It doesn't look like a physical object to me either, though it is really, really well done. In black and white, it might fool me if I weren't in a thread about CGI realism. To echo Warped, it is something about the play of light, esp. in the color pic. But fleshed out in action, maybe it would be close enough to physical not to look out of place as do many of TOS-R effects, to me.
And yes, Chaz A, it's supposed to look like a spaceship, sure. Of course, space ships won't look like that. We might not even need to travel physically. Given that unrealism, I prefer a physical model if the rest of the show is real actors with physical props.
Note the word "prefer." I didn't say physical is "better." (BTW I'd love a good animated trek series!)
If it were seen in motion that might make a significant difference. Note that dirigibles don't look much real either on film except that they are.
In a way this subject reminds me of something I encountered at work. The issue regards calibrating your television for colour and picture. Go to any two homes and it's likely you'll see televisions with colour and brightness adjusted differently. Hardly any two sets will be the same. Calibrating a television takes into account the room's lighting and overall colour and adjusts the television accordingly to give you the most natural looking image. This means skies that look like the blue sky you see outside your window and grass that looks like natural green grass. But note that many people saturate their picture because they seem to want a more "mind's eye" image on their TV as opposed to a more natural realistic image.
On this point I slightly desaturate my TV's colour and turned down the brightness a bit as I tried to get a more natural looking image. I found this particularly appealing when watching SF and superhero films and shows because a more realistic picture helps my suspension of disbelief--it
looks more credible because it looks more real world and natural.
One of the gripes I've had with a lot of modern SF on television (and less so on film) is what I think of as hyperrealism where colour and light and shadow looks more intense than it would be in a natural setting. And for me cgi often seems to exacerbate that. When I see a large physical object, particularly in motion, I expect it to be ill-defined and a bit blurry from a distance and getting more detailed and sharper as it approaches. I also expect to see some forced perspective that reinforces the idea the object is supposed to be large. And the parts of the object that are furthest from my point of view should be less defined than those parts nearest to my p.o.v. It's all very subtle, but it does mimic our experience in the real world.
Now granted that in the vacuum of space there is no distortion of atmosphere to blur objects, but contemporary Earth bound humans aren't accustomed to that, just as we're not accustomed to seeing objects fly past us without sound. And so as a concession to Earth bound sensibilities sound is often added to moving objects in space.
I feel I'm struggling to make a distinction between a pretty picture and a more realistic one or as realistic as it can be. As flawed as they are now by contemporary standards the original TOS f/x often conveyed something suitably convincing. The large 11ft. filming miniature and how it was photographed and lighted and with sound added managed to convince us we were seeing a massive object in motion. With the TOS-R we're seeing greater detail and clarity, but
something has been lost in the process. I find the colour and the detail too intense and "hyperreal."
Peter Jackson's King Kong was a cgi construct and it had the more difficult challenge of mimicking the look and movement of a living animal. But in my estimation they did an amazing job because Kong looks massive and substantive and three dimensional. He blends in with the environment (including the recreated 1930's New York) in a naturalistic way. You're able to believe with little effort that Kong is just as real as the actors and physical buildings. After getting over how cool it all looks you start paying more attention to what's happening because you've become convinced of Kong's "reality" in context of the setting.
That's the thing that bugs me about some cgi and many of the shots in TOS-R. Something is missing where I can't accept the "reality" of what I'm seeing.
