Re: If they had filmed 'Generations' with the same lighting and tone a
You gotta believe 24th century windows have some kind of polarizing properties like a pair of 20th century sunglasses.
The nature of the orange glow in several rooms during the Amargosa sequences tells us that the windows ARE polarized.
When you look through sunglasses, it's not like everything turns
monochrome. The coloration caused by the time of day is still visible, it's just more subtle (and the overall brightness is reduced).
Here on Earth, the light that reaches our eyes from the sun is
heavily modified by our atmosphere. A starship doesn't have an atmosphere between it and any nearby stars, so any windows would necessarily be "polarized" (the Trek equivalent is no doubt far more advanced than anything we could do today, so it might not even be called that) to block out all the harmful effects. This is why no one in ten-forward is going blind from the light. In fact, they aren't even
squinting. They are perfectly comfortable. (You can see this in Picard's ready room right before the ten-forward scene too: Riker is looking AT the window during most of the scene, and isn't bothered in the slightest). The light coming in isn't even THAT bright, it's just really really orange. If the windows WEREN'T "polarized", it would be FAR brighter, and people standing around in the room
would be suffering ill effects. The ship also appears to be
much closer to the Amargosa star than Earth is to our sun.
And we'd never seen the ship interiors subject to such drastic lighting effects no matter what stellar phenomena the Enterprise had encountered (and they've seen plenty).
Now suddenly the ship is subject to such high contrasts?
Hardly the only visual effects discrepancy in Trek that simply cannot be explained away by purely in-universe reasoning. The cause of this particular discrepancy (they didn't have the time or money to make things look "right", then later they DO have the time and money) isn't unique, either.
That's all right. Probably better anyway with the real simple basic lighting cuz it's more real.
Aboard the Enterprise, they are enclosed in a controlled environment at all times, all conditions artificially maintained. It should be consistent and unvarying (excusing the seldom-seen "night watch" dimmer effect).
I think of a similar situation in my work office, windowless and fluorescent lighted and all that. I tell ya, it stays the exact same 24/7/365. You'd never know if it was dusk or midnite or midday or evening or December or August. It never varies in the slightest--much as we always saw the corridors and quarters aboard the Enterprise for seven years.
Except in Generations, when all that changed.
That doesn't even make any sense.
You are comparing a windowless office to a starship that has... lots and lots of windows.
The office I work in HAS windows. Big ones that are quite visible from where I sit. It is
quite obvious from looking at those windows what time of day it is. Given the windows on the ship, GEN's lighting during the Amargosa scenes is FAR more realistic than similar lighting effects (or the lack thereof) in the TNG TV series.
And yes, it's a closed, controlled, and artificially maintained environment. It's a
space ship. It HAS to all those things, by definition. But if they didn't want to still maintain at least some small degree of "natural" interaction with the outside environment (as long as it can be done safely), the ship wouldn't
have windows. They serve no practical purpose. They are only there cause people want to look outside.
And now of course we have that TV show on the way in HD, showing all that resolution. I wonder if they will try to grade it slightly darker for HD
If we're
lucky, we'll see TNG in HD. There is still serious doubt about the chances of this actually happening, due to how much more work would be required to do so (vs. how much work was required to convert TOS to HD).
Generations feels like the show shot right. They had more time to do it.
Agreed.
There are a couple specific
moments in GEN where things are perhaps a bit TOO dark - in one scene that I recall, Riker leaves Picard's ready room, and it looks like he is walking out into total darkness as he steps onto the bridge.
Or is this just a sloppy filmmaking mistake? I've always regarded it as such, highlighting it to friends and family.
Hm, could be, actually. Either way, whether it's bad judgement and they
meant to light it like that, or it's simply an error, it's just too damn dark.
I really liked the changes to the bridge set for that movie... They'd done similar modifications in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and I'd always wished those changes could have been brought over to the show afterward. Having those consoles on the sides of the bridge looked pretty awesome.
Yeah, there are definite callbacks to the YE bridge in the GEN bridge, though personally, I find the latter to be far superior. The GEN bridge is one of my favorites in all of Trek, actually.
