BEHIND-THE-SCENES: DESIGNING THE
STANDARD EXTRA-VEHICULAR WORK GARMENT (SEWG)

Deborah Everton was the Costume Designer for the film [Star Trek: First Contact] which is set in 2373 (and involves travel back to the 21st century). She designed the type-3 standard extra-vehicular work garment (SEWG) which is first seen in that film and later in [Star Trek: Voyager], making its debut in the episode [#71 Day of Honor]. It is a production protocol in Star Trek that when anything new appears which is major e.g. uniforms, equipment or technology, and thus likely to appear in a tv series too, the film gets to showcase it first, with the tv episode or its contents if necessary being rearranged to suit. This was the case with the SEWG, also known as an environment(al) suit or EVA suit, and the new type of phaser rifle. (Another instance is the the white Starfleet dress uniforms first seen in [Star Trek: Insurrection] and later seen in [DS9: Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges].)

Paris and Torres wearing SEWGs in [#71 Day of Honor]

When Everton came to design the SEWG for [Star Trek: First Contact], she already had lots of experience, having worked on similar designs for the underwater suits used in James Cameron's film The Abyss.

Deborah Everton: "Any sort of specialised costumes like that are just a nightmare, unless they're actually real. There are all sorts of problems that go along with them. They have to do very elaborate things; they have to accommodate flying harnesses, and electronics, which never work. You're always fiddling with it! The challenge for me was to design something that was leaner than, say, a NASA suit or a present-day suit, but would still have enough resonance of [a present-day suit] that the people could identify [with it], so it doesn't alienate the characters to the audience. The other thing was I wanted them to be sexy - they're dashing heroes and I really wanted them to look like that. I also wanted a lot of things that looked like they would strap on and go, 'ka-chunk!' and be beefy, and not look like they're wearing pyjamas or something. And those helmets look very simple - but the engineering that went into them was intense! Another lesson I learned from The Abyss is how to make a helmet so you can light the actors without it looking obvious and you can see so much of their face. There are tremendous problems - visibility, fogging the lens, the electronics, not asphyxiating the actor, the problem with reflections. And I tried to weight them forward a bit, so they would have an aggressive stance as opposed to a passive stance. But I think we've accomplished everything that we could possibly want to with them, and they definitely look heroic - in that light grey which will photograph white. It's the classic 'our guys' in the white spacesuits against our very dark Borg. I mean, Star Trek is like an opera, and you don't want to go too far from what the operatic theme of it is."

Filming Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. No stunt-double was used. Patrick Stewart did the stunt himself, and he liked it. The "wire" flying him was removed from the footage in post-production. This picture gives an indication of how the space walk scenes in [#71 Day of Honor] were done.

The space walk scenes in [#71 Day Of Honor] are not just outside on the hull of a starship as in [Star Trek: First Contact]. In [#71 Day Of Honor] Paris and Torres do an emergency beam-out from the shuttlecraft Cochrane and are left in space with dwindling oxugen). Live-action footage of the actors would have been filmed against a blue blackground. A computer program later removes all the blue elements from the scene and replaces them with a starfield. Lighting angles and camera moves have to be monitored carefully between the real elements and those that exist only on the screen. Moving actors with cables on set is a 'special effect'. 'Visual effects' come later such as digitally removing the wire and adding a starfield.