Fans watching any J.J. Abrams movie have noticed that the director is rather fond of lens flares.
Abrams explained why he uses so many of them in his movies.
“I’ll say that when we were doing Trek, I loved this idea…” said Abrams.” The reason I wanted to do it was I love the idea that the future that they were in was so bright that it couldn’t be contained and it just sort of broke through.”
Lens flares have “this great streaky quality and I’ve always loved how that looks,” said Abrams. “There are so many movies from my childhood that had those that when we were shooting Star Trek I remember saying to Dan Mindel, the DP [director of photography], ‘It would be so much fun if we’ — I didn’t think we were going to have quite that number of them, but it became this thing, and it was ridiculous.”
According to Stephen Colbert, a Trek fan counted seven hundred-and-twenty-one lens flares in Star Trek (2009), and eight hundred-and-twenty-six of them in Star Trek into Darkness.
Even his wife thinks that Abrams has overdone the lens flare. “There was literally one scene where Alice Eve, who acts in the movie, was so obliterated by a lens flare and I was showing the scene to my wife Katie, who just said, ‘Okay, you know what? Enough,'” said Abrams. “‘I can’t see what this scene is about. Who is standing there?’ I’m like, ‘It’s Alice Eve.’ And she’s like, ‘I cannot see her!'”
Don’t expect to see so many flares in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “…As you’ll see in the Star Wars movie, I’ve allowed lens flares to take a very back seat,” said Abrams.
Source: Tech Insider
