They spent so much money on lighting they had no budget for plot or no-doze pills to hand out to the audience.
Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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They spent so much money on lighting they had no budget for plot or no-doze pills to hand out to the audience.
No one said that and I have no doubt that such fan fiction exists.
Am I reading correctly that DSC should go back to the lighting scheme of CG work from TNG-VOY-ENT?
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Ummm...
I was actually there in 1979.
Nobody in the theater dozed off during the 7 times I went to see it, folks were still cheering at the end of the movie.
(and my last viewing was three weeks after the opening night)
The expressed "dozing" by fans, didn't come along till the movie hit home video and the 'couch critics' found a place to vent on the internet.
Well, no, the "Motionless Picture" jokes started well before the Internet. But it was the most financially successful Trek movie until 2009, adjusting for inflation. Its box-office success and its negative reputation both existed at the same time, because the audience has never been monolithic.
Ummm...
I was actually there in 1979.
Nobody in the theater dozed off during the 7 times I went to see it, folks were still cheering at the end of the movie.
(and my last viewing was three weeks after the opening night)
The expressed "dozing" by fans, didn't come along till the movie hit home video and the 'couch critics' found a place to vent on the internet.
It's an incredibly beautiful piece of cinema which is often lost on people wanting something with Chris Pine in.
It's a genuine shame.
Ummmm ( see, I used more m than you)Ummm...
I was actually there in 1979.
Nobody in the theater dozed off during the 7 times I went to see it, folks were still cheering at the end of the movie.
(and my last viewing was three weeks after the opening night)
The expressed "dozing" by fans, didn't come along till the movie hit home video and the 'couch critics' found a place to vent on the internet.
I was in the theatre too. We'd just went to see The Black Hole the week before. Oddly enough everyone I was with thought that was the better movie, that included my older siblings and my parents, all of whom were early Trekkers, to various degrees. So perceptions will vary. But I actually DID fall asleep watching TMP then, and I have many times since then. I've said before, and it's true. I actually play it some times when I am dealing with insomnia. Better than a white noise generator.
It was found boring by many people then, and since then. That perception is not an internet thing.
But the lighting.. primo.
QFT!Ummm...
I was actually there in 1979.
Nobody in the theater dozed off during the 7 times I went to see it, folks were still cheering at the end of the movie.
(and my last viewing was three weeks after the opening night)
The expressed "dozing" by fans, didn't come along till the movie hit home video and the 'couch critics' found a place to vent on the internet.
Not the same 1987-2005 CG quality per se, just external lighting levels. To be frank, ENT's space shots were pretty great for the 2001-05 period and some of the best depictions of spaceships in motion in the entire franchise pre-2009.
If we did go back to something resembling ENT's lighting of space scenes it wouldn't be a loss. Whatever one thinks of ENT as a series it was visually attractive.
I think the Kelvin movies light the ships best. At dusk in Iowa, she's metallic. Over Vulcan, she's orange. At warp, she's a dark silhouette. In the sunlight, she's pure white.
For whatever their faults as films, the JJ Treks (particularly 2009) are incredibly well lit and the ship shots convey exactly what the artists and technicians are trying to convey in each scene. (I do wish for just a few more beauty shots where the Big E fits on the screen, but I get why they did that and it works great.) In fact, I'd argue that the design (that's been argued over on these forums so much) is less important to that classic Trek optimism and panache than the lighting. I love me some Orthos and MSDs, but a well lit ship in motion is just incredible. Over in Fan Art, PixelMagic replaced the Prime 1701-A with the Kelvin 1701-A at the end of Voyage Home and it is gorgeous to behold, even though that is my least favorite 1701 variation (the design itself, not the incredible model) by a good mile.
But, folks like you were very much in the minority back then.
And that is not really an opinion, it's based on what I experienced and heard at the multitude of Trek Conventions I went to through the years (use to go to at least 5-7 a year), up till the mid-nineties.
It really didn't start to become widely derided till the late 90's early 2000's and that is very much due to the Internet and it's anonymous crowd mentality.
But, folks like you were very much in the minority back then.
And that is not really an opinion, it's based on what I experienced and heard at the multitude of Trek Conventions I went to through the years (use to go to at least 5-7 a year), up till the mid-nineties.
It really didn't start to become widely derided till the late 90's early 2000's and that is very much due to the Internet and it's anonymous crowd mentality.
All that shows is that people who go to conventions are more likely to have a positive attitude toward the franchise, while those who write letters or comments tend to skew more to the negative. If you read magazine letter columns, movie reviews, and the like back in the day -- the places where opinions were expressed before the Internet, just not quite as ubiquitous -- you would've seen plenty of negative opinions of TMP. It stands to reason that conventiongoers would more positive and hyped, so they wouldn't be any more of an unbiased sample than letter-writers. They'd just be biased in the other direction.
Keep in mind that when Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer made The Wrath of Khan, they chose to essentially ignore TMP because of the lukewarm reactions it had received. They had to reuse the sets and miniatures for budgetary reasons, but otherwise they approached TWOK as a soft reboot and disregarded TMP, aside from the bit about Kirk being an admiral. So the negative response to TMP was there early enough to affect the second film.
And let's be clear: I'm not speaking from bias here. I love TMP. It's my favorite Trek movie. So I have no reason to want to paint it negatively. It's simply a fact that there has always been a strong negative reaction to the film in many circles, even though there have also been those of us who loved it. As I said, both the positive and negative reactions have always coexisted.
Not so. But you can believe that if you like. it's going way past the scope of this thread. You can like TMP, you can dislike it. You can find a great deal of merit in how the lighting is done (it's shot gorgeously, easily the best looking Trek movie ever made and one of the best looking space movies ever made, period), but pretending there was a small minority of people who found TMP dull is wishful thinking.
So you want to draw a hard line between anecdotal statement and opinion. Okay. I'm glad you enjoyed whatever tune was being sung to the choir.
Crowd mentality had nothing to do with it. TMP was NOT a successful movie. It wasn't a successful movie because most audiences found it boring. Many people do like it. Understandably so, but it was not what was needed to compete against that other Star Franchise, at the time. TWOK saved Star Trek. Meyers was able to use a 30 second "flip on the running lights" scene to accomplish what took Wise 10 minutes and a bottle of quaaludes.It really didn't start to become widely derided till the late 90's early 2000's and that is very much due to the Internet and it's anonymous crowd mentality.
^Uhh, TWOK's scene of the Enterprise powering up and leaving drydock was stock footage from TMP, so that's a poor choice of example.
It's a good example because it shows how much better it was done with editing. Meyer didn't have carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and waste time. using those shots saved money, but controlling the tempo also made it a far more watchable film.
The funny part is that the Klingon segment showed Wise COULD have done a more exciting movie. I love the beginning of TMP. But all to often, it reaches into "Heaven's Gate" levels of time wastage. It must have been symptomatic around that era. It killed a studio or two.
Honestly, I think TWOK had terrible, sluggish pacing in its action scenes. There are two or three points where something immediately dangerous happens and Kirk or Khan just sits there silently for 10 seconds before reacting to it. I'll never get what people see in that film. It just goes to show how pointless it is to argue over subjective opinions.