So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  Helping to bring the look of Battlestar Galactica to life was production designer Richard Hudolin, whose prior credits include the TV series Profit, Stargate SG-1, Haunted, and Dead Like Me, and whose inclusion was considered surprising to some, given that the intent was to avoid people who had operated within the sci-fi genre previously, out of fear of a familiar design aesthetic.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I was involved with the production design and had met with a few different production designers, looking at different ways of going at it.

  MARK STERN

  Angela Mancuso was running the studio at the time. I had been there, I want to say, maybe two or three weeks at most. I walked into a meeting where they were talking about production designers. They basically had three different people in mind they were considering. The studio’s position was, “All right, we’re going to make a decision on one of these three designers, period.” One of them had just done a sword-and-sandal epic, and one of them was an art director—not production designer—from Titanic. I can’t remember the third, but they were all very much not right, in my opinion. I remember it being really intimidating, because here I am with the guys and the head of the studio, and I’m like, “Um, I’m not really okay with any of them.” And it got heated, because it became a bit of a thing. I remember at one point I think David said, “Well, if we don’t make a decision on this now, we are probably going to have to push production.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Richard Hudolin came in and he had come off of Stargate, I believe. At first I was a bit skeptical, because I was trying to stay away from pieces like Stargate, but Richard had a very strong sense of design and was very enthusiastic, and I quickly got sold on him.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  Richard Hudolin was a bit of a genius magician. I don’t know how he built what he built with the money and time that he had, but he and his art director, Doug Drexler, had this knack for just repurposing sets over and over and over, and rebuilding them.

  MARK STERN

  I had been a really big fan of Richard Hudolin’s for a while, and in fact he had worked on this Painkiller Jane pilot, and I was familiar with him because he had also done the pilot for Dead Like Me. He had a really great background in this kind of genre. And so I said, “What about Richard Hudolin?” and they thought that was a great idea. That was my first real meeting on the project.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  I met with David Eick and Michael Rymer and we talked about the project. When I walked out of the room, David said to me, “By the way, we will need to see a presentation by January sixth.” I turned around and said, “Are you nuts?” because it was, like, two days before Christmas. He wanted to see conceptual drawings for the battlestar Galactica and all the major sets. I took Christmas Day and the legal holidays off, and spent those with family. I had people in from out of town. They showed up and I said I would be at the studio and would be back in twelve hours, but it worked out okay. Myself and three others worked over the holidays at Lionsgate Studios. It was actually kind of strange, because there was no one on the lot. You would show up and there would be three other cars there and that would be it. So we worked over Christmas. On January fifth I flew down, and presented on the sixth. After everybody had their holiday, they were all nice and refreshed and I showed up. I showed them our drawings and concepts and they all bought into them.

  In that first meeting, they certainly had some idea as to what they wanted, but I had only had one pass at the script at that point, so I was listening to what they had talked to their people about. I am like a sponge at that point, because obviously they had sold something to somebody to get the project up and running. I was listening very carefully to what they said they would do and what they would provide, and out of that mostly was coming that they wanted to see something that nobody had ever seen before. It was, like, stay away from any of the conventions of sci-fi and spaceships and control rooms and stuff like that. They didn’t want to have things like a viewing window, for example, or a commander’s chair. There were a number of things that sometimes weren’t said, but it was obvious that they didn’t want. So it was more a matter of what you leave off the screen as opposed to what you put on it. What I put on it was totally up to me and there were certain functions we had to address, but other than that it was do what you want; show us something that we haven’t seen before so the audience will see it as something fresh and new.

  Following that first presentation, Hudolin had to make a second one for Bonnie Hammer, whose comments, like those of the producers of the show, centered more around the unconventional.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  We got into a very interesting geometric form and formality in reference to some American architects. There were many subtle references to Frank Lloyd Wright; his attitudes and theories were applied to a lot of designs. You won’t see it. In terms of the philosophy of the design, some of the subtleties you might notice if you knew the man’s work and most Americans do, whether they know it or not. That was a big influence.

  TODD SHARP

  There was just such a connection between Richard and that show. He understood what Ron wanted and he lived it. And by the time we were done with the series, because we kept adding on little bits and pieces to sets, we had built so many miles of corridor around our stages. I, who had spent dozens and dozens of days there on the set over the course of the series, would get lost in the middle of that set. And not know how to get out, because it was so massive. Richard was a genius at creating modular sets, the ready room turned into the conference room turned into this room turned into that room. All of our sets with minor modifications would become a different set.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  With the CIC, when you start with the premise that you don’t want it to be like anything you’ve seen before, you’re left in a big scary void and you don’t know where to go. I started thinking what is essentially the bridge as the nerve center. What we were trying to bring together was the physicality of the ship, the machine and Commander Adama and the crew—man and machine, basically. I tried to create almost an operating theater. It’s in the round. It’s got two levels, so you have the upper gallery and the lower gallery. Everything is focused to the center point. Usually in a set like that you are looking out to something. While in this they are looking inward. Adama doesn’t even have a chair to sit in. He’s constantly walking or he’s at the central table and the table has its own lighting source. A lot of the lighting sources are coming from the tables and underneath.

  It’s got what I call the periscope above it, and nobody really got the periscope even in the concepts. I was saying it will come down, like a periscope in a submarine, and you can see space. Basically it’s information from all the sensors around the ship. Until I actually showed it to them on the set during construction, and said we can drop this thing into frame on camera and we can present this—once we got it there, everybody loved it and used it constantly. But getting it there was the laughingstock of the show. Basically, like I said, it was like an operating theater in the round. I thought of Shakespeare in the Round.

  One thing that did change was the degree of aging on the ship. Because the ship was going to be mothballed, they had pretty much restored it so it would be very pristine. It would almost look brand new, because it’s scheduled to become a museum. As we went into building the sets and people would come up and look, they would say maybe it should have a little more aging; maybe it should be like the older rust bucket. So we went back and forth a little bit on that and found a compromise where we aged it a little bit. Some areas weren’t so much aged, but others were. There was a concept at one point—prior to my involvement—where the ship was basically going to be Das Boot in space, but we went away from that.

  In the design of the exterior of the Galactica, Hudolin worked closely with the late visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel, a veteran of several Star Trek series.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  When I was
presenting the interiors in L.A., Gary was presenting some exteriors. When we did the second presentation, we hit upon a design that he had in the back of his book and said, “That’s it! That’s the look we want for the Galactica exterior.” They were basically going to maintain that pontoon kind of thing and integrate it into the design, but that was not the primary motivation of the design. The surface treatment is fabulous. It had a very thin feeling to it. It was very cool-looking, and I said to Gary, “I can work with that.” We worked very closely on it, and I made a big effort to integrate that, especially into the hallways. So all of the hallways reflect this thin-like sealant. Gary and I talked about concepts and what the show would entail and how we like to work. It’s such a collaborative industry. I can’t imagine designing something that is not going to match the interior to the exterior. I would say, “Gary, here is what we are doing, just so you know and build this into your design.” We did it on things like the transport ship. A lot of that is going to be the exteriors totally visually done. The interior we went to a location and then we did some work on the location. So his exterior has to reflect what we were able to find and what we were able to do with it.

  There were about forty sets built early on, all of which were built at Vancouver’s Lionsgate Studios. There were three stages that were “flipped” (in rotation for different sets). That last stage was turned into a green-screen stage where, among other things, cockpit work for the Vipers was filmed.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  We built the Vipers in a whole different way. We didn’t use the traditional building techniques, the ribs and stuff like that. Our construction coordinator came up with a great idea. We drew them up and we’d get these huge blocks of foam that come in at four-by-four-by-eight-feet blocks. He would get a template from one end to the other, keep in mind that the Viper has that long sleek nose. Well, he cut that shape really quickly. Once we had the spaces cut, we would build some structure into it. It’s easy to cut it out and split it and then put steel structure in it, because we have people in it. That’s the easy part. The hard part is getting the nice finish. So we started with the nice finish and built everything else inside of it. We sprayed a hard coat over it. Sanded that and then you paint that and it comes out with the finish you need. You can drop this thing, you can throw hammers at it and it won’t break.

  For the miniseries, we built one complete exterior/interior, one complete exterior and partial interior so it could be a background ship. We built a partial Mark VII and that included the cockpit and enough of the engines behind it so you could shoot it without green screen and the nose. We did a shot coming into the bay and even though it’s a partial, people would swear it’s a full ship, because of the way Michael Rymer directed and shot it. We built a full Raptor exterior and interior that was actually flyable. We had a hundred-foot crane and we lifted it off the ground. It’s actually based on an Apache helicopter. It’s a surveillance ship. It goes out there and gets all the information, so it could be a little more clunky.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The second-season episode “Valley of Darkness” was a tough one. It had Cylons board the ship and we’re fighting up the corridor. It was on our standing sets, which helped. Doing a lot of action on a TV budget and on a TV production schedule is always really tough. And this one had CG Cylons on top of it. So I remember really struggling with all the logistical problems with this. You know, how much fighting could there be in the corridors? Trying to set up the CG Cylons and Centurions coming through the corridors. Where Lee Adama was going to be, where were the people that he was trying to protect. Then there were sort of practical problems in terms of filming the big standing sets of the Galactica—but we needed them to feel like multiple corridors on different decks and be able to track it coherently for the audience so that you could track, “The Cylons came in here, the good guys are over there, the bad guys are trying to get to this location,” and do it all within the same basic run of corridors and ladders and actions that we’d had since the beginning of the show. And then you’re fighting time and money: How much money is this going to be? How much stunt players and live firing all these weapons? It was really complex.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  The interior of the ship itself was based on the figure eight. Remember the scene in the miniseries where Kara is running? She’s basically running a figure-eight course, and the camera guy just wanted to kill me, because I had designed it that way. It just took a lot out of him. But the whole figure-eight concept for the entire ship gave you continuous walks-and-talks and that kind of thing. And then the detailing was us getting in there and saying, “Well, what’s that thing?” “Oh, that’s an air scrubber, or this and that.” It took a while, but I had the time to design it properly. I also had the talent of people around me who were really into it, and excited about it. A lot of people brought a lot of things to that design and that set.

  The real challenge was creating a cross between military and science fiction, because we have so many years of science fiction now in film and television, that there are common things that people rely on to say, “Oh, this is sci-fi, right?” Everybody’s trying to be a little different, but the military is the military and sci-fi is sci-fi. So I’d come up with the basic ideas, do some sketches, do some drawings of them, explain the whys and wherefores. But the thing is, this isn’t a full-on army or air force of space kind of thing. This is a people thing. So the blending of the military, the people, and the space thing is quite difficult, and it takes a long time to do it. Well, it took me a lot of time to do it.

  Like everything else, the visual effects for the show were intended to be different from the types of effects shots that had been utilized previously in the genre on television. The answer came in the form of Hutzel, whom Moore had known from his Star Trek days on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  It was a stroke of genius on David Eick’s part, first for hiring Ron Moore. He just intuitively understood that everyone involved in this show was completely burned out on this genre. Not that there was anything wrong with them, but that vein had been mined pretty thoroughly, and there was a generation of very highly skilled people looking to push the boundaries in other directions. Ron and then Gary Hutzel fit that beautifully. Gary turned out to be a great asset, and so enthusiastic. He appreciated what we were trying to do more than anyone. This is his world and we were in a way opening up other areas that all visual effects designers could build on. I’m not saying we started anything, but we were trying to be part of a progressive thing.

  GARY HUTZEL

  (visual effects supervisor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I had originally worked with Ron Moore on Star Trek, and I had heard he was doing Galactica. I had originally heard about it when it was Tom DeSanto’s production. I had actually talked to someone in his office at that time and they said they were not hiring a supervisor right now. And then that eventually just petered out. So I sent Ron an email saying hi, it’s great to hear that you’re doing more space stuff, hope things go well. He emailed me back literally five minutes later and said, “Send your résumé over immediately.” So I did and met with David Eick and Michael Rymer and we hit it off, and all of us agreed as a group as to what was to come out of this. The new look, the new approach to the way the visual effects should be shown.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Gary Hutzel came in sort of unexpectedly for visual effects. I had gotten a call from David saying, “There’s this guy, Gary Hutzel, who we’re talking about for VFX. He says he worked with you on Star Trek. What do you think of him?” I said, “Oh, shit, why didn’t I think of that? Gary would be perfect.” I had actually had early conversations with Gary about the handheld style and sort of naturalism-in-space approach, and he was really enthused about it. Gary had made the transition from model-based visual effects work to full-on CG, so he was really excited about the possibilities of what could happen in that staged reality.

 
MIKE GIBSON

  (visual effects producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Up until this time, visual effects were done like this: an establishing shot, especially in space, of a planet or a spaceship, and then maybe you’ve got some laser fire or some burn-ins, wire removal and whatnot. People were not making fully animated CGI characters that have their own personality. People were not making large fleet spaceships and then doing multiple dogfights. You’ve got your Star Treks, and that’s where Gary comes out of. You’ve got to remember, Gary comes out of the miniature world, where you actually make models and you shoot them, and you light them, and you do multiple passes of them on film, and then you begin to composite these things all together. And one shot could be anywhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars. So our show comes in at the right time, when the prices begin to drop to do CG.

  So you go through this process and you break it down: What is the most important element that we can bring to help tell the story? One thing that Gary always said is, “We never fear the render.” In the visual effects business, if you said, “Hey, we’re gonna put a full CGI robot and it’s going to interact in this scene, and we’re going to have all these shots,” a lot of people get a little nervous and begin to run from that, because it takes a lot of calculation of computers to put that together. So when we started, the pricing had started to come down, and when Gary would say “never fear the render,” what it means is, “If you have to put that shot in and it’s going to cool out for three or four days to render, well, we’re going to wait, because we’re going to get a really good shot.” In a lot of our business, people will maximize, cut things out to try and reduce that time to make it manageable. “Never fear the render.”

  The other thing he said was, “Never fear the amount of shots. Never fear the volume of shots.” When you go into any project, there’s goals that your bosses have, like Ron and David and the Mark Sterns of the world, but you have to also have your own personal goals. Every season, Gary and I would set those goals out. The first season was that we needed to tell dynamic visual-effects-storytelling sequences. Not shots. So this gets back to old types of visual effects series, space series. We did not want to tell our stories with establishing shots.