It gives them that sense of industrial waste, and I love it. Anything sentient is usually a brilliant shade of white to emphasise its purity, while all the other detritus of the universe is in healthy shades of matte black, faded babyshit brown, rusty orange and metallic grey.
Apart from the Monolith, but even then the black of that is pretty pure, as if to stress it's very existence in the vastness of space.
>>3118 That's quite a nice way of putting it. I've seen it in props for other films, too. SFX students tend to make far more colourful spaceships, copper tones and suchlike. A trick of the trade for the pros, maybe?
It's really all due to the art direction. A lot of the classic sci-fi was made in a relatively brief period so the aesthetics of grungy, cyberpunk looking technology are carried around.
Modern SFX draw from different inspirations and such, you can see a few trends across major film and game releases recently - just compare Avatar and Halo for example.
On a wee tangent here, the Avatar spacecraft was actually really well designed and a good bit of hardcore sci-fi sensibility. Shame it was wasted on SUCH A BORING FUCKING FILM.
May I also recommend the work of Peter Konig? He was the main artistic driving force behind Splice and Hellgate: London, although he's worked on some other well-known projects too. I'm pleased to see he's now working for Valve.
http://conceptart.org/?artist=Peter+Konig http://www.peterhkonig.com/#/101617/990826/ Point of interest: Most of these sculptures are hand made from found objects & super sculpey then imported to a computer using a 3D scanner before being animated. I especially like the one with a moth for a head.
>>3123 He's also an owner or director of some sort for the company Massive Black, their portfolio's pretty fun to browse through
http://www.massiveblack.com
