Tag Archives: scan lines

R. S. Revenge Comms

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Note: In honor of the season, Rogue One opening this week, and the reviews of Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series behind us, I’m reopening the Star Wars Holiday Special reviews, starting with the show-within-a-show, The Faithful Wookie. Refresh yourself of the plot if it’s been a while.

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On board the R.S. Revenge, the purple-skinned communications officer announces he’s picked up something. (Genders are a goofy thing to ascribe to alien physiology, but the voice actor speaks in a masculine register, so I’m going with it.)

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He attends a monitor, below which are several dials and controls in a panel. On the right of the monitor screen there are five physical controls.

  • A stay-state toggle switch
  • A stay-state rocker switch
  • Three dials

The lower two dials have rings under them on the panel that accentuate their color.

Map View

The screen is a dark purple overhead map of the impossibly dense asteroid field in which the Revenge sits. A light purple grid divides the space into 48 squares. This screen has text all over it, but written in a constructed orthography unmentioned in the Wookieepedia. In the upper center and upper right are unchanging labels. Some triangular label sits in the lower-left. In the lower right corner, text appears and disappears too fast for (human) reading. The middle right side of the screen is labeled in large characters, but they also change too rapidly to make much sense of it.

revengescreen Continue reading →

Siege Support

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When Section 9 launches an assault on the Puppet Master’s headquarters, Department Chief Aramaki watches via a portable computer. It looks and behaves much like a modern laptop, with a heavy base that connects via a hinge to a thin screen. This shows him a live video feed.

The scan lines on the feed tell us that the cameras are diegetic, something Aramaki is watching, rather than the "camera" of the movie we as the audience are watching. These cameras must be placed in many places around the compound: behind the helicopter, following the Puppet Master, to the far right of the Puppet Master, and even floating far overhead. That seems a bit far-fetched until you remember that there are agents all around the compound, and Section 9 has the resources to outfitted all of them with small cameras. Even the overhead camera could be an unoticed helicopter equipped with a high-powered telephoto lens. So stretching believability, but not beyond the bounds of possibility. My main question is, given these cameras, who is doing the live editing? Aramaki’s view switches dramatically between these views as he’s watching with no apparent interaction.

A clue comes from his singular interaction with the system. When a helicopter lands in the lawn of the building, Aramaki says, "Begin recording," and a blinking REC overlay appears in the upper left and a timecode overlay appears in the lower right. If you look at the first shot in the scene, there is a soldier next to him hunched over a different terminal, so we can presume that he’s the hands-on guy, executing orders that Aramaki calls out. That same tech can be doing the live camera switching and editing to show Aramaki the feed that’s most important and relevant.

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That idea makes even more sense knowing that Aramaki is a chief, and his station warrants spending money on an everpresent human technician.

Sometimes, as in this case, the human is the best interface.