That's a cool bridge design. They should use it for a ship in the next film.
THIS was the design for the NEW engine room???
- Thread starter RAMA
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Yes. It's real, it was actually there when the filming was done. You could touch it and run around on it like the actors do. It is a vast room filled with pipes and machinery rather than an illusion of a vast room filled with pipes and machinery.
We would know what we are looking at is not actually a Starship's engine room regardless. For the purposes of this movie, it was far better to err on the side of "It looks too real and too familiar" than "It looks too computer-generated and detached."
I'm still trying to figure out the purpose - or the 'charm' - of trying to 'anchor' a science-fiction film visually in our present. It's supposed to be 200 years in our future, using technology far beyond what we have - otherwise, we'd be sailing breweries into space right now. Personally, I'd rather not be expected to believe - or to not disbelieve - that recognizable and even archaic-appearing technology could be responsible for and capable of the sorts of things that the ship's warp drive and weapons can do - unless I'm watching an intentionally steampunk production. If I want to be visually anchored in familiar technology, I also want to be temporally anchored in it - it's pointless to me to say, on the one hand, that we're beyond the limits of known physics, and yet everything looks "familiar." We should neither be thinking, "Ha! A brewery" nor "Wow, look at the cool CGI!" - done well, we should simply accept it as plausible to the context of the story and setting, and maybe nitpick it to death later - here on the board
. Even TOS didn't try to get away with a location redressed as a spaceship set - the sets may have been cheap and simplistic compared to today, but for the time, they put a lot of thought into them to set them apart not only from the then-current technology, but also from the perception that they were little more than plywood and paint. As for the actual content of Ryan's paintings, to me they appear to be the nacelle interiors, esp. in context of his one exterior shot that shows translucent nacelles with obvious internal structures and hardware. However, I could also buy them as the ship's engineering space, if one assumes that the much larger cylindrical shape in the top of the frame is the actual core of the ship's power system, and what we see alongside the catwalk are secondary systems and conduits; I think it's plenty big enough, as it implies additional space both above and below the focus of the frame. I also think if the catwalk and some equipment were practical, and the rest CGI, it would look fine onscreen, neither too perfect nor generic (these things are easy to avoid in CGI - it's mostly the inexperienced that create the plasticky CGI work, and ILM are among the best), and the two methods would be completely indistinguishable.
Yeah this is pretty much how I feel as well. I see the "realism" argument popping up alot and it being used to criticize the "Warp core" style engineering we have seen since TMP and I just don't get it. How is it realistic to have something like a brewery serve as the engine room for a ship out of the 23rd century?
Id rather they use some creativity and give us an imaginative yet intelligent engine room rather than something I could find in a air craft carrier
Simply put, if your goal is to portray a future time that is directly linked to our own world, then there should be visual elements that allow the audience to make this connection, or (even better) to simply "feel" or intuit this connection while they are watching the plot unfold.
From your posts, it seems that you are interested in the speculative engineering aspect of sci-fi. What would technology that could really do these things actually look like? How would it actually work? How would it be designed?
Interesting stuff, I agree, but I don't think the movie's priority was to appeal to the speculative engineers in the audience, and anyway certainly not when the engine room was designed. I don't think this choice was necessarily innappropriate. Star Trek has always been sci-fi that is heavily oriented toward fantasy sci-fi, rather than hard sci-fi.
Trek uses space exploration as a means of exploring the human soul and psyche, basically. That's one of the reasons why it has always obsessively returned to earth's historical past and the present time (our own time). It is more about the adventure of exploration than "What would these machines really be like?" Taking a brewery and using it as the set for a Starship's engine room is in harmony with that spirit, in my view. (Not that I would necessarily have a problem with a different approach, Trek can handle tech in a variety of ways).
We should neither be thinking, "Ha! A brewery" nor "Wow, look at the cool CGI!" - done well, we should simply accept it as plausible to the context of the story and setting, and maybe nitpick it to death later - here on the board
Nothing would really be plausible as the engine room on a make-believe Starship that can do make-believe things like travel at warp speed. It's really only a question of: what are you ready to accept?
Because a large amount of speculative (make-believe) engineering could be done to detail how the warp engine might look, some might be more ready to accept certain designs than others, but that is merely because they are interested in such speculative designs, not because those designs are innately more believable.
No one is going to see the engine room and say "Wow that looks exactly like a real Starship engine room!" What does that even mean? At most they would say "Wow that is some convincing CGI machinery, it looks real and very cool!"
But basically I thought the brewery set accomplished this. In contrast with the bridge and corridor sets, it exuded vastness and complexity, and sold the idea that underneath its sleek exterior the Enterprise is nonetheless a machine that human beings might be capable of building in the not-too-distant future. That's what the set needed to do in the brief scenes in which it was used. Most viewers are not going to sit around dissecting stills and asking themselves what the pipes are really for.
Re: THIS was the design for the NEW engine room??? More Ryan Church ar
This would have totally kicked ass as the new 1701 engine room as opposed to the shitty beer brewery we were given on screen. That monstrosity is one of the only things I didn't like about the new movie...and boy did it suck the air out of the room when it was on-screen.
OK THIS has my vote...make it happen guys!!!!
RAMA!
This would have totally kicked ass as the new 1701 engine room as opposed to the shitty beer brewery we were given on screen. That monstrosity is one of the only things I didn't like about the new movie...and boy did it suck the air out of the room when it was on-screen.
Re: THIS was the design for the NEW engine room??? More Ryan Church ar
In season four of Battlestar Galactica thy finally got around to showing the engine room. It was basically this giant chanber with catwalks over this enormous floating piston that moved faster and faster as it got ready to jump. They could got away with it ona TV show's budget because a) effects have gotten a lot better ad easier to do since th original star trek and b) they only featured in the background of like two shots and never showed it again. I wouldn't mind something like that as the engine room. If your going to make the engine room this giant factory-like space with multiple levels and a maze of catwalks have something ginormous (possibly spinning with lights on it) as the centerpiece. The movies could do a special effect backdrop that they never could afford on a TV show. Based on other (heated) discussions it appears the new Enterprise is big enough to support it.
In season four of Battlestar Galactica thy finally got around to showing the engine room. It was basically this giant chanber with catwalks over this enormous floating piston that moved faster and faster as it got ready to jump. They could got away with it ona TV show's budget because a) effects have gotten a lot better ad easier to do since th original star trek and b) they only featured in the background of like two shots and never showed it again. I wouldn't mind something like that as the engine room. If your going to make the engine room this giant factory-like space with multiple levels and a maze of catwalks have something ginormous (possibly spinning with lights on it) as the centerpiece. The movies could do a special effect backdrop that they never could afford on a TV show. Based on other (heated) discussions it appears the new Enterprise is big enough to support it.
I'm not interested in the speculative engineering aspects of sci-fi - to me, sci-fi is more the speculative human aspects, and where you make the effort to connect to a contemporary audience is through the characters, placing them into a fictional setting, one where the science, hard or soft, promotes the questions and obstacles that recognizably contemporary characters must answer or overcome. But there are times when the creators of the story - and sometimes the audience - can't seem to make the distinction between contemporary characters and contemporary sets. It's not a matter of trying to make "accurate" hi-tech sets, loaded with machinery that somehow 'looks' like what the 'real things' should look like - it's a matter of making a set that is consistent with the overall setting and proposed concepts - as you say, something that intuitively the audience accepts, not as being right or wrong, but as appearing to be sufficiently advanced that its role in what it is supposed to be capable of isn't questioned above the actual plot.
Sorry, but a brewery looks like a brewery. Beyond that, it looks mundane and contemporary, familiar enough as 'our' technology that it stands out, apart from the plot. The idea of the story is not that 21st-century engineers can fly to the stars with 21st-century technology, so we can look and say, "Hey, that looks familiar! I can empathize with them now!" The idea is that characters that share 21st-century personalities are in a 23rd-century setting, and we should be able to look at that setting and think, "Okay, this is the future, not a play being presented at the local Anheuser-Busch." It doesn't matter if the future technology is 'accurate,' only that by its very appearance, without needing to explain it to the audience, we see and feel that this is the future, with technology that we don't need to understand, only to know that it does things that we don't currently know how to do. The guts of a warp engine, on film, don't have to be capable of going to warp, only of looking sufficiently advanced that we feel that it's more likely that they are the parts that do make it go to warp, rather than ferment alcohol, or pump oil, or smelt iron. It doesn't have to look "like" a warp engine - it only has to look more advanced than something one can find in a modern factory, something we see on TV and in other films all the time.
Even the the Earth ships in Stargate that are built in the present day yet using some alien tech (weapons, Sheilds, transporter, hyperdrive) look more more better than the 'brewery engine room' and the 'factory floor' decks the Enterprise has. If the human race was given 23rd century tech to make its own fully functional Enterprise I dare say it would even look more modern inside.
Yeah, if they were going to redress something they should have at least done something warp-coreish like a particle accelerator
http://popsci.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/12/collider.jpg
http://popsci.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/12/collider.jpg
Looks a lot like a brewery to me...
While I did not mind the engine room as much as most, and I liked the thought behind it, I hope something like this shows up in the sequel. I will forgive them for it though because of the budget. Hopefully with the primary sets already built, they can afford something like that in the future.
And I LOVE that bridge. Hopefully the current bridge will be tweaked to match that more closely in the next film. It's amazing what just lighting can can change.
And I LOVE that bridge. Hopefully the current bridge will be tweaked to match that more closely in the next film. It's amazing what just lighting can can change.
You and I have very different ideas of what breweries look like. Though mine might be archaic. Breweries make me think of copper vats.
The brewery worked for me because I actually didn't think it looked like a brewery. And the water spinner thing looked weird enough to be spacey.
And I'm sorry, but that is BURNT ORANGE. That bridge is a color nightmare. I prefer the white/blue look. Perhaps they could tone down the lighting with that depowered blue glow, but the colors in the new one are an improvement over that art. Maybe they could have a scene where the lights are shut off on the bridge.
The brewery worked for me because I actually didn't think it looked like a brewery. And the water spinner thing looked weird enough to be spacey.
And I'm sorry, but that is BURNT ORANGE. That bridge is a color nightmare. I prefer the white/blue look. Perhaps they could tone down the lighting with that depowered blue glow, but the colors in the new one are an improvement over that art. Maybe they could have a scene where the lights are shut off on the bridge.
Funny thing is that place has a curved roof that might just pass for the inside of the secondary hull.
Just add a little more machinery here and there and you've got it.
If by brewery you mean particle acceleratorLooks a lot like a brewery to me...
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