With rumors of a new Battlestar Galactica film and possibly a series coming out, we
decided to take a look at the 2004 reboot and try to understand why it did so well and
how it might be a hard act to follow.
It's hard to shine when you're in the shadow of the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek.
It's hard to create decent VFX for a TV series that is as tight on budget as it is on time,
and it's hard to be good when you're a reboot of a series that was so iconic!
Even if it was, to put it nicely, a little bit cheesy.
Incredibly, the 2004 Battlestar Galactica managed all of these things, and the way it
managed to do all this, was pretty fraking incredible too!
And if you want to learn how to make frakking incredible VFX, but are unsure how to use
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But more about that at the end of the video.
Previsualization.
Even though the series was a reboot, the director and producers didn't want to completely redo
everything but they wanted to make it darker and more complex, they weren't trying to make
the reboot superior to its predecessor but attempting to correct the errors that were
made in the original and overcome some of the hurdles that hindered them, one of these
hurdles were the VFX.
The original series had a surprising amount of VFX shots for its time, in fact, it had
almost as many as the reboot but as happens more often than not with a lot of VFX action
shots, they were disjointed, first, there would be a shot where a VFX event happens,
then a shot of the actors responding, then back to a VFX shot, very clipped and unintegrated.
If the editor wanted the VFX shot to be longer to build tension or for better flow or for
whatever reason they had to do it with the VFX shots they had, reusing the same shot,
repositioning, reversing, or flipping the shot to make the scene longer.
For the reboot, the VFX team came up with a method that allowed the Director and the
Editor to actually design the VFX sequences before they filmed the principal photography.
To achieve this they had a full-time programmer previsualizing the battle scenes, the director
and editor could then adjust the sequence as they felt fit so by the time they came
to shoot the actors in their cockpits, the editor had a full 3D low resolution render
of the VFX sequence.
The actors could watch this sequence and know exactly what was about to happen, they could
fully understand everything that was going on in the scene and exactly how long it was
going to last, this meant they could react more naturally to what they were seeing and
therefore the VFX sequence sits perfectly within the scene.
This method made the action scenes easier for the audience to understand which in turn
allowed the filmmakers to produce longer continuous battle sequences, like, for example, the final
battle sequence, which, at over 8 minutes long was the longest continuous battle sequence
ever done for television, until Game of Thrones and The Battle of Winterfell that is!
Principal Photography.
TV shows are generally done on very tight budgets, time and money tend to be short and
so in order to get decent VFX on a TV show with a time limit and without breaking the
bank, things needed to be streamlined, one of the ways they did this on Battlestar Galactica
was to greatly reduce time spent on match moving.
Match moving is used to track the movement of the camera shooting the live-action plates
so that a virtual camera can reproduce the exact same movement in our 3D environment,
doing this ensures the when we composite our 3D animated elements to the live-action plate,
the motion and perspective of the shots will be exactly the same.
Instead of using tracking markers or manually tracking, they used an automated motion tracker
that could read the film footage and work out the 3D space it originally portrayed,
it could then supply enough data so a 3D CG model could be integrated seamlessly into
the shot.
Using this method also made it easier for the VFX to be consistent with the show's "documentary
style" of camera movement.
Another way they saved time was to streamline the artistic process, in general, when creating
a 3D asset like a spaceship, the art department will first draw up some 2D concept artwork
that the 3D modelers will then attempt to build digitally in 3D, however, a 2D drawing
doesn't translate into a 3D model as easily as you may think and so quite a lot of time
is spent going back and forth from Art department to VFX to get it right.
In Battlestar Galactica, the bulk of the exterior design was carried out by the VFX team whilst
the Art department concentrated on the interiors.
By working closely together they ensured that the dimensions and style of both interior
and exterior meshed but by undertaking the majority of exterior design, the VFX team
was able to create their initial concept art directly in 3D thus cutting out the toing
and froing between the two departments.
PostProduction.
During postproduction, the director sat down with the animators and, in the same way, he
did on set, directed the action on the VFX sequence, the editor also sat with the VFX
team to fine-tune the cuts and make things smoother, by doing this they removed all the
guesswork, the director got the exact look he wanted, the editor got the exact feel and
timing that he wanted.
This communication and flexibility between departments led to Battlestar Galactica having
Visual FX that was leagues ahead of any other TV series of its time, which also led to it
being the first show to win two consecutive Emmy's for Special Visual Effects, and effectively
led to a change in the way TV series producers would view and use VFX in the future.
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which movie VFX you'd like to see behind next!