Strange New Worlds debuted in 2022 as part of the Star Trek expanded universe. A spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery, it follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the starship Enterprise a decade before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series. It has been renewed for season three after a successful season two for which it is nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing. Sound Editors, Michael Schapiro and Matthew Taylor recently spoke to Immersive about the experience.
[Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity]
Let’s talk Star Trek. Michael, you’ve been involved with different iterations of Star Trek (Discovery, Picard), so just curious on a personal level, is Star Trek a thing for you that you were interested in and passionate about?
Michael Schapiro: I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). We’d watch it at dinner, family dinners, that kind of thing. We watched Voyager. It was always something that I enjoyed and loved to see. It was a bit of a shame when it went off the air for as long as it did. When I got the opportunity to join the crew we have now, you can’t turn down Star Trek.
Matt, what is your relationship with Star Trek?
Matthew Taylor: I’ve been a lifelong fan and I would personally consider it a bucket list thing for me work-wise, being allowed to work on it. I grew up with TNG because that’s my age group, but my mom and dad are big fans of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), so I got into that and watched Deep Space Nine and Voyager. I’m a fan really at heart.
Michael, how did you get started in this field?
MS: I flipped from game design to sound design and then moved out here to work at a game studio first. It was not a good experience. I messaged a friend of mine from school, who’s helped us out on Discovery and various other things now because I know he’d done an internship at Danetracks who did all the sound for The Matrix movies. I just wanted to see where they were, and they were literally at the end of my block. I ran down there and handed off a resume. I did an internship for about three months, and then they hired me and it’s snowballed from there.
How about you Matthew?
MT: I was interested in sound in college, so sort of focused on that. I came out here in 2002 was just doing a bunch of free jobs and kind of found my way into location sound. Did that for a couple of years, a lot of sound recording. Then took a job as a driver at Ascent Media and someone pulled me out of the driver pool, and I just kind of went from there and just kind of worked my way through various companies essentially. I always knew I wanted to be in sound.
Strange New Worlds is a throwback to that first pilot where Pike is the captain, so there are lots of recreations of iconic sounds. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of recreating or updating these familiar sounds?
MS: I like to think of it as archeological sound design. We have a lot of great tools these days to be able to do that pull apart stuff, and look at it visually in various ways. We have a bank of some of the original TOS sounds and we’ll try and use them and update them and get them a bit more modern because they’re all recorded on tape. It’s also just being able to pop open a sound in Izotope Rx, which gives you a nice visual view of it, and being able to recognize what kinds of processes might’ve been done and figure out how they might have created that sound using the tools available at the time. Then we try and recreate that process as much as possible and use that to add extra layers to it.
MS: Our best to keep it as close to the original thinking as possible, if not just straight up using the sound.
MT: I was going to just jump in, Mike, if you don’t mind, and just talk about one specific sound. It is the transporter that’s very iconic, probably one of the most recognizable sounds I would argue. You and me and Kip (Smedley) talked about how to create that because that’s always been kind of a thing.
MS: We lucked out that one had some actual written information about the history of the sound too.
MT: We all spoke about this art installation in San Francisco Pier that is a bunch of wires that resonate with wind and it sounds a lot like the transporters of TOS. I think Kip went ahead and made an instrument that’s a box with a bunch of strings across it that if it resonates in a certain way, it was like a harp. So that was kind of part of making that original transporter.
Everything in the Star Trek universe is stuff that’s not in our current world. How many sounds would you say you guys create maybe per episode or season? I would imagine it’s a pretty high volume. Can you talk a little bit about the team that you work with?
MT: The team, is pretty large, obviously there’s Mike and me and then working on the sound effects side most of the time is a gentleman by the name of Kip Smedley. He cuts sound effects. We have a Foley team, John Sanacore, Rick Owens, and Jesi Ruppel and then usually there’s a dialogue and sometimes an ADR supervisor, but there’s a dialogue editor, Sean Heissinger, and that’s pretty much the base of the team essentially and there’s a music editor. We also have our Re-recording mixer, Todd Grayson.
One of the most beloved creatures from The Original Series is the Gorn. Tell me a little bit about creating a Baby Gorn.
MT: Kip has an Alpaca farm and they were shearing the Alpacas, one of them is very vocal, not in pain, but if you didn’t know that this Alpaca was a drama queen, you would think they were murdering this Alpaca. So he recorded the Alpaca and that is a good chunk of the baby Gorn vocals.
So you have huge Star Trek credentials now. What’s it like bouncing between these Star Trek shows? They’re part of the same universe, but they have a very different feel.
MT: There’s a relative sameness in the fact that speaking about the sound lexicon of the universities, they’re relative, they have a baseline, but I feel like Discovery was a very action kind of solve a-mystery type of thing. A lot of that was the same with Picard, but yet we mostly have to take into consideration that we’re a different generation now.
From a sound standpoint of view, the tech has changed. I think what we’re talking about here with Strange New Worlds is now we have to think about the time range we are in, pre-TOS, so we now have to think sonically about what are we doing for all the sound effects. How are we honoring this universe?
What has it been like on the other end of this? Now obviously the latest season was very well received and you’re all nominated for Emmys. You’ve been nominated for Emmys before, but what’s that this time around?
MS: I am kind of regularly surprised, especially seeing the people and shows that we’re up against is a just really impressive set of people. My imposter syndrome kicks in, it’s like, should I be here? This feels wrong every time.
So it’s always a nice little kind of ego boost on some level of like, we’re doing good stuff and people are enjoying it and that feels good. It’s been fun and I’m glad to have a show that lets us do some of the out-there stuff that we do with sound and that’s been very enjoyable.
MT: I think what Mike said, for me, certainly there’s a sense of imposter syndrome. Like wow, all of us on this crew love this show our fans, and we put a lot of love into the show. Being nominated and being recognized is something that’s like, wow. I guess people like the work. It’s very nice.
Strange New Worlds is available to stream on Paramount+
