Babylon 5: Reboot and Zooty

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Babylon 5: Reboot and Zooty

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

There's a bunch of behind-the-scenes interviews and production art here. I can't remember which interviews include it but there was apparently some drama between the CGI guys and Doug Netter.

IIRC, the guys at Foundation Imaging put their hearts and souls into the VFX for B5, going well beyond what they were asked to do to make the work as impressive as possible given the tight time and the limited budget on the grounds that they were blazing a trail and wanted to show that awesome CG wasn't just for big-budget movies. Then Doug Netter thought "Wait, why should these nerds be getting money from Warner Bros that could be coming to me?", set up Netter Digital Imaging, ordered Foundation to turn over all the art assets to his new company, then fired them. The FI crew were understandably pissed off.

I always thought that the difference was visible on screen. Foundation's space battles were more 'flowing', for want of a better word. NDI's battles tended to be "lots and lots of ships going to screen right shooting at lots and lots of ships going to screen left."

# ¿ Sep 12, 2016 08:14

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:04

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I'm currently ripping my B5 DVDs to take travelling. Other than the final episode, is any of S5 essential? (It takes my computer over half a day to rip a season, and I don't have a huge amount of time left.) All I can remember of it is that it felt like JMS had shot his bolt by cramming the Shadow and Earth storylines into S4, the episode with the two grease monkeys hero-worshipping the main cast, and that I absolutely loving hated Byron.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2016 20:56

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

It's a bit gutting that we'll never see Ron Thornton's/Foundation's B5 CGI in full-res as it was originally rendered because of Warners loving up the masters. It may be primitive by modern standards, but it was groundbreaking and had a unique look - you instantly knew you were looking at a B5 shot just from how colourful it was.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 16:34

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Deakul posted:

Nah, it's Byron.

I still can't believe he went on to be one of the best voice actors ever.

All the roles he's done, but I'll always remember him for "The Daaark Draaaagon is truly an eeeeeevillll blayyyyyyyyde!"

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 19:30

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Crusade was badly hosed over by the network (I can't recall the details, but wasn't the whole thing with the change in uniforms to do with forced reshoots?), and the music was indeed poo poo, but JMS has to shoulder some of the blame himself. It's years since I saw it, but the main thing I remember is thinking that he'd burned through all his best ideas on B5 and was now trying to make a meal with leftover scraps.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 14:54

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The Excalibur's such an unmemorable design, I had to Google it just now to see exactly what it looked like. All I could remember was that it looked like a tripod light stand, and I was pretty much right. It doesn't fit with any of the previous B5 designs for Earth or the Minbari, either. Maybe if they'd taken the name literally and actually made it look more like a sword (with two 'crossguards' rather than three, and a longer 'hilt') it might have been better, but it's just a bland dark grey stick with wings, as if someone took the Liberator from Blake's 7 and stripped it of its distinctive detailing like the gun pods and the big glowing green ball.

I can't remember whether it was Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas who once said that an effective and memorable spaceship design is one that a child could draw with a few pencil strokes and it still be instantly recognisable, but whoever it was, the Excalibur would fail the test as there's nothing to it. On the other hand, my son can recognise a doodle of the Enterprise and tell me its name, and he's two.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2017 15:33

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I wonder if JMS had some grand vision of how the ranger VR weapon system would look on screen and gradually turned more and more pale as he watched the end result, or if he proudly thought "yes, this is what people will remember!" Which they did, but...

# ¿ May 3, 2018 21:15

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Hope he's contacted someone high up at Prime directly as well rather than just via Twitter, otherwise I can see them paying as much attention to him as Joe Schmoe offering to redo all the VFX for free on his PC.

# ¿ May 17, 2018 18:38

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Grand Fromage posted:

The CGI gets better. It's still old but by season three or so it looks pretty good.

Season 3 is probably the high point. Producer Doug Netter fired the original CG house in order to use a company he'd set up (and named after!) himself for season 4 onwards, and the emphasis went from "how cool can we make the choreography of this sequence of shots?" to "how many ships can we jam onto the screen at once?" (They still do some good work, but the difference in style is very noticeable.)

# ¿ Aug 15, 2018 23:45

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Timby posted:

Netter didn't just set up the company; he did a complete smash-and-grab job on Foundation Imaging's staff, hiring the best of them and rendering the company dead in the water. Foundation was on the brink of bankruptcy until it got the contract to work on Star Trek: Voyager.

And in doing so, he unwittingly set up the standard operating practice for producers in the CGI era. Some major producer was once quoted as saying he didn't consider himself to have done his job properly until he'd driven at least one VFX company into bankruptcy on each of his movies.

I once read a retrospective on Foundation, and they saw the B5 shenanigans a different way; they kept the people who were trying to push the boundaries of television VFX, while Netter took the ones whose main concern was a paycheque. (There was also allegedly some underhanded stuff going on with future Netter hires taking assets and backups while they were still employed by Foundation.) Of course, that's their version of the story! So the likes of Rob Bonchune, Mojo, John Teska and Doug Drexler stayed at FI despite the company being on the verge of closure, and went on to do some pretty amazing work on Voyager and DS9.

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Aug 16, 2018

# ¿ Aug 16, 2018 15:20

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

I can't help but wonder, is it possible for the movie industry to wake up one day and find that there's not enough VFX talent to go around because everyone's been run into the ground? Wouldn't there be a point where nobody starts effects houses because there's no profit to be made, and too many existing houses went under?

The hardware and software are the same the world over, so they can do what the animation industry did years ago and look abroad for people who can deliver much the same product for less money. India and China have got their own VFX industries now to cater for their own (massive) markets, and if Hollywood comes knocking they won't say no.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2018 21:52

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

That was when Ron Jones was scoring TNG, before being fired because he refused to follow Rick Berman's edict that music should be bland and unnoticeable.

gently caress you, Rick Berman.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2018 08:18

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Vavrek posted:

That new fighter pilot guy was a "suggestion" from higher-up that JMS was given.

What happens to him is one my favorite little details, knowing that the character was forced on the writer.

They never gave him another such suggestion.

Where I grew up, "keff" was slang for a fart, so someone who farted a lot was, naturally, a "keffer". Whether JMS shared the same slang I have no idea, but the character's name always amused me no end.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2018 14:16

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Nah. The Eric Red version with xenomorph pigs, xenomorph cows and xenomorph chickens. IIRC, it ends with the "mechanical" part of biomechanical coming into play and producing a xenomorph space station.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 16:06

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wouldn't be surprised if someone from Foundation Imaging has the entire library of ship models on a Zip disk in their attic.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2018 10:35

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

My favourite VFX shot from the whole show is from 'Severed Dreams': the one where a couple of Thunderbolts do a Stuka run on C&C and one gets a wing blown off by the point defences, but keeps going along its original course and tumbles straight into the bow of the station - with the camera following it all the way in.

'Severed Dreams' in general really raised the bar for CG as a replacement for motion controlled modelwork in general; not just the sheer volume of shots, but the scale and choreography of the action. It was basically Return of the Jedi, but on a (small) TV budget and schedule. Sure, the models are low-detail by modern standards, but everything is moving so fast and fluidly (and consistently through consecutive shots) that you don't have time to care.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2018 00:04

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Mr Morden's Associates are there to do his dirty work as invisible assassins.

I can only hear that in my head as "Meeeessster Morden".

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 17:15

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

I'd say don't read the Boxtree novels, but that would be unfair considering that the writers had insanely short deadlines - Vornholt reportedly had to write Voices in just three weeks, meaning he was compiling 3000 words of copy a day - and the series bible they were given to work with predated S1. There were also only three days allocated for editing, so a lot of continuity errors made it through.

Jesus. I'm a novelist and generally I also do 3000 words a day - but I take at least as long to edit the book as to write it. Even when I did work-for-hire movie tie-in stuff I still got a few weeks to edit it. This poor bastard had to basically turn in a spellchecked first draft. What the hell was the rush? "If we don't cash in on this new TV show right now we'll have missed our only profit window!"?

# ¿ Mar 15, 2019 23:57

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

As a sidenote on the general (lack of) quality and care in TV-licensed fiction, there was a Charmed tie-in novel that got a main character's surname wrong. On the first page.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 18:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I said come in! posted:

I would rather just continue to watch and enjoy the show as it was originally aired on TV. I don't need updated CGI models of Babylon 5, they aren't even that good anyways by todays standards.

The space battle choreography* was several steps above anything else on TV at the time, even if the models are low-poly by today's standards. The fluid action in 'Severed Dreams' still stands up now.

* Foundation Imaging's stuff, anyway. Netter Digital's approach seemed to be "a shitload of ships heading L to R runs head-on into a shitload of ships going R to L and they zap each other".

# ¿ Aug 16, 2019 22:48

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Trek's tight-arsed producers love doing that, whether on TV or film. "That really cool and distinctive VFX shot that you remember from a year or two ago? Here it is again!" [Bird of Prey explodes]

I mean, Christ, in Generations they could at least have flipped the shot to make it look slightly different, but nope.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2019 22:12

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The forest moon of Endor, or the forest moon of Endor?

# ¿ Oct 21, 2019 13:14

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Dirty posted:

I remember hearing this a few times over the years, but I must admit, I never quite understood it. It's not like you couldn't render 16:9 graphics on a 4:3 screen, and Lightwave has always had a "safe zone" overlay for the screen edges. I guess I can see an argument for needing an actual reference monitor to do final checks on the output, but does that mean Foundation was never going to render anything in widescreen until a client bought them a monitor?

VFX companies have a long and storied history of being hosed over financially by clients, so Foundation saying "We can totally do this, but we're not going to put our own money into something that's the client's responsibility" is fair enough.

And then they were hosed over by their client anyway.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 16:35

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

pentyne posted:

I loved the small scale of the ship to ship dogfighting in season 1, you have the CO heading out with a half dozen fighters to attack a raiding party like its some D&D party trying to rescue a caravan.

Also, literally everyone in command positions having Starfury training, like Garibaldi, the enlisted security chief is a trained pilot.

It'd be like if Miles O'Brian was part of a crack commando unit.

"We need someone to go undercover to investigate the Space Mafia."
[Glances around Ops]
"Chief! Drop what you're doing."

# ¿ May 29, 2020 13:03

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I always imagined it as the 'furies having massive amounts of computer assistance in flight, so they don't end up tumbling out of control every time the pilot makes a high-G manoeuvre on more than one axis. So yes, you need training to fly one, but not so much that you have to be Chuck Yeager just to get out of the station.

# ¿ May 30, 2020 23:37

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Grand Fromage posted:

The show as aired diverges radically from The Plan, but just the fact that JMS had been thinking about the show for 10+ years gave him the tools needed to make everything look smooth even when it wasn't.

When I write something I always have an ending in mind, and 100% of the time that is not the ending I write because by the halfway point everything is different from the plan. But the exercise of planning still has huge benefits.

I'm always fascinated by the totally different ways other writers work, because by the time I start the actual writing, the whole story has been planned out in great/ridiculous detail. Obviously stuff changes along the way as characters and situations develop, but the outcome is 95% set before I write one word.

(I write novels, though, so I don't have to worry about actors leaving or suits saying "Hey, what if we had a character whose job it is to gently caress aliens when our heroes make first contact with a new species.")

# ¿ Jun 7, 2020 00:05

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Whenever Morden's not on screen...

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 06:52

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I absolutely stand by the view that if you only watch the first and last episodes of the original miniseries of Lexx, you have a pretty decent, imaginative and weirdly entertaining sci-fi show that is like nothing else you've ever seen.

Beyond that - even though you'll miss Tim Curry and Rutger Hauer thoroughly hamming it up in the other two episodes of the miniseries - you rapidly go beyond diminishing returns to actively hurting yourself.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2020 21:49

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Timby posted:

I genuinely do not understand how you can be a conservative and love B5.

Must be like all these people who complain that Star Trek has "got political".

# ¿ Oct 10, 2020 23:54

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

MikusR posted:

Somebody has taken some of those CGI rerenders. Made them 24fps and slapped a film grain on top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlDaygRhrg8
IMHO looks better.

That's nice, but oof, it really shows how few polys were used in all the debris when ships get sliced up by battlecrab beams.

Also "4k film grain", lol.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2021 09:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The penultimate episode of The Prisoner was filmed much earlier in the run (a year prior to 'Fall Out'), and had a couple of scenes reshot so it would lead directly into the finale. (They had to fudge an explanation for Leo McKern's resurrection and change of appearance, but it's The Village so hey, they can do weird stuff like that.)

McGoohan also wrote the finale in a few manic days, which may explain a lot.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2021 10:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wait, so Star Trek gets Barack Obama elected President of the United States, while Babylon 5 gets Diana killed? drat, this show really is cursed.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2021 22:32

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

CainFortea posted:

Don't let your media consumption ratio fool you. The rank and file of the trumpers are broke as gently caress as well. They're just not usually the ones traveling across the country to do protests.

Because they can't afford it probably.

They're broke as gently caress because they're in debt up to the eyes to pay for enormous pickup trucks and tacticlol rifles.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2021 22:34

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Babylon... Six?!?

Or is it Babylon 5.1?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 18:38

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Ash1138 posted:

same. the pacing is pretty much perfect and the battle is so well done that it transcends the age of the CG.

The CG models and texturing may be low-res by modern standards, but the way the entire battle was choreographed as a story, with multiple set-pieces building on each other, was something I'd never seen before on TV. It was so far beyond anything Star Trek had done to that point (where even major battles consisted of a few shots of ships exchanging fire at close range intercut with lots of bridge shots of people shaking around or describing events too expensive to show) that it instantly dated its rival and forced it to up its game. (And even then, only DS9 came close to that feeling of scale and intensity.)

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 08:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alhazred posted:

The only opening I don't really like is the first one. It just goes on and on. But even that one has some good parts like "Humans and aliens, wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal . . . all alone in the night."

"

Even that bit's flawed: "two and a half million" would be a snappier, less-clumsy way of saying it than "two million, five hundred thousand". But it is what it is. (Maybe JMS will streamline it in the reboot.)

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 15:30

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alhazred posted:

"It spins, okay?"

"It spins now!"
"It spins now?!?"
"It spins now."

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 21:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Lower Decks canonically confirms the holodeck has a j[bleep]z filter. And since Riker's not there, it ain't jazz.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2021 18:44

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Pretty sure the opposite is true, that it's Sheridan throughout

[Neo-Sheridan actor turns out to be a vocal anti-vax fascist; JMS sighs and pulls the trapdoor lever.]

# ¿ Jan 27, 2022 17:05

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:04

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

The turnaround on the first six Boxtree novels was eight weeks, but for the first one John Vornholt only had three weeks because negotiations with Kevin J Anderson had fallen through. He only managed to produce anything coherent because he was a big fan of the show.

Jesus, that's insane. I'm actually a novelist, and I've written tie-in stuff before, but never on a deadline that tight. Assuming the B5 novels were a fairly typical circa-75k words, I would only have written a first draft of 45k of them in that time - and my publishers consider me fast and prolific. :stare:

# ¿ Feb 15, 2022 12:12

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