We're not creating a new way to film... we're creating a new way to fly.
The "Movie" aesthetic.
- Thread starter flottanna
- Start date
It's still less than what Netflix payed for Marco Polo
Which flopped.
I hope Disco makes its money back
The filter is likely both an aesthetic and practical choice to help with digital compositing via blue screen. It's a way to help the composed elements blend in better whereas without it they would look out of place and feel more fake.
I don't mind that style. Not every film/TV show needs to be totally crisp looking. SUPERMAN '78 looks gorgeous with its intended filtered cinematography. I've noticed that style has largely fallen out of favor in the advent of HD television, with a desire to go with the sharpest and crisp picture possible.
Most likely a practical choice. BSG: Blood and Chrome, which relied even more heavily on digital backgrounds, also suffered a lot from this "smeared" look:
I think it's main function is to disguise the "halo" around the characters when filmed in front of a blue/green screen.
Last edited:
Just a smidge of hyperbole there I feel. Can't say it has really caused me any concern or that I've really noticed it. It does look more dynamic than previous Trek but I quite like that it's not just endless identical pretty static shots like the TNG era.
What are you talking about? That's how they taught me to film a scene in the Michael Bay School of Camerawork.
(Quick Note: I'm waiting to binge watch Discovery in December, so my comments here are based on the clip @mos6507 linked to.)
The problem with the scene in sickbay was that it was just standard shot reverse shot with camera swivel. It's not nearly as unique you seem to suggest, and it serves as more of a distraction than an effect in service of the plot or setting. It's designed to make what would otherwise be a plain dialogue scene seem more exciting, but once you become acclimated to such techniques, it's far less effective.
Another problem with the scene is that they spend way too much time cutting away from the actors when they're delivering their dialogue. They could get a lot more excitement if we could see the expressions of the actors as they're speaking. It might also help to have more shots with both actors' faces in the same frame, where you can see both the line delivery and the reaction. One thing I noticed is that they seemed to "cross the line" several times just to get the doctor's reaction, even though he barely has any lines and it's basically a two-person conversation.
I don't think "it's less boring than TNG" constitutes "unique".
I think it's mostly that I don't really notice camera work. Until someone points it out, I just don't spot this stuff. I certainly don't find it makes me 'seasick'.
Every futuristic sci fi show or movie makes up "technobabble" to some extent. That's not what I was talking about. I was referring to the use of 20th and 21st century pop culture slang, which is something Star Trek avoids, and I hope DSC continues. Although some of the creative alternatives writers come up with can be amusing, the fact is, it beats just giving it no thought and just using some slang term (especially when trying to get a laugh). Now that is lazy writing.
And Netflix needed the strong international audience a Star Trek show attracts, thus the CBS/Netflix deal. They both win.
If you made a conscious effort to study the framing I suspect it would become one of those things that, once you notice, you can't UN-notice.
I think the combination of cameras getting light and all digital and today's generation growing up on first-person shooters that the ever-shifting camera perspective has become the norm. It's not 'special' in the sense that everyone else seems to be doing it too (well, The Orville isn't).
Here's a typical sequence in The Orville. Very traditional. Camera on tripod. Minimum movement on the tripod unless characters need to be kept in the frame.
By the background staying static (like a painting) your attention is allowed to focus on the characters. Movement has to have some clear motivation. There's no "dynamic range" if the camera is always zipping around. So the Discovery approach is similar to the trend in over-compressing CD mixes for loudness.
It's a really naive idea that the more camera movement the better. Sure, it adds visual interest by things moving in the frame, but that by itself isn't "better". That "more is more" sensibility is what bothers me about today's aesthetic. Discovery is sort of like Taylor Swift's Ready For It video. It's the visual equivalent to a liberace outfit. It's just too over the top.
Last edited:
To its own detriment, IMO.
Maybe but wasn't there a bit of a fuss when Jason wanted to use the word 'God/god'? That's a word that's been around for a long while. A word that's been around can be discarded or seem dated. 'Tech' might be a word that is outgrown. Yeah, but whatever... they've got to speak some language.
Honestly? I hadn't noticed the shifting background thing before and I now I do!
It's ... for 'mood'.
There has to be more to that story than was reported. If having Lorca say "for God's sake" was such an issue because "people aren't supposed to talk like that in Roddenberry's secular future" what was it okay for Stamets to say "oh God" when he found the corpse of his friend, the spore scientist on the USS Glenn? Or for that, matter, why was it okay for Admiral Cornwell to say "for God's sake" when she was trying to snap Tyler out of his PTSD flashback? Does this show really have so many cooks in the kitchen that the left hand is completely ignorant of the right hand?
Well, it's not Battleship, I'll grant you that. I just don't think it adds more than it takes away. It's camerawork for camerawork's sake. You can shoot a scene differently and still shoot it well.
For instance, they could move the camera as if they were trying to get a better vantage point, creating movement that actually appears to accomplish something in the scene. Or they could put the camera between the three men and rotated the camera slowly in a single direction, arranging it so each person usually starts talking when the camera is on them. Or cut to a wide shot from directly above. Or a low shot that looks up at the Captain to make him more imposing, then reversing to a shot over his shoulder and down to make the scientist look small. You get the picture.
The Orville uses a style requires a certain degree of confidence in what you're actually looking at. The sets, costumes and performances really have to hold up, because the eye has more time to linger and soak in the details. This is not to say that this is always a good idea, though. Sometimes you want to deliberately exclude detail to allow the imagination to fill in the details. Other times you may not have the budget to show all the detail and it may be better to fudge it. However, when you're talking about expensive standing sets, it usually makes more sense to linger a bit more.
Ironically, I think a lot of the movement in "…Ready For It?" does have purpose and motivation. First of all, it's intended to have a tempo fitting the song it's created for. (There's actually a prismatic shacking effect that's used whenever a particular sound is used in the song.) The idea is to get you moving. Furthermore, a lot of the movement is relative to Taylor, so you're moving in the same direction she's walking to keep her in frame. There's also the issue of the type of movement. Much of the movement is to dolly in and out, which is far easier on the eyes than rotational movement, as your center of view is experiencing the least movement. You should also note that there are quite a few shots where the camera remains stationary and lingers from a moment.
I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm just saying that it's hardly atypical for the genre: music videos.
(I quite liked that one shot where she's punching in a code on the keypad, where it's shot from from the vantage point of her finger. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that before.)
Of course, I could watch that music video for hours, so I'm hardly impartial.
But... it was effective. This is a scene where two characters are having a heated disagreement with another character caught in the middle. Is that not a valid case to use effects like this? I think @mos6507 may have been cherry-picking a bit here. Compare this to more standard two-person conversations in the show:
^ A few dramatic zooms in the first scene to highlight some lines, but not much else. The second conversation scene is even simpler.
In this scene, the camera barely moves at all:
And here, we basically just follow the characters:
Now here's another scene with wobbling and swiveling and rapid cuts:
...But it's two characters arguing again. Noticing a pattern?
G
Gul Sengosts
Guest
I'm not a friend of the camera moving around all the time during a conversation, but actually I was glad when the cameraman could even hold it straight for a while. Especially in the pilots, you're exposed to a remorseless assault of Dutch Angles. Truly awful. Apparently they really liked Battlefield Earth.
They're overusing some kind of chromatic aberration filter for the CGI shots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
The funny thing is, in some of the shots the way they blur things (more around the edges than in the middle of the screen) makes it look like tilt-shift photography, giving things a very small "model" feel even though it's clearly CGI.
