Spoilers Picard Prequel "Children of Mars"

[Greg Cox]

Uphill both ways.

Through an ion storm.

 

[thribs]

It's what ever planet they need it to be. Same as all the other "planets" seen in Star Trek since the Sixties.

But for Mars? A real planet that we have actual pictures of?
My point is that they use two very different looking planets as Mars in an 8 minute short.

 

[Nerys Myk]

But for Mars? A real planet that is actually real and we have pictures of?
My point is that they use two very different looking planets as Mars in an 8 minute short.

So? As you say it's an 8 minute short.

 

[The Wormhole]

Anyone notice the two shots of Mars are very different? I think the first one with the shipyard is actually Vulcan.

Since there've been no orbital shots of Vulcan on Disco, nor have we ever seen a shipyard orbiting Vulcan in all Star Trek, there's no way that can be a shot of Vulcan. As for why the two shots of Mars look different, the one with the shipyard at the start was done by the Short Trek's production team, while the one of Mars during the attack is actual footage from Picard the show.

 

[Tim Thomason]

You know what I mean. They used another red planet as Mars. I mean they reused everything else. That whole shot was just bad.

This my bad. I thought you were arguing that one of the "two planets" was actually Vulcan (or something) for some reason, and I re-watched the short to see if there was any wriggle room for it to not really be Mars.

It's obviously meant to be Mars in the short at all times, but it could be some sort of Discovery Season 2 or 3 establishing shot of Vulcan and a Vulcan Starfleet shipyard that was cut for time, and reused here. That would mean their budget was practically $0 by the time someone thought to use an establishing shot for Mars.

We would've recognized the shot from Relativity and there would be even more groans (and less defenders) at reusing that clip, especially since they were building a Galaxy class in that scene, IIRC.

 

[thribs]

I had a look and the first one looks similar to the shot of Vulcan from the JJ movie. I couldn't find a shot of Vulcan in Discovery so it may be a new render for Mars. At least it was red. I'll give them credit for that.

 

[eschaton]

Yeah, I'm a little surprised the body count wasn't a lot higher. They showed massive explosions all over the planet, so unless most of those were over unpopulated areas I would expect the casualties to at least be at least a few times more than what they showed.

It's worth remembering the Xindi attack on Earth in Enterprise resulted in seven million casualties.

I think it can be argued that the tragedy of it wasn't really directed as well, but that's probably more the scope of death and destruction a 9/11 analogue should have.

What do you base that on? We have no idea whether that is true or not based on the available information.

Maybe I shouldn't have trusted the people in the thread who looked through the credits. The point stands though that most of the visual design issues people have stem from this not really being a Picard production., but more like a Discovery production which happens to have a story related to Picard.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I had a look and the first one looks similar to the shot of Vulcan from the JJ movie. I couldn't find a shot of Vulcan in Discovery so it may be a new render for Mars. At least it was red. I'll give them credit for that.

It's not a Kim Stanley Robinson adaptation so....

 

[thribs]

Yeah. It was weird they showed all those explosions on Mars and only 3000 people died. Either Mars is very sparsely populated or the Synths are a terrible shot. Comparing it to the Xindi attack is apt since that was supposed to be the 9/11 similarity back in the day.

 

[IMC Headquarters]

The Synths were drinking Synthohol...

 

[Nerys Myk]

Could be there were specific sites targeted.

 

[Crewman6]

I really don't see why the ships are such a big deal, we saw them reusing TOS era ships all the time on the other shows.

In TNG, 95% of Starfleet was comprised of 80-year-old Excelsior class ships.

 

[Tuskin38]

It would've been nice to see a couple new ships floating around Utopia Planitia.

Can't win them all.

I'm sure we will in the final show.

Um, the same companies do the VFX for all the current Star Trek Streaming series.

Yes, but different productions have different budgets.

I couldn't find a shot of Vulcan in Discovery so it may be a new render for Mars.

We never saw Vulcan from orbit in Discovery. Please try harder next time.

 

[thribs]

It's obviously meant to be Mars in the short at all times, but it could be some sort of Discovery Season 2 or 3 establishing shot of Vulcan and a Vulcan Starfleet shipyard that was cut for time, and reused here. That would mean their budget was practically $0 by the time someone thought to use an establishing shot for Mars.

You say that but it was a very elaborate shot of the shipyards. it wouldn't have taken that much longer to replace those ships with say an Akira and a Norway. Hell, I would've been happy with an Excelsior.

 

[Crewman6]

I just rewatched it, and there isn't a lot there to really discuss.

What's amazing is that the short has four credited writers. Each person wrote two paragraphs.

 

[thribs]

In TNG, 95% of Starfleet was comprised of 80-year-old Excelsior class ships.

Yeah but there was a reason for that. They used physical models back then and they only had a few and it cost a lot to make more. Now in the age of CGI and with them having a library of hundreds of ships, they had no excuse.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah but there was a reason for that. They used physical models back then and they only had a few and it cost a lot to make more. Now in the age of CGI and with them having a library of hundreds of ships, they had no excuse.

Who can say. None of us are making the shows.

 

[Tuskin38]

Now in the age of CGI and with them having a library of hundreds of ships, they had no excuse.

Models that spread out across several people and several companies.
They have a perfect excuse. The Company doing this (Pixelmodo I believe), wouldn't have the models.

it wouldn't have taken that much longer to replace those ships with say an Akira and a Norway..

It would have if they didn't have models that were up to the same quality as the Discovery models.

 

[fireproof78]

It's what ever planet they need it to be. Same as all the other "planets" seen in Star Trek since the Sixties.

They are merely engaging in the "Grand Trek Tradition."

TNG did it just as much. I guess Picard is a sequel to TNG

Yeah but there was a reason for that. They used physical models back then and they only had a few and it cost a lot to make more. Now in the age of CGI and with them having a library of hundreds of ships, they had no excuse.

The models are not up to the quality they want. The models use a different program with no time to do the conversation. The production team didn't have access to the models in a timely fashion.

Take your pick. There are plenty of reasons why, and production teams still have to work with limited time, budgets, and production demands. CGI doesn't make it better. Just a quicker way to screw up.

 

[Crewman6]

Yeah but there was a reason for that. They used physical models back then and they only had a few and it cost a lot to make more. Now in the age of CGI and with them having a library of hundreds of ships, they had no excuse.

Of course they did. Creating a new CGI asset is also extremely expensive and time consuming. Just because it's not a physical object doesn't mean it's easy.