It was also an attempted compromise between the very even, flat lighting used in the TNG series on the bridge and the generally lower interior light levels commonly used in TV and films now.And for comparison, here's the way the set was lit for Picard, which strikes me as very flat, a common way a lot of shows and movies are shot these days. It's done for the speed of setups to avoid having to relight the set to film different angles. You just bombard it with diffused light through a reflector box.
It's oddly foggy-looking. The shadows are too bright and the highlights are too dim, except maybe for the turbolifts. Maybe trying to save too much detail when regrading from HDR to SDR?And for comparison, here's the way the set was lit for Picard, which strikes me as very flat, a common way a lot of shows and movies are shot these days. It's done for the speed of setups to avoid having to relight the set to film different angles. You just bombard it with diffused light through a reflector box.
The fact that space is inexplicably bright white outside of every window has bugged me ever since season two of Discovery, and they just keep doing it.
The 'film in almost complete darkness' trend of the 2020s is a weird one.
I prefer dim-lighting generally. I don't find it depressing. In my own home I lean on towards that by using small lamps strategically. I hate it when rooms are washed out with light. I also work in a dim space and have never thought of it as being unprofessional.
I get that, but I think it was a bad move. To go to all the trouble to meticulously recreate the Enterprise-D bridge as it existed on TNG, and then light it differently, seems such a waste. And after all that attention to detail, they went with white lights on the sides rather than the blue ones that were originally there. I even asked Dave Blass about that once on Twitter and he said that he agreed it should have been blue, and that they fought for that, but ultimately that was up to the cinematographer.
At least the D was better than the lighting on the Titan, though. Gates McFadden said that the actors actually had trouble seeing one another during shooting because the lighting was so low. That's just downright ridiculous.
Some things are so dark it does make you wonder.
I have a crappy TV so I usually blame that, and I'm sure it's part of the problem if not the whole problem, but there's a scene in one of the Captain America films where several people are having a conversation and I can't see anything. It's like staring into a black void. And you ask yourself, how often does this sort of thing happen in real life? How often do you talk to people that are in the same room with you but you can't even see them? It's not never, but it's rare. The last time that happened to me was sometime in the 90s.
There was no way they were going to exactingly recreate the floodlight approach to the set from 1987 in 2021 when they were filming. It would’ve been so wildly inconsistent with the rest of the show’s look, but as has been discussed, would’ve taken too much time to set up.
The Enterprise-D bridge is already wildly inconsistent with the rest of the show's look. It has a very 80's/90's aesthetic that does not match anything done today. But they chose to recreate it, in detail. If they were going to do that, they should have matched the lighting as well. Otherwise, they might as well just have gone with the E instead. When DS9 did the TOS Enterprise, they lit it with color like they did in the 60's, even though that didn't match how shows were lit in the 90's. Because they wanted to recreate the original accurately.
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That was out of production necessity, since they were integrating with the original footage from the 1960’s. They probably would’ve shot it differently if they were only filming the sets, just like how Enterprise wasn’t slavish to the TOS lighting scheme in “In a Mirror Darkly.”
The idea of theatrical lighting has been taken to the extreme in modern Trek. I just watched the Picard S3 finale. In one of the last scenes Tuvok meets with Seven of Nine in a conference room to promote her. They were sitting in a pitch black room with spot lights on their faces.
It's hard for me to maintain my suspension of disbelief when the lighting is so incredibly unrealistic. I've had hundreds of meetings with supervisors over the course of my life, and not one time did they turn off the lights in the conference room and shine flashlights on our faces.
I suppose this bleak, moody, dystopian atmosphere is consistent with Kurtzman's artistic vision, but it is inarguably antithetical to Roddenberry's artistic vision.
It's hard for me to maintain my suspension of disbelief when the lighting is so incredibly unrealistic. I've had hundreds of meetings with supervisors over the course of my life, and not one time did they turn off the lights in the conference room and shine flashlights on our faces.
I suppose this bleak, moody, dystopian atmosphere is consistent with Kurtzman's artistic vision, but it is inarguably antithetical to Roddenberry's artistic vision.
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If you’re searching for realism in Star Trek, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Surely it would be much cooler and more dramatic if the bridge was exposed to space and then we could see the wind whipping dramatically in their hair.
THAT'S Star Trek!
This is totally missing the point.
You're not considered a badass in that universe unless you do warp speed with the windows open.
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