So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  GARY HUTZEL

  Fundamentally, one of the things we were striving to do on the show is to go beyond the regular integration of visual effects, where all the set extensions have a great, natural look. The idea was to take the overall feel from the camerawork and style of the show inside the Galactica to outside the Galactica as well. Some of that falls into the purview of specific rules. There are no magic platforms for camera. We don’t swoop through space. We are hitchhiking with other ships. We stay with the ships just as a chase camera would in a live-action show. So that changes the texture of a lot of what we were doing. Also, we were following real physics—we were not cheating.

  ERIC CHU

  (art director, Enigma Studios)

  At the very beginning, Battlestar Galactica was going through many different approaches. At one point they were aiming for a rusty, old, smashed-up metal battleship kind of look. At other times they were thinking of giving it a very closed and antiseptic 2001 look. So initially our designs were quite close to the original show’s designs. In the case of the Galactica, we started by doing an updated version. We experimented with the landing pod bays and how many struts it had—mainly cosmetic changes very similar to the way the Enterprise was updated for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

  GARY HUTZEL

  Then they said, “Come back with a totally different look. We don’t want to be that strongly related to the original design.” Of course, there were considerations. The story was written around the original design, from the launching tubes to the landing bays and all of that. So we had to take into account all those elements.

  MIKE GIBSON

  We were drawing spaceship after spaceship. You had to give a nod to the original Galactica, certainly, because the design and the shape is amazing. But we also wanted to set it apart. One of the things that I find invaluable when you’re working with a creative team and get into a kind of stumbling block, is walk away. Go think about something else. The facility is in Chinatown in Vancouver, so I said, “Let’s walk down to the Vancouver Public Library and go to the art section and open up some books.” And that’s what we did.

  ERIC CHU

  We started with a trip to the library to look at different architectural styles. Specifically Frank Lloyd Wright and retro starting points. During my research I discovered a photo of a set of vases created by industrial designer Andrea Branzi. These vases, with their distinctive steel-ribbed exterior, were the inspiration for the new Galactica’s modernized surface treatment. Just as a suggestion, I scanned the picture into Photoshop and quickly put together a makeshift spaceship. At that point it didn’t look anything like the Galactica, but more like a 1950s rocket ship. We showed it to the network and they jumped on it. They liked that a lot and once that was approved, then we started to pull it back. We used that same surface treatment, but tried to make it look more like the Galactica so the fans wouldn’t kill us. I would say the new design looks quite a bit more industrial. It’s much more military; more hard-edged.

  MIKE GIBSON

  One of the reasons we justified the ribs is if the ship took a nuclear hit, it was stronger. That the force of that blast would be taken over the whole superstructure of the ship. We were trying to build in a certain amount of science. One of the things that was always really important to Gary is that he would say, “Even though we’re living in science fiction, let’s try and make the science work as best as we possibly can.”

  The ship didn’t change a lot. Besides the ribbing, we knew we needed to have retractable pods. Well, the retractable pods were kind of new, right? In the old Galactica from the previous series, they kind of hang out on the ship. We wanted the sense that, because when you deal with our world of visual effects, any time you can animate or move something, it adds life to it. Gary called the ships potatoes—that we didn’t want it hanging there like a potato. We needed it to have its own language in its life. So the retractable pods became extremely important. The idea of the faster-than-light jumping, which did not occur in the original series. The idea of being able to jump through space and time—that these pods would come into the ship and then the ship would jump.

  We worked very hard with David and Ron to create what the optical look would actually be. We didn’t want it to look like Star Trek or Star Wars. It really had to have its own language. In terms of designing dogfight sequences, we watched tremendous amounts of World War II, Black Sheep, Zeroes … all kinds of airplane footage. That wing cam hooked on to the Vipers was a style that Gary was really developing with Zoic Studios, our partners up there for the miniseries and season one of the show.

  Richard Hudolin and [art director] Doug McLean, from there their interior design of all the ribbing and whatnot totally began to jibe with what we were doing. Richard was an extremely giving production designer; his attitude was, “Guys, here are some things that I’m concerned about, but go with it and have some fun and come back.” We had a little bit of liberty working with Richard. Working with some production designers, they want immense control over that. That was not Richard. Richard was like, “You guys do visual effects. That’s not my business. I want some input, but go, go, go.” He was an amazing partner to work with in terms of beginning to flesh out the visual style of the show and what the ships were going to look like.

  Unlike the original series, no physical models were created for this production. Artists at Zoic Studios, chosen to handle the effects for the miniseries, used 3-D models built in LightWave to create all the computer-generated effects. Back in 1978, the model builders detailed the original Galactica miniature with pieces from various military, Earth spacecraft, and aircraft model kits. This intricate detailing—commonly referred to as “nurnies” in the industry—added scale and weight to a model when photographed. CG supervisor Lee Stringer, the lead modeler for Zoic, who also worked on the Tom DeSanto production, borrowed on those techniques by creating a library of CG model parts to detail the revamped battlestar and the fleet.

  LEE STRINGER

  (CG supervisor, Zoic Studios)

  When you just do something in CG, often it’s just too sterile and a little bit too precise. When you do a physical model, if a piece doesn’t quite fit, you can cut it or twist or whatever. When you do it in CG, you can make it fit precisely, and that preciseness gives it a more CG look. One of the things we tried to do was not make it look quite so natural. So when we built the models, the area details were built from a lot of new CG model kit pieces thrown in here and there to give it that kind of chaos. That kind of randomness.

  GARY HUTZEL

  Fundamentally, I credit the director for that and, in all fairness, David Eick. David was a very strong proponent of embracing what was good about the original show. Obviously the Galactica was important, but the Viper was the ship we were most intimate with.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  Most spaceship shows are shot on very wide lenses, perfectly posed cameras. Our cameras are panning and crashing around the sky looking for Cylons.

  On the advice of several CGI professionals, Hutzel approached Pierre Drolet, a 3-D modeler at Eden FX, about designing the series’ signature fighter. As it turned out, the artist had already modeled a Viper for the then-in-production Battlestar Galactica Sony PlayStation 2 video game, and promptly emailed Hutzel the file.

  GARY HUTZEL

  It was a great rethinking of the original Viper. He had some of the elements that we had discussed, like multidirectional engines, already incorporated into his design. So this was a marriage made in heaven. When the art department built the full-size props, they took their own artistic license, so the ship changed quite a bit from Pierre’s design, but still has all the same tones. It’s not the departure I would have made for a spacecraft, because there is very little detailing on the surface, but the Viper plays beautifully.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  We would ask for three ships coming together, and when we got it back from Gary and his team, there would be twenty. They would constantly amaze u
s. They did so many great effects, but the standout for me was in part two of “Exodus” where the Galactica comes through the atmosphere on fire. Just an awesome visual image, and I’ve got to give those guys credit. Some of them would say, “I’m coming in on the weekend just to add more, because we want the show to be better.” Things like that would happen, and it doesn’t happen often. The quality combined with the emotional place that it came in that episode was just so powerful. The effects were in service of the story at all times, and they were so dead-on perfect for what we were trying to accomplish. I think they hold up incredibly well. It’s amazing how fast effects look dated, even when you look at movies from the early 2000s, but Battlestar effects hold up really well.

  MIKE GIBSON

  The show is called Battlestar Galactica, so the ship itself is in the name of the title. Therefore it needed to feel like a real living character within the show in terms of how Gary wanted to express flybys, how we wanted to express moving around the ship. All very important things. As well as the snap zoom … I’m going to call it verité kind of style. Once again, no one had really seen it. It kind of had been explored in Firefly, but taken to a whole new level as Gary really began to develop that aesthetic and that look.

  GARY HUTZEL

  When I did Deep Space Nine, I did dogfights sixteen ways from Sunday and at a certain point you have to step outside the parameters. The battle scenes on Galactica are very messy. They are very sloppy. You have cameras picking up the battle from obscure places. We’ll be looking at the battle from a camera placed on a ship outside the battle monitoring what’s going on and then cut into the midst of it, and then travel to the enemy lines. So what you end up with is something that fits into the style of the rest of the show, which is a very documentary kind of look.

  David Eick wanted to be involved in everything. A lot of execs don’t; they just want to hear about it. He wanted to know and he wanted to be informed at every step. He wanted to be involved with the actual designs of the ships. In fact, he was more involved with the designs than Michael Rymer was. Although Michael had a lot of great input as well, but he was like, “As long as it does this, this and this, you guys take care of the rest.” So we had a great team going for that reason. It was literally the greatest collaboration I have ever experienced.

  TODD SHARP

  There’s lots of good reasons to go with facilities for your effects, but what you’re really doing is paying for overhead. You’re paying for the real estate. You’re paying for the coffee girl. You’re paying for the other shows over there that are losing money for them. You’re paying for lots of things at a facility when you’re basically just paying for artists and equipment. But once you own the equipment, you never have to buy the equipment again. Now you’re just paying for artists. There’s huge economies of scale. You can see, as the series goes on, our visual effects numbers did not go up, even as the ambition of the shots that we were doing did.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  By the time we got to the season-one episode “Hand of God,” that was a heavy visual effects episode. That’s where Gary Hutzel was starting to slowly build the team that would be our complete Galactica unit. At the outset when we did the miniseries, Zoic did the balance of visual effects. We continued with them into the first season, but Gary started using other visual effects houses as well. He was also slowly building an internal team that would ultimately just take over all the visual effects work for the show, and you can kind of see the transition. We do start doing more and more visual effects work, and, ironically, the cost kept coming down and down. So you kept being able to put more of them into the show. And there was a huge amount of stuff in that show. There’s a bit where Lee finds himself alone and he’s sort of inside the Cylon base in his Viper. He literally stops the ship and is hovering, turning around and trying to figure it out. That’s one of those things that people just don’t do. There’s no X-wing stops in Star Wars, because everybody treats them like airplanes, you know? So suddenly you see one of our supposed airplanes stop and hover and turn around; it’s kind of startling and cool.

  Every department utilized on the show was united by the desire to bring something unique to the mix, and that included cinematography. The miniseries employed Joel Ransom (The X-Files, Band of Brothers, Taken), though the series itself would be shot by Stephen McNutt, whose credits at that point included SeaQuest DSV, Spy Game, American Gothic (where he worked with David Eick), and The Dead Zone.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Joel Ransom did the miniseries. If you look at the miniseries carefully, you’ll see that we were still a little on the fence about it. Like the handheld quality of the interiors was not quite as aggressive as it became in the series itself. Because there was a sense from Michael Rymer of “I don’t know how well this handheld exterior work is going to go.” If the handheld quality of the fighters and the battles isn’t that good and has to go more traditional, he didn’t want a really huge disconnect between the interior scenes and the exterior scenes. As a result, the miniseries is a little more formal. It’s not quite as aggressively handheld as where we went with the show, because no one was quite comfortable with, were we going to be able to pull off the exterior stuff? And then after the miniseries was done and we thought about what was possible in the CG world, then we went much more aggressively into that territory in the show itself.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  I hired a wonderful cinematographer, Joel Ransom, who had coincidentally just finished shooting the American version of the English miniseries Traffic. He had three operators, and the director would set up three cameras and shoot everything, and he would be crossing the axis. I sort of inherited a crew that was on their game. But capturing that documentary look is a fine line, because the network was very shy about the idea. Firefly was sort of a touchstone to avoid as far as the network was concerned, because it had done so poorly. I had watched the show and it was quite well done with a lot of good ideas and good things about it. Maybe the overarching concept of the Western in space is a little odd and audiences weren’t buying it. Who knows why people didn’t flock to it, but I thought that they had attempted some of the thing we wanted to attempt.

  STEPHEN MCNUTT

  (director of photography, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I met with Ron and David and it was a nice meeting and they basically gave me the job. They were going to switch to digital, which is one of the things that was going on in the industry at the time. Everything at that time was still being shot on film, but what they didn’t do was tell the network or the studio that they were doing this. Todd Sharp, who was the main guy on the studio side, said, “If you can shoot on digital and no one notices, you’re the guy that we want.”

  Ron’s a great friend of mine, and my first meeting with him was great, because I remember we were up at the Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver and we were sitting there talking about the look of the show. He said, “I want it to be gritty. I want it to be dark. I want it to be edgy, and I don’t give a fuck if I see anybody’s eyes.” And I said, “Okay, I can do that,” because it’s a need quite often—which is the failure of Voyager and the failure of the Star Treks and the failure of television dramas—they demand that everyone look beautiful and everything is attractive to everyone. This was not meant to be that.

  TODD SHARP

  Although Joel created the look of the show, it’s one thing to create that look when you have sixty days and multiple millions of dollars to shoot it. It’s another thing entirely when you’re making a show on an episodic basis for an episodic budget, to be able to achieve that look. That we have to thank Steve McNutt for. The man is a genius. Frankly, I don’t know that we would have jumped headfirst into high-def television photography if it weren’t for people like him doing what he did on Battlestar. By the way, that look he established—the grainy film look—he did that by boosting the gain and doing all sorts of tricks with light. There are a lot of shows on TV that look the way they do because Steve
McNutt did what he did on Battlestar. I firmly believe that.

  STEPHEN MCNUTT

  Celluloid is a chemical process, so when you photograph it, you have to send it to the lab and process, develop, and print it, and the negative gives you a work print. They cut it that way. Whereas the digital world is all internal in the computer system, and the image capture is on a sensor, not on the film, so essentially you’re not using the chemical base anymore, you’re using the computer’s ones and zeroes, and basically you’re creating your images that way. That does change your approach quite a bit, because in the film world you’re pretty much relying on your eyes and your meters. The other thing is that with film you don’t see dailies until the next day, and quite often you’re surprised by what you do see and you say, “That turned out really well,” or “I wish I had done that.” Whereas in the digital world, with the monitors what you see is pretty much what you get.

  Taking on the role of editor of the miniseries was Dany Cooper, who had worked with director Michael Rymer on the feature film Queen of the Damned. She did not ultimately remain with the television series, focusing instead on feature films. She would be succeeded by Andrew Seklir and, then, Michael O’Halloran.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Dany established the style of editing. You know, we weren’t afraid to jump the line. The thing that Dany said to me that I always remembered was, “This is the kind of show where we’re on people’s backs for really important lines.” I thought that was kind of cool. Michael came up with the whole thing of the really supertight shots on Adama’s eyes, his glasses. Dany would cut to Adama’s hands randomly in the scenes. Or she’d cut around the room or just find something to look at. So her style of editing the show was very influential. We took her style and kept expanding on it.