Ayla Ruby
James Lucero is the Supervising Sound Editor on Star Trek: Lower Decks and recently earned his second Emmy nomination for his work on the program. Along with his team, including Drew Guy, Mark Kellerman, John Wynn, Michael Britt, and Amber Funk, Lucero helps bring sound to the animated show that deals with life, well, below the decks in the Star Trek universe.
Over Zoom, we talked to Lucero about bringing the sound from The Inner Fight and the rest of Lower Decks to life. He shared his philosophies on sound supporting stories and also collaboration. Lucero went in-depth, discussing his joy in creating unique soundscapes for each moment, from the desolate crystal rain in The Inner Fight to the futuristic sounds in the season finale. Read on for the full conversation.
Ayla Ruby: It’s really wonderful to meet you, and I love Lower Decks, so this is very exciting to chat.
James Lucero:Oh, that’s so great to hear. Yeah, it’s a special project for sure, for me. I’ve been in sound for about 25 years or so, and I gotta say this is pretty much top of the list for me on some of the projects that I’ve worked on. Yeah, yeah.
Ayla Ruby: Congratulations on your nomination. This is your second one for Lower Decks and overall. It’s pretty cool.
James Lucero: Yeah, it is. In fact, I think I’m the first actual sound supervisor to be nominated for an animated show, when they’ve combined it with live action.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.
James Lucero: Yeah, yeah.
Ayla Ruby: That’s huge.
James Lucero: It’s just the biggest honor, to be recognized, yeah. It’s very, very heartwarming, to be honest, yeah.
Ayla Ruby: What was it like finding out? What was the moment? Can you share anything on that?
James Lucero: Sure. To be honest with you, I wasn’t expecting it, definitely, even though I had been nominated before. Like I said, it’s such a big honor that, to be honest with you, it took me a couple of days for it to really hit. In fact, CBS/Paramount sent me a bottle of champagne with the Lower Decks logo on it.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, nice.
James Lucero: That’s when it really hit me. Doing this job, I work every day. I’m on a couple of different shows. Don’t have really time to think about these things, and your deadlines. When it appears, to be honest with you, I’m still kind of in shock. It doesn’t matter whether this is my second one or first, it definitely makes it all worth it, to be honest.
It makes me so excited for the team, because I know how hard we work on this show. Our deadlines are pretty tight. We don’t have a lot of time, and I know what we all put into this. To be recognized really goes a long way, and it just makes me so happy for the people that I’ve brought up into this show as well. It’s pretty spectacular.
Ayla Ruby: I want to ask about that too, but before I do that, sound is so important to the worldbuilding for any show, but really with Star Trek it’s especially important. How does putting it all together work? How do you balance it to tell a story, because it is part of storytelling?
James Lucero: Absolutely. What I say to my team, I have a overall theme to how I work, and I’ve said this before. We’re here to support the story, and not just the story, but every moment within the story. I look at every moment as literally the most important moment of the episode, whether it’s comedy, whether it’s a solemn moment, whether it’s an action moment. My job is to make the creator feel safe that I understand what he or she has put together. That’s my role.
I’m trying to discover what is the personality of this moment. How can I support this with sound? Not just music, because we’ll have score playing underneath, but who is this character right now in this moment? Are they frantic? Are they goofy? Are they serious? In animation, we don’t have any production sound to help us. We have to create every single sound there is, other than dialogue and music.
James Lucero: Some characters, they have very specific movement depending on their personality. That’s what I’m saying, even in the details of footsteps for some characters. Are we going to have them pitter-patter, or are they going to have some real weight and heft to them? Also, that’s on the lowest level too. If we’re seeing a new alien ship, is it ominous? Is it evil? Is it bit more futuristic than the era that this show is supposed to take place in? There’s a lot of factors that go into not only the characters, but the character of whether it’s aliens, alien ships, weaponry, the worlds that they find themselves in. A lot of thought behind it all.
Ayla Ruby: Now, you mentioned tight deadlines. How does the collaboration process work with the writers and even the director? How does that all come together?
James Lucero: I’ll meet with the creator and the producer and director, and we’ll go over an episode and we’ll talk about it. I never watch them down first. I don’t want to have preconceived notions on what we should do. I want to watch every episode as a viewer, like how is this moment hitting me? We’ll start to talk about ideas. It’s all about collaboration.
Like I said, my role is to support the creators, and together we are going to collaborate. I want to hear some of their ideas of the moment, and then it’s upon me to figure out what sounds can bring out the moment that we’re speaking about, or the characters, or whether it’s an alien again or a ship or weaponry or something like that. We’ll talk about that together.
Ayla Ruby: You’re nominated for The Inner Fight, and what do you think about that episode? Why does that stand out so much? Even for you just in your role, what was really challenging or exciting about that episode?
James Lucero: There is a moment with Mariner where she’s stranded on a planet with her enemy of the episode. It reminds me of … what’s the name of the movie? Not Bridge over the River Kwai, but where two people are stranded together and they have to figure out how to survive. There is a long moment where they are having this crystal glass rain coming down. I’m watching this. We don’t want to just have it be sounding like broken glass. We’re creating an ambience here that’s showing desolation, this solitude of them together. I want to really enhance this rain to give it this sort of crying rain sound. How do we get out of this together?
There were a lot of different layers that I put in there, from some Foley layers where I have people stepping on glass, but I’m manipulating to where it’s maybe slowing down a little bit. I’m using some chandeliers. I’m using a couple other layers where it’s almost like soft glass, where it’s not there to cut them up, but it’s still this dangerous but also solemn background going on here. That really took me quite a long time to create that, so I’m really proud of that. It doesn’t conflict with the dialogue, but it just enhances, again, this, “They’re alone, how can they work together?” There’s all these challenges that they’re trying to overcome.
Ayla Ruby:I know the scene you’re talking about, and I want to go back and listen for all of those different pieces now and see if I can figure that out. That’s really cool.
James Lucero: Yeah, yeah. In sound, there’s never … for example, there’s a robot. I don’t have a robot sound. It’s about creating with a lot of different layers, even punches. I don’t use just one slappy punch, so to speak. It’s also who is this character? Are they extremely strong? Should I use mono and stereo and fill out some frequencies, so that you really feel the power of this character if they happen to be a strong character?
Ayla Ruby:Was there something from Lower Decks this season … it could be in The Inner Fight, it could be anything this season, I guess … that was really just really fun or really challenging to do?
James Lucero: The last episode was a bit longer. In Lower Decks … I’ve said this before … it’s almost three or four stories within one. It reminds me of Seinfeld in a way because it has a lot of the comedic elements, but then it goes to that next level where there’s so many individual lessons being learned in each episode. They grow with every episode.
In the last episode of last season, Season 4, they’re trying to convince the perpetrator. He’s turned into a god, a headless god, so to speak, and they’re trying to talk him down as he’s basically destroying their ship. Of course, a headless perpetrator is comedic, but it’s also powerful. He has his own ship. Again, Lower Decks lives in The Next Generation, sort of, and his ship is from the future, basically. We’re trying to now create this where it’s not completely different from Next Generation world, but it’s somewhat futuristic to them.
We’re traveling between worlds of sound within that episode. That’s what I really wanted to get to, is within one episode, we’re going to a lot of different places. I love those types of challenges, because we have a personality going through the show, then we have to go into a completely different personality.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s awesome. Maybe it isn’t, but how is Lower Decks different than working on some of the other things you’ve worked on, like Human Resources or Frog and Toad? I mentioned that because my daughter adores Frog and Toad, so I feel like I have to get a comment.
James Lucero: Yeah, I love that. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, interesting. Frog and Toad again, sound, we’re here to support the story. Frog and Toad is very quiet. It’s interesting, because Lower Decks has a lot of quiet moments too. There can be some similarities, because again, it’s so dialogue-driven. Going back to the glass rain, it’s not supposed to be the main character. It’s supposed to be very subtle, but we really want to feel it.
I think the differences between some of the shows that I’ve worked on, whether it’s Big Mouth, Human Resources, The Hospital, are that it really goes from high action and very creative, futuristic sounds to now let’s bring it back down. We’re back in the story. Let’s be very subtle.
There’s a lot of beings that enter into the ship that have maybe have sonic personalities, and they need to be distinct but they also need to be very subtle, very underneath. We want them to be distinct, but again, we don’t want them overpowering the scene, because again, it is about the story and it’s about the growth of the characters. I would say that’s the difference, is we get to go all over the place, then bring it back down.
Ayla Ruby: That’s awesome.
James Lucero: In those quiet moments.
Ayla Ruby: I know we’re just about at time, but is there anything else you want people to know about Lower Decks or about any of you, your work?
James Lucero: I will say it’s such an honor that they chose us. It’s not something I expected. I will give it to our team. I’ve tested on a lot of different shows and been fortunate enough to win some of those shows. Our reputation preceded us, where they chose us. We didn’t have to test for this show. I will say the biggest honor of being involved in Lower Decks is to be able to create sounds that can become part of the lexicon of Star Trek sounds, which are iconic. That’s something I’m extremely proud of and so humbled by.
Ayla Ruby: That’s fantastic, and I think that’s a wonderful note to end on. Thank you for chatting.
James Lucero: Thank you. I appreciate it, yeah. It’s great to meet you.
Ayla Ruby: It’s lovely to meet you too
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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