They might not have had the tugs modelled yet, if they're new models. Or it was a director's revision later on.
Much like a lot of the first-season ship shots, something about the composition and blur makes it seem like a model. Like they're unintentionally recreating tilt-shift photography. Nothing should ever look blurry in a vacuum due to distance anyway. The impression I get, seeing this shot, is someone should really clean the greasy film which is on the window behind Micheal.
That's not how focal lengths work. I'm as critical of the VFX as anybody but this doesn't hold water.
Neither version could be realistically pulled of with a real-world camera. Try having someone standing in a brightly lit room in front of a window at night. You simply wouldn't be able to have both the person inside and the objects outside at night visible at the same time. It's impossible. These shots are not designed to mimick real-life footage. These shots are designed to emulate the "feel" of the real-world. In reality, the Enterprise would be tiny because of the distances involved. But if you were actually standing there, it would "feel" bigger, because you're brain tells you how big it is (compare to how you "see" the moon with your real eyes, and what a tiny dot it is in regular camera pictures). And - this is a purely personal feeling - I think the original version FEELS much more natural than the newer one. I don't know why, if it's the color filter, the smears, the CGI lense effects - somehow, for me, the former version "feels" more realistic, while the latest verison has the same artificiality that plagued all the shots in season 1 and made it feel so very cheap and fake-looking.
The VFX effects in ship to ship combat for season 1, was complete garbage They can't be anything but better in season 2 hopefully. The rest of the effects were fine but for some reason combat scenes involving Discovery were awful. Then again the VFX will never make Discovery look good, dam that's one ugly ass ship Now the Enterprise, she's a beauty.
"The Escape Artist" gives our first look at the Kelvin universe-style warp speed effect, on Harry's jailer's viewscreen (with an awesomely framed shot where the warp effect radiates from Harry's head). Glad it wasn't just a placeholder effect.
I believe the intent of the shot is to have Micheal in focus, and the stuff behind her not (IE it's a Director of Photography shot composition decision. In effect we're seeing it out of context with regard to the full scene in which it belongs.)
The effects were significantly better in the season premiere. One of the best VFX were the Hiawatha crumbling while Burnham is running around. Scenes like that typically look really bad on TV budgets, but it was really well done, from the effects of things collapsing around her to the explosions. I have to rewatch it, but I really can't recall any weird colored nebulas in the space shots.
Agreed, but then even big-budget movies still struggle with the physics of people jumping (see, for instance, the bizarrely fake shots of someone jumping into the water near the beginning of the otherwise expensive-looking Aquaman, or the shot of someone jumping on a submarine a little later). On that basis, I'd say that that shot is pretty excusable. I was impressed by the shot near the end of Disco in the asteroid field, with smoke/haze coiling behind the impulse engine lights. The particle and fire effects in the shot of Burnham running as the Hiawatha crumbles also looked fantastic. Just generally good compositing work, I thought. Purely from a directorial/cinematographic point of view, I liked the helmet-cam shots we got when Burnham catches Pike and when Burnham is running through the Hiawatha, which really captured the terror of each moment. How the heck does that shot inside the turbolift area fit into the ship though? I'm dying for someone to break that down because I don't think we've ever seen anything like that before!
The effects were really a BIG improvement! I think there was probably way, way too much big vfx-work for a television show, so a lot of shots during the action sequence looked kind of shoddy. But that's probably the highest density of high quality vfx we ever had on a Trek show! And most of the "single" vfx-shots (like establishing shots of the bridge or space phenomena) looked really, really great! I'm chalking up the shoddy look of season 1 to the botched production - with a bit more planning they sure as hell are capable of delivering great work!
The USS Discovery is even more huge than I thought, did anyone else see the huge empty spaces around the turbolift rails which had worker bees buzzing around?? Also the wrecked ship looked suspiciously like the ST'09 brewery.
Yeah, that scene was weird. Like, I visually get it, to show how the elevators connect through the bridge. But through an entire, empty storehouse? Really? That being said, I always thought the Trek ships (especially from the TOS era) were ~50% bigger than the fan concensus. Like, the usual deckfloor crams decks straight on top of each other - and even then, it doesn't fit for the Connie. But IMO each ship should have large amount of tech inbetween each levels (creating gravity, pumping air, housing computers etc), and especially thick layers at the very top and bottom (hull plating, shield generators, sensors, etc.) All that technology simply needs some space to be stuffed away.
There was also a VFX goof: Right after the awesome shot of the crew walking down a corridor in Discovery's neck seen from the outside, they cut inside and we see them turn right - which is impossible since there are no right turns down Discovery's neck.
Yeah, I noticed that too! But I'm very forgiving with something like that - especially for a television show. It's like the Enterprise-D firing phasers out of it's photon torpedo launcher. It happens. I like the effort they put in that vfx-shot in the first place - they didn't have to, they could have just shot it like any other corridor walk-and-talk.
Yeah, ultimately they have to deal with the fact that there's just the one set and the corridor only curves one way. Same thing with the quarters we've seen - while the guest quarters from the end of Season 1 (and Shenzhou captain quarters) have the door on the opposite side of the windows, the others we've seen all have them on the perpendicular wall. This leaves people walking past out into space. Maybe the best option there is that some quarters just have fake windows.