I realised: I miss external Enterprise shots... and ad breaks

[C.E. Evans]

I do think a brief 3-second shot of the ship at the start of some acts in an episode can give a quick sense that it takes place over a period of time. It may cut down on relying on log entries or exposition dialogue to tell us that time has passed since the last act or major story beat.

 

[Michael]

Until this thread I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but yes, something does feel differently about the way Strange New Worlds employs (or rather doesn’t employ) establishing shots of the ship. Can’t say it really bothers me too much, but I will say it sometimes feels like we’re not seeing the ship outside all that often. And I’ll agree that on the older shows it helped to create a sense of the passing of time, a sense of location and of the ship as a character.

That said, thinking back to Discovery, I can’t say I’m missing these constant shots flying from a wide shot of the entire ship to one of the windows or the open hangar door. These are cool to have the first handful of times, but they overdid it to a point where it felt rather gratuitous to me, almost drawing attention to themselves.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Until this thread I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but yes, something does feel differently about the way Strange New Worlds employs (or rather doesn’t employ) establishing shots of the ship. Can’t say it really bothers me too much, but I will say it sometimes feels like we’re not seeing the ship outside all that often. And I’ll agree that on the older shows it helped to create a sense of the passing of time, a sense of location and of the ship as a character.

That said, thinking back to Discovery, I can’t say I’m missing these constant shots flying from a wide shot of the entire ship to one of the windows or the open hangar door. These are cool to have the first handful of times, but they overdid it to a point where it felt rather gratuitous to me, almost drawing attention to themselves.

On TOS, there was stock footage. Not expensive to insert, but the same every time, except maybe putting a different color filter on the planet (make that relatively inexpensive in that case). TNG also (re)used lots of stock footage.

Does stock footage go over well these days? I'd expect there'd be a Twitter storm about how the show is too cheap because they're reusing stock footage all the time.

 

[JohnCrichton1999]

On TOS, there was stock footage. Not expensive to insert, but the same every time, except maybe putting a different color filter on the planet (make that relatively inexpensive in that case). TNG also (re)used lots of stock footage.

Does stock footage go over well these days? I'd expect there'd be a Twitter storm about how the show is too cheap because they're reusing stock footage all the time.

They could do more animated stock footage that could probably trick the average viewer enough if they really wanted to cut on SFX expenses. I was thinking of that very idea before, and honestly they did that often with Voyager when it was the early days of pure CGI external shots. They forgot the art of creating CGI stock footage. It really should be a thing again.