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Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

Why there is no light on space Sci Fi series or movies?.

I find it extremely hard to believe that people that master ships at the speed of light, that have nuclear and possible antimatter engines just can't effort proper lighting, like they don't know LED lights, fluorescent lights everywhere.

All films just look like submerged nuclear submarines on red alert,but all the time. On nuclear submarines you have way more light most of the time.

We know that we need strong light exposure in order not the develop illnesses like myopia. Mood is affected badly by lack of light.

I can understand it in games,it was the first trick for hiding a bad 3D engine, make everything dark, but it is not necessary anymore.

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Not sure if you've seen the Expanse, but two comments:

1. The stills here look edited, possible to focus the UIs for the article. I may be misremembering but I don't remember being unable to make out characters on screen!

2. The protagonists in the show comandeer a Mars ship and most shots take place inside it. For narrative reasons, UN ships are bright, Mars ships are black/dark red (and Belter ships are broken, Star Wars rebels style), so the in-space look changes a lot (though the main set is that one Mars ship).

UN ships were very well lit from what I remember.

Martian and Belter ships less so (still, the Rocinante's crew quarters were fine and we've not really seen many ships outside of battle/emergencies) because they were adapted to lower light conditions on their homeworlds, I think that was said once if I'm not mistaken. The Martian delegation to Earth had to wear sunglasses all the time, for example.

More than just narrative reasons, I think it makes sense that the planet that receives half the sunlight would be building less brightly lit ships

> I can understand it in games,it was the first trick for hiding a bad 3D engine, make everything dark, but it is not necessary anymore.

It's become necessary in movies and series as well, because stuff is mostly CGI now.

Look at Star Trek in the golden era (TNG-ENT) vs. what it is now. Despite aging props, the former looks real (if cheesy; color choices in early TNG didn't age well). Federation ships are solid, clean, and brightly lit. That's because they were real, physical sets. Discovery/Picard? It's all dark, and while it may also be a stylistic choice, the fact is that if they lightened it up, all the CGI sets and blinkies would stand out like sore thumbs.

On a related note: I can close my eyes and imagine myself walking around the bridge of Enterprise-D, touching the panels, sitting in the captain's chair. I can almost feel the texture of the chairs, the friction of the carpet, the glassiness of the panels. Can't do that with Discovery. When I close my eyes, I just see non-solid holograms. I can't imagine what would it be like to touch them.

Physically based rendering, as awesome as it is, still seems to subtly fail in reproducing various kinds of materials. Between various games (including AAA productions) and movies I've seen over the years, I haven't encountered one where a CGI piece of metal actually looked like a piece of metal upon closer inspection. Everything looks like make-believe plastic.

I'd advise you to look at some behind the scenes or blooper reel footage of Discovery. There's a lot more practical effects going on on the bridge than what I'd have thought. These see-through displays are actually practical and not post effects.

I'm wondering if the darker look is because they film Picard and Discovery with multiple cameras and there's more crew and equipment on set that might show up in stray reflections.

The “golden era” would consist of....TOS.

It's an artistic choice, it's not meant to say anything about technology. To the extent that it does say anything about technology, it's the HDR video of the present day that makes a difference.

Heavily chiaroscuro lighting is a trend, like the orange-and-blue colour grading that preceded it. It looks like the Expanse has gone for "just blue" with occasional red highlights. A side effect of this is unfortunately unnatural-looking skin tones. Absolute peak example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5438bd1be4b044...

Look at what's highlighted in red there. If it helps, run it through an aggressive blur filter and look at what shapes remain. Face of the woman on the left, details of her uniform, the ship on the display in the middle, and balanced out with the guy at the back right in a red zone.

(Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)

It may also be a deliberate contrast with the dated future of 2001 and subsequent works where interiors were often extremely white and clean.

This is also to tell the viewer who the people on screen are, because you start to subconsciously associate the color palette with different factions. Hence the blue lighting on UN ships and the red on Mars'.

> (Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)

I caught an episode of NCIS a few weeks ago and noticed they had a plexiglass screen up in the interrogation room cuz of covid.

But I also realized it let them get both characters' faces in the shot at the same time thanks to the reflection, despite sitting across the table from each other (and they of course framed everything to take advantage of this).

Same thing just 2020 version.

Not limited to Sci-Fi shows. I recall watching the first shows of CSI back in 2000 and thinking how dumb it was for the techs to work in those horribly dark labs.

I actually pondered this recently, as I watched an indie film where all the shots where lit quite realistically, meaning people had nice bright offices etc.

And it struck me that even though this lighting looked more proper, in terms of that's how an office would look if someone worked in it, it just didn't look as good or interesting as those with more contrast ala CSI.

I'm sure it can be done, but it's probably easier to get an interesting look with more shadows rather than less.

Something I noticed when reading the books is that the authors describe the specific type of LED lighting in every scene they introduce:

> The tunnel outside was white where it wasn’t grimy. Ten meters wide, and gently sloping up in both directions. The white LED lights didn’t pretend to mimic sunlight.

> The lights—recessed white LEDs—gave the gray walls a sterile cast.

> They drank it without talking [...] in the artificial morning of the room’s LEDs.

> The lights were cheap LEDs tinted a false pink that was supposed to flatter the complexion but instead made everyone look like undercooked beef.

A lot of the settings in the Expanse are located in remote areas (often far away from the sun), where spare parts are rare and energy is expensive - at least more expensive than on Earth.

Additionally, people work in shifts on all stations and ships, and you can't constantly mess up people's circadian rhythm by simulating daylight 24/7.

Ironically, in the first book they talk about how a station is always lit to simulate daylight 24/7 :P Something about how they used to simulate a day/night cycle but stopped.

Huh I guess I'll need to read that again, too bad :)

It looks way cooler.

>Why there is no light on space Sci Fi series or movies?.

Besides artistic choices, for the same reason many devs prefer to work in near darkness with dark mode UIs.

I for one wouldn't be letting bright light anywhere near my spaceship's interior...

That said, many sci-fi movies/series have plenty of light internally: Star Trek and Star Wars for two big ones...

>We know that we need strong light exposure in order not the develop illnesses like myopia. Mood is affected badly by lack of light.

Not a problem in 2520 A.D.

> Not a problem in 2520 A.D.

FWIW, Klingon ships were famously dark in the Star Trek's golden era, and also full of vapor/smoke obstructing vision. Obviously, this was done to make them seem more menacing. However, some fans - myself included - adopted an in-universe explanation: Klingon eyes respond to a slightly different slice of the EM spectrum than human ones; their ships are well-lit, just on the wavelengths imperceptible to us (probably infrared, and the dark reddish illumination we see is just what bleeds over to human-perceptible wavelengths), and the vapors are transparent on those wavelengths too.

I don't think it's just artistic choice. Well lit things are also more expensive.

Imagining and depicting s society as advanced as ST is no small task

Literally in the first episode, one character has a nervous breakdown and I quote: "We can so far into the darkness. Why couldn't we have brought more light?"

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