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Comment by DHPersonal | Hacker News Reader

As I looked through the shots of the chairs in the episodes, I noticed that the old shows had some wild lighting: sometimes like a Halloween set, sometimes like a task light was just set up on a tripod next to the camera, and sometimes like a cube farm. The new shows all seem to go for web developer's / Twitch streamer's dungeon with no overhead lighting, wall-mounted spotlights, and RGB rim lights everywhere.

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Arg! I can't find it now but a while back I read an amazing article discussing the set design on the original series; particularly for the alien planets. From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget. In that respect, while later entries in the series had much "better" sets, TOS had the strongest aesthetic.

> to compensate for their lack of budget

of the scanlines wink

> From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget.

I thought it was specifically because of (1) the color film process used at the time required it for faithful (-ish) reproduction, and (2) the need to make something that looked good on both black and white and color TVs, as lots of people were still using black and white.

As to the latter, my mom watched it on B&W originally, and then when it was rerun she had a color TV and was astonished that the skies on the alien planets weren't blue!

It's also just an artistic design choice. They tried very hard to make things look "alien" and "otherwordly" as much as possible, ranging from the set design to the costumes to the music to Starfleet sideburns.

For example sky can be any colour except blue, and doors can open every which way (except downwards, because that would require digging a hole in the set) and they make all sorts of sounds – as long as they're not "just" doors (they're "alien" doors!) They used those awkward holsters for phasers because pockets looked too "common".

Other more technical factors probably played a factor as well, but this also worked two ways and limited creativity: IIRC the origin skin colour for Vulcans was supposed to be red, but was changed to the off-white because the red didn't work on B&W.

Another thing I read somewhere (not sure if it's true) is that TOS used a lot of wacky colors because color TVs were new then, and so they were trying to get more people to watch the show by making it a bit of a showcase, much like "Planet Earth" was popular when FHD TVs were new because it showed the real potential of the technology.

The original Star Trek sets made a lot of use of gobos, patterned metal shadow casters placed in front of lights. You can see some uses of them in pictures here:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/mudds-gobos.276831/#post-113...

https://startrektour.com/photo-gallery/our-beautifully-recre...

and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.

Lighting in black and white movies was much more important where you didn't have the additional dimension of color. My understanding was the Star Trek lighting team came with black and white experience.

A lot of people were also watching it on black and white TVs.

The networks were just switching to color en masse around the time that Star Trek came out and the penetration of color TVs was still pretty low--well under 50%.

I recall B&W TVs still being available as a budget option in the early 80s, though by then most middle class homes had a color TV.

Where I came from, although most families had a colo[u]r primary tv, if there were any secondary tvs (kitchen, bedroom,...) those were b&w up until around 1985.

This is accurate. When I was growing up in the early 80s I loved Star Trek. We had 4 TVs but only one of them was color. That was reserved for my Dad (who hated Star Trek, but loved football). I grew up watching the original series on Black and White... and the lighting was quite perfect for that, even if it was pretty mauve and absurd in color. Also worth noting that the color TVs at the time tended to be very low contrast compared to what we have now. So heightening the shadows and highlights made perfect sense.

As a side note, my mom was an accountant at Paramount who handled residuals for Shatner, et al. She briefly dated Harlan Ellison before marrying my father, which might have explained his aversion to Star Trek and my banishment to the Black and White TVs while watching it. (When I was twelve or thirteen and got really into Ellison's fiction, she got alarmed and told me Harlan was "a creep" and left it there).

The upshot was I got to go onto the TNG set when I was a kid... which was both wildly exciting and sort of disappointing as it wasn't an actual starship. All I wanted was to be Wesley Crusher.

But yeah, we watched TOS in b&w.

[edit] even funnier side note, I used to tape Star Trek TOS on reruns while I was at school so I could watch it later on the color tv. I had figured out how to work the VCR timer by the time I was 11 or so. But there weren't any blank VHS tapes lying around. My dad had a collection of 100 or so tapes of movies from TV, with commercials and everything. Down near the bottom of the stacks were a bunch of tapes labeled "dirty movies 3,4,5" which I thought just meant they were bad recordings. So I was like, I can record over those, they won't notice.

My dad apparently tried to play his porn tapes and found a bunch of star trek videos and came to my bedroom in a rage, but then couldn't explain to me why "dirty movies" didn't mean "bad VHS recordings". Took me awhile to figure out since I'd never actually watched whatever was on the tapes first ;)

Even later! My grandparents still had a black and white "portable" in the kitchen in the early 90s. My friend (who was wealthy) still had a black a white portable that my friend's sister would watch soap operas on in the mid-90s.

We had a B&W portable that lived on top of the refrigerator but was dragged into the dining room to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy for weeknight dinners. The TV itself was from the 70s, but we were still using it in the early and mid 90s. It still had paint dried on its case from when my parents watched it while painting the rooms of the house.

To bring this conversation full-circle, we also watched those two shows for weeknight dinners, except for the one night a week that TNG was on.

(raises hand)

Not exactly the same, but I love the actor's "lighting" in old German expressionist silent films. Often, instead of using actual lighting, shadows and highlights were applied to actor's faces manually using makeup.

If anyone wants to take a look, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some great examples.

My daughter made me watch Nosferatu (1922) on a hundred year anniversary of the movie. Very interesting use of shadows.

I notice in old James Bond movies (and others) the lighting was rather simplistic. A big spotlight casting harsh shadows on the walls behind the main actors that don't make any sense if you stop to think about it. It seems more thought / technique is put into lighting design these days and it's probably better, though of course our current age has its own cliches (the Twitch dungeon style for example)

My son and I just watched our way through the Bond movies, and I remember this exactly. Was it “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” or one of the later Roger Moore gigs? I remember that one in particular was lit and shot exceptionally poorly.

This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.

Visual style of old James Bond movies was heavily influenced by Hitchcock's movies, specifically by North by Northwest

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