How did you create a new costume for a race, like the Sulaban?

When we create a new character or a new species, if we are doing it in a pilot, then we have an enormous amount of time compared to when we do it episodically.

For Enterprise, on the Sulaban, who are the villain in this pilot, They have certain physical abilities, the ability to change shape, to break down, to slide under doors. So, thinking about that, I knew I wanted to do something that was all encompassing. In other words, there would be no difference between skin and clothing..

Ultimately, it was not an idea that Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] really wanted to embrace, for many practical reasons. And some of those are about how to make the joins between hand and neck and body. But I was sort of gung ho to give that a shot. They put up with me for a while and then finally just said, �No, we�re not going to do that, so you have to � you have to think of another way.�

But what they did say is they came with a picture that they had of a head and some hands, that had a particular texture to them. And they gave that to both Michael Westmore and myself, and I was able to create that texture fairly accurately, with processing some fabrics in certain ways.

The concept for the characters was that they had the technology to be able to take this mimetic nature of their skin and develop materials and substances that had the same ability. So they could, essentially, think their clothing into other forms and think themselves into other forms. Using that as a springboard, then, having been able to come up with a texture that was close to what the skin type was going to be, it was a matter then of making sure that we could manufacture the fabric, we could manufacture the suits.