The show "Star Trek: Picard" debuted in 2020, designed to be a slower, character-focused drama, dealign with Jean-Luc Picard in his elder years. The show received mixed reviews, which dropped even further for the second season. The third season premiered in early 2023, to a better reception. Terry Matalas took over as show-runner, and wanted a change in tone, bringing back a full sci-fi adventure and reuniting all the "Next Generation" cast for a last big hoorah. The third season ret-conned a lot of the story material that had taken place over the previous two seasons, pitching this as more of a direct sequel to the events of "Nemesis", that took place twenty years earlier. The show shows Picard and Ryker jumping into action, after receiving a distress signal from a former crew-mate. Eventually the whole team comes together, as they face threats old and new, and Picard meets a family he never knew he had.
Composer Jeff Ruso had worked on the first two seasons of the show, creating a more modern and intimate score, yet one that wasn't exactly beloved by fans of the franchise. With the new show-runner for the final season came a new mandate for the music--large orchestral music, filled with classic thematic writing and big emotions. Matalas brought on English composer Stephen Barton (who he had collaborated on in the final season of his show "12 Monkeys"). Barton jumped at the chance, but soon realized that writing a heavily-scored ten-hour show in a fully cinematic style was almost humanly impossible, so he sought out German composer Frederik Wiedmann to assist him with the final handful of episodes, so as to not sacrifice the quality of the output. Ultimately, both composers collaborated heavily, and paid full tribute to the franchise's excellent history of musical storytelling. Jerry Goldsmith is heavily referenced, there are more several nods to James Horner, as well as television contributors such as Dennis McCarthy and Ron Jones. Besides all the musical easter-eggs and legacy themes, the composers developed a new set of themes, for villains, for the Crusher family, and a central theme for the crew of the "Titan" starship (where most of the adventure takes place), a majestic new addition to the universe that sits side by side with the best of the franchise. For the action music, the team has a bit of a more modern sound, but even then delivers a much more complex and invigorating style than many modern blockbusters, delivering a package that is incredibly layered, paying tribute to all the composers that have defined "Trek" history, while boldly bringing that sound into the present with strong musical storytelling of their own.
The score for the final reason was released on album by Lakeshore Records. It features a lengthy two and a half hour runtime. There has been rumors of a second album with additional music, though the highlights are all captured in the original release already, and for me, even with the long presentation, the music does not sag in quality. The album cover was fine, but I didn't love the spacing of the title and text. After watching this season, and seeing the available artwork, I wanted to jump in and create my own spin on the material. So here's seven new covers to pick from.
All the artwork is based on official or licensed work. The painted pieces (used in Covers 2, 6, and 7) were done by the incredible UK-based artist Paul Shipper, whose work here captures a gloriously old-school sense of cinematic adventure.
Most of the covers needed the usual edits, cloning and patching to remove text here and there, often needing to overlap multiple versions of the same image to get the highest quality possible, re-sizing, color tweaks, blending, adding subtle effects to the text, etc.
On Cover 2, I shrunk down the bottom half of the image a bit, so there characters would be larger in the frame, and then had to do quite a bit of patching on the planet to remove the title and it's blue glow.
For Cover 5, I wanted to create more headspace to fit the text at the top, so I had to clone and paint that in, overlaid some stars, and then shifted the bottom row up a little bit.
Finally, for Cover 6, I edited together two versions of this wallpaper, one with only Picard and the ship, and then inserted the characters from another variant of the wallpaper into a better composition for this format. Unfortunately that version used was in somewhat blurry quality, so I had to pull each characters' face from a separate poster and resize and overlay them to get sharper resolution.
Hope you enjoy, and let me know your favorites!
These are perfect. However, it should be noted that Star Trek: Picard has actually received a highly positive response from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, season 1 has an 87 or 86% approval rating, while season 2 has 85%, and season 3 has 98%. Otherwise, thanks so much for sharing! Live long, and prosper. Peace, and long life. Ex astris, scientia. Ad aspra, per aspera. Make it so! Engage! Tea, Earl Grey, decaf, PIPING hot.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed the covers! My comments perhaps aren't fully reflective of all opinions on the show. I myself didn't watch the first two seasons, but I did watch Season 3, as it seemed more up my alley, and I wanted to hear the score in context, and I was told I didn't really need to know much of what came in the previous two seasons, as it was largely scrapped or retconned anyways. I largely went with anecdotal evidence, some good friends of mine who are big Trekkies and were really frustrated with the early seasons. But I'm happy if the show worked better for others. Have a great day!
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