The locations on “Picard” are plentiful, but the most heavily visited places can be remembered easily. A lot of time was spent on the bridge of the Titan, and a lot of time was spent in Guinan’s bar. The showrunners also had the characters on the Titan recreate Guinan’s bar on the ship’s holodeck, so the set was used even when the action took place far from Earth. There was a sickbay which was also clearly used as other scientific labs in other scenes. The most attention was paid to recreating the set of the Enterprise-D bridge, as that ship was rebuilt decades after it had been destroyed. A lot of the final two episodes of the show took place on the Enterprise-D bridge.
Blass recalls the experience of having to pare down his ideas, and then pare them down again, knowing that he only had a limited budget. At the end of the day, though, Blass found out ways to make it work, and work well. The compromise was hard, but doable. He said:
“Season three was just such a massive challenge because every script would come and it was huge. Then it was the emotional compromise of, ‘Here, I want to design this new set and make it cool. I want to do this.’ Then you submit it — this big huge set — and they’re like, ‘Okay, that’s $5 million.’ And I’m like, ‘How much do we have?’ And they’re like, ‘500.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, maybe the set’s this big, then.’ So it was just a weekly compromise of, ‘Here’s what I want to do, here’s what we get to do.’ In the end, it’s actually fine.”
Necessity is the mother of invention.