Hey, I never noticed that before....

Watching "The Enemy Within" on H&I tonight I noticed that the viewscreen on the bridge is completely blank during the climatic scene. Weird that they missed that in 1966, and weirder still that they didn't add in a starfield or the planet on the viewscreen when they remastered the episode in 2006.

https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x05hd/theenemywithinhd736.jpg

 

I agree that it’s odd, but I wonder if it was intentional. In WNMHGB, Kirk orders “Screen on,” when takes the con. The world’s most annoying screensaver was shown just before that, which might explain why the screen here is white. At least that’s an in-universe explanation.

On the other hand, I can surmise that IRL a) rear-projection was planned but scrapped because the shoot reportedly ran long; b) the planned matte work was dropped because of lack of time or problems with the blocking and/or lighting; or c) the need to get episodes on the air to avoid 60 minutes of test pattern resulted in the blank screen. Any combination of the above might have occurred, come to think of it.

 

Power Save

 

How about a menu?

Or a test pattern?

 

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", early on in the episode when Kirk, Mitchell, and Spock first arrive on the bridge, the first shot is from inside the turbolift. Yeoman Smith is waiting for them just outside the doors, and when K/M/S exit Smith follows them. As she does that, a blue-shirted crewmember slips very closely behind her and enters the turbolift. The very next shot is seen from a different angle inside the bridge, and shows the same scene... but a few seconds earlier! Once again we see Smith move up behind K/M/S as they leave the turbo lift and the blue-shirted crewmember is further away from Smith and the turbolift door and has not yet reached her or it.

Maybe it was deliberate, but it is a very noticeable backwards time jump! I'm not sure if it is the same take using two different cameras (how many cameras did they use?) or two separate takes. I'd have to examine it a lot more closely to be sure.

This is Star Trek after all. Almost as if the production was hinting to the audience "Time weirdness? You ain't seen nothing yet!"

 

Thank you! I must have mistook the date of the most recent post in the original thread.

 

Heck, in Star Wars you can see Han mouth "It's worse" in the wide shot and then repeat the line (with audio) in the subsequent closeup.And such continuity mismatches are all over TV. Usually it's just a mistake. Once in a while it's deliberate so viewers can register a big change in setting and track where everyone is.

Star Trek rarely shot with two cameras. It's harder to light for two cameras.

 

Yep. One well-documented case was the barroom brawl in "The Trouble with Tribbles." They had a hand-held camera in there. And I'll bet they did the same thing for the arena scene in "Amok Time." Some of the wild shots and dutch angles (Spock's madness) were probably done with the hand-held. And also possibly "Operation: Annihilate!" when Spock attacks the bridge and gets wrestled to the floor. That's not a lot of shots in three years.

They probably used two cameras for outdoor action scenes, like Kirk fighting Salish in "The Paradise Syndrome," or the teaser to "A Private Little War."

 

Also "I Mudd" during the "confuse the androids by dancing" bit.

A show like Hill Street Blues would sometimes use as many as four cameras during certain sequences.

 

It happens. In Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, fans quickly spotted the same extra running past Dr. Strange four times in a matter of seconds.

 

Bullitt had the green Volkswagen Beetle.

 

Over and over and over...

 

Hey don't forget the shot of Sulu looking over his shoulder back at Kirk, from TOS S1, but used/cut to many a time over the three seasons of original Star Trek.

 

That's just recycling stock footage. Not the same thing.

 

I took a cursory look at my film clips and it looks like somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the TOS episodes had scenes that were shot using two cameras. The scenes are a mix of those filmed at exterior locations and those done on a sound stage.

 

Could some of those sound stage clips be single-camera, but different takes of the same scene to get an additional angle?

 

No, the slates are from the same takes but from different angles. They’re clearly labeled camera A and camera B. Or camera A and ARRI.

 

That's interesting. On location stuff I find unsurprising.

 

That can give you indigestion.