"So I'm sitting here with Bruce Boxleitner." "And this has been a very momentous day here on the Babylon 5:" "Lost Tales set." " It has." " As you've been back in the starfury for the first time in quite a few years." " I would say probably eight years." " Approximately, yeah." "'98, somewhere around there." " How was it being back in there again?" " Excellent." "Oh, the old baby she's a little rusty, has some pieces missing." " You all right there?" " That's a relative term." "Then you gave him the old red button." "It's over." "Dead-man bargain." "How's your stare?" " Still." " Like a cow?" " They always did, though." " Yeah." "You know that model was always kind of a cow." " It's kind of soft." " Till we got the Thunderbolt." " Yeah." " Which was a lot easier around the turns, better speed." "The old X-Wing, I wanna tell you it's nostalgic." "It is very nostalgic." "And, yeah, but you still have to give her a kick." "You know, walk around to the..." "Is that Delenn or the ship?" " Delenn and the ship." " As we work it." "And depending on what order." " Right." " But it's amazing we found this." "When I first got on the show we had just had the Northridge earthquake." "And I kept thinking all the time I was doing the scenes there were still aftershocks once in a while." "Being in one of these things tied up, everybody would run out of the stage and I'd be all alone rocking around in this thing, you know." "You can't get out." "Once you're in there, you couldn't get out by yourself." "You have to have somebody unsuit you, especially in the EVA suits." "The helmet." "No, it's a lot of fun." "They're a lot of fun." "A little cramped, minus the seat belts." "That was the weird thing." "If you were cramped, do you feel because you're the president now that there's a constrictor on your role that it limits you in some ways in terms of the action stuff perhaps down the road that a change might be welcome?" "Is that leading the question?" "The president has a whole different type of responsibility." "There may be a kind of a restriction to him that makes it kind of more interesting in a way." " You're a natural-born fighter." " You can't..." "Right." "He's a fighter pilot but he wants to go out there and do it." "But you can't and there's a sense of responsibility and a sense of the big picture, right?" "And that's..." "The president has to look at the big picture." "So..." "And it has its own dramatic qualities to it to play." "As we have in the script in this story." "I think we said before the younger Sheridan would've probably committed and justified it perfectly." "Should I take weapons off-line?" "Negative." "Keep weapons online." "You nuke them all." "John "Nuke Them" Sheridan, that's right." "Yeah." "And the reporter scene we shot yesterday does show the arc of the character." "In most television the character you see on the first day is the character you see on the last day of the show." " Right." " You start off as the starship captain." "Station commander." "Renegade." "And now, here you are, returning in triumph as president of the Interstellar Alliance." "In terms of playing all those colors, the changes how they feel about where the character's gone over the years..." "Oh, it's wonderful." "Just wonderful." "Because I actually feel I've lived a life." "And that's how you've..." "The progression of him through these various roles that he played in his life." "But I've lived it." "It's actually remarkably more comfortable to step in right now after all these years." "It feels like we have not left in many ways." "Do you feel that?" "I mean..." "I never left the Babylon 5 universe." " Always there in my head." " You never did?" "I can hear the voices of the characters." "Can't make them shut up is the hard part." "Londo just won't shut up." "He's always in the back of my head." "I love that part, talking about Londo." "And it was terrific, like yesterday, having to sort of talk about these various characters." "You know who we were talking about." " Most of the fans out there..." " G'Kar." "So you hear where they are, you hear what's going on, hear where Londo is." " But Londo..." " He isn't very happy." "No, he's not, and we've gotten to see that through watching him through the series." "We watched the tragic character that he became." "It's fascinating, so..." "And I felt protective of him in a way." "With this young woman asking him questions." "She's, "Oh, yeah."" ""You don't know..." I wanted to say:" ""You don't know the story, you don't know him." "I'm the only one who has the right here to talk about him, to feel about him, to think anything of him."" "You know, it damn near killed me." "I know it's part of your technique as an actor is you often enunciate the subtext as you're preparing for it." "I hear you say:" ""I'm frustrated, I wanna be here, I wanna talk to you."" "We won't have to do any of this."" "In the performance, you don't say those words but that underlies the performance." " Right, right." "Exactly, I do." "It's just everybody has their way." "And did he really pass behind us?" " He looks familiar." " Vaguely, yes." " It's..." " He looked familiar." "I don't know, it's..." " He's Londo's stand-in, wasn't he?" " Apparently so." " Where they found..." " And there he goes again." " Oh, my God." " That's the original Londo hairpiece." "Unemployed for about five minutes." "Poor writer." " That was good." " This Joe and Bruce on Babylon 5." "Bye." "It was good." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "Hi, I'm Tracy." "I'm Colonel Elizabeth Lochley." "Yeah, that was my request, okay?" "Other people wanted some fancy stuff, I wanted a promotion." "But I'm just gonna take you on a little quick tour here around our set." "Over here, we have Erin and Egan's station." "This is the technical green-screen stuff that I don't understand." "I get this kind of look on my face like a dog hearing a shrill noise whenever they talk to me." "But they're really smart and really nice and I have no idea what this does." "This is a laptop." "Well, I know what a laptop does." "To be back on Babylon 5 is..." "It's truly a dream come true for me." "I really..." "I love my character." "I love wearing her skin, wearing her costume." "She has a real sense of fairness and justness about her." "And a real sense of discipline." "And so my character on Babylon 5 is something for me to aspire to." "So sometimes when I'm embodying her, I feel like she makes me better." "Beverley, please." "Beverley, this is Beverley." "She dresses me because I can't dress myself." "So she gets me into my colonel uniform." " And Susan." "Susan." " Yes?" "Susan, I need Hair." "You do not." "You just want to embarrass me." " Susan makes my..." " I'm in a witness relocation program." "No, no." "She says she's in a witness relocation program." "But I have naturally, Shirley Temple Good-Ship-Lollipop hair." "And she manages to make it straight." "You know, we have a history, you know, of having really strong women on Babylon 5 and all of us seem to be sort of altitudinal." "We're all, you know, 5'8"-and-above club." "And this is Keegan, our new Centauri." "Watch your hair." "He's got big hair." " It's much taller than I think..." " Are you from Texas?" "Yeah, yeah." " That's right." " Keegan needs it." "Wonderful new addition to our family here." "From Centauri Prime, where they wanna k..." "I mean, he's having some troubles back home." "With some assassination attempts here and there." "But I had to tell you, I'm a little jealous of his costume." "As much as I love my eagles, I love this." " You can try it on later." " Thank you." "I don't know if..." "Probably won't fit in the bust area." " Well..." " I'm lacking there." "I'm hoping someday..." " Thankfully." " Someday." "Yeah, that's true." "And I have a theory about this." "I think that only..." "And I know this is gonna come out politically incorrect." "But primarily, educated, intelligent men appreciate strong women." "And that tends to be a great portion of our fandom." "And who could forget Samm." "Come on, Samm." "Samm keeps this whole thing running, okay?" "She's the Eveready Bunny." "The creative Eveready Bunny that puts all this together..." " Bless you." "...and keeps everybody smiling." "Which is very important because you know what?" " Life's too short not to smile." " Absolutely." "This is our camera crew and our cinematographer, Karl." "And our first assistant director, and he's in charge of pretty much everything and as an actress, I..." "Well, you know what?" "You can always loop the sound." "But you gotta be nice to the lighting guy." "Otherwise he does this." "Yeah, he puts me in the Witness Protection Program." "But this is Karl Herrmann very acclaimed cinematographer and all around nice guy." "And my agent." "You're still getting 10 percent or is it 15 now?" "It's 20, babe." "It's 20." "Jeez, my wallet's starting to hurt." "So I think that they're not put off by the strength and the power of our characters on Babylon 5 because they get it." "They're not intimidated because they're strong about themselves." "And again, it comes from Joe because he's strong and he appreciates someone who can go toe-to-toe with him." "And so I think he sort of writes the women characters that way too." " Oh, Steadicam." " Hello." "This is the guy of the Steadicam." "It takes a big team to do it." " I just hold the heaviest part." " This guy holds, like a 300-pound Steadicam." " That's sweet." "He never complains." "I mean, we're going, "Where's my powder puff?"" "And he's walking around with 200 pounds on his shoulder and keeping it completely in focus and steady and making us look great." "She's too sweet but I hope she talks to the producers and then..." "I think they'll see this." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "So I'm sitting here with Peter Woodward, who plays Galen both in Babylon 5, Crusade and now Babylon 5:" "The Lost Tales." "And you occupy a unique position in that you were the last person on deck and the first person on the new deck." "How's that transition feel to you?" "Yeah, I was." "I always thought I was very lucky because I squeaked in at the end of B5." "It was interesting because the character was a sort of bridge between B5 and Crusade." "And it's one of those bridge characters that is always in the background." "And always hovering there." "And yeah, it's always interesting to play that sort of slightly God-like creature." "It is typecasting for you, really." "It is, yes." "That's the sort of role I play all the time." "Because God does have an English accent." "I noticed in films and stuff." "Not only God but everyone in the Bible..." " Really?" "...has an English accent, yes." " Are historians aware of this?" " Some of them are, some of them aren't." " The enlightened ones are." " This is true, yes." "What makes a good Technomage?" " An English accent..." " Good start." "This has always been my problem, you see." "You have always kept so quiet about exactly what a Technomage is and where Technomage comes from." " Now it's my fault." "Yes, it is your fault where they come from and what they're doing, and what they want." "You know, I always had so many questions and you've always sort of said:" ""Yeah." "Well, you're doing just about right, you know."" "You ask on the way to the men's room." "Wrong time to ask these questions." "Coming out of the men's room, perfect time." "Into the men's room, not so good." "But I do remember we were at a..." "I think it was a fan convention." "Was it in Toronto?" "And you took me out for dinner and told me that, you know you were trying to arrange a future life for the whole B5 universe and at the time, I thought:" ""Well, that's nice of him to try but, you know, we'll see."" "And lo and behold, here we are." "And full credit to Warner Bros for having the guts to know that there was a future life for this show." " The fans are crying out to see you." " Absolutely, yeah." "Or just crying anyway." "There was crying involved." "We know that much for a fact." "But I'd say, yeah..." "And what's interesting is that the fans of science fiction generally but particularly for B5 and Crusade have already been one of the motives behind getting this show on again." "Because if there wasn't an interest there, there wasn't that continuing interest you know, this wouldn't have happened." "I agree." "As far as the role's concerned, what works for me about this is that we're used to science-fiction shows being about the technology the device, turning on the transducers to turn the force field on." "There's no sense of mystery there." "What Technomages are there to do is to bring back that sense of mystery and wonder." "And yeah, I could show you how I'm doing this, but where's the fun in that?" "Yeah, it's a great trap, I think, in all science fiction and the fiction generally." "You know, even in the new breed of action movies you know, if you just concentrate on the explosions and the chases and the technology of it yeah, you'll get the 18-year-olds." "You know, the geeks who like all the gadgets but you won't actually have a human story." "And whether Galen is a human or not..." "Because I don't know, because he won't tell me." "Whether Galen is human or not, nevertheless there are human emotions involved." "And you know, it's particularly in this episode that I'm in Galen comes across as a really pretty nasty character who has some very nasty suggestions to make to Sheridan, who was given a moral choice about what he should do." "And it's not an easy choice either." "It had some actual merit to it." "And most of your scenes are with Sheridan." "How was it to work with him in those scenes?" "Bruce is great fun to work with and I have to say you know, we're able to joke together and josh together a lot." "But I think we're a good match." "What the hell is wrong with you people?" "Don't you have any other hobbies?" "Well, that's hardly what I call a warm welcome." " You wind him up a lot." " I wind him up a great deal, yes." "Both as an actor and as a character." "Yeah, we get on very well." "But I think what's interesting is that his character has developed a great deal." "Sorry, gentlemen." "That's all right." "You can tell we're right on set." "They're setting up for the next scene that we're about to do right now." "In which, incidentally I'm playing the whole scene on a swivel chair?" "I just got on the set." ""Try swiveling around," he says." "It was gonna be a Barcalounger but we didn't have a budget for that." "Anyway, I was saying about Bruce." "I mean, what's interesting about both him as an actor and his character of Sheridan is that there's a really strong emotional undercurrent." "And as the character of Sheridan you know, he's now president, he has to pull that back, he has to be in control." "But it's still there." "And with Galen, it's almost the opposite." "It's like an absolute ice-cold, steel undercurrent." "Which occasionally just erupts into a joke or a bit of what looks like true nastiness, you know, on Galen's part." "A suggestion, for instance in this story, to kill an apparent innocent." "For what may be his own reasons." "His own political reasons perhaps." "We don't know." "And so the counterbalance is between the two characters." "And, I think, between us two actors is quite good too." "We are looking at new interpretations of the character for down the road, possibly with the voice of Galen attached to it." "We have one over here." "I wanna get your impression." " What?" " You thought about this." "We were thinking of broadening out the interpretation of Galen in some way, manner, shape or form." "So for the next movie, what we're thinking of doing..." "This is upside down, isn't it?" " Is especially going for more of an interactive sock-puppet kind of approach." "It looks like this." "There's the cowl..." " Yes, I see." "...which is like your cowl." " Exactly." " Yeah, and we have the eyes which are very mysterious like your eyes." "It looks exactly like me." "I was stunned at the way that this actually resembles you." "It's attacking my hand right now, which is also par for the course." " Biting the hand that feeds it." " And you're so skilled in using it." "Honestly, I don't know." "The glove puppet Galen." " I was at a convention once..." " Three of us together again." "I was at a convention once and I was presented with several people wearing Galen costumes." "But I think this is probably the best." " I think so." " Yes." "It's the eyes, the best part." "They're mysterious." " Oh, God." " Next movie this is gonna be it." "Tragic, isn't it?" "Tragic." "From Babylon 5:" "The Lost Tales the three of us saying, "Hi."" " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "I saw the Narns as being topnotch warriors." "But what I didn't really see in them which Andreas brought, was a certain elegance, a certain style." "To see someone in all this makeup being very elegant suddenly brought home the impossibilities to bear." "And it showed him the big ways and the small ways." "When I created the character..." "Actually, the first time I created it, it was Jackarr." "J-A-C-K-A-R-R." "I figured that doesn't look right." "I made it G apostrophe K-A-R, G'Kar." "And at one point, I was talking to Andreas." "He was rehearsing and he introduced himself as G'Kar." "I pulled him off to the side and I said, "G'Kar?"" "He said, "I have decided I'm French."" "And I just started laughing." "I said:" ""You know what?" "From now on, it's G'Kar. " And we kept it." "But again, there was that sense of elegance." "Even in his own name at how he approached it." "In his manners and the refinement he brought to it." "As a writer you start off with the hole that you have to fill with the character." "He's a warrior, he's a this, he's a that." "And all I had was he's a warrior." "Andreas brought to him that elegance, that refinement." "So that when you came into his quarters for a meeting and before he leaves his bedroom, five ladies leave first you accept it because it's G'Kar or G'Kar?" "And that..." "We live and die for those kind of moments." "Andreas, it was a marvel to me." "He created this character G'Kar." "A Narn." "What is a Narn?" "You could have said..." "Looked at him and said:" ""He's a large reptilian character with spots and beady red eyes and very eloquent but massive with this big body."" "Andreas felt very home as G'Kar." "I don't think he really wanted anybody to see him." "That's where he really felt alive." "He loved getting in that makeup." "I rarely saw him out of it to tell you the truth." "And in the heat of the summer in Sun Valley there in California he'd sit right out in the shade of my dressing trailer because it was nearest the back door, and sit in the shade of that." "It'd be 115 out." "And he'd just smoked his cigarettes and chat and chat." "I mean, he's in tons of prosthetic makeup and stuff." "He was so comfortable in that." "He never would leave it." "I swear to God he would take it home and stay in costume." "I'd written a scene where G'Kar and Londo were trapped in an elevator." "And the trope in television is that they must work together to stay alive." "I wanted to turn that trope upside down, where essentially G'Kar says:" ""I'm not gonna help you." "Yes, I will die if we don't work together but I get to see you die." "And I'm okay with that."" "And it was written in a very straightforward fashion." "When they went to shoot that scene, I was walking through the stage A and they had called action, and I stopped." "Which is what you have to do." "It's a protocol on set, you stop moving." "I began to hear this laughter." "And I went, "What scene are they shooting where there's...?" "G'Kar's laughing like an insane person?"" "They called cut, then I went up." "Andreas was looking very sheepish." "He said, "Joe, I decided to do this whole scene with Londo where I'm laughing hysterically." It wasn't written that way." "But him being a liberated warrior seeing that he can finally see his enemy die..." "Even though he was gonna die... ." "Would be the funniest thing in the world." "And, "Let me show you what I'm doing."" "And he did it again and tears were running down my face." "It was so wonderfully funny." "In the end, they looked at me, the whole crew like they'd been caught after school smoking." "Then he said, "Is that okay?" I said, "It was wonderful," and walked away." "That's what Andreas brought." "He always came at the material through a right angle." "And when he did so, he elevated whatever I wrote what anybody else wrote to a whole new level of craft in storytelling." "And that is so rare to have." "I'll tell you." "As much as the kindness made feel like one of the family Andreas did something on my first episode." "It was a huge scene with all of us in Sheridan's office." "And they were setting up some lights." "And I had been on my feet all day." "It was my first day." "I hadn't slept much the night before." "I was excited." "And I was walking over to sit down in the only available seat." "Just to rest for a second." "And Andreas ran over and took it first." "Classic." "And Peter..." "Londo, Peter goes, "Dude, what are you doing?" "She's the new kid."" "And he's like, "Hell, no, she's one of the family now." "I'd take any of your seats, I'm gonna take hers too."" "And that teasing probably made me feel even more at home than all the kind gestures." "Because you don't tease somebody you don't like." "I have a picture, I am very fond of, of my 11 -year-old son as this little chubby baby in the arms of G'Kar." "And he's looking down at him really sweetly." "Mikey is..." "I don't know how many months old he was he was a little Gerber baby." "I mean, he was just chunks." "He's crying away but it wasn't because he was afraid of Andreas." "He wasn't." "He was mesmerized, looking up in those red eyes and Andreas' wonderful, wonderful voice deep voice." "And it was because he was hungry for Mommy." "It was food time." "I treasure that picture." "I treasure all of that stuff." "There are people in your life who show you how to live." "There are people in your life who show you how to die." "Andreas showed me how to die properly." "And that was a transformational experience for me." "I had this theory that the more important and intimate the emotion the fewer words are required to express it." "First it's in dating." ""Will you go out with me?" Six words." ""Honey, I care for you." Five words." ""You matter to me." Four words." ""I love you." Three words." ""Marry me." Two words." "But what's left?" "What's the one most important and intimate word you can ever say to somebody?" "It's "goodbye."" "And I think of Andreas, I think of goodbye." "And how important that was for me." "I had no idea how we were going to approach the subject matter of two of our fellows, our members of the cast that are no longer with us." "I wondered how that was going to be treated." "I think it's done wonderfully in this." "I am very proud that I get to kind of refer to them." "But not as though they're dead, because their characters will never die." "They are just beyond the Rim." "And that's always been Babylon 5-ese for a myriad of things that had gone on." "We may never see them again but we know they're out there somewhere exploring." "Spiritually, physically, everything." "I had a line where Sheridan asks me:" ""Who's gonna be there?" And I said, "Garibaldi might come." "I don't know." "I haven't heard back from him in a while."" "And he says, "What about Stephen?" And I say:" ""Haven't you heard?" And the line is written:" ""He's gone exploring beyond the Rim." And I couldn't get through it." "Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs were two wonderful gentlemen." "They were great fun." "Terrific actors, really created some very wonderful characters." "Richard, who played our Dr. Stephen Franklin a wonderfully sensitive man, a party animal but brought so much to every scene." "He used to go down to conventions and dance on tables." "Literally, at midnight with fans." "And he would carry on and just be absolutely nonstop." "And no one ever had a bad word to say about Richard." "When he..." "We had the funeral, everyone showed up." "Every family, every studio, every show has its alliances and its factions and its feuds." "This person likes that person, doesn't like that person over there." "Or this person hates that person over there." "Everyone liked Richard." "Everyone liked Rick." "And we had people who didn't much like each other when the time of the funeral came, put aside everything else for Rick because he would have wanted that." "Richard was kind of the human population of Babylon 5." "Stephen Franklin was kind of our conscience." "He was the doctor." "I was the warrior, diplomat, whatever." "Stephen Franklin was our doctor, our healer." "He refused to fight even though he did when he was put up against the wall." "He handled himself very well." "One stunt man will attest to that." "He knocked him cold." "But that was, "A little too close."" "But he played that part with such passion." "Very passionate man." "It really rattled all of us." "It really affected all of us." "We had a wonderful memorial for him up in Topanga Canyon at the Will Geer Theatrical Botanical Gardens." "So many people showed up to say good things." "That's a testament to you when you're gone:" "How many people show up to tell stories about you." "One of my fondest memories of Rick Biggs and I thought it was, again, very interesting that Joe wrote it this way is in River of Souls when Lochley is going toward the light and facing death the character who appears to her is really one of the lost souls." "But he appears to her in the form of Dr. Franklin." "And the reason that he's taken that form..." "And these are Dr. Franklin's lines, is he says:" ""I'm appearing to you as someone that you trust and love so I can reach you."" "And again, very prophetic." "When we lost Richard I went to the funeral with everyone else from the show." "And I knew that the show mattered to him." "I didn't know quite the extent to which it did matter, however, until the end." "As it turned out..." "We got in line to pass by the casket." "I ended up being the last person in line and his wife was there as well as his father and his, like, three or four sisters." "He's the only boy in the family of girls." "And I met the wife once or twice." "I wasn't sure she'd recognized who I was." "And I had never met the family." "As you come up to them to pass on your regards I thought, "What should I say?" and you know, "Should I introduce myself?"" "I'm not gonna introduce myself because it's not who I am." "But saying to them, "I'm sorry for your loss. " And all the rest of it." "And I get up there and the wife sees me in line." "And starts crying and turns to her father-in-law, Richard's father she says, "It's Joe."" "She didn't say, "The show's producer, it's the producer. " "It's Joe. "" "And I found out at that moment how much the role mattered to him how much he talked about it and that it was his favorite role of all time." "That it was the one time when his being black or African-American was never an issue." "It was never brought up." "It was just him as a person." "And we talked, and we hugged and we cried." "And I realized how much the role mattered to him." "And walked away a very different person." "We're sitting here today at the Vancouver Film Studios offices here in Vancouver." "I'm okay with it being dark because I'm a gloomy kind of person." "I've been known to burst into flame on occasion when the sun is too bright." "Let me show you where the offices are." "We had our first big production meeting today." "We've been in prep now for about three or four weeks." "This is when we have our chance of bringing the entire team together." "And I think that it's a great team." "We're in very good shape." "My job, as I see it, in leading this group of people is to basically screw up the production as much as humanly possible." "It was my idea initially and they can confirm this to shoot with sock puppets rather than real actors." "I thought it would be innovative and imaginative and new." "Warners decided they wanted to be conventional and just use human actors." "It's a blow because I had invested a lot of money into the socks, honestly." "And that work was not appreciated." "I let it go." "I'm not bitter about it." "They, again, refused to see the wisdom of the creative artistic choices that I'm trying to bring to bear here." "But that's all right." "I'm not bitter." "We'll use the real actors and we are now like I said about a week or so from shooting." "And my first directorial shot in about five years." "I thank Warners for the chance to really do that and do a bad job of this because I think if you say that you're gonna do a good job people expect that." "If you do a bad job, the people say:" ""Well, he screwed it up but we expected it."" "I think that's the way to go." " Action." " Camera." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "Well, here we are on the Babylon 5 stages." "We are now on the Thursday before the Monday we're going to shoot." "Sets are going up as you will see in a moment." "This is going to be a cell in which someone will be held captive for a certain period of time." "I'll take you through the rest of the area here." "We go from here into the..." "Well, I'll get to that in a moment, but this is going to be a room in our station for Colonel Lochley, who has been promoted." "This window will look out on to the stars." "And she will come here and think about many, many grand and important things." "The guys in Carpentry and Construction are working round the clock to make this all happen." "Painters, overtime." "This is the main arena on which our story is taking place." "This is the green screen." "We have painted the floor and we have this massive sight behind us here now where we can create virtual environments, virtual sets special effects." "So this is going to be a large part of our show à la Sin City where we saw a lot of big CGI stuff going on." "We do have some additional sets being built right now." "These are all built to look like the original designs from Babylon 5 so that the doors all match and the walls tend to match." "And these cutouts here..." "Okay, I have to tell the truth." "I have to be honest." "See, the theory was, as I mentioned in the prior..." "Prior one of these video diaries, we were gonna do the sock puppets." "And this was meant to be one of the areas the sock puppets come through." "Basically, you walk down..." "This will be like a giant city set." "A giant cavernous city set, five miles high with these windows in the side where you see people waving as you go by." "So you walk along and there'll be a ledge here." "And a sock puppet Sheridan will come out say, "Hello, how are you doing?"" "And they said we couldn't do the sock-puppets thing." "So we've had to now make the big city into a hallway." "And again the artistic vision isn't there that it was before, but we'll..." "We'll make it work somehow." "So this is the hallway." "And now we leave." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "So I'm standing here with Gregg Mayday from Warner Bros." "And this is a great day for us here at the Babylon 5 stage because there's been questions, some confusion about the sock-puppet issue." "And I got Gregg to come up here on the pretext of trouble on the set." "We talked about it on the phone and trouble on the set was mentioned anyway, that there was trouble..." "But it doesn't matter." "We got him up here now." "I can show him the sock-puppet concept and he can see for himself exactly what we had in mind." "And maybe we can reshoot this whole thing and kind of start fresh with the original idea." "So I've arranged for a demonstration here to show you what I'm talking about." "So for instance, Londo is a very popular character, as you know, with all the fans." "And he's big on the color purple." "It's a royal color, it's very important." "So for Londo, we have this." "Well, the hair is not actually there yet but it's a start and that's..." "That would be the Londo look." "And I think it's..." "It really captures the essence of who the character is and the fans would love that." "And next up, we would have Sheridan." "Now, I know this isn't the Sheridan that you're used to seeing but there is the gray-hair thing going on and he wears a necklace during the show." "I'm not quite sure what the eyes are about." "They look like they got stitched together like a horror movie." "But we can fix that." "We can fix it down the road, make that better." "Next up, we have this guy right there, this is Galen." "And Galen is sporting the leather cloak." "And it has the whole, sense of mystery." "Here you can notice, for instance, the eyes are kind of like X's." "That's a concept on Galen." "This is your call ultimately, Gregg, because it's important." "This is Lochley." "We have, you notice, the hair, which is very nice." "The command badges." "I think really no one has seen this before." "So with your permission, I wanna go ahead and try this on a reshoot." "So, what do you think?" "So I think the silence of the network and the studio representative here speaks to the fact of the confidence that they have in this production." "He was overwhelmed, obviously, and speechless." "And I think that this is going to be the wave of the future for Babylon 5." "I'm proud to be part of this." "I appreciate the support from Warner Bros." "And we look forward to talking about this some more." "Gregg?" "Gregg?" "I'm tired of you guys crawling inside my head and showing me this kind of crap." "Every time that I think that my life is finally going okay for a change." "What the hell is wrong with you people?" "Don't you have any other hobbies?" "That's hardly what I'd call a warm welcome." "Not a, "Hello, old friend." "Good to see you again."" "Maybe a hug or a peck on the cheek in a manly sort of way..." "Why show me this stuff?" "Why me?" "Because for those of us who dwell in the infinite space between science and magic between illusion and ultimate truth..." "Sorry, can I go again?" "I'm good with that." "So I'm standing here on probably what is one of the largest green-screen stages up here in Vancouver." "As you can see, it goes up quite a ways in this direction." "And we paint the floor green as well." "The concept behind the green screen and a green floor is that it allows you to put the actors in virtual environments." "Not just to put a virtual wall behind them but to have a virtual environment so you can start..." "And as you pan with the camera and with the actors and go around to create a three-dimensional environment." "So the floor is also green." "They put a cove along here that sort of softens off the gap and it allows us to take our starfuries, for instance and take the cockpit and create around that the rest of the starfury." "We use the interactive lighting coming around the front of the starfury to create the sense of the starfury moving around the sun or the stars." "So that as it moves, the light moves and we can then use a green-screen environment to re-create that same move in CG." "So it gives the ship a sense of actual movement, that we're going someplace." "And weds the real-action footage and the CG footage together." "But I tell you, it is really difficult to work this kind of green screen you know, behind you and all around you as well." " That one?" " In the other direction." " Other direction?" " I think so." "If I'm acting with Bruce here, then the cameras might be where you are then they might come behind us and they might come that side and they might come that side of us, but Bruce and I we don't swap positions, so we're kind of used to this scenario here." "But with green screen, the green screen's behind us." "So we have to do the scene once like this:" "And then once like this:" "And then once like this:" "And then once like this:" "And once like this:" "And of course, every time I turn to Bruce it's a different background, different lights, there might be a cameraman." "There might be something completely different." "It is so confusing." "In other cases, we will often use the black screen over here if we want a general sort of dark environment as we had the void in the dream sequence." "And in the viewing room, we go to this." "And what they do is they put up targets, these little bright LED dots which allow them to map CG onto those areas where we need them without getting in the way." "This is the technology that allows us to do Babylon 5 in a much more creative fashion, liberating fashion because you can do things now in this environment that, wouldn't have been made in B5, originally you could never do." "And over the next several weeks, we'll explore in more detail how that process happens." "You'll come with us to post." "We'll show you how you take real-action figures real-life figures, wed them to the CG and create new environments." "So I'll see you over in post." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "One of the major set pieces on Babylon 5:" "The Lost Tales is set in a New York of the future where many, many very, well, bad things happen." "And this is Jeremy, who's designing our futuristic New York." "Hi." "My name is Jeremy Hoey." "I'm one of the partners here at Atmosphere Visual Effects." "And I'm also the senior and, at present, only digital matte painter." "It's my job to create environments and backdrops and set extensions to create worlds sets that don't exist in real life or are too expensive to build practically or to re-create locations that it's just much cheaper to do digitally than it is to take a crew out." "So I have a pretty wide ranging brief." "And it's a lot of fun because I get to dip my fingers into all kinds of different areas like some 3D, some Photoshop sometimes a bit of compositing." "And I'm responsible on this show for creating the matte paintings for the destruction of New York sequence." "My starting point was to take some photographs of New York." "I happened to be in New York last October for a friend's wedding." "And this was the view from the building where she had her reception." "So luckily the rays of the sun were coming low and I got a great picture." "I actually had..." "I did a panorama picture of Central Park." "And I've just stitched them together and that's gonna form the basis of my matte painting upon which I'll build and add a lot of very tall buildings and make it look like New York several hundred years in the future." "So the first thing I've kind of done is to extend the sky up a bit." "I had some other sky plates that I shot in Montreal several years ago that came in very handy." "Similar lighting to New York." "And since then I've been building a number of 3D elements of buildings." "The foreground and the background." "I want to build New York up and make it look much larger and..." "Because New York isn't really big enough." "New York isn't really big enough." "Not as it stands now." "I mean, figure we got 400 years of growth not we've gotta get in there." "But I'm just roughing the stuff in." "I've been shuffling buildings around and seeing compositionally what works and slowly starting to sort of have an in on what might provide a dynamic composition." "I wanted to get a real sense of depth in here because one of the later shots will be massive beams of energy shooting down from the sky and utterly destroying the whole city." "So we wanna have a massive beam working its way through, just like, plowing through Central Park and tearing up buildings as it moves towards camera." "So a lot of this is gonna be 3D." "We're gonna have some 3D cars swooping through the scene, obviously early days for that yet." "But when we can get towards the end of the process we'll be animating those." "Here's some deep background elements for the city." "Just to sort of fill in the skyline way off into the distance to give that sense of New York as being a truly humungous city." "Once I've rendered up 3D elements, I'll just place them in Photoshop." "That's where I can tweak all the color corrects and I can gently massage them into the scene." "And eventually, this will hopefully look quite realistic." "I'll be basically taking this matte painting and all of these buildings I'll be tearing up making them charred and blackened and twisted and..." "Basically New York City after rays of destruction have completely totaled it." "But still seeing some recognizable forms of the city." "So that'll be an interesting balancing act to achieve." " Excellent." "Very good." " Thank you." "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "So I'm here today at Atmosphere special effects." "These are the guys who provide CGI for not only our show but for many other fine television movies and series and motion pictures." "And we're gonna show you today how you create the Babylon 5 universe going from words on a page to the finished product." "Showing things that actually you shouldn't be allowed to see but it's you." "And I know you so well and why not?" "So come, walk this way." "So this is the part of the DVD where we see things we have seen a hundred times before in the course of production as if we were seeing them for the first time." "So let's all play along and pretend this is the first time." "Andrew, I'm astonished by this incredible environment that you have here." " Thank you, Joe." " Can you show me the big board." "The big board." "2001 music, we have to have it." " Also Sprach Zarathustra very important." " Very, very exciting." " Yes." " This is the show." " What do you think?" " Why is there a pony shot in here?" "There's no ponies in the show." "There's a pony right over there." "I thought I'd try to slip that in, thought maybe you'd miss it." " Space ponies." " Yeah." " Ponies in space, very exciting." " So explain to us what this is." "These here are all of our shots for the show." "You'll notice there's a lot of shots." "Joe came to us, originally two shots." "Kind of expanded a bit." "So how do you determine the numbers of the shots?" "These are actually based on the scene numbers from the script." "So scene two." "Shot two, the first shot in the scene." "X01." "Next shot in the scene, X03." "That's the number of shots." "What's over here now?" "Number of shot, next is our little picture." "So we know what shot we're working on." "Description, in this case we're carrying another description down." "Artist on the shot." "Very important, the due date." " Always problematic." " And what's the date today?" "January 26th, February 2nd, due date." "Yeah, these are gonna be a little tricky." " We'll make it work." " We're screwed." "You can see we got a lot of shots." "I'm not seeing the word "done" anywhere over here." "I think somebody erased it." "We had one shot that was done." "It's kind of due in two weeks." "It's kind of depressing." " Okay, this is the big board then." " This is the big board." "Let's go and see one of the actual artists." "These are the guys who worked for you to create the images we're gonna see on the DVD." " That's correct." "So show us the typical working environment of one of these artists." "So this is one of our artist's suites." "So, what do we have in front of us?" "What are we looking at here?" "We're looking at the light kit for the station which I'm gonna do a couple tweaks to." "Oh, what is a light kit?" "A light kit is basically all of the station's self-illumination." "So all of the blinking lights." "Spotlights on the heat-dissipating panels, things like that." "There's quite a few of them now, compared to the old version." "And we render this by itself with no other lighting and then it gets comped in over top of the other passes of the station." "This is, at least I think, one of the cooler shots in the show which is the battle scene dream-sequence shot." " Right." " All in its previs form so these are just the rough boxes surrounding the geometry which is the only thing that the machine can display in any kind of reasonable time frame." "So it's the only thing that gives you a sense of decent motion when you're just scrubbing with the mouse like this in order to get proper sense of what the animation's gonna look like I would have to render out a preview which would just be a wire frame or shaded preview..." " When you pause, you can see the ships." "Yeah, they render out reasonably quickly." "They're all low-res models." "Actually some of them like this starfury right here is the original model from the old show." "Cool." "So a lot of the original models that we ended up salvaging from various places we're using for previs." "Because they're light enough that we can do that." "And not have to bother spending time building specific previs objects." "This one was a little bit tricky, took a couple of days the camera is traveling with ships and then transitions to watching the overall scene." "So getting a kind of transition point and making sure it's all smooth and elegant the way that it switches viewpoints between fast-moving fighters and larger capital ships." "So, Terry is he's currently working on the fiery cathedral with some lovely fiery elements, all of which are very cool." "So again this is just one element." "We're also..." "The floor is gonna be another fiery element." "We'll have stuff in the background." "There'll be a ceiling on it." "And this is the plate..." "He's quickly put into 3D space." "And we're gonna be doing this really cool push-in shot on one of their characters." "It'll be really quite cool." "This is just a preliminary sort of mockup to give us a rough idea of what it's gonna look like." "Paul is working on the interior of the starfury." "So this is basically just some support struts on the side there and buttons." "And various screens displaying all the information..." "This is the pilot's point of view, piloting a starfury." "This is what Sheridan will be looking at as he's looking through his screen here." "And we have some graphics that'll go on there, radars and all that." "High-tech gizmos that will be bleeping and blooping." "So from here, we'll get our graphics laid out in 2D here and make them look all fancy and really complex." "That's the HUD display on top of the actual object in the background." "Yeah this will be..." "This screen here will be projected in his main monitor here and then reflections in the glass and this will all be..." "So is this his personal altitude control or is that the other ship?" "Oh, let's see." "This is more of a design of the other ship so it's got some kind of a..." "Friend-or-foe recognition system?" "Yeah, there you go." "Still some work to do but I think it's coming along." "Now where's the iPod go?" "Okay, that's a cut." " Okay, still off of that high Y." " Cut." "Okay, we're done with the high Y's." "I'm gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..." "In preparing to shoot these DVDs a number of fans pour forth a number of questions about things they want to hear answered in the course of these DVDs." "We've compiled those questions, and they will be asked here today by a volunteer whose been outfitted with a microphone." "What is the first question that everyone wants to know?" "If you look back at history, the ancient Babylon was a point of intersection for a lot of different cultures." "It was a port of trade." "It was a place where a lot of business got done." "Also very corrupt, also very political." "So on the one hand that represented Babylon 5." "In addition to that, we had Babylonian creation myth which stipulated that the universe was created through the intercession with the balance between order and chaos." "And that, of course, was the very nature of Vorlon-Shadow conflict." "Those who really want to sort of peek ahead to what the conflict was could easily have gone back to early Babylonian creation myth." "And what we did on B5 you can see it parallels with what was done in Babylonian creation myth." "Why the number five?" "Well, the first four stations were destroyed or lost and I figured five was a good number." "It's a five-year storyline." "And the number five kept coming up over and over and over again." "I figured Babylon 14 was just too many stations." "And it just felt right to me." "So, hence the fan's questions of why Babylon 5 is that's it." "Babylon 5 is a history of the B5 universe at this particular time." "It begins in the given year, ends in a given year." "But as..." "If you're doing a story about the history of World War ll..." "World War I, obviously, happened before that the Korean War happened after that." "The elements that set up World War II was set up in World War I." "Thing happened, World War II." "Speed off into the Cold War." "There was a snapshot of these number of years." "In Babylon 5, we take a snapshot of those five years things that happened beforehand influenced this." "Things that happened here, were affected later on." "So I thought, "Let's just tell this five-year story and that's done." "That history is done."" "But life, both fictionally and in the course of our own lives, does go on." "And when the opportunity came up to revisit that world even though the main deal was done, the main story was told." "I accomplished the goal I set out to in telling one story across five years." "A chance to go back, and as hobbits say, "Fill in the corners," was very attractive." "I'm not sure I will go back necessarily to do a whole series." "But to take individual small stories about Sheridan, about Delenn about Londo and tell those stories and revisit those places which are very dear to me." "I had a great deal of attractiveness for me." "So the opportunity came up, I said, "Let's do, not a movie, not a big thing little short stories around these characters."" "One of the driving forces behind these DVDs was the fans who, after five years of DVD sales, had made this a big hit for Warner Bros." "And been asking for more stories to the point of there are now a number of fansites out there that have fanfiction fans asking for more novels to be written." "When you come to a fictional universe, you come there to play to hang out with people you happen to like and wanna be around." "And there has been a desire there for some time amongst the fans to have more tales set in the Babylon 5 universe." "So this is our recognizing of that." "And obviously, there is Warner Bros. That wants to make more Babylon 5." "But the flip side of it is the fans want more stories." "They wanna hear more of what happened." "How did Sheridan live his life later on?" "What did happen to Delenn?" "How did Londo get to where he ended up?" "So in looking at all those questions, we try to answer these for the fans and give them back some of what they wanted." "Talk to us a little bit about your people's studies." "I have a degree in clinical psychology which..." "There are places that I could people-watch and I like to observe those around me and study them." "Usually that involves rats running a maze but in lieu of rats, actors will do." "And on Babylon 5, I will tend to watch actors at lunch or watch them frolicking amongst their own selves and listening for hints about their personalities." "And then, take those hints and those traits and work them into the characters." "What I found is if you can take an actor's actual personality and invest that into the character when they hit those lines in those moments there is that sense of verisimilitude and of truth that comes out." "So for instance with Delenn, Mira had come from the former Yugoslavia that come to be of war-torn times and was an advocate for peace." "And traveled from place to place across all the borders and said, "I'm gonna cross borders whether you like me to or not."" "And therefore investing in Delenn those same tendencies." "When Delenn would talk about the futility and stupidity of war you could see Mira in her eyes in what she believed." "When I hear Jerry Doyle talking about being claustrophobic my first thought was to put him into an air duct as a character knowing that the fear that I see in his eyes would be real." "So I've always tried to take whatever possible moments from the actors' lives and put them in." "Very often they are surprised to see them there." "But that comes from just listening very quietly and observing." "I don't tend to talk a whole lot except on camera." "But I listen a lot." "It's every writer's tool." "You listen to people." "They put back in what you hear." "So for me, the actors themselves are probably the best source of inspiration for character moments." "Plot, a whole different situation." "But for character moments, it's great to have them as personalities available to you to play with and use to your own benefit." "Something that I saw happening on the B5 Lost Tales set which is evocative of the past of Babylon 5 is that the extras tend to hang out with their own kind in the following sense." "During Babylon 5, we would have extras playing Narns, Centauri, Minbari." "And at lunch, Narns all ate together Minbari all ate together, Centauri all ate together." "I was observing this, again pulling out the background clinical psychology and thought, "This is interesting." "We have self-segregation happening because of how people look."" "So one day, I said to our extras director:" ""Take that Narn extra and tomorrow put him in Centauri makeup."" "It doesn't matter but they were there almost every day." "And he put the actor, the extra, in Centauri makeup which of course, are the enemies of the Narns." "And that day at lunch, he went to sit with his usual friends and comrades." "But there was an odd sort of distance there." "They were all kind of bugged by his new appearance." "So the next day at lunch still in Centauri makeup he was sitting with the Centauri." "To me, actors and extras, as a producer, can become great cat toys." "To exploit for my own personal amusement and to see the psychology of our own social tendencies to break up by groups." "Whether it's Narns-Centauri, Caucasian-African-American upperclass-lowerclass." "We seek what we know of ourselves in others." "And that to me is a lot of the fun of being able to watch people in this kind of environment." "In looking back at the experience of directing Babylon 5 I approached this with great trepidation." "My initial hope was just not to screw it up." "And that was..." "If I could just achieve that, I'd be okay." "But after the first day or two, I really began to enjoy it quite a bit." "In retrospect, it was a great time." "At the moment, it was combinations of fear, terror vast and quickly learned humility and generally speaking a sense of, am I really up to this?" "Will they all see that I'm a fake?" "Which of course, everyone's reaction when you do something you haven't done a whole lot of." "But by the second or third day, I began to really get the sense that I got to pull this thing off." "The cast was great, the crew was great." "However, I may have screwed up here and there in small ways." "If there were deficiencies I might have had the crew was able to step in and save my butt repeatedly over the course of production." "In retrospect, it was fun." "At the time you're never sure if it was fun or not but in retrospect, it was fun." "Would I ever do it again?" "Hell, no." "But for this one time it was good to set the template for the show." "And I think that looking back at the entire show." "Now that it's been assembled, we're in post-production I've seen the director's cut, the producer's cut I saw the CGI." "I think it is a worthy chapter in the Babylon 5 storyline." "Rangers had its own feel, Crusade had its own feel." "This, when I watched it again today, as a matter of fact I thought, this feels like Babylon 5 to me." "We have reopened that door." "And to stand in that doorway and bask in that light for me it's a lot of fun." "So overall, I would say, for me, it was a great experience." "The question has come up from a number of people:" ""Why are you directing?"" "I have tried not to take this personally." "People would ask, "Why are you wearing that?"" "You'd begin to wonder, "Why am I wearing that?" "Is there a problem with what I am wearing?" "Is it inappropriate somehow what I am wearing?"" "Why are you asking the question?" "So I have been coming to the shoot, coming to prep, coming to post and the main question I get is, "Why are you?"" "And, "Why did you direct this?"" "Not that I'm sullen." "Not that I expect to have an agenda behind this question." "It could be." "I'll let it go." "As to the question itself why am I directing this?" "When there are many good, talented directors around and there are." "Babylon 5 had a range of wonderful directors." "Mike Vejar, Jesús Trevino, Janet Greek and many others." "Why me?" "There is that question again." "Why me?" "Every morning, I get up and I say, "Why me?"" "And now they should have done the same thing." "I think that's only fair." "Why me?" "Because the Babylon 5 universe has changed and it's grown." "New technology's available to us now to tell those stories and I wanted to set the template." "I lived in the Babylon 5 universe in my own twisted way." "I like going to that place and I see it in my head." "So that let me get in here initially, set the tone, create the template create the Babylon 5 universe as it can be done now with the technology that we have." "And having done that I can now hand it off to other more qualified more respected more appreciated directors than myself." "So now that Helen Keller has finished directing we'll bring on someone else to do a much better job." "But for those who have asked the question, "Why am I directing?"" "The ultimate answer is because I can." "Thank you." "When you direct or produce a show, if you would actually do it right which I have yet to achieve but someday I'm hoping for it." "The key to it is that you prepare properly long ahead of time." "So that when you get to the set it's almost anticlimactic." "You surround yourself with the right people with the right resources." "So that there's a buffer around you that protects and insulates you." "So that you are almost in a way guarded from your own stupidity." "And you can turn to someone around you who's brave enough and comfortable enough to say if you're doing it wrong, "By the way, you're doing it wrong."" "So the key really is hiring the right people." "And to take you through some of the folks involved in Babylon 5:" "The Lost Tales because the director, the producers and the writers tend to get the most coverage." "But it's really done by and made by those people who are on the ground running the darn thing." "The key person, probably after the director in terms of really nailing down the look of the show is the director of photography." "In this case, Karl Herrmann." "What the director of photography does the DP, we call it at the U.S., the DOP, they call it in Canada." "They had the extra O for Lord knows what reason." "He sits on the set with the director side by side." "And he lights the set." "He creates the ambience." "He works with the camera operator to determine which angles are best." "Too often I can say to a DP:" ""Give me an overshot for these two actors."" "But there is like 12 different kinds of overs you can do." "You can do a wide-over, a dirty-over, or, you know, a raking-over." "And the director of photography has to look at all the elements that are there." "See all these cool ways to do it." "Here's the best two or three given our resources and our lighting package and where things are right now." "And you then say, "Okay, of these three this is the one I like in terms of the look of the show."" "He then goes off and tells the camera guys where to put the dolly track where to put the camera, where to put the lights, to shape things." "He really is the guy who creates the look of the show." "As much as directors do it, no question about it." "It's the DP on the ground who does the actual heavy lifting on that." "And our DP in this, Karl Herrmann, was extraordinary." "He was an absolute essential part of my process." "And if I came through this unscathed at all it is largely through his kind intercession." "So on this DVD of the show I'll give a special shout-out to Karl Herrmann for the great job that he did on Babylon Five:" "The Lost Tales." "The director tends to focus on the big-picture stuff:" "The emotions, the scene, the logic, what's the story being told." "And that has to get filtered down into the trenches so that everyone knows what their part happens to be." "Alysse Leite-Rogers was our first assistant director, our first AD." "And she is the person, who in this case when I say, "Here's the grand picture."" "She can break it down to all these component parts." "Make sure that the grand picture is executed by those component parts." "She is the person who takes the script, as with all productions breaks it down:" "What's the schedule, what's the day out of days which days will the actors be needed for what sets we'll be shooting in on what particular days." "It's really the technical work of creating a television show or a movie." "What the first AD also does, and Alysse was very good at this is keeping track of what the shots are to be done in the course of the day." "When you get into a particular scene you can dig in so far on the emotion, working with the actors that you forget how much time is going by." "Much of your time on the set is spent waiting around for something to happen or for the camera to get ready." "You're sitting watching the monitor when nothing's happening a great deal of your time." "But when you're actually shooting, time can go by very quickly." "And the first AD's job is to sit there, look at the watch and say, "You have to wrap up this scene."" "And if indeed you haven't got all your coverage, you and she will sit down to say, "Okay, how can we finish up this sequence in a fewer number of camera set-ups?"" "How can we finish up in a shorter fashion." "We do it all in just the master shot." "We just do one over and they walk out." "Whatever it is, she was always there to work with me to keep track of where we are and set up this scene prep the next scene, so that we're always going in a smooth seamless fashion from point A to point B." "Because it's very easy to get lost not just in the green screen but in the story and in the moment and not realize where you are in the production." "In this case, Alysse was absolutely there at my elbow the entire time doing an amazing job to keep the show moving ahead." "And again, it could not be done without her." "When you're directing what you have to always be very, very mindful of is that all the pieces you have line up." "You will cover an actor from the front and the side, do you need him from this side as well." "We have an actor coming into the scene you cover them only from the front as they walk in." "You cover it from the back." "You have to be constantly aware of the geometry of where your cameras are, because if you're not careful you can miss a piece of coverage." "And when you're in the editing bay, you can literally discover we don't have the shot we need to bridge A to B." "To bring the character into the room or out of the room whatever it is, you lack something." "For that purpose, you need to have a really good script supervisor on hand who, as you are shooting, notes down on a script two-shot, close-up, wide shot, master and logs in all the shots you have so you can turn to that person and say:" ""Do I have everything that I need?"" "In this case Christine Wilson, who's our script supervisor and continuity person could say, either, "Yes, we have everything we need." "The pieces are all there," or, "You didn't cover from this angle." "And you wanna grab that while the camera is here."" "And it tracks what was and wasn't done." "If you do a pick-up where you're shooting a whole scene, the master's fine." "You wanna cut in at some point, she will then say:" ""This actor was in this spot, at that moment in the scene so when you pick it up from here make sure the actor's standing over there."" "So this is all part of the mechanism of filmmaking that is so essential to getting it done in a reasonable fashion." "Okay, that's a cut." " Cut." " Okay, so we're off of that high Ys." "Okay, we're done with the high Ys." "We're gonna come down, set up the camera to cover..."