In the past few years, there’s been plenty of Star Trek to talk about—new shows starting, older shows coming to their ends, the franchise’s future on screens big and small alike (although not always entirely successfully). But for some Trek diehards, a peculiar string of numbers is all that has been on their lips: 765874.
That number—the purported Starfleet serial number of Yeoman J. M. Colt from the original Star Trek pilot episode “The Cage”—is the title that has been given to a series of shorts released by OTOY and the Roddenberry Archives since 2022. Leveraging the VFX wizardry of the former and the Star Trek resources of the latter to create a handful of vignettes exploring crucial, unseen moments in Star Trek‘s past, the short-but-sweet series has become something of a viral sensation every time a new release drops, giving Trek fans everything from the moment the Enterprise-D was recovered after its near-destruction, to last year’s emotional farewell to Kirk and Spock celebrating Star Trek: Generations‘ 30th anniversary.
To find out more about the process of creating and filming the shorts—and how everything from the creative decision to revisit Kirk and Spock, to the technological challenges of creative CG replicas of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy to continue those stories, came about—io9 recently spoke with one of the directors behind the shorts in the project, Carlos Baena. Check out our wide-ranging interview below, as well as some behind-scenes-looks at Baena filming the fourth entry in the series, Unification (including a wild glimpse of actor Sam Witwer in costume as Captain Kirk’s physical stand-in!).
James Whitbrook, io9: Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in creating the 765874 project.
Carlos Baena: In early 2022, I began working with OTOY, Jules Urbach and the Roddenberry Archive as a freelance director, focusing on short-format content. My journey started with directing the first 765874 teaser short and co-directing Memory Wall with Jules, followed by directing Regeneration and Unification in 2023 and 2024. Directing live-action can sometimes be a different experience from my usual work in animation, especially when working on set and shooting on location. It helps to have had some experience directing previous live-action shorts.
My familiarity with Star Trek was limited before joining OTOY, so diving into this world was a great learning process. To deepen my understanding, I explored the original series and iconic films like The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. While I’m not as well-versed in the more recent iterations of Star Trek, I relied on the crew’s insights to help me bridge that gap.
io9: You’d previously teased a set up for Unification in the short released in the wake of Picard‘s third season—in your mind’s eye with this project, were you always heading to tell a story about Kirk and Spock like this?
Baena: It all came together organically. By the time we completed the Spock and Veridian III setup you mentioned in the short Regeneration, we still hadn’t discussed what Unification was going to be. It wasn’t until months later that Jules approached me with the seed of a follow-up idea to Regeneration he had been thinking about—being Jules, someone who grew up on Star Trek and loved it dearly. Later, I learned from him about something William Shatner had discussed in an interview they did with him, which further inspired what Unification could become.
As a director, you take the material and find ways to infuse it with your own experiences to keep it honest and sincere. In my case, that meant drawing from my love for my parents and my emotional journey before their passing. To me, this final reunion between Kirk and Spock had to be just as personal—one last chance for them to be together after decades of meaningful experiences and adventures. My conversations with Jules became the foundation for the film. Story development began with a bullet-point document along with a mood board I created based on those discussions. From there, I was able to launch early on a few people in our team, such as our story artist Ahmed Nasri, our previs artist Jonathan Roybal and one of our VFX artists JJ Palomo.
io9: Unification leaves a lot to viewer interpretation in its view of what exactly we’re witnessing. What made you approach the narrative in this way?
... continue reading