According to Patrick Stewart’s “Making It So: A Memoir,” the cast, which had to knock out 26 episodes per season, worked regular weekday hours. When Friday rolled around, they were typically relegated to the Enterprise’s bridge. “Our custom was to shoot the whole set first, the wide shots,” writes Stewart. “Gradually the shots got closer and tighter as the camera moved from the big viewscreen in front of the helmsmen’s stations to the control panels at the rear.”
This approach allowed the actors in the foreground of the bridge to film their coverage and head back to their trailers, where they could feed their lines off-camera to the performers on the fringe of the set. Per Stewart, one actor was always the last one wrapped:
“Poor Michael Dorn, as Worf, was always the last character with dialogue to stay in uniform, because he had to stand in front of his security panel at the very back. What’s more, he had to stay in his ridged, heavy Klingon makeup, which took hours to apply and had inspired Frakes’s nickname for him: Turtlehead.”