Star Trek: Lower Decks' sci-fi sitcom elements have always gone deeper than maintaining a 22-minute runtime.
"I always tell our board artists and animators that it's an animated sitcom, but it's shot like a Star Trek show," animator Barry Kelly revealed in a conversation with CinemaBlend. Comparing Lower Decks to the longtime success of The Simpsons and Family Guy, he added, "there's a sense of the camera, but it doesn't have blurs or rack focuses, lenses, and stuff like that. ... Everything is kind of like on a grid, and that's where the characters are in space. I think when trying to make Lower Decks, we want it to feel like it could translate to a live-action world as easily as translating a live-action show to a cartoon."
This animated camerawork format creates a sense of worldbuilding where, according to Kelly, "It's not realistic, but we want it to feel like the characters are in a real space. It's not a drawing, it's a shot." Adding to this aesthetic is the Lower Decks voice actors' performances, which, however fast-paced, are subdued "in the sense that they are in their own physical space and they can't just turn into Mister Mxyzptlk. Badgey can do that stuff. I think we limit it in the confines of Star Trek technology in that, being a hologram, Badgey can do that kind of stuff. ... But that's definitely the kind of thing a live-action show can't do that we can. We push the medium towards our strengths."
More recently, Star Trek successfully bridged its live-action and cartoon universes together with the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Those Old Scientists," sending Lower Decks characters Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner back in time to meet the original USS Enterprise crew. The episode began and concluded with animated sequences, while the majority of its story allowed Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome to physically portray their ensign characters opposite the Trek show's cast. To prepare for the episode, Quaid revealed that he rewatched multiple Lower Decks episodes in order to get a sense of his character's movements and properly incorporate them into a live-action format.
For its fourth season, Lower Decks' first two episodes saw Mariner, Boimler, and their co-workers Tendi and Rutherford get promoted to Lieutenant (junior grade) status aboard the USS Cerritos. Joining the quartet this season is T'Lyn, a Vulcan ensign who previously appeared in season 2's "wej Duj" before getting transferred to the Cerritos. Intercut with season 4's more humorous storylines, however, is a dark subplot about an unknown starcraft capable of overriding other ships' defenses before destroying them.
New Star Trek: Lower Decks episodes air on Thursdays on Paramount+.
Source: CinemaBlend