Favourite Enterprise...

I like the TNG production design just fine. In fact, I liked the way the alternate Ent-D bridge was lit in Yesterday's Enterprise. Nice and dark! I hated the lighting in Generations overall. Very muddy, dark, and washed out looking -- similar to the lighting in Nemesis...ugh. I didn't mind the dark bridge though. I dunno...I kinda think a starship bridge should be kinda like a submarine bridge as far as lighting goes...but that's just me.

 

I think Generations is an odd case too. I know they had a very well-respected cinematographer on that film, and I know that he was trying to go for a much more dramatic lighting scheme than was possible on a TV series where lighting setups can't be changed for each and every shot. But to me it just came off looking extremely unnatural.

It looks so dark that you have a hard time believing the crew could even be seeing what they are doing. There's tons of very noticable shadows being cast everywhere, which just looks odd. Even times when unusual lighting was deliberate -- such as in Ten Forward when there's supposed to be intense lighting from a nearby star -- look "off" somehow.

About the only lighting I liked in that film was the Enterprise-B bridge, during which they obviously tried to mimic the lighting of the TOS movies, and the exterior scenes.

 

Trumbull's TMP spaceship shots are accomplished via the techniques developed for Close Encounters and later improved upon for Blade Runner. The models are photographed against black velvet because then you can light the model any way you want as opposed to lighting to prevent blue-screen spill and other issues. But since the models can have black in them, then you have the problem that you can't pull a luminance matte off the photography because anything black on the model will be see-through. So, what you do is replace the black velvet with a backlit white screen and repeat the camera pass to shoot a high-contrast black and white image, where the ship is a dark silhouette against white. Push the contrast in post and you get a pretty solid matte element (albeit reflections are sometimes still a problem, so you might have to have artists hand animate fixes). This is known as Hi-Con matting. In some productions, they wrapped the models in white (maybe gauze) and shot a second pass against black to pull a matte that would have no reflections.

The problem is that ILM didn't do hi-con mattes. Their system at the time leaned heavily on the photochemical blue-screen process, where you shoot different passes of the model against a solid blue background. In the lab you do some tricks and the blue doesn't print and ends up as clear, so that's how you get the mattes. Now, the Trek features after TMP were lowish budget, so for ILM to do the shots economically they probably had to do what they could to shoot and process the shots with a miminum of fuss. A pearlescent model is doomed to a lot of blue-screen spill, so their apparent solution was to dull down the paintjob. I'm not certain precisely when this happened, as some of the Enterprise shots (notably the initial approach to the Reliant) still appear to have some of that pearlescence, but it's possible that as the production progressed that dulled the model more to make it easier for them to photograph.

Hope that makes sense.

 

They dulled it enough to prevent a lot of bluescreen spill, but not enough to obscure it completely. Besides, they also reused a lot of TMP footage, so they couldn't go too far or it'd really stick out which shot came from where.

 

Wow. No love for the Pike era Enterprise? I quite like it after the series production version.

 

Yes, it does. Thanks for re-explaining all that. It's something I knew at one time, but forgot in the fog of time...

 

There's certain shots in Khan where it's pretty obvious the paint has been modified. To me, the shot where the Enterprise pulls up alongside Regula One...it looks almost completely gray in that. Ugh.

 

I love it. It's hard to pick a favorite. I just like all the detail of the TMP ship...but, I love the Pike era Ent through TMP.

 

Kirk era E, Pike era E, refit E. It all depends on my mood.

 

Totally agree!

 

I don't hate the new ship--I've warmed up to her and look forward to seeing her again. But both she and the TMP design suffer from being too pretty. The original design strikes a balance between (illusory, I know) utilitarianism and gee-whiz pulp grace. And I love the copper "radar" dish.

 

The TOS production ship is my favorite, followed by the JJPrise and the ST:TMP versions.

 

I used to like the refit best, but over time I've realized that I just really don't love the nacelles. The original ship just evokes the feeling of a naval cruiser, and it edges out the refit on those basis.