The props in Stargate are special pieces of art and craftsmanship, and they take specialized people to create and maintain them. Kenny Gibbs, Property Master for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe joins us to talk about some of these amazing pieces — including one so evil it earned him the nickname, “Evil Kenny!”

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
00:25 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:59 – Welcoming Kenny
03:06 – Kenny’s Stargate Beginnings
07:29 – Developing an Interest in the Industry
08:36 – A Typical Stargate Day and Prop Discussions
13:58 – Upgrades and the Armbands
17:18 – “Evil Kenny” Moniker
21:20 – Favorite Props
22:43 – Evolving Staff Weapons and Zat Guns
27:11 – “200”
29:16 – Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe
36:24 – Duplicate Props
38:38 – Research and Development
42:33 – CG Aliens and Advancing Technology
47:20 – Air Force involvement
48:56 – Filming in the Arctic
50:44 – Wrapping up with Kenny
55:29 – Post Interview Housekeeping
58:02 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, I appreciate you joining me today. Kenny Gibbs, Evil Kenny, property master for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe is joining me for this episode. This is an interview that I’ve been wanting to have for years and I’m privileged that he’s sitting down with me to talk about this. Before we bring him in, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, click that like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click subscribe. If you click the bell icon we will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. Clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. This is a pre-recorded episode so the moderators will not be taking questions for Kenny in this show. If we’re lucky, we’ll have him back in the future so that you can ask him questions about specific props and the process in creating so much of the magic that occurred through production. I think I covered the basics for the first stint of what will hopefully be another interview in the future and I really hope that you enjoy it. Let’s bring in Kenny. Kenny Gibbs, property master for Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. Sir, it is a privilege to have you. I have been wanting to have this conversation for a really long time so I’m grateful that you’ve taken some time out of your weekend to spend it with us. It means a lot.

Kenny Gibbs
Well thanks for having me. It’s been great being a part of Stargate all those years and it was my honor to be on the show.

David Read
So if I understand it right this is kind of where you cut your teeth in your field. Is that right?

Kenny Gibbs
Correct. It was. I was in the industry for probably a couple of years before I landed the Stargate job. It was just through coincidence that it ended up being probably the longest running series that I’ve ever been on and probably the closest match I’ve had to anything that I’ve really wanted to do.

David Read
Wow. Tell us about what that journey means for you; to have such a rock solid baseline for such a quality program at the start of your career. I imagine it set you up for all the do’s and don’ts for everything that came after. In terms of knowing people and in terms of working with people and getting what you need out of people while making sure that they get what they need and all the politics involved in everything.

Kenny Gibbs
Like I said, I fell into it, it was just coincidence and luck, sheer luck that I ended up on the show. The previous prop master had left, took most of his crew with him so I was a fresh start with a new prop master. I think the prop master that I started working for was the assistant prop master in previous seasons. I was brand new and brought on a few people that I knew that I had met along the way from the couple of years that had been working in the industry. The rest is history. It was great, every day on that show was a blessing. The crew was great. The cast, producers, it was all like an instant family. I think I came on in season four or five, something like that. They had already had a few years working together so I was the newbie. They embraced me so well and those were back in the days when we did 22 episodes a season so it was a long run. Everything was professionally done and they were so nice about things. One of the things we would brag about is that by the time you got to the end of the week, because of shooting schedules, because of having to push your shooting your call time, because of running longer days or whatever instance would happen. Sometimes by Friday your start time would be 10am or 2 in the afternoon so you’d end up working into your Saturdays. We were one of the only crews that would always be consistently working at 7 or 7:30 in the morning and we’d be just kind of waving to people saying, “sorry, going home on Friday at 7:30 to enjoy our weekends, to enjoy our life. Life with Stargate was awesome.

David Read
Yeah, it seemed like, the conversations that I’ve had with everyone, is that they recognized they had families outside of work. The work fed into the personal life, the personal life didn’t feed the work. I think it probably is indicative of one of the reasons that they were able to go 17 seasons, because they didn’t burn themselves the hell out.

Kenny Gibbs
That’s right. No, it didn’t. It was great. Doing SG-1 and then doing the two movies and then Atlantis and then Universe, we just expected to go on and on. We didn’t think it would end really. It was that fun. It was that much…going for it. Sometimes you don’t even have words for it because it was so great.

David Read
No. Who gets to work on a job of that magnitude for a decade plus? It’s pretty uncommon in that industry.

Kenny Gibbs
Very uncommon, very uncommon. It doesn’t happen anymore and even back then it was pretty uncommon. Unless you worked on a soap opera or something, but this was high end science fiction. We did a lot of locations, we did a lot of studio work, we did everything, right? We weren’t shy and the writers weren’t shy and producers were excited to stretch the boundaries of it. We were lucky to do what we did and the cast was awesome about it all the time.

David Read
Were you eight or nine years old when you woke up one morning and said, “I want to be a props guy when I grow up.” Were you a fan of movie and TV? What was your impetus for getting into this?

Kenny Gibbs
When I was young I just loved movies. I loved TV but I really did fall in love with movies. Almost every weekend I’d go grocery shopping with my parents. I’m from the East Coast originally, I’m from Montreal. We went to a little shopping center and back then it was like, “okay, well you guys go shopping and can I go and watch a movie?” and they’d go “Yeah, sure.” So I would go to the theater that was connected to the mall and I would go and watch a movie every weekend by myself. I would just be so giddy about the fact that I was sitting in a theater and just watching movies. That got me hooked, that really got me hooked. Then later on in life I just said, “okay, this is what I want to do.”

David Read
Wow. Wow. Now David Sinclair, was he who you worked with at the start of the career? With with Stargate?

Kenny Gibbs
Correct. He was my first prop master on Stargate.

David Read
Okay. Tell us about what he expected and what a typical day was for you in the beginning.

Kenny Gibbs
Well, like I said, David did actually take over from the previous prop master. He got bumped up I think from his assistant prop master status. David was just keen on continuing with the show because he knew how good it was for him. We were basically strangers. He had interviewed me about, I guess, six months before I had the job. We kind of hit it off in the interview and I said, “okay, sure. You want to take a chance? Let’s go!” I’d never, at that point in my career I had never run a set before. I was always an assistant to the assistant postmaster on set. I guess he saw my resume and just through word of mouth, that’s how it works in this industry a lot, he had heard that I can run a set so he took me on. I guess because of word of mouth he thought and hoped I could handle it and I just fit right in there. It was also mostly because of the crew and the cast, they just made me feel like “this is your home. We accept everybody.” It wasn’t hard at all, in fact, it was fun. Most days I’d going to work with a smile on my face and everyone would be like, “Why are you smiling so much?” I’d go “Look where we are. Look what we’re doing.” That never wore off.

David Read
You said high end sci-fi. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have people like Richard Hudolin and Ken Rabehl and Bridget McGuire and James CD Robbins churning this stuff out and then you guys having the opportunity to take it and bring it to life. I have right here, not to mention all the stuff behind me here, but [holds up Ancient device from Evolution Part 2]

Kenny Gibbs
Oh, yeah.

David Read
To be able to go to work and produce this! This is the second iteration of this, this is from 200. The stuff that you guys had to turn out week after week, I don’t know how you kept up with it. I guess it’s just the proper infrastructure and the willingness to give this a shot and “if this doesn’t work this way, we’ll figure out another way to do it.” I’m guessing.

Kenny Gibbs
Well, it’s like you said, we had brilliant minds, brilliant, inventive and talented minds. Just like behind you, you have the naquadah generator that. Richard and yes, especially James, but the key behind a lot of those props were our props and model shop. Our model builders were world class. Gord Bellamy basically was their leader and the foreman for the shop, he was amazing. Amazing. We had literally engineers working for us, engineering a lot of these props, electrical engineers putting together all of the inners. We did everything ourselves. A lot of shops these days and a bit in the past, would have to farm out all of that stuff to have it done. We did everything in house, every bit of it was done by Stargate model builders.

David Read
Wow. Was it a necessity to keep everything internal or was it that you guys just wanted to build out and had the leadership in position to want to build out everything internally? Or was it just to do with time?

Kenny Gibbs
You hit it, you hit it right there, it’s time. The necessity of having input every day, maybe twice a day, on the progress or sometimes failure of ideas. You need everything in house and that way we were able to keep our finger on the pulse of how the build was going, if it was progressing in the direction that the director would want and also if it was feasible to work on set. That was part of the biggest thing; sometimes it’s a nice picture but then you ask “how’s it going to work when people start handling it and throwing it around?” That’s part of the reason everything needed to be in house, so we could see if it was going to pass or fail right away.

David Read
I want to go back to your first season. You once told me in an interview for the Propworx catalogs the story about the armbands, the Atanik armbands from season four’s Upgrades. Tell me about the process of…Can we use them as a case study for something that you have to refine on the go? Would you mind sharing that story?

Kenny Gibbs
The armbands for Upgrades? Yeah, that was my first challenging experience on set. Translating a prop that started off as an idea and then a photo to an actual feasible prop that our actors would wear, sometimes we didn’t have a lot of time to test things. Your test was basically the first day of camera. These armbands are supposed to give our characters powers, alien powers, that would increase their strength and their speed. They looked pretty, they were great, but they weren’t made to be worn more than just holding your arm like that [up and straight] or holding your arm straight out. I remember we were doing a rehearsal and Rick just made a gesture like that to point with his arm and the thing flew right off his arm across the room. You have to find a way so what we tried to do…and it had an electrical source, a power source inside. At first we had to hardwire it. One of the first scenes was with Rick on set and we were up in the… I think the first scene that we ever played, it was up in the…it was up in the…it wasn’t in the control room, it was in the briefing room. It was up in the briefing room. We had to literally hardwire down his arm, up above the shoulders, down his leg and I had the control for it to keep the tracer going. It got to the point where it’s just wired out and then I was like, “okay, it’s too much wire. We’ll have to figure it out on set. Well, how are we going to do this? Cut the wire.” We made the connection shorter to go from the actual led to the battery. We made it a bit bulkier but then at least he was able to turn it on and off himself. There was no more hardwire and it was like, “okay, few, there’s one problem.” But then it was the fact that it didn’t have much memory so it wouldn’t cling on to their arms. Any sudden movement and it would fly off. Literally between takes I had to figure out what to do and we were actually keeping them cooled in a cooler. I had elastics around them to keep them in the shape that we needed them to be and keep them cool. It worked as long as it worked. The whole episode was a challenge and actually that’s where I got my nickname from.

David Read
Yes, okay. So Evil Kenny, I wanted to know about the moniker, where that came from. So that was this?

Kenny Gibbs
Well, that was from that episode, it was from that prop. Speaking of people who treated me like family from day one, it was Martin Wood. Martin Wood still is one of the most influential people that I’ve met during film. I love the guy. He’s still close, I did a film with him a couple years ago. I went to Guam with him just to be with him. Martin did that episode and he saw the struggles, he knew. He’s the kind of director who will always try to help you and always try to get the most out of not just his actors, but his crew. What had happened is that we had a couple of incarnations of this prop and what we had to do at the end, we built a mechanical one that would actually just… Okay, sorry, the whole premise of the prop was once it was on their arm the alien technology would not let go, so we had to find a way to make it let go. To show this on camera we built a separate model that was just mechanical, that would just basically open up like a clamshell. I said, “okay, well, we got this one because, come on.” So we brought in the prop, or I brought in the prop, put it on the floor, we’re getting ready for the shot. He said, “Okay, camera’s rolling. Whenever you’re ready Kenny.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” I flipped the switch and nothing happened. I said “okay, let’s reset” and I flipped the switch and nothing happened. I just gave up, I just dropped the remote and I walked away. Everybody, they’re good hearted, they started laughing and they said “It’s okay, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” I said, “Okay, we’ll try it again. We’ll get our builders in here and figure it out.” Martin was just trying to lighten the mood and he goes, “Okay, Evil Kenny, Evil Kenny, bring in that evil prop of yours, bring in that evil prop of yours. Let’s try it again.” So after that I became Evil Kenny.

David Read
You are faced with challenges in your life, some of them professional, some of them personal, where you come down to the wire and you have no choice but to get through it. You have no choice. There are thousands of dollars now riding on you because you are the one who has got to get this thing pushed up the hill. It’s got to happen, you can’t just say, “okay everyone go home, Kenny can figure it out overnight.” You’ve got to get it done. You have minutes. Wow man, that’s just extraordinary. That’s wild. You’re dealing with something that’s electronic and form fitting where a person can flex. Like you said, you have to get it to work just as long as it’s on camera and then it doesn’t need to work.

Kenny Gibbs
Right. There’s a lot of R&D involved. That was probably one of the rare times it didn’t work, one of our props failed. Like I said, we do have a super talented model shop, we did. It was one of the rare times that a prop [failed]. I think that was the season, and I’ll remember this Gord, I think that was actually the season that Gord Bellamy went off to do a feature. He was taken away to the feature [movie] world for a little while. We lost his input on props like that for about a season but we got him back. We got him back and we got back on the road.

David Read
Wow, that’s just extraordinary. Do you have any other memories of specific props from that production? I am blessed to have…that’s a replica of that naquadah reactor. But it’s all based on just visual, no measurements. Do you have any memories of some of the props from the show over the years? Some that you just love to work with or you thought was a cool idea. I’m curious to know what your favorites were. Well, out of the hundreds.

Kenny Gibbs
Early days, out of the hundreds? The naquadah reactor was one of them, definitely. We dealt with a lot of the alien props, dealing with Chris Judges props; the Jaffa, the blasters and the Zats. I think when we got into the later days and we had the replica blasters, those were really cool guns. We did a great job engineering those and they were they were pretty good. They were really cool.

David Read
You’re talking about the silver ones with the mouth that would drop down on it?

Kenny Gibbs
Yes.

David Read
Those were metal. Absolutely glorious.

Kenny Gibbs
Yeah, we had CNC machines, we had all the tools. We had all the tools at our disposal to make anything we needed.

David Read
Can you tell me about evolving the staff weapon as the show went along? The Zat gun as well. I know you started off pneumatic and then you guys designed an internal power system so you can battery load them. Can you tell me about those weapons a little bit?

Kenny Gibbs
Yeah, again, sure. That’s, again, evolving of the technology and also some of our crew. We ended up being lucky enough to employ some electrical and mechanical engineers and they just basically said, “look, well, we can do this better!” It’s like, “okay, let’s do it better.” They reengineered, especially the Zat. Before it was an air compression. It was an air compression system that would make the Zat go up and down and the head cock back to fire. They changed it to pneumatics and it was all battery powered. It was much lighter because it didn’t have the pneumatic tube in it and everything and we did the same thing with the staff weapon. It became lighter and more reliable in fact, the engineering was amazing. With the staff weapon, when we first had those the head of the staff weapon would not open, it was just all CG. Then we actually made ones that would actuate and open up. That was for us, even as prop people, we’d be like, “look at our prop, it is so amazing, right?” So, again, evolution of technology and it was great. It’s great.

David Read
I didn’t know the staff had a CG open at the beginning. How long did that go on?

Kenny Gibbs
For quite a few years because that was just a bit beyond us. To get that kind of air pressure, pneumatics, through the long shaft of it, it was impossible in the early days. So that came afterwards.

David Read
Wow. I’ve been fortunate enough to see the one that Chris had at the end. The batteries, if I’m not mistaken, went into the Cobra head and then the front end [opened and closed]. The brainpower involved in creating a system that would allow that to work is just mind blowing. I would sit there and I would play with it. It’s like, “I can’t believe that they actually made it. The only thing missing is that it doesn’t fire or smoke.”

Kenny Gibbs
It fooled a lot of people believe me. A lot of people when they saw that, that head charging and just open up, some people just jumped back at the first time, just looking at it and seeing it. It was really was amazing to work with.

David Read
And it had a problem with, especially when you had a lot of them, with bowing over the years.

Kenny Gibbs
Again, we had all different versions. We had light versions for Chris and the Jaffa to run with, the stunt versions as well. We had to make lighter, but at the same time, flexible versions so that they wouldn’t break. We used mandrel and urethane to keep its flexibility but some of the stunt ones that we needed to be a little softer, they would bow. We’d call them noodles because he’d start running with them and you’d see them [wobble]. At a point you couldn’t do much about it, especially at the end of that shot. Chris was running in and then had to clear people out of his way so we had to give him the stunt one. It was like “which one do we give him?” We would be testing them on the side, shaking them and “how’s this look?” “Okay, let’s just try this one.” “How’s this look?” “Oh, that one looks better.” We had a lot of different models for a lot of different situations that we had to film with.

David Read
The 200th episode where this little guy, the cube came from, and a few others. I’m curious, did you take part in any of the filming of the puppets down in L.A? Did you go for that shoot?

Kenny Gibbs
No, unfortunately, I didn’t. No. We just built everything up north up here in Canada and we just sent it down.

David Read
Tell me about that 200th episode. Christopher Judge said you had three and four episodes basically going all at the same time for that in terms of the amount of work. He said everyone that he saw had a smile on their face because they knew what this meant. They knew that the fans had made the show go on for as long as it was and this work was a celebration.

Kenny Gibbs
It really was. Again, you can’t say it enough; being with the crew and the cast, it was a blessing every day. Just doing that 200th episode, we knew that we were hitting a milestone that not a lot of people ever hit in their professional careers. As an actor or as a crew member, floating in and out and being part of the industry, you know that working on a successful series is very hard. It’s very hard. You can’t even judge what’s going to happen. You’re like “Oh yeah, well, season three, season four, we’ll get another one and then all of a sudden, season five, you’re done.” But for us, we just kept going and going. It was the strength of the writers, it was the strength of the cast and again, it was the strength of the fans loving the show. Working on that 200th episode was amazing. We enjoyed every minute, with a smile, again, with a smile.

David Read
Absolutely. What challenges did Atlantis bring? Or was it more of the same kind of process? Or were there unique challenges that Atlantis brought you, the years that you were doing it?

Kenny Gibbs
Atlantis was its own little entity too because they had a different premise. We called SG-1s “saving the world every 47 and a half minutes,” whatever. Atlantis was a little different because they were floating through space. Right. A lot of their challenges weren’t Earthbound, it was all alien. I think for them, their storylines were a little harder because the writers had to invent a lot of different situations and ideals that weren’t part of SG-1s kind of deal. Even though we did always go through the gate and visit alien worlds, all of their world was alien. You know, traveling through space and then the dilemma of not being able to go home and not knowing when they could go home. Atlantis was their own little entity, it had its own little challenges, but good challenges.

David Read
It wasn’t as easy to do Earthbound episodes because you had to have an excuse for them to go back to the Milky Way to do them. They did them but they were far more rare.

Kenny Gibbs
Correct. It was the same kind of thing that we ran into with Atlantis where Atlantis…

David Read
You mean Universe?

David Read
Yeah and you could use Earthbound technology and hide them inside them. Like with the…

Kenny Gibbs
Oh, sorry. Yes, Universe. Universe, they couldn’t go home. They were out there and everything that they had was a challenge. It was kind of like going back to the original Star Trek where you’re out there for the first time and you’re meeting alien life forms that you don’t know are friendly or not. I love that interaction that they had with each other and just the parallel, modern day parallel, of “okay, what are we doing here? Do we know what we’re doing?” It was great to build props for those shows because we were inventing our own things. We were just, “well, let’s invent something that looks like a tricorder.” “No, no, we can’t do a tricorder but we’re going to do…” Everything was invention, everything, so it was great. The minds returning a lot with those two series.

Kenny Gibbs
What do you got? Oh, yeah. {David holds up “life signs detector”]

David Read
It’s a HP Palm Pilot in there.

Kenny Gibbs
Correct.

David Read
This one actually isn’t. This one has just got a light source. The battery’s dead, I need to fix it. But, you know, there’s so much cannibalizing of what we have here to make it into something else.

Kenny Gibbs
That’s right, that’s what we did, that’s what we’re good at. The sets were amazing too, some of the sets, you’d walk onto the set and you’re like…Actually, I remember for when we did Universe we had to set out an index for them to figure out what they were doing. They sit down at the bridge, this one was the control for thrusters, this one was communication. We literally had to put out everything for them because they needed to know what they were doing in continuity. We had to structure it so that it would kind of make sense for them as an actor and also for the direction, to film.

David Read
You didn’t want to fake it. You wanted to make sure that that button was used for that thing only.

Kenny Gibbs
It’s all part of it, it’s continuity too. Then you’d hear the continuity person saying “Oh no. You didn’t reach over there for the communication device last episode or last scene.” We had to keep it real. Even though it was all sci-fi and all fake, we had to keep it real. That onus, the actors love that too. They go “we want this to look real” because for them, sometimes walking on some of the sets that were built, it was amazing for them. It was like something they’d never seen so they were into it 100%.

David Read
I want to talk about Universe for sure, I want to go back to Atlantis briefly. I had a chance to sell large portions of the prop collections for SG-1 and Atlantis and one of the things that absolutely blew me away was all the Wraith stuff that you guys created. I’d love to know how you concewived them. This sinewy, organic, muscley, just builds for everything that involved them. It looked like things had been taken out of an alien carcass, from a creature from another world, and wrapped around props to make them come to life in this way. The lights and the textures; the haptic feedback when just touching some of this stuff was just absolutely wild. Was there a process that you guys went through? Well, obviously there was a process. Tell me about the process that you guys went through for constructing this material that looks so organic.

Kenny Gibbs
Again, it was our model builders, Gord Bellamy leading the way. To make it look organic, it was a very time taking process. What they had to do a lot was stretch the urethane or whatever skin it would make, stretch it out to make it into skin, wind it up and we’d have to layer it on the different prop. Whether it be one of the devices on or a ship or one of their props, it would just have to be layers and layers of the different urethane. Coloring it and heating it up to make it melt a certain way to make it look…It was a very painstaking process but they had the plan, they knew it would work. We did have a big team at that point, the time we were starting to do Atlantis, they had the time and the crew to do the R&D to make it look really well. A lot of it was just layering, layering layers and layers of the polyurethane and just…

David Read
Wow, that’s amazing. Where and when would it come into play where you would decide “Okay, we’re gonna make two of these.” A lot of things that we had was twins and then other things weren’t. I’m like, “I’m guessing this was a certain size that they’re not gonna be able to make two of them.” The R&D for this one, like the BFG, the Big Effing Gun, that had the big crystals on the end and the mini naquadah generator on the top, you’re not going to make two of those. You’re going to get that one, you’re going to make sure it works. At what point would you decide whether or not you would create duplicates of a piece? Was it money? Was it tactile interaction with an actor? Where did that kind of fall in?

Kenny Gibbs
There are a couple of reasons. In the prop world it’s always said that “one is none.” If you have that one prop and something happens to it, whether it’s in the scene because it breaks or it doesn’t function, you have to have a backup. You ultimately have to have a backup. Sometimes money is involved if it’s a very large prop. Other times money’s not an issue because if it’s something that has to see some action you always have to protect your stunt performance and your actors and you have to make a rubber version of it. We’d always have a hero version, a hero backup most likely, but also a stunt rubber as well. A lot of times if you saw something on screen, there are three different versions of it. But again, back in props, it’s always “one is none” that’s our motto. It has to be really ornate or super expensive to produce for us to only have one. Or it just doesn’t really do much besides live in an actor’s hand or be pointed a certain way. But anytime anything sees any bit of action, most likely we have to try to build some kind of stunt robber for that scene or for that amount of use for that prop.

David Read
just a second here. I suspect you know what this is? [holds up Kino]

Kenny Gibbs
I do, I do.

David Read
So this is screen used but it was taken from the kino sled. A fan bought these and took the half hemispheres off of the bottom of them, combined them and then sold them online. It’s kind of sad but I’m also really thankful that I basically have one. Can you talk about the R&D that went into creating something like this which is essentially spheres upon spheres. Also the fact that you had to have some rubber ones because at one point one actor hits one over the head with it. Also, a lot of the time that we saw it it wasn’t real. it was in a computer.

Kenny Gibbs
That’s right. That’s right. Those were the days were 3d printers were just coming out and our 3d printer was the size of a small room. It would take days for it to create something as elaborate as that. We did the R&D by seeing how much of the inside could be layered to create a shell around it so you could see the dimension, so you could see the layers and the detail. But at the same time making a clear shell for it so you can see almost right through it. That was at the height of some of the prop building, again, a lot of R&D involved. The 3d printers made things go a long way and it just improved the amount of props that we could produce,

David Read
For something like this, I imagine if it was stationary in a scene you guys could pull it off practically in some way. Were you ever hanging it by a wire? What tricks did you use from scene to scene to pull something like this off? I’m curious, did you examine it from scene to scene to see which method would be the most economical and most realistic looking? Is that how you approach something like that?

Kenny Gibbs
Well, again, we had a great team and great minds about how we could could use these props and what’s the best and most efficient way for them to film. That came down to our visual effects team. I think I actually still have a version of one of those. We had one of those Kinos on a clear Plexi rod that was maybe three feet long. Whenever we needed them to fly or doing anything we would cut, we would bring the VFX ball in and they would run around and they would basically just take the pattern and path of anywhere that kino ball had to go. Our stage was so big we couldn’t do it on wire, that was the only way we could really do it. So basically, it was a kino on top of a clear Plexi shaft and then run around with it and they would track it and add it to it after.

David Read
So the camera would duplicate the pass with the ball not there so the kino could be inserted digitally I’m guessing.

Kenny Gibbs
Correct. We’d lock off the camera and then our vis effects would come in and they would…All of it is vis effects; you have to record the camera angle, the shutter speed and everything. They would just run around and create the path, or try to recreate the path that was done or that didn’t need to happen and the rest would be done in post.

David Read
Did you have any responsibility with, especially near the end with some of the fully CG aliens. There were some scenes where the communication stones from the show, the blue rocks, sometimes there would be interaction between a performer, a live performer, who was there and an alien or an exchange of a prop or something like that. Was that something that you guys would be called on to assist in, to do a handoff on screen, or was that more digital effects would just make that seamless? I’m curious to know where you interface with them on scenes where you were dealing with creatures or objects or props that were just too complicated to make practically so you had to do them digitally.

Kenny Gibbs
Usually any interaction, direct interaction, with an alien or anything, giving a prop to an alien, it was a very intricate matter that needed to happen. To put a live figure next to that digitally processed image wasn’t easy to do. A lot of times our visual effects department would basically just take our prop and scan it. They would add everything digitally afterwards because they couldn’t marry the two at that time; they weren’t able to marry the two. The easiest thing for them was to just scan it so there’d be no mistakes and they would turn the prop into a digital prop and add it to their digital sequence afterwards.

David Read
That’s absolutely wild. The technology continues to evolve, I’m sure. I imagine there are circumstances where the stuff that you come across is like, “I wish we had this for Stargate” or “we started that off on Stargate and this has come to evolve in this direction with what we can do now.” Do you look back on the work that you guys did with with Stargate now and be like, “Man, I wish we had this then?”

Kenny Gibbs
Like I said, we were super, super lucky. Maybe it was just the time that we were doing Stargate and the people that ended up becoming part of the crew. We were right at the edge of just starting to evolve with all of the technology that would help a lot of the prop crews and film crews altogether. There are a lot of things that I see now that are just like, “oh yeah, we did something like that” or “similar to that.” We weren’t that far behind. I guess near the end of Stargate a lot of our props were just world class props. They were world class technology. We left film and we started recording digitally. We were evolving with the world. We weren’t catching up, we were basically some of the leaders in it. That is really good question. But no, I don’t see anything. We were talking about this staff weapons and the Zat guns, everything we had evolved. All the props we had evolved. It’s just because we were catching up, not really catching up, we were just evolving with everybody else.

David Read
Is it that you had time to refine something like the Zat or the Staff or was it out of necessity that those things improved? Or was it that the technology was just coming along as you went? Or was it a combination of all of them?

Kenny Gibbs
I think it was a combination of the scripts becoming a little bit more elaborate and a little bit more challenging. We had situations where we needed our props to evolve and needed to do things that we didn’t have them do before. Again, we had talented people that became part of our crew that said, “No, I think we can engineer that to do that.” Even with the Vis FX, it’s like, “No, you couldn’t do that before, I think we can make that happen.” So everything, all of our departments, everything was evolving. Like I said, some of the scripts became a little bit more challenging, or challenged us as builders and makers, to have our props hold up to the timeline and make everything magic.

David Read
Absolutely amazing. Did your team have any involvement with the Air Force? When the Air Force had a hand in SG-1?

Kenny Gibbs
Absolutely, the Air Force basically went over a lot of our scripts, or basically the outline of our scripts to make sure they were always seen in a positive light. The whole premise of the show is around the Air Force and creating the SG-1 team to travel the galaxy and travel the universe. They had to make sure that they were being seen in a positive light and we always did. We actually had one of the Colonels at one point come to visit the show. It was pretty crazy, everybody had to go through security checks. They loved the show, they loved us; we were basically promoting them every week. Then to the point where we went up to the Arctic where they let us on their nuclear subs to film Contintuum. It was amazing, it was pretty breathtaking to be allowed to do that just because of our entertainment, our show that was entertaining millions of people. We were pretty much given carte blanche, almost carte blanche, by the the Air Force.

David Read
So you were part of the Arctic team?

Kenny Gibbs
Correct, yes. Martin brought me up there, we had a small crew. Filming up in the Arctic wasn’t very easy but we made it happen. We’re all cool together. It was great, they actually had me in one scene with Rick when we were coming out of the…In that one scene where we finally show Richard Dean Anderson finding Michael Shanks, I was one of the other, I guess you can call them Arctic Force operatives, that was with him, that paired up with him. We had to do what we needed to do to make it work.

David Read
Wow, that’s cool man. Is it one of those life altering experiences going into an environment that is so barren and coming away like, “yeah, I was up there for a little while and we filmed a movie?” Who can say that?

Kenny Gibbs
Yeah, it was a blessing and an honor to work on a show because yes, we did a lot of things, especially that, that a lot of crews would never ever get a chance to do. So. It was one of those things like, “Hey, do you want to go to the Arctic and go aboard a nuclear sub to film the movie?” “Hmm, let me think about it. Sure, yeah, I’ll be there.”

David Read
Oh my gosh. Wow. That’s just wild. If Stargate came back, I know that Amazon and MGM want to do a fourth something. Either a either a series or a movie, they keep waffling back and forth from the information that I’m hearing. If the Vancouver team was invited to make it happen again would you clear your schedule?

Kenny Gibbs
In a heartbeat, in a heartbeat. To get that team back together, or at least as much as we could, it would be magic. I would definitely clear my scheduled to make that happen again. It would be like going back home, it would really be like going back home.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. You guys did yourselves proud. You said you had 22 episodes in seven years, in other years you guys were doing 40. You had Dean Goodine, you had a team with you to fill that stuff out but as Stargate productions, the whole umbrella, 40 episodes for three years, 120 shows in three years produced, that is madness. No one will ever do that again.

Kenny Gibbs
I can say this, when Dean Goodine came aboard, another magician. Another true, true prop master. He stretched things out. I remember talking to him or just seeing him after a day in the boardroom, a full day. At one point he was prop master on both SG-1 and Atlantis ao he was in there all day. I would see his eyes, they would be a little glazed. He just looked at me talking and all the information running around. I’d go, “It’s okay, I’ll talk to you later. Whatever I had to say, it’s doesn’t matter. We’ll talk about it later.” Even then, he’d still have a smile on his face. It was still a great experience to do it. But yes, we pushed the limits.

David Read
You are on the frontier of creating things that are extraordinarily cool to be hold on television and also pushing the limits of what you as creative people can do. I had a conversation with Ivana Vasak a few weeks ago and she said to me how surprised she was. Initially she was like, “I’m out of ideas after this. I don’t know what else I can possibly think of.” The more she would do, the more her brain would provide to her more ideas. It was like a muscle, it just kept on churning. The more it churned, the even more it churned after that.

Kenny Gibbs
Richard Hudolin was a lucky, lucky man. So smart and he also had brilliant minds like Ivana working with him. Like you said, she came up with idea after idea. We would sometimes walk onto the set and we’d be looking around “whose mind did this come out of?” She just kept coming up with it. It’s like musicians, it’s like a muse that feeds you. It just inspires you and that’s what Ivana did for the Stargate franchise. She was amazing.

David Read
Yeah. It really takes a village; the number of people that have to come together with their specific set of talents to pull this stuff off, week after week, season after season. You guys really did yourselves proud. This has been a privilege to get to know you a little better. I’d love to have you back on with fans. I know there are fans who are watching, “I want to know about this prop. I want to know about that prop. I want to know about that day.” I’d love to have you back in the future to explore some more memories. This is so cool Kenny.

Kenny Gibbs
It was my pleasure to be here. Thank you. Let’s visit that, let’s talk, when I am not working my proverbial butt off and have some time to do that. I’ll make the time, it’d be an honor to come back.

David Read
It means a lot to have you sir and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Kenny Gibbs
No problem. Thank you David.

David Read
My thanks, my immense thanks to Evil Kenny for joining me in this episode of Dial the Gate. He and I talked years ago for Propworx for a brief interview that I did with him and one of the Propworx Stargate auction catalogs. I only had 15 minutes with him and I felt so bad because I just wanted to go into further detail with him. The guy is a maestro, the stuff that him and his team have been able to create. They’re so responsible for so much of everything that we love from these shows. The fact that they were able to use the technology as it evolved to continue to create so much amazing stuff just blows my mind. They are magicians. Thank you again Kenny for coming on. My thanks to Rob Fournier for passing along the email which made this interview possible. Hopefully we will have him back in the future so that you all in the live chat can ask him in real time specific questions about some of the props that you love. It was just tremendous to have him. My thanks to my moderating team, Tracy, Antony, Sommer, Jeremy, Rhys. You guys continue to make the show possible for me week after week in churning out these episodes. My thanks to my Producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, for continuing to have my back throughout the entire process here. My web developer, Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he enables our website to keep a record of all of the content that we have. We have a number of interviews coming your way before Dial the Gate concludes its third season. Go to dialthegate.com to see who’s coming down the line. Everyone who has confirmed an interview and availability is going to be listed there even if they’re not scheduled yet. I just want to keep you guys all in the loop on what it is that we’re doing and creating here over at the Stargate Oral History Project. I appreciate you tuning in, my thanks once again to Kenny Gibbs for his time and I appreciate all of you for watching. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.