Re-designing the costumes

Costume designer Deborah Everton: "I came up with this concept - a similar silhouette to the old Borg, but much mor elaborate for a feature's scope. I wanted it to look like they were Borgified from the inside out rather than outside in. It was tricky to get the layers and the depth into the costumes so it would look like the piping and the tuving were coming out of them. We collaborated on the headpieces with Michael Westmore (make-up designer). I'm really happy with them. And when you see them all lit and in their element, they're very creepy."

Make-up

Make-up designer Michael Westmore: "And this took days and days. One man alone, Barry Koper, sculpted up the Borg eyes. We had ten different kinds of eye. Jake Garbre sculpted up all the mechanical Borg pieces for the head implants. Scott Wheeler sculpted up the Queen's head and the bald heads. None of the Borg actors had shaved heads. They all had appliances on their heads, and then the other pieces had to go on top of them. There were all the implants that would literally be nailed right into their skull, and pull and warp it. And then there were othe individual implant pieces that went on the top of th ehead, and plates of warped skin with the computer effect showing through them - dangerous things...different appliances with a look like the tuves were buried under the skin where you could still see the ridges disappearing."

Ordinarily, making up an actor as a Borg for television is a process that takes one hour for make-up and an hour and a half for costume. This process in [Star Trek: First Contact] became three hours of make-up followed by two hours getting into costume, all of this before a shooting day of fourteen or more hours. Due to the exhaustive nature of the project, an individual Borg drone's look would often be duplicated on a second actor if that Borg were required to appear in a scene two days in a row.

Make-up designer Michael Westmore: "I actually had two teams. We normally ran eight Borg a day, and I had eight make-up artists that would come in around two o'clock in the morning and get the Borgs ready. Then I had another team of eight make-up artists that would come in at three in the afternoon. They would take over on the set and keep them all up, and then take them out of their heads at night, clean up anything that was usable for the next day and have it ready for the artists that were coming at two o'clock. We went on like this for a month once we got into the Borg scenes. It was very exhausting, not only for the actors but for the make-up artists also, to keep those kinds of schedules. Scott Wheeler and jake Garber and james MacKinnon would sit and paint a bunch of bald heads, so those were all done ahead of time. And then Brad [Look] would paint all the metallic ones up, and the pieces were all set up on Styrofoam heads, and then in would come the Borgs and they'd just start grabbing [rubber prosthetic] pieces. They used up so much stuff that every day we had to run rubber - load the ovens up and cook more rubber. They were gobbling it up faster than we could produce it! You'll find they evolved through the shooting of the feature. When we first see the Borg come into the nightclub [during the holodeck sequence], they look great. But by the time you see them in the hive, the early ones are simplistic compared to the later ones. All of a sudden they're much more ferocious than the earlier ones, much scarier. What happened was - the make-up artists got bored! They got bored putting one tube onto the face. So all of a sudden they were using two tubes, and then they were using three tubes, and then they were sticking tubes in the ears and up the nose!"

[Star Trek: First Contact]: publicity shot: "We are the Borg."

New species

Michael Westmore: "One day for the fun of it, when I came in they had thrown some Bajoran noses on some Borg, so we had some Bajoran Borg. Then near the end, I asked Rick [Bermanj about letting me do a Cardassian Borg. You have to look quick for him because he only worked two or three days."

In-house joke

Michael Westmore: "Every eye blinks out somebody's name in Morse code. My son, Michael jr, is the one that wired and built the programs for the eyes. He's an editor now on [Star Trek: Deep Space Nine], but he had his time off, and he's always done the electronics for Star Trek. We had thirty-five eyes and there were thirty-five names he programmed into them: Rick Berman, [Paramount studio chiefl Sherry Lansing, all the executives. They don't know it, but their name is blinking out in Morse code in some Borg's eye walking around there. He finally ran out of names, so his dog Bonnie is in a blinking Borg eye too!"

[Star Trek: Voyager] screenshot from [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier]: "We are the Borg."