There is quite a bit of magic which goes into creating an episode of science fiction, especially ones as VFX-heavy as Stargate. For the first six seasons of Stargate SG-1 that man was James Tichenor, who also joined Stargate Atlantis Season Two for the same role. He is also responsible for helping to bring the SG-1 stories “Menace” and “Metamorphosis” to life, and directed second unit for Season Six’s “Abyss.” James joins us on Dial the Gate to share some stories from production and take your questions LIVE!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:31 – Opening Credits
01:00 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:24 – The Visual Effects Role
05:34 – Script, Effects and Cost
09:28 – Filming the Stargate Series
14:17 – Restoring and upgrading the film
21:18 – Early career and progression to Stargate
26:14 – Process for a Season of Stargate
30:14 – Visual Effects Triad
32:42 – Running Out of Time with Special Effects
37:09 – Evolving Effects – The Stargate Puddle
43:13 – Exploring and Learning Special Effects
47:24 – Favorite Effects and Memories
55:38 – Ascended Beings and Light Sources
58:54 – Explosion Effects and Gunfire
1:06:51 – Fan Questions: Stephen King project and Stargate Atlantis
1:14:16 – Image Engine
1:16:28 – SGA and the Daedalus
1:18:11 – Easy Visual Effects
1:19:30 – Favorite Shooting Locations
1:22:00 – Directing the Opening of Abyss
1:25:05 – Machine Learning
1:31:55 – Coming Back to a New Stargate
1:34:00 – Menace
1:38:51 – Metamorphosis
1:40:35 – Shooting on September 11th
1:45:00 – Wrapping up with James
1:46:06 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:48:04 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Welcome everyone to Episode 169 of DialtheGate, the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have James Titchenor this episode, he was visual effects producer on Stargate SG-1 for six seasons, supervisory producer and then producer on Atlantis season two and he’s also responsible for a couple of stories from Stargate SG-1. He actually was second unit director on an episode of SG-1 called Abyss. We’re going to get into all of it in just a moment here. Before we do, if you enjoy Stargate nd you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please consider clicking 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 because I know you have them. #if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guests changes. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next several days, more likely weeks, on both the Gateworld.net and DialtheGate YouTube channels. One thing real quick, Anna Galvin was scheduled for 4pm Pacific Time. She’s had to postpone so I’m going to be posting a notification in the YouTube channel for that. In the meantime, I am fortunate to have James Titchener, visual effects supervisor and producer and writer, of Stargate SG-1 joining us in this episode. Sir, thank you so much for being here. It really means a lot to have you and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time.

James Tichenor
Awesome. Thanks, David. I really appreciate you calling me in.

David Read
Absolutely. When you say visual effects supervisor or visual effects producer, what does that mean? Some people picture you as being on a computer creating the visual effects. Some people picture you as being onset. Where does the line fall for that particular role?

James Tichenor
All right. So specific to Stargate let’s say, this was in an early time when visual effects was just getting going in TV. I think we had Star Trek before that and obviously there were some shows previous to that, but it was a lot harder to do visual effects. This was right in the cusp era when visual effects became much more affordable and digital. A person like me was hired to come into production, read a script and consult with the producers and the director about what is the vision? What do they want to actually do and how would we best execute it? I would follow the execution of those shots, the visual effects shots, all the way through post; through shooting, posting, the revision process, computer generated elements process, the compositing and then the final into color. On Stargate I was kind of doing everything. The only thing I didn’t do was sit on the box. I would generally hire an artist or take the shots to an outside facility to do that work for them. I would sit and work with all the directors and with Brad Wright and the producers to get the idea of what they wanted. We would design the effects, which back then was not near as reliant on CG, we had to come up with different ways to do things. We would shoot a lot of practical elements. We would figure out what other bits and pieces that we can bring together into the compositing suite. This was also very high end expensive gear and wasn’t the kind of thing that you would do on your laptops anymore, or back then, now we do that all the time. I guess the VFX supervisor is sort of the person that helps to define the workflow and get the shots through. A producer, that kind of came in a little…I think it was Dan Curry who actually introduced that job. In TV, the visual effects producer’s almost a little bit more of an overseer of a whole team. As Stargate grew and got bigger and a little more complicated, we sort of built more people into our teams and stuff. That’s why I got that credit as well. I still ultimately was a supervisor. I’m a very hands on person when it comes to the effects.

David Read
So it all starts with the scripts and bringing that vision to life from there all the way through to the end.

James Tichenor
Yeah, oh yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s just all on the page. It’s pretty easy working with people like Robert Cooper and Brad Wright, who were definitely a couple of the best show runners I’ve ever had the chance to work with. Every episode was all about taking that script, going through it, determining what could be done in camera, what had to be done as a VFX. Some things are very obvious, spaceships are gonna be VFX, but other things, more subtle effects, might be able to be done in camera or mostly in camera with a little bit of visual effects help. That was always the conversation and what is the what is the story point? What’s the purpose of this shot and what’s it do for the story and how do we do it sort of in the most cost effective simplest way? That’s essentially the prep we need to figure out.

David Read
Speaking of cost effective, we’re at the the end of the 20th century here when SG-1 is airing. There’s, I imagine, not nearly as much reliance on CG like there is now. To get the story to the screen would you look at it from a cost analysis in terms of “okay, what’s going to be the quickest way to achieve something?” Or “what’s gonna be the best look for something?” How would you kind of analyze it given the situation?

James Tichenor
For Stargate, we had a pretty good resource. It was a fairly high quality, high profile show. It was on Showtime for the first five seasons, there was a nice budget put aside. Even when they went to Syfy, which at that point was kind of an upstart new pay per view, or not pay per view…

David Read
Cable

James Tichenor
Yeah, like a pay subscription service essentially, subscription channel. Stargate was the premier show, so it was always well funded. Having said that, every show, every movie is always outside of the realm. If you’re not outside of your resource realm, then your your vision isn’t big enough. I think Brad and Robert were constantly balancing the cost of an expensive TV show, and not just with the VFX, but the whole production process, with trying to keep as big and cool and exciting a vision on the screen as possible. There was always budget debates, there was always horse trading, essentially, like, “we’ll do these big shots, but we’ll cut these other ones because maybe they’re not as big a story point as these big shots are going to be.” The expectation on my end was always to come up with ways to do shots simpler, or do this one expensive shot this way and then we can reuse elements to do all these other shots. That’s all sort of part of the job. Nowadays, there’s huge shows, right? Netflix spends a fortune on VFX on their premiere shows and HBO spends a ton on VFX. It’s not like VFX has necessarily gotten cheaper, just the scope has gotten probably broader and necessary team size. When doing things with CG and computer based graphics kind of stuff is a lot of work, just because the crews are bigger.

David Read
And we’ve gone to 4k in many cases now whereas we were shooting on film. Was there a certain amount of future proofing that you were considering when doing a lot of these shots? Were you thinking “okay, we need to get this good for Showtime?” or “at some point this is going to be placed on another medium?” “I want to make sure that this is good for that as well?” Was that occurring to anybody or were you just head to the grindstone getting things done?

James Tichenor
No. The biggest thing that we did in the early days was yes, shooting on film, but we would switch format. For all non-VFX stuff they were shooting on 16 mm, super 16. Then we would bring out the 35 mm cameras to shoot plates on so that we get a denser, bigger pallet essentially. We can zoom in in post, you just get a better fidelity image out of those 35 mm plates. After a certain point, I think the whole show ended up being 35 mm and then we made the transition into HD, which we shot film and then transferred HD. Up and till that point it was all standard definition so you have basically, I can’t remember what standard def resolution is anymore. NTSC, completely gone.

David Read
480 isn’t it?

James Tichenor
480 yeah, which is tiny. I don’t even know what is 480 anymore. Nothing is less than HD.

David Read
My home movies are 480.

James Tichenor
Yeah exactly, like that, maybe some of the cheaper phones shoots for at 480 max or something. It’s all a trade, you’re always trading what resources you have with what’s available and you do the best that you can at the time. For sure future proofing is a thought but when we first started shooting Stargate, I don’t think HD was ever even on the horizon at that point. It was only until season, I want to say four or five, that that became part of the conversation.

David Read
You did an episode in season four, which featured a computer intelligence coming through the Stargate that takes over Amanda Tapping’s character Sam. That was shot I believe in HD. I think that episode was the test.

James Tichenor
That was the first episode that was HD. That was Alan, our editor. I’m forgetting his last name. My memories are just…

David Read
It’s been a while.

James Tichenor
You’ll be able to tell me Alan’s last name. I should know this. He’s probably going to watch this and be like “how can you forget my last name, you bastard?”

David Read
Let’s see here. Alan Lee.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that’s right, Alan Lee. It would have taken me forever, it’s all the old names. He got to direct that one. It was sort of a big like, “wow, bring out the HD cameras.” Now keep in mind, we had shot for a couple of seasons on film cameras, but then done the effects in HD. That was a big jump. When you say we’re going to 4k, because a lot of shows do deliver 4k now, that leap, that exponential leap of resolution, is always kind of a pain point when you first make the jump. Inevitably processes are worked out, pipelines are developed and that just becomes the new norm and then you just [inaudible] resolution anymore.

David Read
You mentioned some of these elements were shot originally on Super 16 and then eventually moved over to 35. Was that an expediency thing? Was that a cost cutting thing?

James Tichenor
No. The Super 16 would have been any scene that was not VFX heavy. Any shot that didn’t have VFX in it would be shot Super 16. Then we would pull out 35 mm cameras to shoot VFX on. If you had an eagle eye, you could sit and watch the grain structure of the scene and you could see that the grain was a little bigger and a little bit more present on all the non-VFX stuff. Then the VFX shots would come in and suddenly it would be a cleaner image. We would actually put a 16 mm grain on top of our VFX to try and match the grain across the scene. That was sort of the main conceit when we first started Stargate. That was something they were doing in Outer Limits as well. Outer Limits, Poltergeist and Stargate, were all kind of in the same workflows. We all worked in the same office together, it was many of the same producers. The MGM post workflow was designed and used similarly across all three shows.

David Read
I’ve had this conversation with a number of people. SG-1 is on Blu-ray now but it was up res’d. It looks acceptable but everyone’s like, “why didn’t you just go back to the 35 mm negatives and do the whole show?” We’ve been trying to explain to everyone, the show wasn’t entirely shot on 35 mm. This is not TNG restoration that we’re talking about here. The show used various elements to bring it to life and the raw material, you just can’t go and do that. The material that there is, we’re talking millions and millions of dollars in restoration so they instead went to the HD up res route.

James Tichenor
Yeah. The main reason you can’t do that is we didn’t have a film workflow. If you’re making a movie you end up with a negative cut of your film. You shoot everything on 16 or you shoot it on 35. You might post digitally but ultimately you’ll cut all the negative film together, so hand cutting the film that went through the camera into the final movie. From that you create your prints and all your answer prints etc. But when you’re doing TV, you abandon the film almost immediately. We shoot on 16, or we shoot on 35 but then we do an SD transfer onto tape and then from then on, it’s all tape, it’s all digital. There’s no way to go back to create the negative cut. It would just be it would take forever. Then also, none of the effects were done on that film. You would end up with a bunch of nice negative cut, non-FX shots and then all your FX shots would be up res’d because you would have to literally go back and redo the effects for a film finish. Years ago I was working in a facility here in Vancouver and we were asked to bid all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows to do exactly that. To basically go in and re-do all the effects so that they could release, I feel like it was a Blu-ray at that time, so they could actually do that kind of exercise of doing the most high fidelity up res as possible. I don’t know. Cost wise, I don’t think the sales benefit is there. Maybe for a movie, maybe for a one off, maybe you could pick like an episode or a pilot. Maybe one of the season finales and do potentially kind of a Special Collector’s Edition kind of thing or something. It would cost a lot. The effects costs would be comparable to what they were originally, you would have to basically spend the same amount of money again. It wouldn’t just be a simple process.

David Read
Do the files exist on hard drives still do you believe? Or do you think a lot of that stuff is gone?

James Tichenor
Um, I think gone is probably too strong a statement. It’s buried, let’s put it that way. Everything is backed up on tape backup likely, for the early years. DCT tape, probably DBC tapes before that. Those all are living in some archive somewhere most likely. It would be tricky to find them and do the machines that actually play the tapes back even exist anymore?

David Read
That’s the thing. Some museum somewhere probably.

James Tichenor
Yeah exactly, on eBay.

David Read
So it would probably be doable, but we’re talking one or two, three or four year process in the millions, right?

James Tichenor
Yeah, it would be a big, big, a big job, a big expensive job. If somebody should start a Kickstarter and then we’ll do it. All the fans will self finance that one and then we’ll have this really great single episode of Stargate that just looks awesome at 35 mm. So much of our stuff was shot as elements so you’d have to go find all those elements. I think it would be along the lines of what George Lucas did with those Star Wars films, right? That whole restoration was a huge process and many tens of millions of dollars.

David Read
Just for a few movies.

James Tichenor
Yeah, exactly. I don’t even remember. Did they do anything other than the first one, A New Hope? Did they do? They probably did.

David Read
They restored all three of them and put them out in 1997.

James Tichenor
That’s right, with all the CG at the time. Also you kind of get into this whole thing of like, “do you really want that?” It’s kind of of its time right? Like a tape, cassette tape with music, playing in a cassette recorder is of its time. That’s the format of the era and it has its own aesthetic quality. Nowadays you see movies where people are trying to mimic cheap VCR, those little handheld camcorders, right? It’s like of the time so in some ways you don’t want to try and blow out all of that old the grit. Anybody who loves movies loves the texture of film and the last thing you want to do is remove film texture in a restoration.

David Read
There are a couple of movies that I have that if I’ve ever watched…I have a VHS to digital suite and hardware to make it work. I also have the Blu-rays of a lot of the films but for a couple of these movies when I go back and watch them, I like to watch them with the commercials intact when I taped it on VHS on TNT in 1990.

James Tichenor
Yeah, same for me.

David Read
I was eight years old and I enjoyed watching the Excedrin commercials where the first half you’re sitting with the lady and she’s like rubbing her head and then at the end of the commercial break, the headaches gone.

James Tichenor
My dad was in the movie business and made documentaries when I was very young. He bought the very first Betamax machine, let’s say in 1977, or something ridiculous like that and there was no place to go rent tapes. He just bought a bunch of blank tapes and we recorded stuff off TV. My memory of Jaws is Jaws, the TV cut of all of the intros and outros and commercial breaks, all of it is part of that experience of knowing that movie. We had five movies, that and The Sting and you know, three others, and we watched them 2000 times. It’s just as part of the joy, right? Removing all of that? I get it, I get it. Movies and TV shows and everything deserve a reconstruction and restoration for sure but there’s also the emotional experience of what it was at time that we’re kind of going back to?

David Read
It was your dad how you got interested in getting into this industry?

James Tichenor
Yeah, pretty well. I was on film sets when I was seven years old, as early as that, I remember?

David Read
Wow. The visual effects were what interested you from the beginning? Did you find yourself getting involved in editing? Take us through the route?

James Tichenor
Sure. My career started when I was 10, literally. I was my dad’s assistant editor on his documentaries. I helped him clean up film trims. He had a flatbed Moviola in his bedroom and he would cut all these films and I would be called in as one of my chores to go and clean up trims, put them into reels and then sink rushes, all of that kind of stuff.

David Read
Exploitation begins at home.

James Tichenor
Exactly, yeah. That was how I got my allowances; mow the lawn, shovel the walks and sink the rushes. My cousin Dylan, who he’s cut many, many, big, really prestigious films, he also came and stayed with us on that farm one summer and learn how to edit and sink rushes and handle film. It’s sort of in the bones. When I got out of high school, I didn’t necessarily want to go into movies but it seemed to be a good track, like you need a job. My dad set me up on set on the show that he was working called Danger Bay. I got to grip, I got to electric. I then went into the production office and was a PA for a long time. My heart was in writing and still is, I love writing. I worked in the story department, when those became something, partially because I was comfortable with computers and the story department coordinator needs to format scripts. I learned how to run a program called Scripter, which was a wild old program. You would take a Word file and kind of run it through Scripter to actually create your scripts with the scene numbers and all that kind of stuff. I worked on a show called The Odyssey, which was a wild, cool, young CBC show about this kid who goes into a coma and it’s kind of his coma life. It was actually Ryan Reynolds first show, I think here in Vancouver, and a lot of people worked on that. That’s how I met Brad Wright. Brad was one of the writers on that show and we kind of nerded out together because we were both really comfortable with computers so he and I would kind of share Scripter tips…so nerdy.

James Tichenor
There’s nothing wrong with that.

James Tichenor
No, it’s great. I would say we were work friends from that. I knew he had written a spec script for Star Trek, I believe Next Gen.

David Read
I didn’t know he did that.

James Tichenor
Yeah. I don’t think it was ever produced. I don’t even remember if he was when he told me that or if..There were other writers like Hart Hanson, who’s the Bones showrunner. He was also a writer on The Odyssey, I think he wrote actually on the first season on Stargate too I believe.

James Tichenor
Rings a bell, yeah.

James Tichenor
So this sort of little community of people in early Vancouver in the early days when there wasn’t a ton of production. Jump Street was around and Steven Canals had started North Shore Studios. This was where I made my bones right. I ended up getting hooked up with a guy named John Gajdecki, who is still a really good friend and I think is probably the greatest effects person in Canada. He’s definitely one of the most passionate VFX people I know. He’s still incredibly passionate, he’s doing Superman and Lois right now. I was hooked up with him because the production coordinator that I was PA’ing for was like, “hey, you like computers and VFX is computers so you should meet this guy.” We met and we instantly got along great and he brought me in as kind of his PA assistant on Outer Limits for a few episodes. Then we did a movie called Warriors of Virtue, which was kung fu kangaroos, shot by the guy who shot Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and edited by the guy who edited like early John Woo movies. It was an awesome movie, cool people, super weird; literally kung fu kangaroos. I then started working as a coordinator for John, doing effects and learning that craft, as it was just coming up. Then he got on to Stargate I went with him. Brad and I, who hadn’t talked for a couple years, kind of reconnected there. That was wonderful to be able to start working with Brad again.

David Read
So we had an idea, you indicate a process for like a typical episode from from script to post. I also have have noticed, in conversations talking with a lot of you, that there were arcs for seasons as well, in terms of like, heavy introduction, then pull back, and then “oh my god, we’re running out of money.” and then finish strong, seemed to be the arc.

James Tichenor
Was that the arc? That wasn’t the arc I was thinking you were talking about. But yeah, that sounds about right.

David Read
There was an indication that there was a bit of, not like a psych out and not that this would happen all the time, but they would want to give the writers the idea to save a little bit more before the end just in case we went over so that we would come out in the black in the end. Does that familiar?

James Tichenor
I would say so. I don’t think that that’s wrong, right? You want to push the boundaries, you want to do the most you can possibly do, to make the best show you can possibly make. If you come in under budget then it’s not on the screen, you haven’t done your job. I think Brad and Robert, John Smith as well, are some of the best producers I’ve ever worked with, ever since. I think in a lot of ways I was really spoiled in those early years and I just didn’t have the knowledge that I have now of how lucky I was to be able to work with people that good. They were just so good at being able to know their resource, know what is worth putting on the screen, know what matters for the story, know that “yes, it is important that we spend this amount of money on a pyramid blowing up” or we run a big model threw a bunch of trees or whatever we’re gonna do, we blow a whole bunch of stuff out at Stokes pit. They just knew that you have got to open strong, you have to have a really big middle point on your season and then you got to go out big too. Inbetween you kind of connect the pieces with stories that are a little bit smaller, a little more character focused, are no less entertaining but are not going to be your big…Not every single episode has to have the big massive effects. You just wouldn’t be able to manage it. At the time in Vancouver, Vancouver was a very small city. There was I want to say three or four VFX studios. There’s Rainmaker, Northwest Imaging, Image Engine, Prospero. I don’t know whether they were involved in Stargate, they were involved in the previous projects. Lost Boys was there too. And that was kind of it right? Vancouver didn’t become this massive VFX hub until the government changed some tax incentives. Then all of a sudden the D-Neg’s, the NPC’s and the ILM’s and all of these big L.A. based studios started moving into the city and changed the landscape significantly. But back then, there was a very small little community, and Stargate and Poltergeist and Outer Limits to certain extent as well, that was a lot of work for these studios to be able to manage. The producers knew that and they knew that if they overtaxed the VFX teams, the effects would not look good. They would spend the money but the stuff would be rushed and it just wouldn’t be worth it. Being able to manage that and plan it out like “we know we’re going to be really busy in the fall once we get into the final episodes. Let’s balance that with a couple of big summer episodes and then we can tail it off while we finish those ones and then we’re now prepping and shooting the final ones.” It’s all kind of part of a master plan for sure. Then they can actually build their story arcs for the seasons around that kind of symphonic shape as well.

David Read
I have a personal question. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the visual effects triad where you can have any two of the three. You can have it good, you can have it cheap, you can have it fast. How much truth is there to that?

James Tichenor
Oh, that’s 100% true. 1,000% true. That’s absolutely true.

David Read
Oh gosh.

James Tichenor
What is it cheap, fast and good? If you want it fast and you want it good, it’s gonna be expensive. You just have to spend a ton of resource to get it really, really quick. I don’t know whether you can do cheap effects that are good and just take forever. I’m not sure that part of that triangle works that well. I know, in theory, you could set up a tiny little crew of people to just grind away on something for a long time. That might not cost as much money but that part of the triangle I think is a little unstable.

David Read
A lot of the SyFy Channel movies of the week, they can have it fast, they can have it cheap and the good is questionable James.

James Tichenor
I’ve done some of those in the last few years. It’s difficult. There’s definitely two tiers to VFX; there’s a big budget, well supported, maybe a good schedule, but maybe not, in terms of time, world. Actually, the big shows know that if they’re going to spend all that money, they want to give the proper amount of time so they do plan for that. Then there’s just a ton of stuff that’s done really fast, really cheap, expectations are ridiculously high, ignorantly high to be honest, and they just come out the way they come out. It is what it is. A lot of that stuff just comes and goes. We’re not going to be sitting here in 30 years talking about it.

David Read
Exactly. Part of me would be like, “I did it, but I don’t want my name on this.” It’s not quality work.

James Tichenor
Yeah. Producers are not keen on people not taking the credit. Everybody thinks they’re making a good movie and they want to believe that everybody who’s on the film also believes they’re making good movie. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie so the last thing they want is a bunch of crew members telling them “yeah, I’m not James Tichenor on this one. I’m actually Frank McGillicutty. That’s my other credit.” Like, “why do you have this other credit?” “Well, I don’t know, maybe…” They don’t love that kind of thing. It is what it is.

David Read
How often have you had to look at something Mr. McGillicutty and see that “we need more time with this. We need more time and we’re out. We’re out. We have to send it out as it is?” One of my favorite sci-fi miniseries is Children of Dune and it won for visual effects. If you look in some of the shots with the ornithopters, if you freeze frame, the characters are stick figures. They sent it out as stick figures and they want awards for it. Right in front of the camera.

James Tichenor
There’s no movie that’s ever been made that didn’t run out of time and money. James Cameron, when he makes Avatar, runs out of time and money. It’s just the way it is like, it’s an infinite spiral of resource. At some point you you just have to call it and that’s where it ends. That’s where the project is for all of time unless you go back and do a big restoration. Stargate was no different. As good as the resource was, as great as the time was and as reasonable and brilliant as the people who are involved were, from the artists, to the producers, to the exec producers, everybody cared a lot about that show and wanted to do a really good job. There were tons of times when the effects did not follow through. I noticed one of your questions early on was for Matter of Time. Matter of Time, I think was second season? That was my first really big show. That is not a show that I’m not unproud of. That show was really, really, really hard. It was shot in all kinds of really complicated ways to try and get the effects of gravity over here instead of on the ground. There are times in there where the effects just don’t work. The green screens were not well lit at points because we were too ambitious with the camera moves. I hadn’t worked out the angles that the cameras had to match properly at points so sometimes a camera angle on an element wasn’t right for the background. There were tons of mistakes in there. Even when we were making it Brad was like, “I think we’ve succeeded with this stuff, this part didn’t work. But overall, I think the show holds together and we’ve learned a ton and next time we do something like this, we’ll know better how to do it” which was exactly right. We sort of hit our peak in seasons four and five of “we really know how this works, we know what our resource can hold, we know when we’re being too ambitious and we now know the tricks to actually pull a lot of this stuff off.” You could go through Star Trek, they always had a bigger budget and more time than we did but they had lots of points where their effects just, they just weren’t able to pull it off. When it’s early days of VFX too for TV, there’s so much like, “I don’t know. Maybe this will work, what if we shot this thing and put it in and bring this other thing in here. We’ll have to glue to that, maybe that’s going to work, maybe it won’t. We just won’t know until we do it.”

David Read
And you have to do it. You are on the cutting edge of this stuff.

James Tichenor
In feature film, there is much room for mistakes. If you go down a path, a strategy, “this is how we’re going to pull this effect off” and it doesn’t work, you finally see it put together, they tend to have more room to be “okay, let’s go back and try a different tactic. We can re-work this or we can rebuild this.” With TV there’s none of that. You [are] committed, you roll the dice and you just hope for the best. If it wasn’t working Brad would come up with a really clever way to cut around things or throw a big glow overtop of everything. The idea ultimately isn’t to watch things frame by frame. I get, fan really loves their experience of their show, for sure. There’s so many cheats that we have to do that, for sure, if you watch every frame, you’re gonna see the stickmen, for sure. If you’re just watching it as a piece of entertainment, and that shot comes and then the next shot comes and I’m in the flow, none of that matters. None of it matters.

David Read
I loved watching stuff evolve too. The Kawoosh for example, when you first started off doing the Kawoosh in early season one, it was a practical water effect that was being used for parts of it.

James Tichenor
It was always a practical water effect. It was always the same element, all through the whole time I was there. I’m not sure what they did after I left.

David Read
Oh, okay. Later on by season two or three, I assumed that was much more of a digital shot because I couldn’t see the water anymore. When it comes back down, the explosion, there’s this rush on the sides of the gate, where there’s some kind of actual water there. That went away later on as the seasons went along.

James Tichenor
Basically the way that works and the Coles notes of that is season one we had myself, we had John, my boss, and then Ted Ray was the other, we had alternating supervisors and he was the alternating supervisor. Ted Ray is a fantastic practical effects guy. I think he shot a number of seasons of Game of Thrones as the set supervisor on that one. He’s like next level, John, as well. I’m not trying to say that Ted was any different, they just had different strengths, obviously. John’s actually really strong with practical, too. We had Ted set up in John’s studio in Toronto, this big tank of water and we would fire air cannons into the water and we would shoot it from all these different angles. What we did was we shot front on side, three quarter, one side, one from the back. You just shoot a whole bunch of different elements. Each angle you do like 20 different times and you light it a different way. You just try all of these different things to gather all of these elements up. Now we have this element library that we go — when we shoot plates for the show, we would match the angle that we shot the tank at. If you want the Kawoosh to come straight out you you’d set the camera up on the stage, looking straight at the Stargate. We would take the element of the water element we shot and we composite that in and then we would blend it in with a CG because the Stargate itself was CG that wasn’t a water element. Over time what changed was the compositing got better, we had more time to refine it because it was an effect we were doing a lot. Every season we would try and redo a new… Because we have the library so as you I’m sure as you watch it you sort of see the same shot over and over. It’s kind of like the Star Trek spaceship trick.

David Read
Right, the same shots of the ship again and again.

James Tichenor
That’s part of smart resource management. You create shots that can become part of your library. Everybody understands it’s a transition, it doesn’t have to be brand new every single episode. We would do new versions or we would do it in different locations. We just got better at being able to like, “okay, now when the water element settles and we transition to the CG element, we can use a ripple effect to kind of transition from the water to the CG.” We would put a drop into the CG to create the ripples and times to the Kawoosh etc, etc. You’re not necessarily seeing a different element, what you’re seeing is just a refining of the compositing process.

David Read
Brad talked about puddle passes. Bruce Washington at Rainmaker did a lot of those. He would just paint it by hand. I always thought “why not have just a laser?”

James Tichenor
Yeah, we tried that.

David Read
It wasn’t as good?

James Tichenor
It’s tough to get the mat out of that. Basically what you’re doing is creating a mat element that ripples across the body surface. For sure, this laser that goes across could give you a guideline of how the shape of the water goes frame by frame. People like Brad and the compositors working under him, not Brad, sorry, Bruce. All of the Stargates for the most part were done at Rainmaker, and Bruce was in charge over at Rainmaker for that stuff. They just got so good at like, “we can pick that up in two hours.” There’s no point in spending an hour on set with some complicated laser rigs setup when they can just do anything.

David Read
Dealing with clothing and different elements that go along with the person going through. Bruce said it used to take days and by Atlantis, it was taking them hours to do.

James Tichenor
Yes, exactly. Right.

David Read
But still, according to Brad cost $5,000 for a pass. Why is this always the same price?

James Tichenor
Brad actually say the price? That’s hilarious. I don’t think that’s totally right. I think Brad might be overestimating that. I think by the end, the cost of the pass through, came down quite a bit. I want to say I was budgeting 1800 per shot for one of those. But I could be wrong.

David Read
Per shot or per every time someone went through? There were a bunch of people in a shot.

James Tichenor
Yeah, we would probably mark that up a little bit more. Here I am Mr. Budget producer guy right now. My gut is going to 2500, I feel like I was writing that down in the budgets. Brad will be like, “what are you crazy, everytime it’s $5000.” The $5,000 is..every matte painting was always $5,000. It’s funny, all of this stuff is so arbitrary. You stick a number…it’s even like that today. Who knows what it’s gonna be like, you’re just creating a bucket that then allows you the room to try and do something good, that makes everybody go “oh, that’s exciting. We haven’t done that before, I’m really happy with how that looks.” Everybody’s happy because [the] people who did it got paid properly and the people who bought the effect feel happy with the effect.

David Read
I’m sure there were instances where you guys had things created and they came back to you and said “this is not working as we intended, we’re going to have to spend more time on this if you want to get it right.”

James Tichenor
Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Matter of Time was a hard hard episode. I definitely lost some years of my life on that one. I’m trying to think of others,. The early years were the toughest because we were really trying to figure stuff out then. I was trying to figure stuff out. I was young, I was in my early 20s or mid 20s and I was doing this job that I was kind of learning on the go. Brad had so much confidence me which was incredible that he did. I was reading my Cinefex magazines every night and like “well, how are they doing it on the movies? How can we adapt that to the TV shows?” We didn’t have YouTube, there’s none of this. Nowadays the reference is just enormous. There’s just an insane amount of reference. You can look at almost anything and just take it match it, like “we got to do that.” You have all the control with CG stuff, which for better or worse, it makes this process a lot, maybe not a lot simpler, but simpler because you have reference and you have control. Whereas what we were doing was no reference, or mind reference and you’re trying to do it based out of shooting elements. “Let’s shoot some burning steel wool and take that and use that as a mat to reveal this and if we put a glow on that how’s that look?” Then you would bring it in and they’d be like “Ooh, I don’t know, that looks a little weird. What if we take the glow off and do more of the burning steel wool or how about we put some sparks on there?” It’s all very collaborative and very explorative. Just kind of a different world, we were kind of just figuring it out as we were going, which made it wonderful, just wonderful.

James Tichenor
I can’t imagine your stress management. You had deadlines and you had to figure stuff out in a finite amount of time. At a certain point, it’s like, “okay, that’s gotta go to post production.”

James Tichenor
I don’t want to say none of that has changed. It’s still hard and you still have to solve problems and find looks. Having it all BCG or majority CG does not make things any simpler. Many people are working on movies today that are not properly…big, big, big movies that don’t have enough time to finish. They are doing first version shots and they’re showing up in the movie theater a week later. That part of it hasn’t changed. It’s still a very stressful job at points. I think what I miss about that time is just the practical nature. It was not all digital, there was a lot of analog, there was a lot of magic involved. It’s genuinely kind of an alchemic magic of VFX that they don’t think you have. What people can do with AI and CG now, all of that stuff has its own magic that’s quite incredible but there’s something in taking film footage and massaging this into this new nascent digital process but not really knowing what’s the right way to do it. So “let’s just try this or let’s try that”. Everybody being into it; Brad and Robert were the biggest effects fans. They were so into “excited”. I always felt kind of special because they’re constantly bugged. They’re always super nice to everybody, always very welcoming, really good people to work for. When you bring in a tape and you’re like, “let me show you some effects”, you could genuinely see the excitement on their face because they’re just like, “oh, cool”

David Read
Like kids.

James Tichenor
Yeah totally. That was super fun to be able to be the communicator of that. That’s like one of the best parts of that job.

David Read
What’s some of your favorite magic from that shoot?

James Tichenor
I really love doing models. We did one, I’m never gonna be able to tell you the name of the episode, it was a glider thing. Remember the glider, it’s kind of like a triangle spaceship?

David Read
The cargo ship going through the trees? Last Stand, season five.

James Tichenor
There you go. I was really proud of that. We figured out the best way to do this is not to try and mimic it and CG. Let’s just take the black box version or green screen box version, actually it would have been a blue screen box version of this spaceship, let’s build it to size, I want to say fifth scale maybe. We build a whole bunch of trees that we put in these little posts and then we just blew this thing through those trees. We did it over and over and shot at this angle, shot at that angle, shot another angle and then took it to do the effects. Doug Campbell actually did the work, he actually won an Emmy for Game of Thrones too. He was a compositor that did that work and then putting those shots together and seeing the CG version on top of the blue box and now the CG spaceship’s blowing through real trees and you are getting all the real dynamics. That perfect blend of CG and real was for me totally magical because it kind of like suddenly had a life that a lot of times if you go all CG, or you went all models, maybe just wasn’t there. Those worked really well and then the replicators…

David Read
image Engine right?

James Tichenor
Yeah. Image Engine but Image Engine in a different time. Image Engine now is a huge studio, super successful. What they did with Neill Blomkamp, who actually was one of our Stargate effects guys for a couple of years.

David Read
Neill worked on Stargate? I didn’t know that. With District 9, the Prawns are something. Every time I would reference it “those guys did the replicators.”

James Tichenor
Yeah. It was a different time. Image Engine was a much smaller company. They was only five or six people. There was a guy there, Craig Van Den Biggelaar, who was kind one of my great collaborators, him and Doug Campbell and Bruce Woloshyn and Christine Petrov. These were the kind of the main senior artists that I got to work with. Robin Hackl, was also one of the owners of Image Editing. They were always my first point of contact. When I get a script it would be like, “okay, this week we have to do this, how are we going to do this?” Then we would all sit down and strategize this together. Actually, I’m having an interesting memory. Not Stargate but a few years later we did one of the Twilight movies. Robin Hackl was put on that because they were one of the vendors for the, I want to say the running really fast and then also some of the wolves. I just remember sitting with him when we’re trying to work out how to do the running really fast through the woods together. That’s just like doing this. “What if we tried this, what if we do that?” That’s the core of VFX; you’re working with these people who are your friends. Everybody’s got their strengths; my strength was set, his strength was computer compositing with a nuke and stuff. Craig’s strength was CG and lighting. To be able to each say, “this would be the best way for us to do that” you just end up with like the best product. So I’d say that’s magic. There’s this one shot where, again I’ll never be able to quote the episode. but Amanda goes outside of her house and she reaches down and picks up a newspaper and then stands back up and in the background.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that’s right. And then she stands up and suddenly that dude’s just standing right there and it’s like, “how the hell do you get there so quickly?” I just loved the magic of that of figuring out, “okay, if we just do this magic trick here, we can make this work and it’ll be a great reveal.” It’ll just be like, “Whoa”, like, everyone will be all shocked. I felt like that worked really well. Also another one would be Rick, when he was fighting himself. Bruce and I figured out how to basically do kind of early face replacement. It’s no big deal nowadays, it’s been done constantly. The amount of time we spent shooting to get it totally right. We [would] shoot him in one pass and then he was doing it with Dan Shea and then we’d flop them he would do that arm wrestle thing with Dan Shea under his arm. You basically just needed Rick on screen in both performances at the same time seeing them looking towards camera at the same time. Bruce spent weeks finessing that to make it perfect and it just looked great.

David Read
Sean Patrick Flanery

David Read
Looks great. Doppelganger. You have to have at least some sequence like that. It’s Jack for crying out loud. Michael Shanks directed that episode.

James Tichenor
He did, that’s right. I have a picture of me and Rick looking at the splitter monitor and I’m talking him through how we’re doing this. I always loved that, he’s such a good guy, was such a nice man.

David Read
For an episode like Ascension where you had Sean Patrick Flanery as Orlin and the camera goes down and it comes back up. I just always assumed that that shot, he was painted out and composited over from a shot where he wasn’t there.

James Tichenor
He was always there. She came out and he was always they’re, always they’re, always there, till down and reveal and he’s still there. We just painted him out from before. You basically remove him from the head of the shot and he can just stand there the whole time. It is super simple and took nothing to do but it was a…Anytime you do those sort of bargain switchy kind of like “the cameras looking and then it goes here and it comes back and something’s changed” all of that is fun. Playing with the edges of the frame always, for me, feels magicy. It’s what magicians do.

David Read
You also have to spend money on things that that don’t appear on camera. I had a conversation with Bruce once about rig removal, where there are cables in shots and he would have to digitally erase them. He would say that that’s hard and if you do it right you will never know that anyone touched it.

James Tichenor
Yeah, and it just takes forever, especially if you got rigs that are across people’s faces or wires. That was another part of Matter of Time. We shot them all hanging on wires with a camera looking up or looking down and then you take it and you comp it in to a regular angle. Basically your gravity has shifted to the right side of frame but what was hard in there is they’re all hanging on wires so you have got to get rid of the wires. There all these support wires and the wires would go over their leg. It’s not just a matter of painting it out from over the leg, a lot of times the wire will pull the fabric of the arm and so you have got to get rid of that effect. It’s hard work. I’m not a capable CG artist myself. I have spent time on the machines but I was always a management person. I did at one point go to Atmosphere for maybe for four or five months and was a junior compositor. I actually painted, what did I do? I painted something out, just a horrible rig removal for one of the Battlestar Galactica shots. It was this wire that was wrapped all around this actor. I spent so much time on that, so much respect for people, a lot of really smart people figuring out ways to do this stuff.

David Read
And patience, a lot of patience.

James Tichenor
Now we have all these AI’s that just do it for us automatically. Remove the wiring…gone!

David Read
Right, like it’s that simple. The ascended beings, the glowy aliens. Did you take a look at that clip that I sent you?

James Tichenor
I did yeah.

David Read
Did that bring any memories back.

James Tichenor
That was Maternal Instinct, right?

David Read
Maternal Instinct was the first one that we saw. We got Shifu, he came back for Absolute Power and then Orlin, obviously was an ascended being. When Shifu is moving through the SGC you have to have that light source that, I’m assuming it was painted out, and then you composited the creature on top of it? And then the Stargate is active. What a mess.

James Tichenor
I’m remember the plates of, I don’t know who would have been, our gaffer, Rick. I don’t remember Rick’s last name, unfortunately. I just see him or somebody, one of the electrics, walking through the shot, with that lamp. You have got an interactive light on the set and then you paint him out a then you stick the CG element of the weird flowy cluffy being person and you float that over top. I didn’t love the animation on it. If I was to redo that shot I would probably have maybe gotten rid of the [waves hands up and down]; to up and down. It would be so different now. That was early days CG where cloth dynamics was brand new. I think we would do something a lot more complicated and interesting with the kind of tools we have now. Then when they got up to the top we would shoot the actor at the top there and then you basically reveal the actor through the little floaty octopussy creature thing. For sure, the reflections of the gate and the window, a lot of that was practical. Jim Menard came up with this whole system where he projected, we gave him an element of our CG, just a fullscreen watery element, then he got a digital projector and put a screen in the Stargate. He projected the Stargate onto that screen so when we’re looking in reflections, it can all be practical and they can save some money that way.

David Read
I think it’s either season three or season four when you’re looking at the control room through the gate room you can see the reflection. It’s not the Stargate that we know but it’s close. I always assumed it was just some kind of a rear screen projection with a glowy element on it.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that’s what it was. Or sometimes it was mylars. They use a lot of mylars to do their interactive light. But yeah, they did a projector. You’re just trying to figure out how to put all the resources into the big shots and these sort of throwaways that you need because without it… All that subtle reflections and things like that is what sells the “in the world”, you buy the Stargate being there because you’ve seen it in a shot but you’re seeing it in people’s eyes or glasses or in reflections. That’s what really sells when an effect is real.

David Read
By season eight for a lot of the shots they had a projector on the gate and were projecting an image of the CG puddle. The evolution of that as you go through the show is just something else to behold. My two favorite shots in the show, I’m wondering if you can speak to either of them, were of Jonas getting himself out of basically a submerged section of a goa’uld mothership through rings. That’s one of my favorite shots of the show. He finds himself in a different section of the ship and for a moment the water is contained in the rings and as the rings go away the water just explodes. It still holds up.

James Tichenor
The other unspoken, great collaborator here, and rest in peace, is Ray Douglas. He was an awesome, awesome part of all of this. You had asked about the explosions from the plasma blasts. All of that is on set. I haven’t done that kind of fun explosion stuff since that show. We would go to Stokes Pit out in Surrey and he would wire the whole place up. It’d be like explosions as far as the eye could see.

David Read
Death Glider shots, everyone.

David Read
Yeah the Death Gliders, that’s it. He and his team would just do some of the great big explosions that sold those effects so well. There was another shot, I wasn’t involved in this one, this was Michelle Cummings did this, or her and her team. There was maybe a goa’uld, but it’s not like the, it was some big shot where it crashes on the Stargate and then there’s just a mammoth explosion as the Stargate itself is blown up.

David Read
Yeah. 48 Hours. Tanith, his big ship goes into the DHD and the Stargate snaps in half, which we have never seen before.

James Tichenor
That must be like season seven or something because…

David Read
Season five

James Tichenor
Oh, season five, really?

David Read
48 Hours.

James Tichenor
Season five, oh there you go. Anyway, I always had that one was awesome. What made that one really awesome was the explosions they had onset. I know Craig, who did that shot, because Image Engine was doing that model or that vehicle, he also enhanced it with a lot of explosion effects to try and get the ship itself blowing up. The interaction between the practical and then the CG is always, always, always going to be better than just CG by itself. It’s always going to just sell it because you just get so much out of your plate when actual things are exploding or actual things are reflecting or actual light is moving. Whatever those things are, that always sells effects. It’s hard because if you don’t shoot it well or you make a mistake in how you shoot your interactive elements, then suddenly the VFX artists have to do a ton of reconstruction work. For every successful thing that I shot for people I shot some pretty bad plates to that they unfortunately had to go in and fix a ton of stuff in as well. When you get it right it’s gold.

David Read
I was told the explosions…

James Tichenor
Let me finish on that. Your ring shot with the water is exactly that. The rings are CG and then we would have had, I’m not totally sure, I can’t remember what we did. Probably a tank dump from above from top of frame out of framw and then you would not see it pouring in from top of frame but you would reveal it in as it all splashed onto the ground. Same deal there, using real water on the set and then controlling when to reveal it in CG.

David Read
Madness. Just hitting your marks, you know, and then painting in…

James Tichenor
And hard because you flood the set, you’re done. There’s no second takes, you’ve just poured water all over the set. So now what? If it didn’t go well or wasn’t done right, the pressure always in those situations was on Ray and his team of get it right. By far one of the best effects teams I’ve ever worked with. I’ve worked with a lot of different effects people and those guys were just awesome. Ray was always so into it like “let’s do this” or “I can give you that” or “what if we did this part”, so great.

David Read
Do you recall blowing up the Abydos pyramid?

James Tichenor
Yeah, so again, same deal, right? We hired a local model maker here. I don’t remember his name, but he was a really talented model maker. We built a 12th scale model, maybe even bigger than that, it was probably like 20 feet high. We took it out to Stokes pit, Ray wired it all up and blew it up. In a lot of ways there really isn’t a lot of VFX in that. That was mostly like forced perspective. We added I think these little doors and some pillars falling down in the foreground. I think Matt painted in dunes because we didn’t really have anywhere that had dunes and then maybe replace a sky to give some scale. The trick with that that is kind of a lost art is shooting models to scale. Using film really helped a lot because you can use different speeds of film. It will create a sense of slow the explosion down which creates a sense of it being a lot bigger than it is. It’s the same deal with the going through the trees. We would shoot that at a high speed, 96 frames per second or 120 frames per second. There’s a formula that you would use based on your scale that I’ve completely forgotten. I used to be able to do in my head. The same with that with a pyramid exploding and then Ray I think tiered it so it’s like ba ba ba ba ba.

David Read
It was being shut down from above so it exploded outward.

James Tichenor
Exploded from the bottom up kind of thing. Just great. Say with the replicators, same deal if we were in the sub for the first episode in that season, five?

David Read
Season four, Small Victories.

James Tichenor
It’s all blurring together. Then that previous season, season three, we ended with the replicators there. That all worked because we had so much of the gunfire which is very contentious right now; whether we want to be shooting guns on set anymore. Understandably, not something that’s exciting for people to have to deal with. 100% not exciting. But when you do it for real, it just, there’s something you can’t act in that. The recoil of the guns and flashes, the muzzle flashes of the guns, they light up the whole set and all of that. Putting a bunch of CG into that just suddenly works so much better.

David Read
And there’s the overwhelming nature of the replicators in that last one. It’s a great sequence in Nemesis at the end of that episode. It’s so cool.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that was fun to do. What a crazy little creature that was. I actually saw an AI, no robot, creature that looks almost exactly like the replicator now, that somebody had made. [David holds up a model replicator] Yeah, there they are. Yeah, that looks like…where do you get that?

David Read
A fan made them?

James Tichenor
Oh, that’s cool. They did a really good job.

David Read
It’s amazing. I never thought I would own one. 3D printing. It’s advancements in technology and people with the right amount of of skill. This is the version that was introduced in season five in the premier.

James Tichenor
Was that full 3D printed as one go or did he 3D print all the pieces and then put it together?

David Read
I think that in this context, it was, I don’t know. If you’d like I’ll put you in touch with him to see how did it. He’s brilliant. He’s absolutely brilliant. That’s 3D Tech Pro, they are on Etsy. I have some fan questions for you. Are you good for another 10 minutes?

James Tichenor
Yeah, my other commitment fell out so I can talk.

James Tichenor
Okay. Understood sir, I didn’t want to rush you out. You did Atlantis season two as well. We haven’t mentioned that at all. Were you asked to come back into the show? Was there something else? You left and then you returned.

James Tichenor
That was an interesting time in my life. I was on up until, what was my last season on Stargate?

David Read
You said season six, but records say season seven but you said you didn’t do the super soldier so that means season six. The wiki could be wrong.

James Tichenor
What was the episode where it’s over the ice planet and there’s this huge ice battle, spaceships flying in all directions.

David Read
That’s Antarctica. That’s Earth. That was the end of season seven.

James Tichenor
That was the end of season seven? So I was in season seven.

David Read
Bruce did the the lava planet, Praclarush Taonas, I don’t know who it was that flew over Antarctica.

James Tichenor
It was all Image Engine. At the same time that we were doing that I got hired to do a Stephen King miniseries called Kingdom Hospital. I would never have left Stargate except for the fact that Stephen King was like James Titchener, at age 11, greatest favorite writer of all time. This show was so insane. I was like, “I can’t leave Stargate, I’ve been here for too long, I just can’t abandon them.” But then they sent me the scripts, the 12 episodes that Steve wrote. It was based on the kingdom by Lars von Trier and it was just insane, like, these pages were insane. All the effects and that were so weird and horror movie. It was so different from what I was doing on Stargate and it was Stephen King. I think the producer was somebody I knew and it was big. I was like, “I’ve got to do this. I have to do this.” I went to Brad, I’m like “Brad, this thing has come up. I really feel like I have to go and do the show. This is like young James’s dream to work on a Stephen King thing. This was like, all the reasons why I want to be a writer was Stephen King books that I read as a kid.” He was awesome. He was just like, “you should go do it. This is something that you want to do so I support you.” What we did is I did both. I finished season seven and then I started shooting Kingdom Hospital which I think was 13 episodes. block shot, super complicated. A whole different deal, I don’t want to say difficult because the people there were cool in their own ways ways, but very different expectations. It was like back to season one on Stargate where you’re working things out. You’re working out how to work together, expectations very high. It was a tough show. That was a hard show. I spent a lot of time on sets and asleep on floors in studios and kind of dealing with managing expectations which were very, very high and trying to manage process which was not established. People were working ridiculously long hours and it really was probably the hardest VFX show that had come to Vancouver up to that point. A lot of people did not have a good time on that show. There was just an incredible amount of different effects. I went off to do that. I finished season seven of Stargate at the same time that I was doing Kingdom Hospital and once I finished Kingdom Hospital season eight had already started. I think I want to say season eight and season one of Atlantis. John Gajdecki came back I think to do season one and then Mark Breakspear who was somebody at Image Engine, no at Rainmaker, he worked alongside Bruce Washington. Mark was hired to be the main series supervisor while John did the pilot. Cut ahead another year, I had moved to England for a while and was coming back to Vancouver. Brad reached out and was like, “I would love to have you come back.” What they wanted to do was figure out a way to have more in house control over the effects. That was the season that we used to build this in-house department where I was able to get the Atlantis model back into studio and we bought a bunch of servers. It was a not a trivial thing. Still hard to set up a studio, but it was tricky to set up an in-house that was actually capable of doing significant work. So I actually spent a lot of time on that season helping to set that up and running that and managing the in-house department and less so on set. I hired a friend of mine, John McPherson, to come shoot the set for that. I don’t have a lot of memories of Atlantis, oddly enough, because I was so involved in the producing portion. I think that guy, that Aquaman was in it though, right?

David Read
Oh, yes. Aquaman was definitely in it.

James Tichenor
It shows you how disconnected I was. I left after that once we got the in-house department setup. I feel kind of bad about that because I left Brad and I think Brad was a little upset that I left after only one season. I knew he was happy that we got the in-house setup. I just felt like at that point maybe my time at Stargate had come to an end. Oh, the other big thing that we did was we brought in Mark Savela and worked all that season to kind of establish him as the new Stargate guy. Mark had been another long friend, he had been involved in Stargate since season one as a coordinator with TV FX in Toronto. In the meantime, over the seven seasons, he had become a supervisor in his own right. Setting up the in-house and setting up Mark to succeed, I think, was my main focus during that season. Mark went on to do everything after that and was a huge part of that team. I feel like in the end it worked out fine. It was tough. I don’t love leaving shows. That was the only show I think I’ve ever left but I got to do a commentary with Stephen King for the pilot of Kingdom Hospital, which was amazing to get to sit with him.

David Read
You have to take care of you and if a childhood dream manifests itself you’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t pursue it.

James Tichenor
Totally right. I’m very proud of that show even though I think it was the worst rated show on TV. Nobody has ever watched that show, nobody ever talks about that show when they talk about Stephen King adaptations. We did this anteater creature at Image Engine that I think proved to Neill that Image Engine was capable of doing serious creatures and I think that’s what got them District 9 honestly. Neil worked, was he working on Kingdom? I had done some shots with him on Stargate sort of towards the end. He was kind of this boutique artist who would just do everything. I would bring him a shot and he would just be like “okay.” He’ll take care of it all, he modelled it all, he did all the camera, he did all the action and all compositing, he did all the lighting; everything was a Neill shot. I don’t think he ended up doing anything when he was at the end because he was a co-owner in a company called The Embassy here. I remember him maybe prepping D 9. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, it all sort of overlaps.

James Tichenor
He did a short called “Alive in Joburg.”

James Tichenor
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

David Read
Which I loved and when District 9 came out, I was like, “okay, someone’s going to be getting lawsuit papers” and then I thought, “oh, it’s him. It’s the same guy.”

James Tichenor
Also he did a Nike commercial right in between there that ended up never airing because I guess the message of the commercial that Nike decided wasn’t right. It’s cool, cool commercial. It’s a Nike factory that generates athletes and it was a cool. Neill is just such a visionary. I think he must have been 18 maybe when he did his first Stargate shots. He came in as this little kid into Rainmaker and they all sort of adopted him and it was clear, almost immediately, how incredible he is with cameras and filmmaking.

David Read
Have you seen Rakka with Sigourney Weaver?

James Tichenor
I don’t know.

David Read
It’s a 2017 short. Sigourney was supposed to do another Alien. It’s brilliant.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that’s cool. It’s neat that he stayed in Vancouver, too. There’s a lot of people that work with him.

David Read
Jeremy Heiner. If you don’t remember any of these elements, just let me know and we’ll move on. I do have some fan questions about a few specifics. The introduction of the Daedalus was at the beginning of season two. That’s this model right here. Do you recall anything about the Daedalus from that season? The Siege part three when that ship comes to the rescue of Atlantis. The Wraith are bombarding Atlantis from space, there’s darts, there’s madness. Do you remember anything from that episode?

James Tichenor
Which series is this?

David Read
This is Atlantis, the beginning of season two. It’s all good.

James Tichenor
Uncomfortable silence. I don’t know what it is about that series. I’m pretty sure it’s because I was so involved in management stuff, I just wasn’t as involved in shots. I mean, I did, I supervised them and we took them through post. For some reason, I just don’t remember it the same way that I remember the Stargate stuff. I think part of it too is it was a lot of CG stuff. CG is you shoot a plate and you send it to the vendor and the vendor sends back shots. There’s way less like, “we have to shoot this and this and this and this and this has come together” and so you’re way more involved. With CG stuff, you’re not near as involved as a supervisor so it becomes much more of a managerial task. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the Daedalus at all.

David Read
Raj Luthra – what were some of the visual effects that you found were the easiest to pull off that would probably be more complex, but behind the scenes, it’s actually really rudimentary? Was there anything like that?

James Tichenor
Mmm hmm. Not hard to do but look like they would be really complicated? Nothing’s coming to mind right now. There’s so many. That would be one of those ones where you’d sit and you’d show me an episode or you show me a reel of shots, and you’d be like, “how’d you do that?” “Oh that one’s easy, you just do this, this and this.” I think anything that’s split screens, twinning stuff like that, seems like it might be really complicated. If it’s shot well, and it is, it can be very complicated when you’re shooting, but when you put it together, as long as it’s shot well, it goes together like in no time at all.

David Read
Timing, making sure that the actors get their marks.

James Tichenor
Yes, and the lines are right. All of that stuff is complicated to shoot but super easy to do as long as you do it right. If you don’t do it right, then suddenly you’re into a whole world of pain of changing people’s heads and eyes and moving stuff around that doesn’t want to be moved around.

David Read
Lockwatcher, some of your favorite locations over the years to shoot with.

James Tichenor
What is Lockwatcher? What do you mean when you say that?

David Read
Lockwatcher is his alias?

James Tichenor
Oh, we’re getting questions, fan questions? Now I’m understanding.

James Tichenor
I’m sorry James.

James Tichenor
Lockwatcher, is that an episode?

David Read
I’m giving the viewer credit for asking the question.

James Tichenor
I’m too old for this stuff. I don’t get how it works. Ask me the question again.

David Read
Lockwatcher asks “what would be some of your favorite locations over the years to shoot at?”

James Tichenor
Okay, I’m working up in what we call the GVRD, which is North Vancouver, out past the Capilano college. It’s a little trickier now to get in, we used to be able to drive in there. There’s just some incredible views out there, we shot a ton of different things. I can never remember what episodes they are but I remember one episode with a bunch of Unas in a row and they all kind of stepped forward. We did CG Unas, we did all motion capture years before they were doing mocap on the Lord of the Rings. We shot a guy in the foreground with cool ass Todd Masters makeup effects on it. So that view and then there was a view of this city over of a beautiful cliff with mountains and the city kind of ripples in.

David Read
The Nox.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that was all shot out there. Just an awesome part of the city. I go hiking up there all the time. I ride my bike up there still.

David Read
It’s a beautiful area. Is it Greater Vancouver Regional District. Is that what GVRD stand for?

James Tichenor
Yes. But that describes all of Vancouver for whatever reason. In the film business, the GVRD was always the Seymour Demonstration Forest and that’s what it’s called. There was one episodem season one, maybe episode three or four, where we were in the Bloedel Conservatory. It’s so cool.Shooting there is really muggy and hot. They had these chairs that they sat in and these little tentacles came out and wrapped around them. Lost Boys did that stuff, it was really fun doing those shots. That was some of the first CG we did that actually started to work really well. I think those would be the ones and maybe Stokes pit. It was not the most glamorous place to shoot, but we were out there a lot. Whenever you’re in Stokes pit you’re going to blow something up. I think that’s what I shot the night sequence, the one little second unit that they let me direct, kind of a chase through the woods.

David Read
So you shot the opening of Abyss, they’re running to the Stargate, that was your sequence. Can you tell us about that.

James Tichenor
I wasn’t meant to direct that and I had never really had much ambition to be a director I always wanted to write. They ran into a problem where Martin, I feel like his mom might have gotten really sick or passed away, unfortunately and he had to leave on a moment’s notice. Andy Makita was the other kind of, or no, it was Peter and Andy. They were both wrapped up in other things and they had this night unit. They asked me, “is this something you’d want to do?” At the time, I thought “sure that sounds like fun.” We went out, I didn’t even have access to Martin to see how he wanted it shot. All I had was a video that he had shot on, on the scout of like, “I think that’s a shot that he wants to do and I think that’s a shot.” We had worked together so much that I kind of understood what he was trying to go for. The other hard part with that is the reveal of O’Neill, it was held back for some reason. I don’t remember.

David Read
You’re hearing a Tok’ra voice and so it’s a shock that it’s coming out of O’Neill at the end.

James Tichenor
That’s right. All of it was shot kind of from his point of view when he’s running. We had Tim Spencer on Steadicam kind of going crazy out there, the guy always had so much energy and at four in the morning was running around like a maniac. I pieced it together as best as I could while not revealing the actor or not revealing that it’s Rick. It kind of got a little awkward I think at a point towards the end of that sequence. The chase was all good but the way the reveal happened I think I messed that up I think. That’s the best way I can put it because I remember Brad kind of getting into the editing room and sort of reworking everything to make it work a little better and then they never asked me to direct again. It didn’t go as well as they were hoping or something. It turned out okay, I think it was fine. I did something completely wrong. It was like maybe shooting the thing, the dialer, maybe I did that wrong. I don’t remember. I screwed up somehow.

David Read
You were asked to pitch it on short notice.

James Tichenor
Yeah, nobody held it against. It was fine. It was like “okay, noted. Don’t give that guy stuff to direct”.

David Read
Mack Bolan’s conscience – can computer vision or machine learning be used to truly improve the quality of shots? What are your thoughts on that?

James Tichenor
Right? Machine learning. I don’t know about the computer vision portion, but machine learning is coming and we’re going to use it. It will be used in a lot of repetitive tasks like rotoscoping, camera tracking, all of the kind of meat and potatoes not creatively driven work. That’s there and that’s going to happen. I think there will come a day to where we will describe our shots to the computer and it will generate elements. I’m actually talking to a friend right now about a show that he starts shooting on Tuesday and we’re talking to some pretty cool, edgy Stable Diffusion artist. He set up a really innovative way of using Stable Diffusion to generate content. Another one, we’re looking at using deep fakes to do some face replacements sort of on the sly. These are tools being used on a very low budget independent movie. I see that kind of stuff happening more. I think Martin Scorsese, the Irishman, probably would have succeeded better if it used more of that technology and less of the more traditional CG technology. Easy for me to say. I think there’s a resolution issue with using that, so probably not doable. The problem with all of this is it’s an uncontrolled resource. It’s cool on one hand, because in the old days, it was uncontrolled resources of shooting water, shooting, fire, shooting explosions, shooting burning steel wool. All of that stuff was like, “I don’t know how this is going to turn out.”

David Read
That’s nature. This hardware has been created by someone.

James Tichenor
Yeah, but it’s also natural in itself. There’s no way to kind of take what the machine has learned to generate and “just give me just 5% more of this or 2%.” It just does what it does. At this point there’s no way to tune the brain of this creative entity. The other part of it is I don’t think the art of it is that fantastic. I think some of it looks kind of neat but it all has a very uniform vibe to it. In my mind, Stable Diffusion and the other ones, DALL-E. I sort of think of them as like web searches for images that don’t yet exist. They’re coming up with these pictures that you asked for and you get something that sort of is like what you asked for. Sometimes it looks kind of neat but I think in my mind, it will never… Our aesthetic bar is going to have to lower itself until we accept that as being equal to what a great artist will do.

David Read
We we have an artist, Adam Cahill, who is using DALL-E and Stable Diffusion to create Stargate episode images for each episode as we go through it on our commentary channel. For some reason, it loves to make fingers. I don’t know what it is, but six or seven fingers, you know. Little things that keep on creeping into every image. I really think it’s a question of time. Time will solve a lot of those.

James Tichenor
Yeah, I don’t know what’s to solve, though. I’m not totally sure that it is necessary. This guy Wizard Head, if anybody wants to see some of the coolest machine learning, image generation stuff. This guy Wizard Head is working on YouTube and he’s the guy that we’ve been talking to about doing stuff with for the movie. He’s doing crazy stuff. It’s crazy because he’s trained Stable Diffusion on a very specific set of images and then paired it with a very specific set of source material. It creates this very dissonant, uncomfortable experience that is only that way because a human being told it to build it that way. It’s not just like type in my prompt and get a picture and then we’re good to go. He’s using the tools in a creative way and understands the tools to be able to do those things with it. Then he does things with sound that’s similar and there’s somebody there that’s really thinking about what they’re using. I see the future in that world but that is also a smart human being, in control of the situation, not just relying on the machine to tell it to give us the material.

James Tichenor
That’s it. Exactly. The human being prompted it with novelty. The computer doesn’t generate novelty. The computer takes the idea and runs with it.

James Tichenor
Yeah, exactly. At this point, it’s a kind of a uncontrolled beast. It’s like an untamed animal that just gives you what it’s gonna give you. It may be cool and may not and there’s weird areas that are just oddball and bizarre, those are kind of interesting. I would not love the idea of replacing my compositors. I can see, say, a texture artist, using stable diffusion to create textures. That makes total sense to me. But I don’t see us replacing our whole asset team with assets generated by machine learning at any point in the next…I don’t want to say.

David Read
It’s all up for grabs at this point.

James Tichenor
I have not seen a single thing done in any inspiring way with music, poetry, words. No poem has been written so far that I’ve read that is as good as a poem that was written by a good poet. I can’t imagine that would be any different for creating incredible images.

David Read
I think it’ll be interesting to see. Dseb99 and Wacko, they asked questions that you kind of answered iwith this discussion here so I appreciate them adding. Jeandiata Smith just wanted to make a comment. “Just wanted to thank you for giving us such great effects.” And she says, “I know if I see your name in the comments, it’s gonna be good.” Pamela Gasper wanted to know would you ever come back to Stargate to do more content when Amazon and MGM finally get their rear end in gear?

James Tichenor
If Brad and Robert were involved, I would be there in a heartbeat. I would love that. I don’t know whether I would be considered. My guess is that I would not be part of that slate, I think that those studios would expect a much more high end or high credited supervisors to do their work. I don’t think I would be seen as as capable, unfortunately. Which is fine.That’s just the genealogy of these things, right? The world kind of progresses and it just is what it is. If they wanted to shoot models, if they wanted to come in and do old school Stargate, and have that old school Stargate look, then yes. If they wanted super high end CG, I don’t know that stuff well enough. I don’t love that stuff well enough. I feel like I’m still an old school, play the guitar with like a real guitar, but they want synth and EDM kind of thing. That’s totally cool, I get it, that’s the look of the world now. I don’t understand that that well and I don’t have the passion for that and they would want somebody who’s passionate for that. If they want to build models and run spaceships through trees and all that, I’m their guy. You won’t be able to find a lot of guys like me anymore.

David Read
Wow. Do you have a couple more minutes? I want to wrap up by talking about the stories you contributed to. Menace, which actually was filming during September 11.

James Tichenor
It sure was. I remember that morning we were shooting.

David Read
Can you can you tell us that day? First of all, let’s back up a little bit. The story itself?

James Tichenor
The history there is like I said before, when I was working on that show the Odyssey, Ryan Reynolds first big show, Brad was one of the writers. Brad and I always had the the pre-Stargate connection of him being a writer and me being a story department person. He knew that I still wrote and I still cared about being a writer. One season, I think you’ll tell me, season five?

David Read
Season five, near the end? You got it.

James Tichenor
When I came in that season to negotiate my deal I said, “I don’t need a raise, but I would love an opportunity to pitch a story” and he said, “you got it.” So as part of my deal of being a part of the family, he would do this for like, Alan Lee, the editor, was given an episode to direct and Michael Shanks was given an episode direct. The people that were creatively a part of this family of Stargate are always given opportunities to do other things. Pete West directed a number of episodes, I think he directed that Maternal Instinct.

David Read
You have to grow.

James Tichenor
Yeah, exactly. It’s easier to bring those people in, in theory, because they know the show so well. There’s a little bit more control than if you just bring some stranger in. There’s only so much that Martin or Peter DeLouis can direct before they sort of burnout. I pitched the idea of the origin of the replicators being this young girl who was just playing with her robot toys, essentially. She created this AI, kind of much like our machine learning that went kind of bananas. In my story, we kind of find her amongst her toys and discover that her whole family and kind of the last vestiges of her planet, the people of our planet, the ones who have survived, live in these caves. They live in a place that like is zero tech. The only place that the replicators could go, because otherwise they run out of energy, we never developed as part of it. My story had us finding this really archaic, back to the landers people, who had come out the other side of this apocalypse, this machine apocalypse.

David Read
Because they won’t eat that stuff. Stay away from them.

James Tichenor
Exactly. That was the only safe place for them. I guess in my story, we would have helped unify her family with her again and kind of figure out how to not ever get eaten by replicators. I think Brad likes the “Oh that’s cool, this young girl made toys that went bananas,” this innocent person who has no idea of the power that she’s unleashed, he liked. I did an outline on that story and then they took it over as they tend to do and they’re like, “Okay, well, we like this part, we like this part, we like this part, but we’re going to run with it ourselves.” So Robert Cooper actually ended up breaking the story in the way that the story ended up. I got a story credit out of it which was wonderful. I thought that episode actually turned out really well. I wouldn’t say that that was necessarily my story. That’s just the way the movie business works. You bring in a concept, you take it as far as you can as the writer and then the show runners are going to finish it off. They will always love the person that can take it the furthest along because it’s the least amount of work for them. I think in that case, and even in the other episode that I actually wrote, I think it was decided in the end, kind of like my directing, maybe good with, but maybe not [writing]. I’ve written way before that and continue to write to this day. I think the stuff I write is really good, but it’s mine and it’s very specific to the way I see things. When you write for a TV show, you need somebody who can write in the voice of the producers. I was never able to do that.

David Read
Well, I mean, without a doubt the germ of Menace is yours. That idea is really cool. I never knew the back story to that so that’s great.

James Tichenor
Yeah. Metamorphosis was a similar thing. I really wanted to do kind of a, because we had never really done it, but find somebody that was like a bad guy geneticist. I just had this image in my head of some dude, a normal guy, that had had wings grafted on him; we would do these really cool ass CG wings. I still remember Brad’s like “what are you crazy, you know how big those wings would have to be? That’s insane.” But he liked the idea of the genetic manipulation gone bad sort of thing. Again, same deal, you bring the germ and then you work with them and then they kind of like “the story is now gone this way”. I’m like “cool, okay.” You take a stab at writing the script and I’d say maybe 20% of the script is what ended up in the show, ended up on the screen, and Brad re-wrote the rest of it

David Read
Jacqueline Samuda also had…with this gene machine, you know. Climbing a ladder of a helix.

James Tichenor
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was one of the effects we did right? Didn’t we create a kind of a holographicy kind of…?

David Read
There was no climbing but I mean, it’s a cool sequence.

James Tichenor
Yeah. That was, again, Brad’s thing of like, helping people who have been on the show for a while. Also “Oh, those two had a similar idea. I’m gonna take that part of her idea and bring in James’s idea and we’ll make this into this new thing.” It’s fun, it’s great. The greatest thing, honestly in that, is that to this day, I still get a residual check, which is amazing.

David Read
There you go, every time it’s played, right?

James Tichenor
Every three months, I get a couple of hundred bucks and I’m like “whoa”.

David Read
That’s great. Can you speak to your episode in production during September 11. What was that day like?

James Tichenor
It was wild. We were shooting my episode. We were doing effects on that, so I was going to set for the effects. I might not have written the script, but I was involved in the story. I wrote an episode of The Odyssey years ago, as well, the second to last episode I think was one that I’d written. I had been a producer in the past but it was cool to do it on Stargate which is a place I really liked being. I was driving to work and I heard on the radio something’s happened in New York city. It was a little kind of like, “Oh, Jesus, what’s going on.” Through the day, they had monitors on set that were showing the news while we were working. There was a lot of like, “we shouldn’t be working, wwe should be going home. This is insane, what’s going on?” In that moment, you don’t know what is coming next, as everybody knows really well, right? You’re just in this kind of like nether zone. Martin Wood actually, O think at the time I was kind of like “I don’t know about this.” But in retrospect, I think he was absolutely right. He was just like, “no way, everyone’s just gonna go home and they’re gonna sit in front of their TVs and they’re gonna obsess on this. Let’s just keep going. Everything’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our thing, be respectful, it doesn’t make sense to kind of wallow in this.” I think he was right. I kind of didn’t want to watch it. I stayed away from the monitors and just focused on us shooting. The biggest image I have of the day is looking back at our crew, a bunch of them are all standing watching the TV and all their faces are just like, “oh my God” as the towers actually fell. Just that moment of gasping is what sort of is burned into my head on that day.

David Read
These are the moments that define our lives. The people that were with us, all of us who were alive and cognizant at that point in time remember where we were and what happened. I appreciate you sharing that story, thank you so much. I think you guys eventually did shut down production, if I’m not mistaken. I think so, at a certain point.

James Tichenor
Maybe cut the day short?

David Read
I think so.

James Tichenor
Possibly. I just remember Martin being like, “I think it’s a bad idea.” That really stuck out to me as a wise moment, definitely a wise moment. It’s easy to kind of get lost in this stuff. It’s important to be respectful, for sure, but it’s also important not to kind of get consumed. There’s a lot of dark stuff that happens in the world and we’re lucky that we get to do this goofy job of making entertainment, which is totally cool.

David Read
There’s also a certain amount of element of “don’t let the evil win.”

James Tichenor
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. I don’t think it wants to go to the extreme of “just go out shopping” which was is done a large percent of the time, but you also just can’t become overwhelmed by forces that are out of your control. Stories are kind of written around that idea of perseverance and resilience and that kind of thing. I wouldn’t say that we were particularly resilient just to keep shooting. I think people generally are resilient in that you get through big moments and you kind of live through them. The pandemic is a great example. I literally wrapped a movie and then suddenly we were all into quarantine. That two or three months was like “what’s happening? What’s gonna happen next?” You don’t know, right? You just have to keep a head on you, keep yourself at an even keel to a certain extent.

James Tichenor
Do the best you can. James, this has been so cool, I learned so much new stuff. Just gonna be sitting here and digesting. So I was like, “I have new questions for a lot of people.”

James Tichenor
It’s really fun to do. It’s been nice to talk about this stuff. I haven’t talked about the show in years and definitely is a point of pride in my film career, for sure. I really love those people, working with them. I miss Brad and I miss Robert. Martin, I got to see Martin a couple of years ago, which was really fun.

David Read
It’s a quality product and a product that you all can be proud of. It’s cool.

James Tichenor
It’s the only show that I’m talking about after all of these years, it’s great.

David Read
There are a few people that I want to email you about to see if I can get on the show as well; to see who you’re in touch with. I appreciate you taking so much time to share these stories and thank you again.

James Tichenor
All right, thank you. Really appreciate it.

David Read
Take care of yourself, you be well.

James Tichenor
Yeah, you too. Bye.

David Read
Bye bye. James Titchenor everyone, visual effects producer for Stargate SG-1 through to season seven and season two of Atlantis. There’s so much that is established earlier on in the shows that come to fruition later on. So many of these people who are responsible for it, it’s just a treat to be able to have them on the program and to bring some of these stories to life again. We have coming up, if I can get my little ducklings in a row here, we have FailWhale34, YouTuber, who’s going to be joining us in just a few minutes here. He is a Stargate fan who has his own YouTube channel. He has been going through and rewatching a number of different series. Right now he’s in the middle of season seven of SG-1 and he’s going to be joining us in just a few minutes. Anna Galvin is going to have to reschedule so I’m going to check my email in here and see when that’s going to happen. We were originally going to have her at four o’clock but she’s going to be pushed back. John de Lancie, Frank Simmons in Stargate SG-1 and Q to the rest of the Stargate fan community. He’s actually gonna be joining us this Wednesday, February the 15th at 11am Pacific. I’m going to be sending out notifications for that episode in pretty short order here. I’m going to go ahead and wrap and get us set up for our next episode with Michael, FailWhale34, and we’re going to talk a little bit of Stargate from the terms of just fans. I appreciate you tuning in. My thanks to James Titchenor for joining us. Thanks so much to my moderating team; Tracy, Jeremy, Rhys, Antony, Sommer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, my producer and Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb for making the website possible. My name is David Read for DialtheGate, I’ll see you on the other side.