B5 Scrolls

2008.06.28 - Saturday

B5 Scrolls

A while ago I was contacted by Tom McFayden about a website project he was doing which involved Babylon 5. He wanted to know if he could ask me a few questions about my time working on the show, and I was happy to help out. He's recently uploaded the nearly finished site, and it's full of great information. Not only is there a ridiculously comprehensive list of all of the ships which have appeared in the show's various incarnations, but it's thankfully written without the usual uber-Geek slant of technical information and measurements. Instead you'll find interesting trivia about who designed or built the CG models, and what the script called for, straight from the artists who've worked on B5 all the way back to the original pilot.

The interviews and concept art sections are by far the most interesting to me, and I think Tom was able to get some great behind the scenes information from some people who may not even be in the industry anymore and can therefore afford to be entertainingly candid. I hope the site is widely read, and that a few misconceptions, and several outright myths, are justifiably put to bed. Always remember that film production, like any huge artistic project, is a team effort from top to bottom. Creative input comes from everywhere, and everyone has finger and palm prints on the product the public ultimately sees. One can't simply cut off the head of a production team, move it to another body, and automatically expect the same level of success a second or third time.

Not the Signs of a Healthy Democracy

2008.06.22 - Sunday

Steven Weber: The Sleep of Monsters Produces Reason

I know a couple of people who thought I was crazy when I suggested this Obama business was getting dangerously close to a cult of personality. Canada had their experience with it in Trudeaumania, and to this day we still have to put up with the "Canadian Kennedys" in one way or another. I haven't made up my mind about Obama yet, but it's not really him that's bothering me. It's how people are reacting to him. What they're saying about him. It's mildly creepy on one end, and quasi-religious hysteria on the other. Even if you take the piece linked above as satire, look at some of the comments. Those are genuine, and as far as I'm concerned, that spells trouble.

Peak Oil?

2008.06.15 - Sunday

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Who knows, twenty or thirty years from now "peak oil" might be as ridiculous as "global cooling" or the "population bomb". The biggest problem I have with these predictions of environmental or economic doom and gloom is that they make no allowance whatsoever for Human ingenuity and invention. Our ability to respond to problems is as flexible as the problems themselves. Always has been, always will be.

Who's Inside The Box, Ron?

2008.06.13 - Friday

Moore On Escaping "The Box"

Ron Moore, showrunner for "Battlestar Galactica", did some great work during TNG. He's right that spicing that show with a bit more character helped to make the latter half of the series some of the best sci-fi ever produced, but I would never say that characters in the show displayed "petty jealousies" or major character flaws, except for the ones from non-Human cultures.

I find it interesting that Moore praises the departures from the Trek formula that "Deep Space Nine" took. That series enjoyed significantly less success than "The Next Generation". The decline continued with "Voyager", and ended with "Enterprise" being cancelled, despite its prisoner-torturing, all-to-Human Captain. Moore's Galactica series, firmly planted inside the hyperdrama world occupied by shows like "24" and "CSI", currently struggles to maintain its audience of barely one million regular viewers.

Now I'm not going to suggest that this pro-drama, pro-character flaw ideology is the only reason the later Trek shows declined, but I think it is significant. People didn't tune into "Star Trek" in the 60s to see the characters, they tuned in to see the stories, and the stories were based on classic as well as new ideas. The characters were in service to those stories, in service to those ideas, not the focus of them. Suggesting that positive, idealistic, morally strong characters are "too hard to write" is just lazy, sloppy, and unimaginative. Science fiction can be dramatic, but drama does not make science fiction.

When We Left Earth

2008.06.08 - Sunday

"When We Left Earth" at Discovery.com

How did I miss this? I have no idea, but I just came across a preview article this afternoon. For the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Discovery has gone into NASA's cold storage film vault, re-scanned and remastered roughly one hundred hours of archived footage for HD, and produced a six hour documentary series covering nearly our entire history of manned space flight.

Hot damn.

The series premieres tonight on television, but the all important Blu-Ray release is coming in July. I can't wait to pick it up and see some of the cleaned up footage, which apparently includes various launches, nearly all of the in-flight footage from Apollo, early Shuttle program stuff and orbital shots of Hubble's repair among other things. It sounds like the "Planet Earth" of space documentaries, and I can only hope it's as good.