloodworms, and being able to show it— We're always shown the cool, dark black granite city, and it's nice to show a little bit of what a farm would be like. They have their own versions of sunsets in a way, it's more red. We still want it to feel like you're not too far from that Qo'noS city feel. There's still spikes on the farm houses. There's still Targs running around everywhere, but they're a little bit more like farmhouse Targs. We just wanted to give a little slice of life. It's a little bit of the day to day of being a Klingon. It's beautiful and kind of sad, in a way, because you know he's not doing what he wants to, and he's stuck there, just kind of dishonored in a way."

On the Series As A Whole

Reflecting on his time on the series across five seasons, Kelly reveals, "I think we'll never really feel satisfied when you have to bring something to an end, and I never want to say, 'It's the end.' I never want to say, 'Bye,' it's just, 'Bye for now.'"

"As Star Trek has proven, who knows what form these characters or these storylines could come back in some new form," concludes Kelly. "There's still a comic that's going around. Again, one of my wishlist things was a Data and Geordi episode or something. I love Geordi and LeVar Burton. He seems so sweet. And we get to include the Geordie visor a few times on characters and stuff like that. So I would really wish for a Geordi, that's kind of my wishlist. But as for the main title, I mean, I would love to have done our 10-season, main-title plan, where that shot is even more packed with more stuff, where I don't even care if it's messy and you don't know what's going on. It just gets funny, especially if you've watched all 10 seasons or all five seasons at that point, and you're like, 'What is going on in this shot?' But if you know the journey of getting that far, that'd be awesome."