Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 133: It’s my first day back in the office in a month, after vacation and a week of working from home. The Head seemed a little put out by being ignored for a month, but was mollified when it saw that my desktop Star Trek ship collection is gaining the USS Cerritos from Lower Decks.
This YouTube video shows how impressive of a job the Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover did with reworking the opening credits in the Lower Decks style.
But part of what stands out to me is how well this highlights how woefully under-lit the live-action Enterprise is. There’s a ton of detail in the animated version that I’m sure is drawn directly from the live-action version (especially since, really, they’re both animated versions, just in different styles), and it’s gorgeous!
I understand that it’s a stylistic choice on the new shows (Discovery and Picard also did this a lot) to go for more “natural”/”realistic” lighting on their ships, and a ship traveling through deep space isn’t likely to have a convenient light source nearby to make it all pretty and shiny.
But — spoiler alert — none of this is real! (I know, I know, I struggle with this as well.) I’m entirely okay with adding “we can actually see the ships even when they’re in space” to the same base-level suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying visual science fiction in general.
Update: Thanks to @kamartino@mastodon.online for pointing me to this video from Douglas Trumbull where he discusses directing the space dock sequence in The Motion Picture. At four minutes in, he specifically notes that they wanted to create a lighting design so that the Enterprise appeared to light itself, so even when the Enterprise was out in deep space, it would still be visible.
Here’s a gag I’d like to see on Lower Decks: Either through needing to research something that happened on the TOS Enterprise and reviewing ship’s logs, or perhaps (if necessary, though it’s been done to death) through a time travel mishap, we see the TAS Enterprise crew in all their ’70s Filmation glory.
Here’s a few quick mockups I tossed together using screenshots from the first LDS episode.
The TAS bridge crew says hello to…well, a few random background extras, I guess, since this was the only bridge shot with the view screen in LDS S01E01.
Captain Freeman looks up some historical data on Captain Kirk while briefing Ensign Boimler.
Someone reviewing one of Mr. Spock’s science logs, perhaps?
