Star Trek: The Next Generation Would Look Amazing In Cinerama, See The Proof Here
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You might remember a while back when we ran a story about a mad genius who fiddled with footage from from Star Trek: The Original Series to show us what it would have looked like as a widescreen Cinerama presentation. He basically found scenes that included a long, one-take camera pan and edited them into a single widescreen image. The results were bloody gorgeous, and now artist Nick Acosta has done the same thing for The Next Generation, with equally stellar results.
While The Next Generation got the same high-def upgrade as its predecessor when it was released on Blu-ray, the show was still shot in the old boxy 4:3 format, and Acosta’s images make us wish we could borrow one of Trek’s numerous methods of time travel and venture back to the ’80s to convince the producers to shoot the thing widescreen. Star Trek’s supposed to be an optimistic, hopeful vision of our future. Surely that doesn’t include 4:3.
In fact, you’ve probably noticed that Acosta’s Trek shots are even wider than the widescreen presentations we’re used to. See, the artist is actually imitating the ridiculously wide format of Cinerama, a largely abandoned format that used three cameras projecting onto an enormous curved screen. The results of Acosta’s Next Gen experiment really give you a deeply immersive sense of actually being aboard the Enterprise, so I can only imagine how much that effect would be magnified if these things were actually thrown up on a giant screen.
Acosta’s Original Series work obviously caught a lot of people’s attention, so he created the glorious widescreen Next Gen shots for the Bay Area Science Festival. It’s just a shame creating these stills is a helluva lot easier than creating the same effect on the episodes themselves. Maybe the guys at Area 51 have some sort of alien tech that could help us out. Come on, men in black, help a guy out already…
