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I don't understand the production design...

Arpy

Arpy

Vice Admiral
Admiral
The future of Picard (PIC?) looks neither like the future of TNG nor our likely future. Frankly, it looks like a low-budget Syfy channel movie...with a bigger budget. Was this the result of network executive's note to make the future less mystifying to a new generation of viewers, or are contemporary artists less imaginative about what the distant future might look like, or.....?

(EDIT: I write this after watching the instagram trailer for the next Short Trek "Children of Mars," in which, again, we see contemporary clothing on people of the distant future, and find myself lamenting the unimaginative "human adventure" already tread.)
 
Huh? Looking around, I note it's 2020 and there are no flying cars, excessively tall skyscrapers in LA, and android-like beings mining the off-world colonies. Things generally look like they did 30 years ago. So, perhaps dialing back the "futuristic" vision of the future isn't quite the bad thing you think it is.
 
It looks a bit dystopian to me. I liked the TNG asthetic, I mean - you could imagine living and working on the Ent-D. The Discovery ships, not so much. There's too much John Eaves in there, a varied production design team might help the situation.
 
A) TNG onwards showed AWFUL fashion for civilians. If they’re dressing them closer to how we dress now, that’s only a good thing.

B) As we’ve seen from this past century, fashion trends often just operate on a cycle, and come back in style repeatedly.

Given the advancements in clothing and fashion the last number of years, I’d fully expect that even by the 24th century, we probably wouldn’t be dressing all that differently to how we do now.
 
MrPicard said:
TNG's future looks VERY 1980s. VOY's looks VERY 1990s. ENT's looks VERY early 2000s.

In other words: It's nothing that hasn't happened on Trek before and has always been happening.
Click to expand...
Nah. People weren't walking around in the French waiter's uniform in "We'll Always Have Paris" in the 1980's. It was an attempt to extrapolate what a future tux might look like. Similar to the Season 1 TNG uniforms vs. contemporary ones. The jackets and ties and suits and more worn in PIC and in part DSC and Short Treks suggest a less far-out there vision for the distant future from us un the 2010/20's. Maybe we've become decadent today, if we can't even imagine more fashion (and other) differences 400 years hence.
 
The uniforms are a nice nod to TNG and DS9. Picard's Armiral Uniform looks like something from early TNG.

picard-adm-uni-01-750x926.jpg
 
MrPicard said:
TNG's future looks VERY 1980s. VOY's looks VERY 1990s. ENT's looks VERY early 2000s.

In other words: It's nothing that hasn't happened on Trek before and has always been happening.
Click to expand...

Got to disagree. One of the few things I liked on ENT was how it looked very fifties in the areas we are talking about, which makes sense from a ‘fashion is cyclical’ perspective and makes sense of some of the more ‘sixties’ stuff in TOS.
TNG didn’t really look eighties/nineties except maybe in female hair styling. And you can see how Voyager wasn’t really tied to its production era by watching Chakotays hair when he’s incognito on nineties earth.

If what you mean is they sort of vaguely resemble design choices made at the time of production...sure, a little (especially TMP) but it’s a chicken and egg scenario. Half of The Girl From Tomorrow cast look like TNG escapees, especially from Tasha’s colony, but that’s because of the influence of Trek and Mad Max (the show was made in the nineties.) Sometimes Trek is influenced, usually it’s the influencer.

I would agree that this time round, Trek is being more influenced by other shows (and itself) than the other way round. Which may be the ‘high budget syfy show’ thing that’s happening. Ironically, I would say almost zero new has happened since roughly Farscape in terms of SF telly. Pale aliens are de rigeur, and silicone is the new latex.
 
jaime said:
If what you mean is they sort of vaguely resemble design choices made at the time of production...sure, a little (especially TMP) but it’s a chicken and egg scenario. Half of The Girl From Tomorrow cast look like TNG escapees, especially from Tasha’s colony, but that’s because of the influence of Trek and Mad Max (the show was made in the nineties.) Sometimes Trek is influenced, usually it’s the influencer.
Click to expand...

Yes, I was referring to the design - the Enterprise-D's interior looked like an 80s hotel, especially in the first few seasons. (I love the 80s so this is not meant in a mean way.) The hairstyles were also very 80s. I dunno, but when I watch the first few seasons in particular I'm really always reminded that the show was made in the 80s. It shines through. All I'm saying is that, in 30 years or so, people will look at DSC/PIC and say "this show was made in the 2010s/20s, the design is SO 2010s/20s". It reflects the time in which it was made, sometimes more, sometimes less.
 
I think a lot of the production design choices were done purposefully to hammer home the idea that this isn't Starfleet any longer, and the squeaky-clean touchscreen look isn't how normal day-to-day living gets done in this universe.

Makes sense to me.
 
I think future clothing will consist in large part of jeans, leggings/sweats, t-shirts, and hoodies. And snuggies.

Honestly, people like to be comfortable. Is it possible to improve upon the t-shirt? Have jeans appreciably changed in 100 years? Enterprise got it perfect with their ballcaps - it is the perfect utilitarian headwear.

I hope that in 2120, the President of Earth takes a selfie of herself in the midde of getting sworn in while wearing her formal t-shirt and semi-translucent (in the right light) jeggings.
 
I want to see off-the-wall stuff in the future, like all the visitors walking around Starfleet headquarters in short, stylized toga-like garments and sandals.

Kor
 
Kor said:
I want to see off-the-wall stuff in the future, like all the visitors walking around Starfleet headquarters in short, stylized toga-like garments and sandals.

Kor
Click to expand...

And kilts....inside-out kilts to be exact.
 
While I know it's a prequel story, I don't think we can be 100% certain that the production design for Children of Mars has been completely integrated with Picard.

Indeed, I'm guessing it hasn't. Chabon isn't executive producer over there, and I'm guessing if it was a within-Picard plotline, they would have had a greater budget for props and the like, and wouldn't have things like a library with real books and visible dewey decimal system entries on the spine.
 
There aren't many, if any people who can predict the future, so what they might wear could be the style of that era.
No matter how silly it might look to us.

80s isn't that far behind us and take a look at those clothes. Would you like to wear 80s clothing everyday? What might happen in hundreds of years from now in fashion, perhaps people don't wear anything at all.
 
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