IMO the nautical paintings work very well, they complement the aesthetics without drawing the eye away from the rest of the room.
A lot of people go crazy with national and service logos on everything in SciFi, but if you walk through an actual navy ship there's really not so much of it poking you in the eyeballs at every turn.
I think one of your big culprits is the frames chosen for the paintings. How thin they are, and that gold, makes me think of cheap mass-printed paintings bought from Macys in the early 90s. They need something more lavish, I think.
Maybe aeronautical might be more suitable, perhaps old b&w photos of the Wright brothers, or something along those lines? A lot of bars nowadays have b&w photos on their walls showing what the place looked like a couple of hundred years ago, or the people that worked there back then, perhaps something like old pictures of San Francisco might work?
At least one of the paintings in the dining room of the Enterprise-A had an ornate frame to it. The frame around the portrait of Sarek looks to be a lot more modest. I know that that set had a painting of Abraham Lincoln, too, but I can't find it in any screencaps. EDIT: Here it is in a behind the scenes pic. Looks like it's a matching frame with the Sarek painting, and those two are flanked on either side by smaller paintings with fancier, thicker frames.
Here's a suggestion how about a painting of a Constitution class starship from the TOS time period harkening back to her origins
I kinda disagree about the paintings. Or at least anything too representational. I think something abstract in the same vein as the Mondrian-style artwork would fit best.
We also see some of these glasses in the miniature of the observation lounge. http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=587&pid=63764#top_display_media
Didn't get the chance to post this yesterday. I believe the matte in TMP intentionally flipped the coastline to show geographic change after 300 years, sea level change, and a World War. Also Roddenberry's description of 23rd Earth was a lot different than later Trek where all the Big Landmarks are still in place. (Yes, the Golden Gate is a Big Landmark.) I can't imagine that FX artists working at ILM didn't know where the Presidio is. Especially when they made 2009. (Lucasfilm is now at the Presidio, right?) I also wonder how many depictions of the ship you are actually on are around both decoratively and functionally. @Donny this first sailing picture over the "bar" looks perfect. The other two over the retractable walls don't. Maybe go with the direction of TUC and have portraits? Paintings of old time San Fransisco wouldn't be bad either. Also maybe more than one per panel and not so perfectly centered? Just ideas, of course. Portraits of Paladin from Have Gun Will Travel? Lt. William Rice, USMC? Oh, and the glasses / bottles look fine.
Nah, probably the composition just looked better that way. Sometimes movie and TV editors will deliberately print a shot reversed because it improves the composition or line of action. For instance, in the climax of "The Enemy Within," the close-ups of the evil Kirk were mirrored (you could tell by the scratches being on the wrong cheek), either because it worked better with the alternate shots of good Kirk, or maybe because it emphasized the "mirrored" nature of the duplicate. The hope is that viewers will focus on the big picture and the overall impression and won't be distracted by the inverted details. The cause and effect is the other way around. The reason we now believe that Starfleet HQ is at the Presidio is because some of the FX shots in movies, TNG, DS9, etc. put it there. At the time the movies were made, all that had actually been established was that Starfleet was based in San Francisco -- or at least that the Enterprise was constructed at the San Francisco Navy Yards, per its dedication plaque. So TMP's filmmakers naturally decided that if they were going to show SFHQ in San Francisco, it had to be next to the most scenic and recognizable landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. And different movies and shows put it on opposite ends of the bridge, their decisions guided by the aesthetics of each particular shot. But the majority of the shots over the years put it on the San Francisco side of the bridge, i.e. on or near the grounds of the Presidio, and so that ended up becoming the accepted default idea of its location.
My conversations with Rocco Gioffre, who executed the matte under Matthew Yuricich’s direction and with Roddenberry’s input, confirmed that the coastline was indeed flipped in an attempt to disorient the viewer and give the impression that, as Tallguy says, there had been substantial geological changes. I think this also might be mentioned in the contemporary interviews in Cinefex 1. Remember, among other formidable changes, Roddenberry says Los Angeles is an island in his TMP novelization (something I contend was a slip on his part and was intended to be San Francisco Island. Looking at SF at the end of a peninsula crossed by the San Andreas fault at Colma, it is easy to see how the City might indeed become an island.)
The circa 2009 conversation here covers this with exquisite detail. How I miss the formidable storehouse of all things TMP that was TGT. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/robert-mccall-tmp-spockwalk-sketches.81285/
Unless a massive earthquake has hit Los Angeles, leaving it in ruins and completely surrounded by water. From this new island hell rises a deportation penal colony for the Federation's immoral criminals.
Yeah, I was thinking rather than general sailing ships, maybe something leaning more on the history of Star Trek, a la the sketches of prior Enterprises in Archer's ready room. Eaves and Probert did some future-history-of-spaceflight paintings that would fit in with some of the oil paintings that are already being used, and I'm sure there must be paintings on-line of the WWII and 1960s carriers Enterprise, or you could use screencaps, renders, or photos that are 'shopped to resemble oil paintings. (The best part about this all being a personal project, not for distribution or sale, is that I can keep telling the little voice in my head worrying about securing clearances for the background artwork and not just raiding Google Image Search to pipe down.) Well, with the rise of the alt-right in recent years, I'm sure he's much happier at whatever sci-fi-themed Bund meeting he's gracing with his presence now.
A shame he couldn't have just dumped all that knowledge into a database for us to trawl through on our own so we wouldn't have had to deal with his rampant antisemitic, neo-fascist bullshit.
I will not debate his relative merits, since we are not supposed to do that, and this is a Star Trek forum and on the subject of that manifestation of Star Trek, his views were without equal (with the possible exception of the member Trevanian). The important point being made is you simply cannot compare the way San Francisco is depicted in TMP with any other manifestation of Star Trek, including the DE. Hell, the later Treks get the location of Starfleet wrong because of this altered coastline stuff - despite the fact they could have figured it out by just looking at the piers of the Golden Gate Bridge. TMP’s depiction was so madly overthought compared to the brief snippets of it we saw that it is no wonder so few people understand what is going on in those matte paintings. But believe me, as someone who did TGT kinds of research on the subject, I can tell you it is fascinating and truly an intricate exercise in worldbuilding.
I agree...I use logos sparingly in my work, and only included two of the seals here for demonstration purposes, but will only keep the large one in the foyer for this area. I actually went with the simplified gold frame because it ties in with what I've set with the rest of the room. Putting ornate frames on the paintings will detract from the Art Deco/Nautical feel I'm going for, methinks. Maybe I can find something in between basic and ornate, like a wider but more conventional frame such as this or this? Thanks for the idea! I'm leaning towards a frame more like the Sarek/Lincoln one. I definitely want to do this for the TMP lounge! I want to use more abstract art for the TMP lounge/dining area. Btw, does anyone have an actually free resource for royalty free abstract art? EVERYTHING seems to be behind a subscription pay wall these days. Thanks for the suggestions. I take those as beverage cups, and not alcohol bottles that one would see behind a bar. But I DO plan on modeling those multi-colored cups for the TMP side of things. The way I see it, plastic multi-colored 1970s Tupperware cups for TMP, and glassware for TWOK, BTW, can anyone tell me what photographs or paintings we see in this miniature shot of the lounge: The one on the left is a crap shoot...but the one on the right is obviously a moon landing photo or painting, but I'm having trouble finding that image. Any ideas? Oh, and if anyone has ANY clue as to what the others are, please let me know. (EDIT) Found the Apollo painting, by none other than Robert McCall, who was a concept artist for TMP: https://arthive.com/artists/10394~Robert_McCall/works/287740~Landing_on_Mars#show I wonder if they were all McCall paintings??
& Rocco's a good guy. He's cleared up a number of TMP matte issues for me. That said, what he neglects to mention is that there's an even more practical reason for it the artists don't cop to: there's a hill just west of the northern end of the bridge where you can put a camera and shoot towards the city, but not on the other side. If you shoot a plate from it and want to see anything like the composition in the film where you can see "downtown" you have to flop the shot. Yep, and before that they were at 3210 Kerner in San Rafael just north, and yet they still botched the coastline in TUC. & Why does invoking TGT always make me feel like I'm saying "Beetlejuice" three times? I miss his input on TMP but I don't miss the things I later discovered about his attitudes (eek). Anyway, yes, according to him the intent was for the low area where the San Andreas crosses the peninsula south of SF (through Biurlingame, San Bruno and Daly City) to have sunk somewhat, so thus connecting the ocean to the bay through what is now Lake Merced. I think he claimed you could see it if you looked at the Earth in closeup the shots of the orbital office (keeping in mind that "north" would be at like a 60º angle to the right), but I was never sure that was clear. If that's supposed to be SF below then not only has the coastline changed radically, but both Alcatraz and Angel Island (which is a mile square) are missing, as is the whole Tiberon peninsula! A mere earthquake don't do that! Yep. Star Trek IV is the film that—probably not intentionally—first implies SFHQ has facilities in Marin, because the mattes for the views of it were shot from the Marin side looking ESE at the bridge, and if you know the bridge is asymmetrical then you always know which side/end you're looking at, so go, "ah, they're over at black beach!" or Kirby Cove or what have you.