By the time Jaeger's design made it down to the producers, the film's costume designer Deborah Everton had finalised the look of the Queen.

Deborah Everton: "Her whole thing is that she doesn't walk around scaring people or killing people, so I wanted to keep her really simple and elegant. You can do something incredibly elaborate and then the actor can get lost in that, to the point where you miss all their nuances. [My costume design] is a very complicated suit that she's wearing, but it is 'lean and mean'."

Alice Krige as the Borg Queen

Everton's design left an exposed area of flesh und her shoulders that clarified exactly how much of her body should be lowered from above. Everton also suggested that the latches in her costume could hook into the Queen's skin. Her design for the Queen's head was then combined with a modified version of Jaeger's design for her metallic spinal cord.

Once the look of the Queen was established, Jaeger drew up some storyboards showing how her head would be lowered from the ceiling by a series of cables.

Alex Jaeger: "Originally, I had lots and lots of cables attached to her. Actually, in the original design you saw the cables come down first and then she was sort of brought down by the cables. As we got into it and realised that all those cables were going to cost a lot of money, we decided to pare it down to just three that held her up, and that stayed pretty true from then on."

At the same time, Jaeger and the team at Industrial Light & Magic were working out exactly how they would shoot such a demanding effect. The shot had several requirements.

Alex Jaeger: "She's talking while she's coming down, then she connects to her body and then she walks away all in the same shot! We went through some brainstorming sessions on that."

Everyone imagined that the sequence would be carried out digitally by Industrial Light & Magic but Borg design supervisor Todd Masters saw the solution.

Todd Masters: "To me, it sounded like it was a prosthetic effect with some digital sweetening, so we started talking early on to the producers about that. Industrial Light & Magic had another process that they were going to try; they proposed shooting her separately on green-screen and compositing the head onto a digital body. Industrial Light & Magic's an amazing company, so I'm sure they would have done an amazing job, but my problem with digital effects, sometimes, is it's easy to see how it's been done. This was the opening, the introduction of the Queen, and we really thought it needed to be kind of magical. The way she came down shouldn't look like an effect. We didn't want people saying, 'Oh, I see a couple of pixels out of whack.'"

There was another disadvantage to Industrial Light & Magic's approach, namely that Alice Krige (who played the Borg Queen) would have to film her entrance weeks, even months, after the rest of the scene, so inevitably the final result would not play as well as if she and Brent Spiner (who played Data) were on the stage together. Master's solution over came all these problems.

Todd Masters: "Our version was essentially putting Alice on a slant board with her head craned back, resting on the prosthetic neck and shoulders and a lower spine portion. We would digitally remove the rest of her body [which was wrapped in a blue cloth to make this possible]. It was kind of a crazy idea. Everybody,just looked at me and said, 'Well, why don't we test it?'... This way it was her real face the whole way down. Then, once she got into her body, we would transition to her actually in the makeup and the suit, and we could have her walk away and continue her dialogue. Everybody loved it; they thought it was fantastic. The great thing about doing it that way was that Alice was really giving a great performance in the sequence. I really wanted her and Brent to have a real connection in their performance. If you did it the other way, you wouldn't have the same connection; it wouldn't feel as much like it was in the scene."

Alice Krige with director Jonathan Frakes

The final part of the effect showed the latches on the Queen's 'costume' grabbing her skin. Alex Jaeger says that Deborah Everton had designed the hooks, but Industrial Light & Magic had to work out how they would move.

Alex Jaeger: "We animated them so that they come up and grab the skin, and pull her down so she's locked into the body. The skin was done with a little 3D; they had a computer- generated patch with the skin texture applied to it. They animated a little buckle and pull into it so that when we brought the hooks down you could see the skin stretch." This is illustrated in my article: Behind-the-scenes: [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier].

With the shot complete, they cut away to the normal footage of the Queen as she walks toward Data. The shot lasted approximately 25 seconds.

In [Star Trek: Voyager], we see more detail about the assembly of the Borg Queen's body. In [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier] we see the components of the body being assembled before the Queen's head and spinal column are dropped into it, and in [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero] we see the whole process of assembly starting with the head and spinal column in their storage place in the ceiling of the Borg Queen's lair.

The Borg Queen's body is assembled. (pop-up window) [#146 Unimatrix Zero, Part One]

More screenshots of the assembly of the Borg Queen can be seen via SHIP'S LOGS: EPISODE GUIDES or LIFEFORMS - see BORG INDEX for details and links.

Behind-the-scenes: [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero]
includes words by Susanna Thompson who plays the Borg Queen in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier] and [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero]

Make-up

"In total, the whole thing took seven hours to put on the suit and make-up, and it took two more hours to get out of it. In fact, I had a wonderful time because the make- up artist, Scott Wheeler, who created it, and Mark Bussan, who helped Scott put it on, were wonderful.' This sense of fun surrounded her for the entire process of becoming a Borg. 'It was a delightful group of people to be surrounded by. Usually, I go into hair and make-up for forty-five minutes and then I'm out of there. For some reason my make-up and hair usually stays, so I don't need maintenance during the day. That's it. I get to spend all the time I need alone on a set. But on First Contact it was a totally unique experience. You know those sharks that are surrounded by little shoals of fish? I was constantly surrounded by about six people. The make-up was always needing to be touched up and repaired, the suit needed gluing and the battery packs needed checking, so I was constantly surrounded. They were all delightful, which is what made it okay."

The make-up included wearing painful silverised contact lenses. Because of the length of time required to remove her costume and get back into it for calls of nature, in a business where time is money, Krige cut down on the amount of fluid she drank in order to reduce the number of such visits - quite some self-restraint given the heat of the set's lights and the long working days.

above and below: Alice Krige as the Borg Queen in [#171 and #172 Endgame]

Alice Krige. Source STN.