Generations photography

[indolover]

The photography used in Star Trek Generations seemed to be different to the series (,i.e. photography in the filmmaking sense, not taking still photographs).

The bridge for one had less focus on the panels and more on the characters. the lighting used was also darker. Was this deliberate, in order to give the film a different feel?

[Pavonis]

I'm sorry, but how could it not be deliberate? What's the alternative - that it was done accidentally?

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

The sets were made for a TV show and they weren't sure if they would up on the big screemn. Plus, even TV lighting is simply something they have to do on a TV show, but for a film they can spend more time setting up lights to create the exact mood that they want.

[lewisniven]

Yes it was deliberate, they talk about it quite a lot in the extra features, same with the set modifications that were made to the bridge.

You couldn't have a feature film lit the same as the tv series, it'd look very weird and low budget.

[ChristopherPike]

John "Chinatown" Alonzo was in charge of the cinematography.

I actually loved how he treated lighting realistically. The Veridian star is just outside the Enterprise's massive windows and so that's what casts long shadows, which Picard walks in and out of.

Somehow makes everything less like an overlit film studio set. Of course, you could probably make a case for a 24th Century lighting system, polarised windows etc which accounts for it. Maybe Generations takes place on what should be the night shift, with subdued lighting but Picard and co are all up, taking charge of the emergency.

[SchwEnt]

FWIW, I didn't like the GEN lighting.

I wanted to see TNG I knew on the big screen. Didn't need change just for the sake of the cinema. TV lighting would have worked fine for me.

Now that TNG eps are being screened in cinemas, is the TV lighting that horrible and unacceptable?

[Maxwell Everett]

indolover wrote:

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The photography used in Star Trek Generations seemed to be different to the series (,i.e. photography in the filmmaking sense, not taking still photographs).

The bridge for one had less focus on the panels and more on the characters. the lighting used was also darker. Was this deliberate, in order to give the film a different feel?

Well, Generations was lensed with anamorphic glass, just like all the other Star Trek films with the exception of The Undiscovered Country (which was shot in the Super-35 format which uses spherical lenses). Anamorphic lenses compress the image recorded on the motion picture film in the horizontal dimension by a factor of 2, resulting in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.20:1. When the film is shown in the theater (back when 35mm film was the norm!) a corresponding anamorphic lens turned 90° pulled the image back out into the intended 2.40:1 aspect ratio.

The anamorphic format offers the cinematographer twice the angle of view horizontally while giving up half the normal depth of field of a spherical lens (at large apertures this is known as shallow depth of field, where the area of sharp focus is a narrow plane -- objects in front of or behind this plane are blurred).

To give you an example, in Super-35 (framed for 2.40 extraction like The Undiscovered Country) if the cinematographer used an 18mm lens for a wide shot, in 35mm anamorphic, he or she would need to use a 40mm lens. This is because an anamorphic lens has double the horizontal view of the same focal length in spherical... and the longer the focal length (i.e. the longer the lens) the shallower the depth of field. Hence, objects in the background are more blurred.

[heavy lids]

SchwEnt wrote:

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Now that TNG eps are being screened in cinemas, is the TV lighting that horrible and unacceptable?

For some people, yes. I personally don't care about watching
remastered Trek. I've enjoyed Trek for many years without high definition, but now that it exists, people act like TNG was filmed in the 30's.