The Undiscovered Country is the only TOS Film I like
Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
- Start date
1. TMP
2. TWOK
3. TUC
4. TVH
5. TSFS
6. TFF
That's not just a list of my personal preferences, it's peer-reviewed science.
2. TWOK
3. TUC
4. TVH
5. TSFS
6. TFF
That's not just a list of my personal preferences, it's peer-reviewed science.
anybody else get star trek: the art of john eaves?
i skipped to the discovery section yesterday and while most of the material is already pretty well covered by eaglemoss' discovery collection magazines, it's a little more revealing about the frustration over bryan fuller's design edicts. the square nacelles apparently really tripped them up. us too.
i skipped to the discovery section yesterday and while most of the material is already pretty well covered by eaglemoss' discovery collection magazines, it's a little more revealing about the frustration over bryan fuller's design edicts. the square nacelles apparently really tripped them up. us too.
Might be a good fan art challenge.
funny, the more i look at his artwork, the more i get the sense that it wasn't eaves' designs or even fuller's requests that failed discovery's fleet. it's poor CGI.
eaves concept art has a life to it that the ships fail to exhibit on screen. i realize that's a pretty ephemeral thing to say, but to my eye, the ships look a lot more interesting on the page than they do as CG models or on the show.
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Trek, at its essence, is cheesy. Even when it's serious, it's still slathered in cheese. Whatever style they were going for with the ship presentation in season 1, the result seemed like an attempt to make Trek uncheesy. "Realism" as an aesthetic, is no more realistic than any other style, and it's not something that fits comfortably with ships all flying on the same plane or many of the other Trek aesthetic standards. To your point, Eaves' ships could have looked super cool if presented as something other than VideoGamey shadows. Gepard pretty much broke down that presentation style further upthread (re: diffuse illumination and specular reflection), and again, Lost In Netflix Space (and for that matter, the Black Mirror USS Callister episode) have great stylized lighting that shows off the designs with specific verisimilitudes. A bright ship in the middle of space (no close light source) can look cheesy, but it can also look like Star Trek.
I think it has to do with how he lights his ships in the concept paintings. They have that softer lighting and he doesn't add insane specularity into his concepts. The shadow contrast and fill lighting is more in line with what we're use to seeing in the movies and just somehow has a more approachable feel to it. A lot of his concept work looks like how they approach lighting in Lost in Space.
That's hardly fair, because it's looking back from an era with different standards. To 1960s audiences, Star Trek's visuals were gorgeous, sophisticated, state-of-the-art stuff, the most visually spectacular SF imagery ever achieved on television up to that time. Every season of TOS got Emmy nominations for the effects and art teams, the only people other than Leonard Nimoy to get Emmy recognition for the show. And every subsequent Trek TV series from TNG to ENT was on the cutting edge of TV visual effects and production values, at the opposite end of the spectrum from "cheesy." A lot of TNG looks bad in retrospect, but compared to the design and FX work in most of its contemporary shows, it was extraordinary.
The problem is, the techniques keep improving over time, so what looked amazing and beautiful and classy when it was new will almost always look "cheesy" to jaded, fault-finding viewers looking back from 30 or 50 years later. And that often leads to the mistaken assumption that it was meant to look cheesy. But I'm old enough to have seen everything except TOS when it was new, and in my experience, the various Star Trek shows were pretty much always the least cheesy-looking science fiction on television. Discovery is the first Trek show I've ever seen that looks cheesier than its contemporaries.
agreed, but i also think a lot of the way he details and colors the ships themselves that somehow gets lost in translation.
which is surprising given the process, which involves eaves producing concept art, then the VFX team producing rough digital models, then eaves drawing over those models to add detail, then sending them back for a final pass by the VFX department.
i wish i had the book in front of me to demonstrate the dynamic look of the concept art versus the anemic, sometimes amateurish-looking models the VFX department turns out. this may be down to lack of time or budget in season one. and yeah, we've discussed ad nauseam the problem with the way the VFX shots are composed and lit.
there's always something lost between concept art and final version. sometimes it's for the better, but in this case, not so much.
Your point is well taken, but my "cheese" was hyperbolic, and not directed at the SFX except in terms of a modern demand for "realism". Treks are shows where aliens are humans with lumpy heads, or greek gods, or spinning lights, and the exceptional (and expensive) SFX were not bad at all, but they were stylized in a way that wasn't anything like the modern sense of "realism". This has been variably true through all the series, with perhaps VOY and ENT occasionally chasing some sense of "realism" as an aesthetic just a bit here and there, up until DSC. Not that DSC is realistic at all, it's just another set of style choices, but I digress. I get your point and I don't disagree, except in terms of how I meant "cheese", which I meant about lighting and filming angles and tone setting, not quality of production. Star Trek is theatrical, it's over the top, it represents whole crews with just a few leads, and none of that is bad in the slightest, because it supports the storytelling, which has traditionally been pretty excellent. But in terms of any kind of scale of "grounded" "realism", it's cheesy (at least in the way I employ the term). Or to put it simply: a ship in the middle of empty space looks good when well lit (and it need not have self-illumination of the exterior) and that isn't "realistic", no matter how well photographed/rendered the model. I call that a wonderful cheese, delicious.
I prefer a good ale with my cheese, but I hear it's not legal (depending on the time period).Well aged cheese deserves a good wine...
Oh...,
... Never mind...,
There's already plenty of whine to pass around already here.
I'm allergic to hops.
But I like anything else not made with rye.
(prefer anything distilled from potatoes or sugarcane)
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Well aged cheese deserves a good wine...
Oh...,
... Never mind...,
There's already plenty of whine to pass around already here.
Well, it can be confusing if you use a term in a different way than most people use it without making that clear in advance. Usually, "cheesy" means "low in quality." That's how most people hearing your words are going to take it, no matter what it means in your own head. You can't just go around redefining words and expect other people to sauerkraut what you ungulate by them.
