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A Space Opera, a Mystery and an Intrigue Walk Into a Bar

Promotional Image from The Expanse on SyFy

Promotional Image from The Expanse on SyFy

 

It was more subtle than I expected, for some reason.  In the Expanse we are following, essentially, three different types of stories with three different visual directions.

The first is Noir Detective tale about a cop, hard-boiled right down to the hat.  Gritty, morally questionable, bloodied knuckles and twitchy informants, you could separate this tale out and have a tidy, stand along show all it’s own.  Yes, it’s set on a space-station, but you could take this story and plug it into the back-alley’s of any major port city in the world, it would be just as tight as well-handled.

The second is is pure Space Opera.  Borderline dysfunctional crew on an away-mission watches in horror as their ship is blown to smithereens.  As they work together, first towards safety and survival, next towards identifying the target of their revenge, they start to form a cohesive, if wary team.

Third is an absolutely gorgeous Palace Intrigue tale.  Lush environments, vaulted ceilings, wardrobes and fabrics to die for.  No fists, no guns, only words, sharp, lethal, beguiling and clever.  Careers and lives are ended without our characters lifting so much as a finger.

Each story follows its own thread, with the environments and directing styles built to match.  The interior of the Ceres is befitting a noir tale, dark, dimly lit with sharp shadows and more than your usual share of detritus in the corners and alleyways.  In contrast, the crew of the Canterbury goes from the interiors of the Cant to the Scopuli to the Rosinante, always well kept and orderly.  Even the old workhorse of the Canterbury was tidy, even in its moments of disrepair.  The intrigues on Earth take place in similarly appropriate surroundings.

All three stories are following the same mystery from different angles, giving us, the viewer, a complete picture.  A roundabout, if you will, where we can see the same event from every angle and every lens.

The interesting stuff is going to happen (for those of us with a yen for the visual design and thought processes) as these stories collide.  We had our first taste of it here at the end of Season One, where we see our Noir Detective meet up with the Plucky Space Crew.  It’s almost a shock to see those different presumptions, those different visual canons come together.  The same room with the Plucky Space Crew getting shot at takes on an ENTIRELY different light once our Detective shows up, our Detective looks out of place, a Noir character dropped into a blaster-fight in a brightly lit space. Once they ascend the stairs, we have a shift again, we move all the characters over into the Noir where our Detective looks entirely in his own element as they find the room where the person they have been searching for is holed up.

The visual language is just going to get more complex, and I am hugely interested to see if they continue this trend of casting the environments into a different light depending on which character is the lead in any given bit of the story.  I’m hoping they don’t end up with a homogenized look at the end of the day, but seeing it here, in the first season, suggests that the visual designers and directors are telling us this story on many levels, not just with the words and actions of the actors.

 

Background Noise in: The Force Awakens

Screenshot of Rey and Finn running from a tie-fighter

 

Normally I like a bit of punnage in the title, but I couldn’t think of a good one this time, my apologies.

So I’ve been to see the force awakens. I don’t think the below’s going to be terribly spoilery unless you’re an art nerd like myself.  Just in case though, stop here if you haven’t seen it yet.

 

 

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Okay, you’ve been warned.  Shall we press on?

One of my pet peeve’s in cinematic design is the recent trend towards the overuse of the visual noise used to kick environmental realism up a notch. We have a long pushed towards making scenes and backdrops lush and complex in order to make them feel like they are actual places. Like they are lived in.  The original Star Wars, Episode IV, was one of the first to make their universe feel really lived in. Spaceships were worn and dirty, robots had rust marks, random bits of sprue and geometric shapes could be seen littering the backdrops and worlds. Occasionally a random creature would wander through the establishing shot. It began a new way of looking at environments as characters (okay, not wholly new, Jim Henson and Co. laid some of the groundwork, you got me there.)

But the addition of wear and tear did not mean they had allowed their backgrounds to become busy. There is balance within the shot.  Background information is conveyed in layers of gray on gray on blacks, rather then each individual object being distinct and easy to recognize. Objects are vague, without an actual purpose to attach them to.  It conveys the impression of depth without giving us enough detail to linger and be confused.

The Star Wars prequels made the mistake of becoming self involved. The environments were glorious, hugely, delightfully detailed.  They are what you get when you allow your environment designers to pour all of their love into a project. But the environment designers are not supposed to be the guiding eye of any given scene.  They build their piece or pieces with an eye towards making that single part the best it can be.  They will build you something so beautiful it can make you weep, but once you throw characters into that environment everything changes. From a cinematic perspective it was easy to lose track of the action in those films, sometimes you had to hunt for the characters in scene. It gave you a more “real” world, but at the cost of the story.

The Force Awakens has taken lessons from both the classic Star Wars and the CGI heavy prequel. They still have enormous set pieces, epic scale architecture that reminds us just how small these characters are against the backdrop of the world, but the detail is dimmed by elements like atmospheric perspective, by thoughtful use of color and contrast (and often lack of contrast). There is just enough to tell you that the detail is there, but not so much that you spend all of your time trying to pick your characters out against it.

In TFA this extends to a depth that I have not seen very often in modern cinema. There are scenes in the film where stormtrooper battles take place in front of dark environments, the bright white of their suits making it easy to follow the action.  We see black empire ships silhouetted against the light sandy dunes of an alien world. The visual design is very thoughtful and goes along way towards enhancing the viewing experience.