Когда некоторые фразы так и не удаётся расшифровать после десятикратного прослушивания, я начинаю сильно сомневаться в своём знании английского. Тем более что половину даже тех слов, что я поняла, я перевести всё равно не в состоянии. В том числе, кем работает половина этих людей.
Production
Richard Hudolin: When they hired me to do Galactica the only mandate was “show me something, we’ve never seen before”. Which was, when you think about it… it’s a dream on the one hand and nightmare on the other. Because you have no reference points.
Doug McLean: When we came into the series… Because we changed to HighDefinition instead of film. We did some camera test and found we had to take that edging even further.
Because we are shooting this in HighDefinition television it’s very crisp. It really pops colors, and you have to [?] that it doesn’t get too music video looking. So we’ve edged this thing incredibly, to the extent when you look at the screens and we’ve taken waxes and paints and literally gone over all of the screens to knock the brightness back.
Steven McNutt: Well’ we’ve decided a long ago… that visual style wanted to be very … snatty, is the word.
We attempted to make it a reality-based looking film. And of course we are now shooting HighDefinition 24p, which is exiting media, because we have create so many visual looks in the camera. It’s really digital format, it’s a different kind of a scan ray. What you are shooting right now is video, which is in interlaced format. And what we are shooting is a progressive scan format, which give you an illusion, a closure to what film will give you. I have control of the image with a master setup unit that I use and I go in to work with different grain structures or noise structures. I can work with contrasts, blacks&whites and highlights and shadows. And I can crush blacks down, I can blow the highlights up. And I can create colors with it, I can do all kinds of different things, that I do in this media, that a lot of people hadn’t started doing yet.
David Eick: Battlestar Galactica attempts to present its environments in as realistic a way as possible. So for example we shoot on lenses that are longer than you might expect to shoot a science-fiction show, where you might use a wide-angle lens to present a staggering vista or a glorious set. We shoot on the longer lens to feature the individual amidst the set versus the set.
Michael Rymer: The visual style - and it was very much Ron Moore and David Eick’s vision, before I was even brought in – was “we want to make a documentary style science-fiction show”. We want it to feel real. We want it to feel… to feel the grit of what it’s like to live in the space ship, what it’s like to have the world destroyed.
Steven McNutt: Doing a hand-held show is always a bit chaotic. Because it never lends itself to that much stability. The cameras are very heavy, so, you know, the camera operator is constantly trying to hold it up and… And it adds to the chaos of the show, which then helps the grittiness of the look.
Ronald D. Moore: That was one of the very first decisions, to make a show sort of a documentary look and feel to the whole thing. And that came…comes directly out of me working in science-fiction television, mostly Star Trek. If you look at the way Star Trek is shot, and produced, and realized, it hasn’t changed very much in the last 20 years. Realistically. It’s very, you know… The audience is distant from the material, you don’t believe anyone really lives aboard the Starship Enterprise. You got to imagine that they do, but you don’t really believe that people live and breath there, they live their day-to-day lives in that environment. It’s more escape, it’s a stylistic convention of what the future should be. I find that that distances the audience from the drama you are trying to tell. The further away you get from a real place and real people and real situations, the more the audience is just sort of watching the show, the less they are experiencing the show.
Steven McNutt: They are not laying it as you normally would another show, because they want it messy. And it is a very messy look. A lot of dark eyes, a lot of top light, a lot of, you know, just industrial type of looking space. Well, with Mary obviously, you make her look beautiful and Number Six has to look beautiful, but Eddie doesn’t want to look beautiful. He likes it the way he is and keeps saying “Don’t make me look too good”. And he is very serious about it. He likes… he likes the messiness of it all.
Patricia Murray: For the whole look of Battlestar we went for more of feature quality. Meaning it’s not how much make-up they wear, but it’s bringing out the essence and quality of the character. So we are saying that they may be actors who are only in the chair for a few minutes, and then we get more involved characters, like Number Six. Who is in my make-up chair from 45 to hour depending on the outfit she is wearing. And she allows me to [?] and help create Number Six’s look. I’m also working with the [?] and Steven in lightning her so she is almost illumines.
Gerald Gibbons: All looks are very…very modern looks. We are not trying to do cutting edge modern. Bu we are right in there if you look in magazines or other…other things. The people are wearing around you. We are kind of right in that niche of …we don’t have any futuristic hairstyles per se. The theme of the show was kind of to stay away from the weird hairdos and weird colors. Our military people are easily identifiable, all of girls have ponytails, all the guys have buzz cuts. You have to kind of match what the wardrobe is saying and… and you know, to have a wild hairdo and a normal wardrobe, you’d see that it wouldn’t work. So very day-wear look.
Glenne Campbell: Because everyone is running for their life, they didn’t grab a lot of cloth. When they left their home or their office or wherever it was. So it creates an interesting element for costuming. In that… It’s different, we don’t have a lot of clothing and costuming to deal with, but the ones that we do finally select have to be dead-on. And be able to function for the run of the series. It’s a shipping crisis so, you know, the edge has to be there. They haven’t had a lot of time to think about how they look.
Mike Mitchell: I generally like to construct stunts... And the majority of the stunts on our show are fight scenes and things like that. I generally like to construct them so the actors can do almost all of their own stuff. We have a really handy cast and generally speaking we don’t have in the dead in the crowd they are all pretty active. Sometimes we have women fighting with women, and men fighting with women and vice versa. We break away from the traditional, you know, bar brawl with men. Even sort of our glamour character Six, played by Tricia, has been getting…getting into the fight too.
Tricia Helfer: The one episode where I had a stunt fight, I’d never done that before. So, I, you know, had to work with the stunt coordinator, and practice at home quite a few my punches and kicks. With the towel over the shower rack, and you are punching away.
Mike Mitchell: Also it gives my stunt women an opportunity to do things that they probably wouldn’t do normally. Because we usually don’t cross those boundaries, so it gives my stunt cast an opportunity to do something very [?].
Steven McNutt: The world has changed so much in past five or six years. With the.. With styles of shooting, and there are almost no rules anymore. But I do think that the cutting edge part of this show is the fact that we are manipulating the new media, the digital media, and we are pushing it to the very edge, that it exists right now, and trying to go past it. And it’s just a matter of learning.
Ronald D. Moore:You put a tremendous amount of work and effort into all this sort of prep. Writing it, getting things lined…getting all the pieces lined up together. And then the reward for all that is – you get this piece of film. And here is this footage of something that, you know, you talked about in your office. And here is some notion that you were telling other writers months ago. And oh, here is this episode, and how it ended. And here is that viper doing a thing that you asked it to do. And there is the interior of cylon raider, and we realize it’s the way we always hoped. That’s what it’s all about. The satisfaction of the film itself. Of “Wow, look at that. Eddie Olmos. Look at him go. Look at him do this role. Oh my god, it’s great.”. You know, I mean, that’s…That’s why you do the job at all. That satisfaction of watching the story actually happen.
The Cylon Centurion
Gary Hutzel: In the Original Series the cylons were the creation of an alien race, that was setting out to destroy the humans. And of course they were guys in suits. So going into the show there was a discussion about whether we should maintain that same aesthetic. But as we continued to develop the show, we realized that it would take us out of show and create the wall with the audience saying, they would now it was a guy in a suit. And so the decision was made to make the cylons entirely virtual.
Michale Rymer, who had laid groundwork for the entire series, as the director of the miniseries, had… Can the the cylons as basically being an interesting piece of the set. He wanted them to not interfere with the performances that he was getting from the actors. And so we had them stationed at the back of the room. But unfortunately, as soon as they showed up in the scene, and we started roughing them in to the rough cut that Michael was working on, he realized that they just completely stole the scene. And so we put more and more shot of cylons into the miniseries.
Richard Hudolin: The decision to do the complete CGI was that you could control and make them look totally unique. Again following, the thought process of “we want totally different”. If you use a person, your hip, no matter how thin you are, is still going to be [?] your waist or 20 inch waist, or whatever. And you will still have that human aspect to your centurion.
Gary Hutzel: We’d used number of different approaches to the cylon movement. Including actually tracking a moving person. And allowing cylon to be quite human in its motions. And it was an eerie fact, it was very strange to see this shiny metallic monsterm you know, walking into room with a swagger. But Michael’s reaction to it originally… I thought it was quite interesting, but Michael’s reaction was to burst out laughing and say “Nice cocktail walk”. So we eliminated it from the show and our cylons no longer swagger into the scene, they are quite a bit more mechanical now.
Richard Hudolin: So the desion was made to go totally CGI, which allows you to create something that is basically running on a bolt-joint at its.. at its hip. And it made it look fantastic, because of total[?] creations.
Gary Hutzel: It has full articulation meaning that all the components of it work just like a physical object. The fingers are all connected to the hand and operate in articulate way. Likewise the arms, legs, head, everything. It therefore has a very particular way of moving, that is limited by its physicality in a virtual world. But they still frequently… we realize very human reactions to them. The cylon will address individuals. It will face them, look them in the eye, behave threateningly. But it’s distinctly not human. And through the course of the first season we continue to develop the feeling of the cylon and how it works within a scene.
When we go to do a sequence with a cylons we use our friends behind us here to stand in, so that the actors have a eye lie. In a scene with a cylon an actor doesn’t know where it is, or how tall it is, or what it’s doing. So we use our stand-ins. We have them in several different sizes and positions. So we can demonstrate what the cylon can be doing in the scene, so the actors have more to work with.
We rough it in, send it to the producers so that they can art-direct the cylon. And frequently our directors get involved as well and say well, and honestly, we’ll direct the virtual character of a cylon. And we’ll say, oh, he wouldn’t do that, we’d like to have him… He’d really turn away, you know, from camera on this point. And we take all of that into account and re-work the cylon until we get the performance that the director and the executive producers want.
We never drive the scene with the visual effect. Ever. We drive the scene with the best composition and the best performance. Then we back it in from there and put the creature in. We haven’t really thoroughly explored them, even in the first season. As to what their capabilities are, whether there are sentient or [?]. So it’s fertile ground for season two. We are waiting to do even more with them. But it’s been exiting season for the cylons. There will be quite a bit cylon action.