Наивно-оптимистичный сайлонский тормоз в ромашках
Про противоречивый, но интересный эгоизм Балтара, и то, что правильные спецэффекты делаются ради драмы, а не ради самих спецэффектов.
The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind)
James Callis: Set against the, I suppose of hilarity of not being in control of what you think or what you are going to say is the awful tragedy of being implicated of implicit in a major disaster. In a genocide. So it terms of Litmus, which is the name of one of our episodes, he kind of… he goes through the universal indicators from like… what is it… from indigo to red and he’s fluctuating with colors all of the time, ‘cause there is so much going on. As an actor that’s an absolute joy. To be able to be not tied down to a personality, so that there are always things that you can explore.
I know this guy in London, who I respect. And in fact, you know, he’s a real genius, and got several degrees from Oxford. But he’s very bad liar. And that amuses me that somebody, who is so brilliant… He’s a very very clever guy, but can’t really tie his own shoe laces, is hopeless in a supermarket, wouldn’t know what to do. And he’s in that respect… because mind is always on theories and the ideas and beauty of kind of… He’s very bad liar. He just kind of transparent. So that’s something that I wanted to bring on the table about Gaius Baltar.
David Eick: Our main antagonist Gaius Baltar is not psychotic, he’s not schizophrenic or clinically insane. And he’s not mustache twirling evil villain. He’s simply a pathological narcissist. He operates purely out of his own agenda and to satisfy his own needs and desires. And so what better way to get at a man who is that brilliant and yet that weak than to go at him with the most beautiful woman at the world.
James Callis: Well, I think he’s coming to terms with…he’s coming to terms more with this hallucination, who’s Number Six, in his mind. He’s becoming more comfortable, I suppose, with the idea of being bonkers. Or at least… I do not believe for one moment that he thinks there isn’t a chip in his head. What I’m trying to say, that there is a possibility for somebody like this that really there is no chip in his head, he’s just going nuts. But Baltar hasn’t thought about that. Baltar totally believes that, you know, there is some kind of thing stuck in his brain, that is broadcasting Number Six’s image to him.
She helps me and hinders me, I suppose, almost simultaneously, to… I suppose, to keep me alive. From episode to episode.
I don’t think I’m really taking anything from the original. Apart from the name. And the name brings with it an enormous backdrop. In a sense of I have entered this…this drama as Gaius Baltar and the lion share of people who watch this show will know it, know that I’m going to be the guy who… He’s bad. I mean Baltar was the baddie. So in that respect … And I’ve seen John Colicos, I remember him, so well, I have a visual kind of picture of him. My hoping was to be as different from him as I possibly could. From that.
Katee Sackhoff: James is just a riot. He just cracks me up. I had a scene where I had to dead-look at him and not make an expression for the whole scene, and he’s sitting there cracking me up inside. And I’m going “OK, don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh.” And I laugh.
James Callis: This kind of a character is quite new. In a sense of, he might do something heroic but it would be for totally the wrong reason. So, yes, he’s ambiguous and ambivalent. And in a nature of somebody who is very hard to pin down or understand, where they are coming from. I believe that’s why they are interesting. Because all we want to do, when we look into somebody’s eyes is to kind of be able to say “I kind of know who you are, and I’ve got your energy, and I get it.” And with this individual I think it’d be very difficult to pin a color on him or say he’s exactly this kind of a thing. So, that’s great.
Visual Effects
Gary Hutzel: Battlestar Galactica is unusual in visual effects because we’re studiously avoiding science-fiction visual effects. We’re not creating a sci-fi look, something that is going to take the audience out of the show. Instead we want the audience… Ron Moore’s concept was always that the audience would continue to be involved with the performance. They were there for the spectacle of human drama. And we just needed to frame it with visual effects. And so we’ve struggled to make sure that our visual effects are smoothly integrated with live-action. And that there is nothing fanciful about them. That there is physical operations behind everything that happens.
Richard Hudolin: Yes, things like the space jump we… We designed our set in such a way that we could get a viper from its static position into a launch tube. We then yank it physically, pull it for may be 20 feet or so, which begins the shot-down tube, which then is taken over by visual effects.
Gary Hutzel:In doing the flying sequences for Battlestar there are two key elements. One is to create some real physics in space. In truth in dealing with… in dealing with space… space is vast. It’s really really big. And so going anywhere in space is actually very time-consuming, boring thing to do. So we have to take some licensing taking our characters from one place to another. We try always to do it in a manner of cutting as opposed to actually saying that they are taking a kind of magical super-light-speed-jumps. And we try to always place the audience in a canopy with our characters. We like to put our audience into that environment. So they can feel the threat of being under…being in those conditions, under battle conditions. So in dealing with space we try to always pay attention to the physics. You notice our ships only use RCSs or Reaction Control Thrusters to rotate, to reorient themselves. They don’t have big magical engines that glow in the dark and make them go, they have rocket engines that are actually fuelled by a liquid fuel. It’s something that is very understandable, they know when the engine thrust is big and bright that they go fast. And it makes a certain amount of logical sense. You don’t… the audience doesn’t spend time getting involved with how do the get from place to place, how fast are they going, how do they… how does that thing work. They are not involved with that, they are paying attention to what the actors are doing. And in the case of Battlestar we are very fortunate because we have actors that can not fill that time, make that real for the audience, but excel and create that incredible environment that’s very very real for the audience.
In out show we do what we call jumping. We go from one piece of space to another piece of space dimensionally. The ship doesn’t speed up and then zip away at light speed. It literally crosses dimensionally from one space to another instantaneously. So there is non of the usual stuff that you see for instance in Star Trek or other…or episodics, where they speed up, and there is a great streak and they fly away and all of that. They simply appear in one place of space...in one area of space as opposed to another. So the interesting thing about our jump effect was that originally we’d done a bunch of design…3D design work. Ron Moore’s original concept for it involved what I believe he called an origami like unfolding through space. Which sounds great. But in execution we found out that what happened is that we began to develop it … There were number of good concepts we had for it… But it became obvious that taking time out to do a sci-fi gag, where our ship is unfolding like an origami bird, was just not going to work. It didn’t fit into the context of the show. And so we’ve worked with Michael on a very very simple effect. That just reveals the ship through a light effect, that is specifically meant to be unobtrusive. Make a story point, then move on.
Specifically today we had a scene that takes place inside a raptor. And a raptor is a helicopter like spaceship, with a large glass canopy in front of it. In this particular case the actors are doing a scene where they jump and they came in too close to a planet. And they react to coming in very very close to this planet and having to correct the attitude of the ship and get into orbit. So for the actors…basically they are looking out the glass canopy and they see green and a bunch of blue dots and little triangles stuck on a screen, which doesn’t look much like a planet. And it’s not very threatening. So we have to get them on board with exactly what’s going on outside. We do quite a bit of green screen work on this show. Of course our cast is pretty familiar with this now. And they are pretty seasoned pilots, so they understand what we’re talking about, when we get into that. But it’s great fun because ships are mounted on gimbals with airbags, allowing us to rock the ship and add vibration. So for the purposes of the performance the actors are actually physically being jolted from one side of the ship to the other, to give a more natural feel to it. Really helps them to get into swing of the scene.
The trick to doing good visual effects on television is… we use basically the same tools that features use now, because we are finalizing our product on high-def. High-Def is just below 2K resolution for film. So the image size if virtually the same as you’d use on a feature. So we have to create all materials at full resolutions, just as you’d for a feature. But the real trick is not so much the tools it’s working with the director and executive producers to create scenarios that allow us to explore new things in visual effects ground. And that’s been very successful on Battlestar. We have the nature of the show itself, the way that the components of the show, the sets, the ships, everything about it have a natural feel to the audience. It’s an instantly recognizable feel. It’s not false or organic, or very art-designed, it’s very basic, and sure hand to the audience that they understand. That’s when you are in the viper it’s a fighter and it’s one-man ship. They understand that the Galactica is huge landing strip in space. It’s instantly understood because of the design of it. That then fits us a great deal in then being able to execute story elements very quickly and smoothly, without bothering to explain why the space ship does this or why the spaceship does that. And I think that’s really the secret to creating good visual effect. Is good… basically good design. And then to have the cooperation of the writers and the director in following through on the layout of visual effects and on how they are integrated into the show.
The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind)
James Callis: Set against the, I suppose of hilarity of not being in control of what you think or what you are going to say is the awful tragedy of being implicated of implicit in a major disaster. In a genocide. So it terms of Litmus, which is the name of one of our episodes, he kind of… he goes through the universal indicators from like… what is it… from indigo to red and he’s fluctuating with colors all of the time, ‘cause there is so much going on. As an actor that’s an absolute joy. To be able to be not tied down to a personality, so that there are always things that you can explore.
I know this guy in London, who I respect. And in fact, you know, he’s a real genius, and got several degrees from Oxford. But he’s very bad liar. And that amuses me that somebody, who is so brilliant… He’s a very very clever guy, but can’t really tie his own shoe laces, is hopeless in a supermarket, wouldn’t know what to do. And he’s in that respect… because mind is always on theories and the ideas and beauty of kind of… He’s very bad liar. He just kind of transparent. So that’s something that I wanted to bring on the table about Gaius Baltar.
David Eick: Our main antagonist Gaius Baltar is not psychotic, he’s not schizophrenic or clinically insane. And he’s not mustache twirling evil villain. He’s simply a pathological narcissist. He operates purely out of his own agenda and to satisfy his own needs and desires. And so what better way to get at a man who is that brilliant and yet that weak than to go at him with the most beautiful woman at the world.
James Callis: Well, I think he’s coming to terms with…he’s coming to terms more with this hallucination, who’s Number Six, in his mind. He’s becoming more comfortable, I suppose, with the idea of being bonkers. Or at least… I do not believe for one moment that he thinks there isn’t a chip in his head. What I’m trying to say, that there is a possibility for somebody like this that really there is no chip in his head, he’s just going nuts. But Baltar hasn’t thought about that. Baltar totally believes that, you know, there is some kind of thing stuck in his brain, that is broadcasting Number Six’s image to him.
She helps me and hinders me, I suppose, almost simultaneously, to… I suppose, to keep me alive. From episode to episode.
I don’t think I’m really taking anything from the original. Apart from the name. And the name brings with it an enormous backdrop. In a sense of I have entered this…this drama as Gaius Baltar and the lion share of people who watch this show will know it, know that I’m going to be the guy who… He’s bad. I mean Baltar was the baddie. So in that respect … And I’ve seen John Colicos, I remember him, so well, I have a visual kind of picture of him. My hoping was to be as different from him as I possibly could. From that.
Katee Sackhoff: James is just a riot. He just cracks me up. I had a scene where I had to dead-look at him and not make an expression for the whole scene, and he’s sitting there cracking me up inside. And I’m going “OK, don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh.” And I laugh.
James Callis: This kind of a character is quite new. In a sense of, he might do something heroic but it would be for totally the wrong reason. So, yes, he’s ambiguous and ambivalent. And in a nature of somebody who is very hard to pin down or understand, where they are coming from. I believe that’s why they are interesting. Because all we want to do, when we look into somebody’s eyes is to kind of be able to say “I kind of know who you are, and I’ve got your energy, and I get it.” And with this individual I think it’d be very difficult to pin a color on him or say he’s exactly this kind of a thing. So, that’s great.
Visual Effects
Gary Hutzel: Battlestar Galactica is unusual in visual effects because we’re studiously avoiding science-fiction visual effects. We’re not creating a sci-fi look, something that is going to take the audience out of the show. Instead we want the audience… Ron Moore’s concept was always that the audience would continue to be involved with the performance. They were there for the spectacle of human drama. And we just needed to frame it with visual effects. And so we’ve struggled to make sure that our visual effects are smoothly integrated with live-action. And that there is nothing fanciful about them. That there is physical operations behind everything that happens.
Richard Hudolin: Yes, things like the space jump we… We designed our set in such a way that we could get a viper from its static position into a launch tube. We then yank it physically, pull it for may be 20 feet or so, which begins the shot-down tube, which then is taken over by visual effects.
Gary Hutzel:In doing the flying sequences for Battlestar there are two key elements. One is to create some real physics in space. In truth in dealing with… in dealing with space… space is vast. It’s really really big. And so going anywhere in space is actually very time-consuming, boring thing to do. So we have to take some licensing taking our characters from one place to another. We try always to do it in a manner of cutting as opposed to actually saying that they are taking a kind of magical super-light-speed-jumps. And we try to always place the audience in a canopy with our characters. We like to put our audience into that environment. So they can feel the threat of being under…being in those conditions, under battle conditions. So in dealing with space we try to always pay attention to the physics. You notice our ships only use RCSs or Reaction Control Thrusters to rotate, to reorient themselves. They don’t have big magical engines that glow in the dark and make them go, they have rocket engines that are actually fuelled by a liquid fuel. It’s something that is very understandable, they know when the engine thrust is big and bright that they go fast. And it makes a certain amount of logical sense. You don’t… the audience doesn’t spend time getting involved with how do the get from place to place, how fast are they going, how do they… how does that thing work. They are not involved with that, they are paying attention to what the actors are doing. And in the case of Battlestar we are very fortunate because we have actors that can not fill that time, make that real for the audience, but excel and create that incredible environment that’s very very real for the audience.
In out show we do what we call jumping. We go from one piece of space to another piece of space dimensionally. The ship doesn’t speed up and then zip away at light speed. It literally crosses dimensionally from one space to another instantaneously. So there is non of the usual stuff that you see for instance in Star Trek or other…or episodics, where they speed up, and there is a great streak and they fly away and all of that. They simply appear in one place of space...in one area of space as opposed to another. So the interesting thing about our jump effect was that originally we’d done a bunch of design…3D design work. Ron Moore’s original concept for it involved what I believe he called an origami like unfolding through space. Which sounds great. But in execution we found out that what happened is that we began to develop it … There were number of good concepts we had for it… But it became obvious that taking time out to do a sci-fi gag, where our ship is unfolding like an origami bird, was just not going to work. It didn’t fit into the context of the show. And so we’ve worked with Michael on a very very simple effect. That just reveals the ship through a light effect, that is specifically meant to be unobtrusive. Make a story point, then move on.
Specifically today we had a scene that takes place inside a raptor. And a raptor is a helicopter like spaceship, with a large glass canopy in front of it. In this particular case the actors are doing a scene where they jump and they came in too close to a planet. And they react to coming in very very close to this planet and having to correct the attitude of the ship and get into orbit. So for the actors…basically they are looking out the glass canopy and they see green and a bunch of blue dots and little triangles stuck on a screen, which doesn’t look much like a planet. And it’s not very threatening. So we have to get them on board with exactly what’s going on outside. We do quite a bit of green screen work on this show. Of course our cast is pretty familiar with this now. And they are pretty seasoned pilots, so they understand what we’re talking about, when we get into that. But it’s great fun because ships are mounted on gimbals with airbags, allowing us to rock the ship and add vibration. So for the purposes of the performance the actors are actually physically being jolted from one side of the ship to the other, to give a more natural feel to it. Really helps them to get into swing of the scene.
The trick to doing good visual effects on television is… we use basically the same tools that features use now, because we are finalizing our product on high-def. High-Def is just below 2K resolution for film. So the image size if virtually the same as you’d use on a feature. So we have to create all materials at full resolutions, just as you’d for a feature. But the real trick is not so much the tools it’s working with the director and executive producers to create scenarios that allow us to explore new things in visual effects ground. And that’s been very successful on Battlestar. We have the nature of the show itself, the way that the components of the show, the sets, the ships, everything about it have a natural feel to the audience. It’s an instantly recognizable feel. It’s not false or organic, or very art-designed, it’s very basic, and sure hand to the audience that they understand. That’s when you are in the viper it’s a fighter and it’s one-man ship. They understand that the Galactica is huge landing strip in space. It’s instantly understood because of the design of it. That then fits us a great deal in then being able to execute story elements very quickly and smoothly, without bothering to explain why the space ship does this or why the spaceship does that. And I think that’s really the secret to creating good visual effect. Is good… basically good design. And then to have the cooperation of the writers and the director in following through on the layout of visual effects and on how they are integrated into the show.
@темы: актёры, комментарии
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04.07.2010 в 20:08Келлис рассказывает, что как актёру ему играть Балтара очень весело, ибо того постоянно шатает из стороны в сторону в личностном плане. С одной стороны, там юмор из-за того, что он сам не всегда знает, что сейчас скажет и сделает, с другой, трагедия невольного участия в геноциде. В общем лакмусовая полоска доктора постоянно мерцает всеми цветами радуги.
Вспоминает, что у него есть в Лондоне знакомый, который тоже практически гений, но который совершенно не предрасположен к обычной жизни. Он слишком много думает об умных теориях, что бы нормально справиться с завязыванием шнурков или с ложью. И Кэллис хотел Балтару добавить немного такой же "прозрачности" (ИМХО, тут бы я поспорила, но он так говорит)
Эйк уточняет, что Балтар у них конечно главный антагонист, но он не сумасшедший, не шизофреник, и не привычный усатый злодей, просто эгоист в крайней стадии, и всё делает себе на пользу. Ничего удивительного, что такого умного, но слабого соблазнили прекраснейшей из женщин.
Снова Кэллис, про то, что по ходу первого сезона Балтар постепенно смиряется с тем, что у него есть галлюцинация в виде Шестёрки. При этом если сам Кэллис считает, что вполне возможно и нет никакого чипа, а есть сошедший с ума доктор, то Балтар, по его мнению, возможность собственного сумасшествия полностью отрицает, предпочитая верить в чип, в котором живёт Шестёрка, которая ему одновременно помогает и мешает, но из-за которой он всё ещё жив.
Из оригинального сериала, по мнению Кэллиса, Балтар взял только имя, зато с именем ему достался большой багаж. Кэллис сам смотрел оригинал, помнит тамошнего Балтара, и понимает, что при появлении нынешнего куча людей сразу же запишет того в плохиши, ибо оригинальный был чистый злодей. Но при этом он старается как можно дальше своего персонажа отвести от той картинки оригинального, которую помнит.
Кэти рассказывает, что Кэллис очень весёлый человек, вплоть до того, что сниматься с ним невозможно. От неё требуется смотреть на него не меняясь в лице, а вместо этого она безуспешно старается не засмеяться.
И опять Кэллис рассуждает, что такие персонажи как Балтар это нечто новое. Ибо он очень двойственная и противоречивая натура, способная на героизм, но по совершенно неправильным причинам. Но тем Балтар и интересен. Потому что нам всем хочется посмотреть на кого-то и сказать "Ага, я тебя понял", а с Балтаром такое проделать очень тяжело. Что Кэллиса весьма радует.
Visual Effects
Хатцел, главный по спецэффектам, говорит, что в БСГ спецэффекты уникальные, потому что они старательно избегали стандартного сай-файного подхода. У Мура изначально был намечен подход затягивать зрителей в сериал, а не давать им смотреть на него со стороны. Главное, это драма, а спецэффекты к ней рамочкой. Так что ничего выделяющегося на фоне остального сериала, все спецэффекты должны быть как-то связаны с той реальностью.
Худолин приводит пример с вайперами, в случае которых декорация была построена так, что шесть метров от обычного их местоположения до трубы запуска те тащили руками, а потом уже сам запуск отдавался на откуп спецэффектам.
Хатцел (который до конца будет рассказывать), продолжает про полёты. Что во-первых, в космосе создавали реалистичную физику. А вообще космос большой, туда-сюда лететь долго, но вместо того, что бы сказать, что всё, волшебным образом уже долетели, внимание зрителей фокусировали на персонажах. Вообще они любят снять так, что бы зритель себя ощущал как бы в кабине вайпера и ощущал ту же опасность в битве. Обратно к физике, вот, например, поворачивают вайперы специальными двигателями. Никаких чудесных двигателей, которые светятся в темноте, у них нет. Есть обычные реактивные, которые требуют обычного же жидкого топлива (Хотя я не помню, что бы тилиум был жидкий, но им лучше знать). И зрителям всё интуитивно понятно, в том числе то, что чем ярче двигатель, тем быстрее корабль летит. И зрителям не нужно думать над вопросами вроде того, как они летают, с какой скоростью летают и так далее. А значит они могут следить за сюжетом и актёрами. А актёры в БСГ замечательные, и добавляют происходящему ещё больше реалистичности.
В отличие от Трека и тому подобных вещей мгновенное перемещение в БСГ это мгновенное перемещение. Никакого разгона, сливающихся в полоски звёзд и так далее. Исчезли тут, появились там. Мур сначала хотел, что бы прыжок сопровождался эффектом, похожим на оригами, когда кораблик как бы раскладывался бы обратно в три измерения, как положено. Но когда начали над ним работать, выяснилось, что подобное не вписывается в сериал. Тогда, посоветовавшись с Раймером, сошлись на простом эффекте появления из света. Что бы сразу было понятно, что произошло и можно было бы продолжать историю дальше.
Тут Хатцел вспоминает, что сегодня они как раз снимали сцену нахождения раптором Кобола. И актёрам нужно реагировать на то, что они слишком близко к планете прыгнули, выправлять орбиту раптора, и так далее. При этом видят актёры только зелёную ткань и налепленные на стекло раптора треугольники (не объяснили зачем, увы), что не очень пугающе выглядит. Поэтому им всегда рассказывают, что снаружи на самом деле сейчас происходит. Актёры уже пилоты опытные и всё сразу понимают. К тому же раптор стоит на шарнирах и воздушных подушках, что шатать его позволяет вполне реально, заодно и актёрам помогает более реалистичные ощущения испытать.
Спецэффекты на телевидении сейчас почти такого же качества как и в фильмах, ибо в фильмах разрешение 2К, а на телевидении HD, что только на один уровень хуже, так что качество вполне сравнимо. Но самое главное это не в том, какие инструменты используются, а в совместной работе с режиссёром и исполнительными продюсерами, для создания правильных спецэффектов. В БСГ это прошло успешно, и все корабли, декорации и прочее воспринимаются реалистично и на своём месте. И если зритель видит вайпер, то он сразу понимает, что это одноместный истребитель, который живёт на Галактике. А если дизайн правильный, и ничего дополнительно объяснять не надо, то можно сразу это использовать в сюжете, а не объяснять кучу почему. Так что секрет хороших спецэффектов это хороший дизайн и хорошая совместная работа со сценаристами и режиссёром, что бы спецэффекты были в сериале не сами по себе, а как одна из его частей.
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04.07.2010 в 23:56