It's official: Thank God for Remastered!
- Thread starter darkwing_duck1
- Start date
It's ironic that fans of a tv show about the future would object to making it look more futuristic.
I am fortunate that my Michigan education has led me to be able to appreciate art on more than one level. There is futurism, yes. And there is a '60s production ethos which should be respected. I reject your evil Ohio simplicity. "Both/and," not "either/or."
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
Prepare yourself: I agree. I watched The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before --both remastered-- this week and while some of the visual effects add-ins were nicely done, sometimes the Enterprise does look rather cartoon-y.
I really didn't like how they redid that opening shot of the Enterprise approaching and banking towards you in "The Cage." It just looked wrong somehow. As stiff as it is I like the original shot much better. For one thing the original filming miniature conveys a sense of mass, of something actually there. I find that totally missing in the cgi shot. I can't help but feel it could have been done so much better.
I'm not, and if you're suggesting any equivalence between TOS and The Monkees as a premise for critiquing Trek Remastered you're diminishing TOS rather than the revisions.
Nah, just bein' goofy.
Me too.
They should remaster The Invaders, using a stunt double for Thinnes who occasionally resembles him.
It's not ironic that fans of an art form would object to screwing with the art.
The "same effort and money" would have gone nowhere near as far.
Do any of the original film elements even exist? If so, in what condition? If, OTOH, you're suggesting digital clean-up of the original composites - well, by the time enough work was done to even touch up the matte lines to something minimally acceptable they'd have virtually painted over the film image so much that CG would still be preferable.
Some people say that the original images look more "real" than the CG versions. The only sense in which they look more real may be that to some they look like photography rather than having the "painterly" appearence that some less sophisticated CG rendering does.
Fair enough - but in HD they look like poorly-lit, degraded and grainy photographs of objects, not realistically like spacecraft or large objects.
George Adamski's 1950s photographs of flying saucers have exactly the same "real look" as the model photography on TOS - and look just as much like spacecraft as the TOS Enterprise does on a big screen in HD, which is to say not at all.
...and aesthetic choices...they didnt try to re-create it as state of the art ST:Enterprise FX but as 1960s FX...they therefore fit into the time period better. I think this has been stated as the goal numerous times, and each time, a lot of the naysayers seem to conveniently forget or ignore it.
RAMA
Yes but you are not objective..you've been indoctrinated to the original and can't fit anything else into your brain-space. You can't break yourself out-of-the-box. There are a lot of older fans like myself, who don't have that problem.
RAMA
Duh, its NOT in HD...the resolution is different...it wouldn't have worked...the elements are all long gone or damaged...and the elements in the 1960s were often simply wrong...compositing in the 1960s was extremely primitive, its not replaceable. Its either all or nothing I'm afraid. Any sane, rational human being looking objectively who is NOT a hardcore trekker would realize this. Anyone looking at it from outside fandom knows the TOS FX are primitive. TV isn't art, its a PRODUCT! This was even more true in the 60s than now (when niche programming simply didn't exist). There are technical elements that can be replaced..and they were, with great success.
RAMA
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Yeah, they produced traveling mattes, ghost images, bad lighting, analog images that lost quality on every printing, etc. in lower resolution
All easily forgivable, right?http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=4056329&postcount=109
RAMA
Yeah, they produced traveling mattes, ghost images, bad lighting, analog images that lost quality on every printing, etc. in lower resolution
http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=4056329&postcount=109
RAMA
Not that I want to add fuel to the fire, but I do want to point out that the filmed elements that were used for TOS's f/x are a much higher resolution than 1080p.
TOS' f/x was as good as you could get on '60s television within time and budget. But, of course, it wasn't the then state-of-the-art. That would be found in feature films. And if you check the feature films of the era then you can see what could have been possible. It sure as hell doesn't look like second rate cgi, but it would be more aesthetically consistent with the rest of TOS' live-action footage.
TOS-R has some okay shots judged in their own right. But they look wholly out of place spliced into TOS. It's like taking a well restored classic car and slapping a vinyl roof on it.
People keep going on about how the new f/x look better. And every single one of those raves conveys a lack of sense of artistry. We will go round and round with this because it's like trying to describe a particular colour to someone who happens to be colour blind to the said colour.
TOS-R has some okay shots judged in their own right. But they look wholly out of place spliced into TOS. It's like taking a well restored classic car and slapping a vinyl roof on it.
People keep going on about how the new f/x look better. And every single one of those raves conveys a lack of sense of artistry. We will go round and round with this because it's like trying to describe a particular colour to someone who happens to be colour blind to the said colour.
That's actually quite similar to the comment that my wife (who is not a fan of Trek in the least) made when she watched one of the episodes with me. She pointed out that it didn't mesh well with the live action footage and that it looked "too smooth". Having watched all of the TOS-R episodes on blu-Ray, I'm inclined to agree with her, but for different reasons than she was thinking. I don't think that they went far enough. While I fully get that the effects artists were greatly limited by time and budget, the effects worked best when they added to the story. Beyond the great new matte paintings they did, I personally think that "Tomorrow is Yesterday" was their best work - not because the effects were good (and it was some of their best work) but because they added excitment to the story, particuarly the climax. "Elaan of Troyus" could have been like that if it wasn't for the poor Klingon Battlecruiser model and it's ridiculous movement. However, that's what I think they should have done. They already had a fine starting point within the episodes. If they had simply concentrated on puncuating the story rather than some sort of half-way there "this is what it would have looked like if they had time and money in the 60s" (which it doesn't), I think the project would have been more successful. Imagine if they had gone with the original concept for "The Doomsday Machine"? Or a more dynamic "Balance of Terror"? I think that it would have been a fun alternate look at the episodes, especially since the originals exist on the blu-rays anyway, if they had approched the project less constrained by what had come before.
That depends on whether you're a producer or, ya know, and artist. To the studio, it's product. The art director, cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, model designer, model-makers, lighting designer, actors, etc... all the artists working on the production... probably don't feel that way.
Most artists paint/sculpt/compose/write for a patron or to sell the work to the public. Almost all art is also a product in that sense.
Frankly the later Trek incarnations are more product than Star Trek (TOS), since it was a personal (albeit borrowed) vision/endeavor to tell stories, rather than a franchise to keep afloat, to enhance shareholders' stock value. But I digress.
Frankly the later Trek incarnations are more product than Star Trek (TOS), since it was a personal (albeit borrowed) vision/endeavor to tell stories, rather than a franchise to keep afloat, to enhance shareholders' stock value. But I digress.
RobertScorpio
Pariah
I'm not sure what side you are on..but, IMO, the ENT-E in FC was great, and looked cool. In INS/NEMESIS, the CGI version just sucked; royally.
Rob
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