Creating visual effects for science fiction is no easy task, and requires a mix of vision, creativity, and raw talent. VFX Supervisor John Gajdecki brought these to Stargate, and will share stories from the process and take your questions LIVE!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:29 – Opening Credits
00:58 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:34 – Welcoming John
05:02 – Personal Memories
07:15 – John’s Background with Slideshow
12:20 – Goa’uld Ship
14:43 – The Filmmaking Process
18:56 – Kawoosh (Energy Vortex) Water Tank
21:23 – Death Glider, Camera Types and Filming
26:33 – Models and Budgeting
42:21 – “Children of the Gods” Set
45:04 – Ship Models, “A Matter of Time,” and Reetou Models
51:44 – Sulfur Pits and Filming Issues
53:04 – Filming the Kawoosh and Other Images
56:00 – “The Fifth Race” Set
57:23 – Bridge Studios and Crew
59:47 – Photo Montage
1:03:36 – Video Clips and Commentary
1:14:05 – Atlantis Sequences
1:22:46 – John Gajdecki’s Team
1:27:17 – Advancements in Technology
1:31:45 – The Energy Vortex and Other Effects
1:35:09 – A Difficult Shot
1:38:45 – Hard Effects to Execute
1:43:01 – Models VS Computer-Generated Images
1:47:01 – Wrapping up with John
1:52:54 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:54:45 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 202 of Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project, my name is David Read. John Gajdecki is joining us for this episode. He was the visual effects supervisor on Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis so we’ve got a number of interesting stories heading your way here, I suspect John won’t disappoint. Before we get into the thick of it, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click the Like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will help the show continue to grow. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment the new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes, this is key if you watch live with us. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live show I have my moderators, I believe Tracy and Antony today, in the chat ready to take your questions for John as we go along. His specific episodes can be found at the Stargate Command wiki which is a really easy place to check out. Also I really recommend checking out johngajdecki.com which is really cool. It shows his action real and environments real off, really cool stuff. John Gajdecki, thank you so much, sir for joining me for this episode. It is a privilege to have you.

John Gajdecki
Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. Now that I’m reaching the other end of my career and I look back, I have to say the Stargate days, the whole MGM days in Vancouver, which is where the shows were made, were actually really special. I am going to turnover my phone, although I just got a text from Robert Habros, who is the effects producer for all of those shows. What’s really interesting is all of the people, many of the people who worked on these shows, we stay in touch to this day. In fact, we went over to Brenda Levert’s, who was one of the coordinators, we had dinner at her place two weeks ago. It was a really special time for all of us and I hope that that was translated into a show, clearly it was, that you guys are all still really interested in.

David Read
Christopher Judge called at Shangri-La; there was something that was really special about that group of people, on front of and behind the camera. It’s not every production that would bring in bouncy houses for the the kids of the families who worked on the projects and have barbecues. Thats really says something special about the people who were involved in it and why they loved it as much as they did.

John Gajdecki
No you’re absolutely right. There’s a friend of mine who loved the show, he loved it so much. When I say a friend of mine, I’m not sure that I even really liked him but I gave him my Stargate jacket because he loved the show so much. I talked to Brad Wright one day, the producer, I said, “would you mind if this guy and I came by for a tour?” and he let me bring him to the stages and I walked him through all the sets. You’re right, that was Brad, that was Jonathan, that was Robert Cooper.

David Read
Very giving.

John Gajdecki
They were all just super people. In fact, I was chatting with Brad a couple days ago.

David Read
Yeah, the caliber of folks that made up the show was great. I’m always amazed at how thankful and how willing people are, years later. to come on and say, not everybody, but those who have to come on and say “let’s talk about it again, it was a great period of my life.” What do you remember most about looking back on your body of work with Stargate in particular, when you look back at all of those shots that you did,

John Gajdecki
I was the supervisor for the first two seasons basically. The way the show’s were structured, the way the MGM shows were structured is, we were brought up, there were lots of people from out of town. So Bob Habros who I just mentioned just texted me, in fact, we’re staying at his house in Point Roberts. We all really do keep in touch. We all came up from L.A, I came from Toronto, people come from all over to work on these shows. I think what the group of us remember, aside from the wonderful work of course, was the time that we spent. How should I say, we were all single, we all had per diem. You’ll notice when I start showing you some stuff, one of my directories is called “parties.” In fact, Richard Dean Anderson and I threw a Halloween party. There’s a bar here in town called The Waldorf. It’s not fancy like The Waldorf in perhaps New York, in fact it’s not fancy like that at all. But it’s a pretty good place, there’s a bunch of bars in there, we rented all the bars and we threw a party for the crew.

David Read
Aaaah. Should we start off with show and tell? Should we begin with that or how would you like to proceed?

John Gajdecki
Sure, any structure is cool and I’m a fan of taking questions. What I’ve done just so you guys know is over the last couple of days I’ve been digging through all of my material in order to find stuff to show you. Some of it I can’t get. As you may or may not know, I’m one of the visual effects supervisors on Superman and Lois. With the writers strike we’re all sitting around doing nothing and the studio is locked off so a lot of my material is actually at the studio. I’ve gathered up what I could, which I think you’re gonna be really happy with.

David Read
Oh, I can’t wait to see. You should be able to share your screen.

John Gajdecki
Okay. Push and share and I share the whole screen. One thing I have done, just you know, as my background on my screen I’m running a slideshow from pictures from Stargate.

David Read
Ah.

John Gajdecki
Oh, actually, look at that.

David Read
Look how young you are?

John Gajdecki
Oh, stop it. So here, let me actually just go right there. These are in no particular order which is the way it is. This is the model shop. The way the show was structured is there were two visual effects teams; there was myself and James Titchener. James started with me as a coordinator and a PA many years before so James and I worked together for years and years and years and years before Stargate. He inherited the show after I left and he did a fantastic job. There were the supervisors on the show then we had several vendors. Rainmaker was one of the vendors, Northwest imaging was another vendor, we used Image Engine sometimes and of course they’ve gone on to do great things. I gave them some of their very first work on the Outer Limits many years before. There was a morph shot, I still remember that. Mark Barnard was on the show. Mark’s gone on to a run a school called Lost Boys where a lot of the best artists come from now so a lot of tremendous people came into the show. I had a company in Toronto and I had a company which I opened for Stargate in Vancouver. Toronto, that’s where I’m from, I was working on a show, I did TekWar, which was the William Shatner series. As that was winding down, the producing company, Atlantis, said, “you know, we have this show in Vancouver that we think you’d like to do.” I moved to Vancouver, I didn’t move to Vancouver. For 10 years I literally lived in Vancouver and Toronto; two sets of underwear, two sets of clothing, the whole thing, so I could just get on a plane and not worry about forgetting stuff behind. It was not a bad life, it was kind of crazy, we won’t go there, yet. So this picture, this picture is from my Toronto office. My Toronto office had the latest digital tools. We were the first company who was investing in Discreet Logic which wrote Flame software which was very, very big at the time. One computer was a million dollars, that’s what visual effects were in those days. Upstairs we had the computers, we had the 3D section around the hall and I probably have some pictures of that. Downstairs, I had a model shop. We had a shooting stage, movie cameras, lights, motion control; we were basically a full on visual effects facility. These are some of the guys from the model shop, this is my brother actually down here, who I saw a couple of days ago. I went back to Ottawa to see him. I’m just going to do stream of consciousness and you tell me if I’m going too far.

David Read
Did you guys make this glider from scratch or was this an asset from the film?

John Gajdecki
What glider? What glider?

David Read
The one in between you guys there?

John Gajdecki
No I can’t see it. Oh, you mean that? I’m fucking with you. Yes, we did. We built it from scratch, we based it on the film. What was super cool is one day, I’m walking around at the studio, Bridge Studios, they have the original gate from the film, they had some of the original pyramid models in storage, it was really cool. Anyway, we built the glider. The one thing we had to do was the glider in the film, the wings were basically out, we decided in order to make the shots cooler and I can show you some of those in a minute, we would give them folding wings like naval fighters do so you could jam more of them into a given space. We built a fighter with wings that were down, added all the details blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you can see there’s some little guys in there. Rick, my brother, built it. Dave Axford was the model shop lead. These two gentlemen, I hate to admit, I don’t remember their names anymore. But Pete Edmonds here was the best pyro guy I’ve ever worked with, he could blow up anything and trust me, we did, on all kinds of different productions. We’ve worked together for many years. He also had a large gun collection so occasionally we would have to go to military bases and just put rounds through them. But maybe that’s another channel, or not another channel another time. This is one of the goa’uld ships, you can’t quite see it because it’s white against white. We needed to blow up one of the ships for one of the episodes and we decided to build a large model. We would call them black box models but we haven’t painted it black yet. We have the CG object, we’d have the CG ship, but behind it is a physical model loaded with pyro. We line them up in 2D in the computers and then when the ship needs to blow up, we sort of reveal the explosion in this black box model, if that makes any sense. For chuckles, obviously I wasn’t around otherwise we’d be working hard. This is my brother and Dave and that is Simon Lacey, Simon Lacey was one of the coordinators and supervisors on Stargate as well. Early days. We went to York University together a long time ago and he came on the show with us. Obviously they’re not holding it up, it’s being held up by a gigantic construction crane. It looks fun.

David Read
Is it pathetic that I know exactly what shot this is from?

John Gajdecki
No, because I do too.

David Read
It’s the climax to Serpent’s Lair.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. That’s right. Oh look, I have my Stargate hat. For some reason, I don’t know why, I always wear hats sideways. I can’t help it. Also, when I shoot, pictures are often crooked and I bet they’re related.

David Read
It’s stylized.

John Gajdecki
Of course, I’ll go with that. It was really a shitty day, it was raining a lot. What does it say here? Jonathan, John and Brad and Michelle, wish you were here? They were not.

David Read
Is it Michelle Comens?

John Gajdecki
I’m sorry?

David Read
Is that Michelle Comens?

John Gajdecki
Of course. Michelle Comens is doing spectacularly well in real estate.

David Read
Yes, I saw that. I would love to have her on the show if I could.

John Gajdecki
Oh, dude, she is so nice. We were at her party last year. It is remarkable how much we keep in touch now that I think of it. It’s the only show where we all keep in touch.

David Read
Yeah. You guys had a great time and made a lot of good memories.

John Gajdecki
We did, we did. Simon Lacey. I’m not sure how much your fans want us to talk about the filmmaking process.

David Read
Let’s go.

John Gajdecki
Okay, so there’s about 10 people on a movie that makes creative decisions. There’s a director there’s a writer, production designer, DP, visual effects. Everybody else moves heavy shit, that’s really what a movie crew is. If you look at this stuff, it’s all really heavy and it travels with us everywhere we go. This is just the visual effects department, the main unit was gigantic and its own thing. This is us, we’re getting ready to shoot the ship blowing up. Funny story, stream of consciousness, you said tangents, here we go. We rented this field to blow up because we need it to be outside of the city. This was in Toronto. Next door to us they were shooting a movie. Oliver Stone was on a ship next door, shooting a movie. They had so much light that we didn’t have to use all of ours, it was just everywhere. But when we blew stuff up, it wrecked their takes. We got one of their radios, they got one of our radios so when we were going to blow something up we tell them. They’d all run to the side of the ship and they would watch and then when they were shooting we wouldn’t do anything loud so that we wouldn’t wreck their takes.

David Read
Yeah, good neighbors.

John Gajdecki
You gotta be good neighbors with your filmmaking buddies. What else we got? For some reason we’re starting with a Simon Lacey medley. When we were at Bridge Studios there was a building, iit was the effects building, it was at the back of the lot and that’s where all the effects shows were. This is basically Simon sitting at his desk in the effects building. It was really cool because Outer Limits was there, Poltergeist was there, Stargate was there, Jeremiah, we were all in the same building. That was a decision that was made by Hudson Hickman, who was the VP of physical production at MGM Studios. Hudson is a wonderful guy, we still keep in touch, although he doesn’t live around here so we don’t see him so much. He really set up a system. Bob Habros was in charge of all of the teams but Hudson set up a system that really did a spectacularly good job of getting the most out of everybody without killing us. You guys know, the movie business, the hours can be somewhat oppressive. It’s not just because it’s expected, it’s because you want to. That’s actually one of the hardest things to do. People need to realize that they have to take time off when we’re working. I remember I was in Hong Kong working on, of all things, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Every morning that I’d come in there’d be somebody sleeping on my couch. I swear they played paper, scissors, rock for the honor of sleeping on my couch so that I would come in and see how hard they were working. I would say “no, go home. I’m not going to get the best from you if you’re staying here working till two in the morning and then you’re up at eight or nine again. Go home, get some rest.”

David Read
It’s easy to get lost in the work if you’re having such a creative outpouring of energy on a project. It’s easy to forget, “oh, yeah, I need to eat” or “I need to go pee.” Those things kind of fall by the wayside because you’re involved in this thing.

John Gajdecki
It’s true. It’s true. On film sets, of course, food is provided. You’d think, “Oh well, that’s great,” you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but sometimes you just forget. So it’s really handy to be able to go to set or something, grab something to eat, go back. I have stories about that too.

David Read
What is this?

John Gajdecki
This is the tank that we shot the kawoosh in. This isn’t the kawoosh shot, we’re shooting some other smoke but this is basically the water tank. I don’t know if you guys know how that works. Very briefly, it was one and a half meters by one and a half meters, it was a gigantic tank. One cubic meter of water weighs a metric tonne. This would have been about three or four tonnes, we had to reinforce the floor before we filmed. For some shots the camera would have to be underneath. There’s a camera underneath, there’s this gigantic water tank, then above is an air cannon. The air cannon basically shoots air into the tank and as the air pushes in, it displaces the water which creates that cool shape. That’s how we did it. You might have thought, “oh, well that was all done in CG” but in those days the computers weren’t powerful enough. We tried to do it and we continued working on it and I think they eventually got it. But at the beginning, we did it the same way they did it on the movie, air cannon shooting water into a tank. Setting the air pressure is really critical because if it’s too little, it doesn’t look cool and if it’s too big, well what happens? And of course, your first take is always too big. We shot the air in, the water just lifted vertically out of the tank and landed all over the studio. So that wasn’t a good thing. In fact, had anybody been underneath the tank, they would have been the only person dry. You always wondered if that kind of explosion in water would crack the tank and kill you so we didn’t let anybody go under the tank when we were filming.

David Read
Yeah. Go ahead name, let’s see who’s here in the shot.

John Gajdecki
This is Dave Axford again, ran the model shop. That’s Rick, my brother who ran the model shop next. This is Jon Campfens. My company had three senior supervisors; myself, Tom Turnbull and Jon Camfens. Tom and Jon mostly stayed in Toronto. Jon Campfens, if you google him, he did a lot of shows you would possibly recognize back then. Tom Turnbull, I think he’s working on Halo right now. All of us have gone on to work on really big stuff. There’s the fighter again. So this is this is our movie camera and there’s a green screen in the background. In the ship, the art department designed this little sort of a, the cockpit would lift vertically up into the ship.

David Read
Yes. Yeah. This is the SG-1 season one finale.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. That was quite a big episode.

David Read
Wow. That’s wild.

John Gajdecki
This would be in our shooting stage back in Toronto. The movie camera is Mitchell, 55 mm high speed. I bought it 15 years before from a gentleman who personally knew Charlie Chaplin. We modified it to take Nikon lenses because they were very plentiful. In fact, if you look behind me, there’s my collection of Nikon lenses, most of which we would have used on this movie camera.

David Read
Wow. Is it true, John, that you guys shot a lot of the more intimate stuff in terms of with cast and crew, with Super 16 cameras and a lot of the more the visual effects oriented stuff for 35. Is that correct?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, at the end of the day, money isn’t infinite on shows like this. It was cheaper to shoot on 16, it was significantly cheaper on 16 and we were using super 16 which of course gave us the widescreen aspect ratio. Strangely, I think most of the early Stargate episodes are aired 4:3 even today, but we shot them 16:9 and we did all the work 16:9, so that exists, if you can find it. Here’s the thing, movie cameras with film, as a shutter advanced the film would be pulled down and then a registration pin would engage the film and hold it steady in place while the shutter was open. But if you imagine that 16 millimeter film is half the size of 35 the amount of weave is essentially twice as much. So gate leave is what we would call that; the film would move a little bit between frames. Even in a locked off shot, the film would always be moving just a smidge. 35 mm gave us better registration and 35 mm cameras would often have more registration pins, certainly a Mitchell like the camera you’re looking at now, that would hold the film much steadier, which made it easier for us to layer the visual effects into a shot.

David Read
James Titchenor said that in order to combine in the smoothness between the transitions of the 35s and the 16s, you’d actually have to add noise into the 35s.

John Gajdecki
So philosophically, when I do visual effects and this is what Mr. Titchenor is alluding…Mr. Tichenor, I can’t believe I said that. That’s what James is alluding to, Mr Tichenor. We’re not trying to make things look real. We’re trying to make things look photographically real. Our visual effects have to look like man unit shot it, otherwise we failed, otherwise you’re gonna stick out and you’re gonna go “that’s not real but I don’t know why.” Oh, well, because the grain doesn’t match.

David Read
It’s too clean. You can reach out and paint it with a finger.

John Gajdecki
And of course now on shows like Superman, there’s virtually no grain in the image at all because of the digital cameras. Sometimes we put it in if it helps mush everything in together, maybe that’s another episode. Yes, we’re constantly trying to take our images and make them look like main unit shot them. So 16, super 16, sometimes if they’re shooting high speed, or if they’re shooting on a 400. In those days we called it ASA, these days, it’s ISO stock, there’s a lot of grain in there, we’ve got to match the grain. Sometimes, depending on the lenses, the corners of the screen get a little soft. Sometimes there’s vignetting so we put that vignetting in the corners, we soften the edges. When we do CG it’s even cleaner than 35 mm. When we’re doing fully CG environments you’re adding grain. There’s lots of tricks to adding grain which we don’t necessarily have to get into, but I love that shit in case anybody cares. We’d add the grain, we diffuse the sides of the screen, we do all these things. There’s some software called CG Munge and you use that to put some chromatic aberration on the sides of the screen, just to make sure that what we’re delivering cuts in, so it looks as bad. I’m using sort of in a joking way, but it looks as bad; it completely matches the live action footage.

David Read
Okay, that’s crazy..

John Gajdecki
Aha, so what episode was this? There were three of these things on a hilltop.

David Read
Yes. So that is Thor’s Chariot.

John Gajdecki
Damn, you’re good.

David Read
Thank you, sir. Yeah, you guys made your own, I don’t know if they’re a pyramid ship, or if they’re a pyramid base. Certainly I recognize that they were definitely a little different in appearance than the one in the feature film.

John Gajdecki
They had these big gaps in it.

David Read
Yep. And they also appear in Need when Daniel is going through his drug overdose. This is so cool, man. How much time would it take to build something like this?

John Gajdecki
Well, you have to do the math, you have to be really good at math. We’ll calculate “what would it cost to build this on set?” Of course, something like this, it’s basically infinite so we’re not going to do that. Then we always look at the two solutions, do we build it CG or do we build it as a physical model? Back in those days, there was a rule of thumb that would always give me the right answer. If the camera had to move then it’s easier for us to build a CG object and track it because the tracking software was pretty good, even then. So if there’s a lot of camera move in a shot, we would lean towards building CG objects. If the camera did not move, then building a model and taking it outside in the parking lot and shooting it always looks better, but it’s hard to track. The math was often not financial, it was more how are we going to approach the shot? How are we shooting it on set? How are we going to comp it later? One interesting thing about this shot, because I remember the way we did it, we set it up in the parking lot, we waited, we basically wait for the kind of weather that we want. We would shoot them on still cameras. In other words, if the model is just sitting there and I grabbed my Nikon and I set it up. When you’re shooting you have to match the way you shot on set, we’re making our stuff look like it was shot by the main unit. We would know the distance to the hilltop for instance, we would know the tilt of the camera, we would know the focal length that we shot on. If we’re shooting on a Nikon instead of a movie camera, it’s about a 1.5 difference so we would compensate with the focal lengths and the scale of the model would affect the distance that you shoot it from. If you get all that stuff right, and it’s really not very hard, it looks perfectly real, it just drops right in and there’s no need to shoot it on a movie camera. There’s not an infinite amount of money so if we can save a little money shooting with a still camera, especially in those days. This sounds ridiculous, email didn’t exist. We would send instructions to each other by fax, we would draw signs. “This is great, we can send a piece of paper across the world.” We would do a drawing and send it over and they’re like, “no, it hasn’t arrived yet,” it’s coming. By shooting a single picture it was often easier to bring back and it was cheaper to FedEx, we would FedEx stuff all the time. It’s so much easier to do this work now. The model would have probably taken about two weeks for this number of people. Some of them are better at building, some of them are better at painting, some of them are better at just making sure it gets done; those are all very important skills. There’s a saying that is, “we don’t need it good, we need it Tuesday.” For us it was all about optimizing the crew, getting it done by Tuesday, because if you don’t, people get fired.

David Read
I’ll hold my question to another shot but I’ve got a question about that.

John Gajdecki
No, go ahead, please.

David Read
I don’t know if there’s a term for it, I kind of think of it as like a visual effects triad. You can have it good, cheap or fast. You can have any two of the three. If you want it good and you want it cheap, you’re not going to have it fast. Is there any truth to that?

John Gajdecki
Oh, dude, absolutely. In fact a couple of months ago I think we sat there and said, “now you only get to pick one.” That’s really the key to almost any industrial process, especially a highly iterative, political, creative, big budget process. If you imagine the good fast, cheap triangle, you guys can see my screen right?

David Read
Can you stop sharing for a moment and then we’ll be able to go back to you?

John Gajdecki
Okay, stopping share.

David Read
Okay. Perfect. All right. Go right ahead.

John Gajdecki
What I was going to do is actually draw on the screen the good, fast, cheap triangle.

David Read
Oh okay, I apologize John. Go back to that.

John Gajdecki
Go back to that, I was only going to do it because that picture had a lot of nice white empty screen space. Okay, so moving the image over, can you guys see it?

David Read
Yes, sir.

John Gajdecki
Okay, grabbing my noting tools. Good. Doesn’t matter what side you put it on, fast, cheap, we literally call it the “good, fast, cheap triangle.” You can already see where this is going. If you want something good, which everybody does, you can have it fast or you can have it cheap, but you can’t have both. If you need it fast, it’s gonna be expensive because we’re going to do lots of overtime, everyone’s going to work really hard we’re going to probably need pizzas in the middle of the night, all the stuff that it takes to keep people working. If you want it good and you want to cheap, if you have lots of time, well,that works really well. There’s no O/T, saves a lot of money, you can have a smaller crew. Part of the creative process, and I know your fans know this, if you’re working on something, sometimes you’re working on it and you just put it away, you come back next week. When you’re in the grocery store, you’re still thinking about work, you can’t help it. You’re kind of making progress even while you’re out doing human normal things. If you want good and cheap and you have time, that’s actually the best. Now if you need something fast, which often is the case, like on Superman and Lois, we had it pretty quick, it was a television series, it wasn’t a television streaming show. They wanted it fast, they wanted it good so it’s not going to be cheap. Again, we’re doing lots of overtime, we’re going to break stuff up over lots of different vendors to get the work done running in parallel. When you do that mistakes happen. These guys make something “oh, it doesn’t work, got to work the weekend to fix this.” The “good, fast, cheap triangle” is the key to visual effects. If you want a cheap, you can either have it good or you can have a fast, but you can’t have both. You either need a lot of money or you need to have fairly low expectations and I’ve worked on shows up both types.

David Read
Yeah, that’s crazy. You have to find what the customer wants and make it work.

John Gajdecki
You do, you do and there’s a couple of ways that you do that. I’m a fan of budgeting, I actually really enjoy the process of budgeting. This is kind of for another conversation but when you’re doing your budgets you’re thinking through the process. As you’re doing that, you’re sort of “oh, well, I’m gonna get Dave to do this and Andrew is going to do that and Anne’s gonna comp it and this is how much time I think they’re going to spend.” As you’re doing the work, as you’re doing the budget, you’re sort of planning out the whole process. When you go to the producers to present your budget and I presented a budget yesterday for an Apple show, one of the things that comes up is I’ll say to them, “for every person in the approval chain add about 5% of the budget.” Usually the room goes silent. For you, people who want to work in the movie business, this is a really good trick. When the room goes silent, when you drop a bomb like that, the next person who talks loses. You just say, “for every person in the approval chain add 5%.” If you’re an asshole you do this [sit back and fold arms] and if you’re a bigger asshole you do that [sit back and cross arms above head] and you wait. Somebody’s gonna say, “yeah, okay, I see that” and then they decide so and so is in charge. I’ll tell you, on some shows there’s 7, 8, 9 people who you have to get feedback from. Often for lower level executives, as they’re working their way up the food chain, they’re given positions where they’re not really allowed to say yes, they’re only allowed to say no. They can’t approve something because this person up here has to approve it. You go to them, they’ll go “oh, you know, I don’t really like the pyramid. I think it should have more weathering in it.” You’ll weather it and then they give you some other note and then it goes up the food chain and usually they go “this is great.” Sometimes they’ll say, “well why is there so much weathering?” and you can’t rat out the other person.

David Read
Right, it’s all political. You’re gonna have to work with these people in the future.

John Gajdecki
You do, you do, even if you don’t like them and on Stargate we were lucky because we liked everybody, except for one person and I can’t tell you who that is. So then you have to say, “well, you know, I kind of thought it would be a good idea but obviously I went too far. You know, it’s super easy for us to pull it back and we can have that for you tomorrow.” A lot of it is just making people feel good about the decisions they’re making and the process. In visual effects, we’re still sitting here staring at a model, which suspiciously what I should have done now that I think about it. Oh, this is going to be almost funny. We could have gone good, fast, cheap and used the pyramid itself. There you go.

David Read
That’s funny John. Oh, that’s funny. You did make a pyramid above a pyramid, that was pretty funny.

John Gajdecki
That’s right, I’m sure some of the fans noticed that earlier. “Come on, do it, do it.” We could talk about this all day but then we’re never gonna get anywhere.

David Read
All right, what else have you got for us?

John Gajdecki
I got nothing. I’m joking. Okay, what do we got? Okay, so this is a computer control camera, it’s called a motion control system. I went to York University, so did Simon. Often when you’re filming and I don’t know if Tichenor talked about this, but shooting a camera move in those days, it was hard to reproduce it later, especially if it’s going to be a model. This camera, this is a very simple one, the camera is here of course on a whirl head which we motorized with Stepper Motors. This is the computer and the drivers for the motors. We had these remote wheels, you could drive the camera up and down the track, you can pan and tilt it. We had other ones with crane arms and stuff like that. We save the move and then we go back to our model stage and if the model is, let’s say, one quarter scale, you can scale all the linear dimensions by .25. All the rotations remain the same and when you play the move it will scale with the model.

David Read
So this allows you to match layers and plates together into one shot.

John Gajdecki
These days you do it all digitally. It’s better, it’s faster, it’s cheaper; you you literally get all three sides of the good, fast, cheap triangle, which is unusual. In those days that’s what we had to do. Sometimes, motion controls, they were a little tricky. Simon and I would work out with the first AD, the first assistant director, after we’d shoot to take, we would check the rig. If we said the take was good, then the take was good. If we said the take was perfect, it means we have a problem and the first AD has to find us a few minutes to figure out what’s going on. That’s just one of those little filmmaking tricks.

David Read
So you wouldn’t want perfect?

John Gajdecki
No, but you also wouldn’t want to say you have a problem. In the movie business, we’re talking mostly about the movie business, not about the show, we’ll get back to the show. In the movie business there’s only two right answers, “yes” and “yes, but…” Somebody says “can we do something?” Of course we can do it, but it’s going to be expensive or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can always say that but you always open with “yes.”

David Read
Well, yeah, you guys are problem solvers.

John Gajdecki
We are, we are. That’s me with my Stargate hat. This is my Mitchell camera which would do up to 120 frames per second. This camera would shoot 500 frames per second.

David Read
Oh my gosh. So make things really, really big?

John Gajdecki
Oh, you should hear it, it was unbelievable. We were shooting, I think the Reetous, which we’re going to get to in a second because this is really cool. Oh, okay, so there you go. There’s the ship with our pal Oliver Stone and here’s the goa’uld ship suspended from a construction crane. In the middle of a field, “oh look, this is probably oil, it’ll probably explode and we’ll all die.” Didn”t think about that. Here’s the film crew, there’s all the gear that you saw. I mean, really, this is the whole crew that it takes to shoot a model like this.

David Read
John, how big is that model? 20 feet?

John Gajdecki
Maybe 15. Okay, here’s how big the model is, it had to fit into a five ton truck. So whatever the diagonal is to a five ton truck that’s how big the model is.

David Read
Wow. That is so cool John. Thank you for sharing these.

John Gajdecki
I can make these bigger for you guys.

David Read
Perfect. Thank you.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. This stuff is fun. You know, granted, you’re getting rained on and it’s the middle of the night and all of that stuff but it’s way better than almost anything else that you can do for a living. This is a really good career but I’ll tell you, you have to have a stomach for it. I don’t feel stress very much, but people who do, it kills them.

David Read
Especially at this stage in time, late 90s, I imagine you’re making so much of this up from scratch. It’s just like, “can we put these things together and make it work?” When it works it’s gotta be like, “oh man, this is awesome” and when it’s not it’s like, “okay, we tried that, let’s try something else.”

John Gajdecki
Correct. And the deadline is approaching!

David Read
John, look at this. Is this Children of the Gods set?

John Gajdecki
Yeah it is and I’ve got a funny story about that. Okay, so you know the temples that they had? There were these temples in a couple of shots we looked at and they were Greek style temples and they had figures on the edges. So we hired this matte painter and we say, “okay, we’re doing these temples are they are kind of like Greek temples.” He’s a really good matte painter, he paints the temples but the little people aren’t on them. I said, “Hey” and I’m not gonna use the name, “where are my people?” “Oh well, you know, Greek temples don’t have people like that.” I said, “well yes, but they’re Greek-like temples and we would like the people on them.” “Okay, sure, sure, sure.” Next week I get what looks like a final and the people aren’t there; the little sculptures aren’t on the tops of the temples. I said “well, this is really good. I really like…” because you always open with something positive…”this is really good, good job, you’re so big and strong, but where are my people on my temples?” He said, “well, I thought about it a lot and Greek temples don’t… I said “you know, we’re in outer space, we’re not in Greece, these aren’t Greek temples. Brad Wright and Jonathan they really want…” and he just wouldn’t do it because Greek temples wouldn’t have it. Creatives people, and I’m one of them, can drive you bananas. Anyway, here’s a shot, this is more of the crew. We’ve got the gate, we’ve got the dialling device, there’s your show. I don’t have a lot of behind the scenes pictures on Stargate because cameras really weren’t permitted. That’s one of the things, well on all shows. On Superman I have a ton of behind the scenes pictures because people thought I was the set photographer. As a visual effects person on set, you don’t actually do anything. So end up like, “who is that guy?” “Oh, he’s the set photographer.” But on Stargate they all knew who I was. This gate basically traveled in a truck and they’d show up the day before and they put it together. You’d have the gate and you’d have the pieces, it’s all basically Styrofoam and fiberglass that’s been painted. We wanted the gate to spin of course on location but we just couldn’t make that happen.

David Read
I sold the location gate to the Sci-fi Museum in Seattle in the first Propworx auction in 2010, September 2010. It went for 75 grand.

John Gajdecki
Oh my god. I assure you they paid more than that. I’m not sure what this is and I don’t recognize it. We needed a snow field and we needed some snow so we had a matte painting of some object and this is how we created the snow for it.

David Read
Wow. Very cool.

John Gajdecki
There’s the ship exploding, terrible photograph. I’ve got a better one. This is cool. So remember we saw the ships in space? Look at how big…Oh, we’ll come, we’ll come back to that. Okay, I’ll go back. I thought I had a better picture. That model is enormous.

David Read
Yeah, cuz you had to zoom in to SG-1 on the bridge.

John Gajdecki
We had to zoom in onto the bridge. I remember shooting that and I had a horrible cold. I’m dying and we’re trying to shoot this plate and what we were discussing is, should the camera start moving slowly and continue slowly through the whole move or should it move out quickly and then slow down and come to a stop? Which is easier for us digitally and that went back and forth for a while. We probably shot it both ways and then Jonathan just said, “you are so sick, just go home.”

David Read
Aaaah. When your executive producer comes to you and says, “hey, dude, you gotta take a breath.”

John Gajdecki
But they didn’t say that while I was shooting the most important plate of the season. It’s like, “no, you stay here and die then if you live, you can go home.” The model is gorgeous, this does not show it to its best. I think I’ve got a better picture. Here’s the fighter again after the battle damage.

David Read
Wow, look at that detail. Can you zoom in a little bit?

John Gajdecki
I can, of course.

David Read
Look at that detail. That is so cool.

John Gajdecki
This used to hang above my desk in my office for years.

David Read
I can understand why. What’s the wingspan?

John Gajdecki
is about four feet. It was big. This was a really big model, it photographed really nicely. You’ll notice it’s on a green screen, because the model is blue.

David Read
You don’t want pieces of it to disappear.

John Gajdecki
If the model is green, you know what color the screen would be? So this was one of Tichenor’s episodes.

David Read
Yes, it was. This is A Matter of Time.

John Gajdecki
You can tell just from the blue screens.

David Read
This is the gravity of the star pulling the guys toward the gate. He said that if you watch the episode there’s a couple of different ways that they did this. They actually had a background element in some so it was like a projection and some of the set photography was done with that one. One of the things that James admitted to was a lot of these shots, or a handful of them in this episode, he’s not happy with and others he is. I guess that’s probably the case with your work as you go back. “That’s better than that, that’s not so good, we tried that. I’m glad we tried that because we never did that again.” That’s wild. Look at that.

John Gajdecki
There’s a rule we have with the artists and that’s “no shot can be great until every shot is good.” Where I’m going with that is sometimes you’re working with somebody and they’re glomming onto a shot and you know in their heads, they’re like, “oh this is gonna look good on my demo reel.” They keep working on that shot at the expense of the other ones that aren’t there yet. When we approve shots one of the levels of approval, one of the status levels, is CBB which means “could be better.” As soon as a shot is getting close to being good, we CBB and then you move on to something else and if time allows you to come back to it later. This is one of the Reetous. This is after it exploded. We basically built these things as models and we blew them up at 500 frames a second. I’ll tell you why and it’s a really interesting story. One of my friends, one of the guys that I work with on Superman, Chris Deger, he loves Stargate and he loves Amanda Tapping.

David Read
Don’t we all?

John Gajdecki
I was working on a show with Amanda and Amanda comes in and we’re sitting there and Chris Deger is sitting there and we’re talking about the shots and we’re looking at the shots. Chris Deger who is like the nicest, most trucker like, absolutely inhibition free guy who will say anything that crosses his mind, couldn’t find the nerve to say hello to Amanda Tapping.

David Read
Amanda, she’s so disarming.

John Gajdecki
I flew into Vancouver once after New Year’s, we would all go home and we all flew back. The airport was packed, packed, packed, packed. I’m thinking “how am I going to get home? I’m never going to get a taxi.” Amanda Tapping walks up, “hey John, what are you doing? Good to see you blah, blah, blah. How are you getting into town?” I said, “well I don’t know. I guess I’m gonna get a taxi.” She says, “well, why don’t you come in the limo with me?” As we’re walking, we see more crew members and we all gathered into her limo. She is a super person, absolutely superb person.

David Read
She deserves every success she’s earned. Directing now, she’s great.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, super, super, super nice. So the Reetous, we could not afford to keep them on the screen all the time. In the original script these guys were running around and you can see them. I suggested, “oh yeah, you see it now.” I suggested to Brad, “hey, why don’t we have some kind of device where they can see them? Otherwise, we don’t have to do them.”

David Read
So that’s why they’re invisible?

John Gajdecki
That’s why they’re invisible, we couldn’t afford to do them in all the shots. It turned out being cooler. Again, good, fast, cheap triangle. We could not do that many shots good in the time that we had. The solution was to make them invisible.

David Read
And it’s a great sci-fi idea; you have enemies that are exactly 180 degrees out of phase of your reality. They’re still here, they can still interact with the world, but we can’t perceive them. That’s cool, I didn’t know you did that.

John Gajdecki
So you’ll probably recognize this. Those are piles of sulfur, they’re sitting on the dock across Coal Harbor and they get shipped out all over the world. Somebody said, “why don’t we film there?” That’s a great idea, look how cool it is. Except it might have been the hottest day of the year, of course, nothing compared to these days. The sulfur as you walked would land on your face and then your sweat would drag it into your eyes and then you would go to the to the ambulance. No one expected it to be that hot, it was just one of those things. As soon as there was a problem they brought everything that we needed. They brought us tons of water, we were wiping our face, we got goggles and everything. We just didn’t anticipate how hot it was going to be.

David Read
That’s crazy. This isn’t the one that’s downtown by the water? This is the one that’s out in the middle of nowhere, the big plant right? now.

John Gajdecki
No no, this is downtown by the water. If I turned around you would just see the other side of Vancouver.

David Read
So you did shoot the whole thing downtown?

John Gajdecki
We did shoot the whole thing downtown.

David Read
Wow I was always under the misconception that it was the big facility outside of town. I forget what it’s called, where the bigger piles are. So that’s really cool.

John Gajdecki
Here’s one of the gates. I think that’s from the movie.

David Read
The Chevron’s are red. It’s yours.

John Gajdecki
I’m just gonna pick up the pace a little because we’re kind of done. This is a moon, but I got tons of stuff. This is a moonscape, remember the camera pulled out and pulled out and pulled out and…

David Read
Message in a Bottle.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. Was that the one that had the bomb inside of…there was a little girl and there was a bomb inside of her?

David Read
That’s Singularity, that’s season one. This is Message in a Bottle season two. O’Neill got taken over by the blue organism.

John Gajdecki
There’s me. Oh, there you go, there’s your little Stargate.

David Read
Can I ask a question about this?

John Gajdecki
No. Sorry, go ahead.

David Read
Okay, so how many of these kawooshes did you end up archiving for the long haul?

John Gajdecki
Are you going to check my answer against Tichenor’s? That’s what you’re doing right?

David Read
Nope, I didn’t ask him this question.

John Gajdecki
You know what we did? To save money we spiked the floor in four places in the gate room. So long as we always put the camera back in one of those places we had elements ready to go. In the time that I was there, which was only two years, we had four positions in the gate room. When we would go on location, we would have to reverse engineer the camera position so that the elements would work.

David Read
Okay, so you essentially had four principal shots of the kawoosh.

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Wow, that is so cool.

John Gajdecki
There we go, there’s the crew that did the reetou explosions. We had to put plastic everywhere because the model shop couldn’t build these inside so we actually use real meat. For weeks we had raccoons going up and down in the alley at night going “this is great.”

David Read
I’m sure they were in love with you guys.

John Gajdecki
They were like “this is gonna last forever.” Of course eventually they got it all.

David Read
What kind of meat? Do you recall? Just any kind you could grab?

John Gajdecki
Whatever was cheap. Cheap meat is better, it’s sinewy and it’s got crap in it. Like I said, fun thing to do for a living. I don’t remember where we used this but we needed to fly over a cloudscape. This is all the stuffing from pillows.

David Read
Wow. This could have been The Other Side in season four. Were you still there at that point?

John Gajdecki
No I wasn’t. You know, it could be something we ended up not using.

David Read
Okay. It’s really cool, stuffing from pillows. Ah, The Fifth Race, how wonderful.

John Gajdecki
Yep. When we were in the game room, which of course isn’t this image, you know what? I remember being on set this day because I brought one of our new compositors who had just left another company to come and work on the show. She and I were sitting at the back and she’s like, “this is crazy you guys do this for a living.” Anyway, in the gate room, you know there’s the ramp that goes up to the gate and the gate is there and then there’s this back wall. Did you know the back wall slid out of the way?

David Read
Yes because that was the end of the stage.

John Gajdecki
Because the green screen was there. When we ordered that green screen, they laid out the nap of the fabric, because it was huge, back and forth. It looked like a baseball diamond after someone cut the grass. We looked at this and said “we can’t use this.” We had to send it back to them, they had to cut it all up and resew it flipping every alternate strip so the nap matched so the lighting was the same.

David Read
Yeah. There’s one shot in season three episode one Into the Fire. They pulled the the back away to show Hathor’s big generator and it’s the same thing. Is that the pyramid from the movie?

John Gajdecki
It’s the original, yeah.

David Read
It looks like it’s floating.

John Gajdecki
It sort of does, doesn’t it?

David Read
It looks like it’s skating through the lot and it’s like mid air.

John Gajdecki
Gonna hit somebody’s car. This is at Bridge Studios, we’re looking north. These are the Stargate offices up here. My office would be about a couple of hundred meters to the right in that building. I skateboarded back and forth and I would skateboard around the lot. I remember some of the grips brought skateboards and they were told to stop skateboarding at work. They were like “well he skateboards,” they go “no, he uses the kit from his office to back and forth.” So that’s me and that’s Bob Habros. Look at those laptops, they’re like three inches thick. This might have been the Outer Limits.

David Read
And you could only look at them dead on, you can’t look at him from an angle.

John Gajdecki
Oh, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. There’s me again, Kennedy was our lead motion control guy, and Simon Lacey. Look at that shirt.

David Read
Yes. And the goa’uld communication ball?

John Gajdecki
Absolutely. It was an element and here we are shooting it.

David Read
Can you explain the color palette for me?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, so this is called a Macbeth chip chart and these are known colors all over the world. People use a color palette, this chart everywhere. When you’re shooting an object, you shoot one with this chip chart in it so that the artists who have digital versions of them on their machines can match the colors to know that it looks exactly right. But, you have to watch out because colors fade in light so you have to keep your chip chart in the dark. You pull it out just for the use and you put it away. If you leave it out, the colors will fade and then gradually you’re giving bad information to the artists.

David Read
That’s cool.

John Gajdecki
This is Ted Rae, the only known picture. We worked with Ted on the pilot.

David Read
You caught him in the wild.

John Gajdecki
I did. This is my office, this is my Toronto office and these are those million dollar computers. Here’s that model I was showing you with the motion control so you can see…

David Read
Final shot of the show. So this is just one facade of the ship and you blended it in with the other model as the two of them are approaching Earth?

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
Okay. Look at that. Look at the detail on it.

John Gajdecki
The detail? Well, you said yourself, we needed to push right in. If you look at it, I actually built some of these units. What we did is I built these guys. I’m actually a really good model maker. If you could see I got some models that I made, I still actually make models sometimes. I made some of the detail panels and these things and then the model shop cast them up and reproduce them. This one’s good, that’s actually a pretty good example. We built it and this is the correct angle. You can see the camera is just right here, so we’re way up in the air, but that’s what we needed. This is for the pullback shot, this is for us. It was at the right angle, the camera is way up in the air and we would pull back across the whole length of the soundstage.

David Read
So you don’t have any kind of green or blue screen around these edges? Is it just because it’s a triangle you can just cut it out?

John Gajdecki
Yep. You can roto a shape, it’s just a triangle, it would take two seconds. Sometimes people put green screen places and I’m like, “you don’t need to do that.” But if you feel good, let’s put green screen everywhere. Here’s the gate.

David Read
Aaah. You can always tell what time of the year it is in Vancouver. It’s earlier in the season, everything’s kind of dead.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. Oh, okay, so funny story. First couple of Stargate episodes we were shooting in the woods. Hudson Hickman sends an email, now Hudson, remember, was the VP of physical production for MGM. He was telling me, because, you know, we just talked about shit. We were just talking about management and Hudson was talking about emails and how people misinterpret emails. Hudson sends an email up to Vancouver, I guess I was wrong earlier, there were emails when we did Stargate and the Outer Limits. Hudson sends an email up and he says, “hey, can we not go to the rain forest planet anymore?” Fair enough, but everybody read it “hey, can we not go to the rainforests planet anymore you assholes.” He said, “you have to watch out when you send an email because people always put the words ‘you asshole’ at the end of it and if you read an email that way you now know what you have to go back and change.” That’s actually one of the most important things, is that kind of communication. Sometimes you’re tempted just to bang something off and send it.

David Read
Yeah, yeah, we often interpret the worst because it’s our voice in our heads. It’s not what they necessarily intend. I think emoticons have helped with this, they’ve helped they’ve helped grease those skids. I’ve seen this shot before, this is so cool, John. You can see that’s where the camera is, that’s just as the ship has been destroyed.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. That’s right, when it’s in orbit around the Earth. I’m going to show you something else and then you can tell me how much time we have because this is really cool. I found, oh, it’s on the wrong screen. What are you guys going to do? Joking.

David Read
What we can with what we got. Oh, look at that.

John Gajdecki
I found this this morning. Isn’t this cool? That’s a nice shot.

David Read
I love that shot. Yep. That was so cool.

John Gajdecki
We did this shot, we pulled an all nighter on that the night that it was due because it wasn’t working.

David Read
The helmet?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, me and Matthew Talbot-Kelly, we stayed up all night, we cut it up and we did the shot.

David Read
Wow, look at that.

John Gajdecki
Oh, I guess they’re repeating.

David Read
I’m fine to look at it again.

John Gajdecki
Here it comes. Oh, this was a good one.

David Read
Cold Lazarus. That’s one of my favorite puddles right there.

John Gajdecki
That was a good one, yeah. There’s a Reetou. Oh, we blew Teal’c through the window.

David Read
Outer Limits. I thought that was one.

John Gajdecki
I think you’re right, yeah.

David Read
Reetou, Reetou, cool. I didn’t know you guys actually used meat for that but that makes sense. Replacement face, that was Dan Shea did that shot and then you guys put Jack’s face on it.

John Gajdecki
I’ve got a funny picture of Dan Shea. I was out with my daughter last week, last month, we were at a restaurant and I’m taking a picture of my daughter and I look up and Dan Shea is photobombing us because we were at the same restaurant.

David Read
That morph with Charlie, I think is one of the single coolest shots from the show. I don’t know how you did it.

John Gajdecki
I’ll tell you how I did it because it hurt. So if you look at it, we’re looking at Richard this way, then we’re looking at Richard that way so you’re looking 180 degrees. You can’t put this much green screen up, not realistically in a location on this shoot day. What I had to do and what Richard had to do, is he’s in the set, he’s screwed to the floor almost so he doesn’t move. As he moves, he’s moving forward, this is all motion control, remember the computer control camera, that’s the key to making this work. We’re on Richard, we’re probably looking at him like this and we counter. We’re looking at Richard, the camera starts moving towards him as it pans away. So first, we shoot on this side and there’s a stand in here, probably Dan Shea. Then we take Dan Shea out, we put Richard in, we shoot it again. Because the camera is computer controlled, the move is exactly the same. Then we shoot the boy with Richard on this side. We have a switcher on set and we just shoot take after take, move your hand up, move your hand down. You’re right, this is hard and the way you do it is you just brute force your way through it. You tell everybody “I’m going to need an hour, that’s what it’s going to be.” And they’re like, “No.” You just shoot versions until you get it.

David Read
Yeah, because you can match it in camera as you go. If you look at the hand, it’s seamless. Now that you say that it’s like “I bet they did 50 takes of the hand to make sure that they got that right.” I’m imagine you’re watching that in real time on one of the screens, it’s blending as you go, right?

John Gajdecki
Yes, you can see it right around here, just a frame or two before. That’s Richard and a little bit of the boy and that’s the boy with a little bit of Richard.

David Read
That’s Kyle Graham, the kid. I hope you had a lot of patience for him and he had a lot for you.

John Gajdecki
I bet you 100%, I bet you we shot Kyle’s take first. Richard Dean Anderson is a pro and he would get it in 10 takes where the kid may never get it. It’s funny because people ask me what I do for a living. I don’t tell people what to do, I tell people what order to do it in. Yeah. That makes all the difference in the world.

David Read
Well, if you don’t get this right, if it looks good on camera and then you guys walk away, you can’t go back.

John Gajdecki
No, you don’t go back, you’ve got to make it work. So here’s something that’s kind of fun, there’s the ship, do you know what we’re doing here?

David Read
I’m guessing it’s steel wool?

John Gajdecki
You are the winner. You’re right. Because the camera was computer controlled, we shoot the hero pass first, then we send it back to the beginning, we turn out all the lights and we put steel wool on it. That’s Dave Asling who built a lot of models for The Mandalorian. We put the steel wool on, we shoot a few passes and there you can see it on the ship.

David Read
Yeah, they did the same thing to the Enterprise in Search for Spock.

John Gajdecki
They sure did and Wrath of Khan. I remember delivering this shot to Brad and he’s like, “can we have a few more pieces of debris?” So we went back and we built these pieces, now you can see the interlace because we shot at 24, video in those days was 30. We built a few asteroids that we then animated flying past.

David Read
That is so cool. That shot, go back to that the shot with all the debris. It’s probably a four, five second shot in the final show.

John Gajdecki
With the huge explosion back there and everything.

David Read
How much time is in that shot? How much manpower time?

John Gajdecki
Well, Barb Benoit was the lead compositor on this, so woman power. A shot like this, there’s a couple of weeks building the models, a couple of days shooting them for a small crew. Barb probably worked on this for about five days. That would be five days straight, 40, 60, 70 hours. Now, this is a bigger shot. If we were doing that today the camera would move, probably follow it and do all that stuff. This is sort of the limit of what we could do for TV. We always would have to in our heads scale the expectations to “what can we do really well and not overreach?”

David Read
When I saw this in the show, I couldn’t believe you guys had pulled it off. You made it look so convincing like the movie, I was so pleased.

John Gajdecki
Okay, so look at it again. I don’t know if it if you can see it clearly, every piece is a flat panel. In other words, we took the mask, which you can’t see here, I’m sorry and we cut it out into about 20 pieces and we moved each one one at a time.

David Read
And you just subtracted them away?

John Gajdecki
And then subtracted them away. We tried building a 3D model, we tried all kinds of stuff. The deadline is coming and Brad and Jonathan to their credit, and of course, Robert Cooper later, they’re not panicking. It’s like, “okay, okay, do it, you’re gonna be fine. We know you’re gonna deliver.” That one was definitely an all nighter.

David Read
It doesn’t have to be the coolest tech that there is at the time with the most money as long as you can sell the shots. I as an audience member am going like, “they took an effect that was done just a few years ago in the feature film and did it on screen”. The episode Thor’s Chariot had aired a few weeks before and they had to cheat. They cut to Daniel, you hear the sound effect and then you cut back to Heru’ur. It’s like, “well, that was disappointing.” Then when Secrets comes along, we get to see it and it was like “okay, that’s cool.”

John Gajdecki
You know, we had a mask that mechanically did it. It only did one or two things.

David Read
Yes. For Apophis and for Teal’c.

John Gajdecki
Correct. So that’s what we would have seen earlier. But we’re like, “no, no, we can do this. I’m sure we can do this. Can we do this?”

David Read
Yeah, because those are for the Serpent heads but this is for the Horus Guard; these are the ones in the movie.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. You’re right.

David Read
So cool. John, thank you for sharing this. This is magic.

John Gajdecki
Well I gotta tell you, I have a ton of stuff here under pre-vis that I bet you’d love to see for Atlantis.

David Read
Wow. Okay, let’s take a peek at Atlantis.

John Gajdecki
Okay, so Atlantis, I have more stuff. I’ve got a lot of pictures, but I can’t find them. This stuff I was just organizing this morning.

David Read
Look, I would love to have you back this fall if you’re willing to share some more, if that’s cool with you.

John Gajdecki
I’m pretty good. The writer’s strike guarantees that I’m available.

David Read
Whatever you want to share now that you have now, I’m appreciative.

John Gajdecki
There’s a funny one, let me see. Unfortunately I’ve just got the shot names. This was the pilot, we pre-vis’d all the action, of course. The other thing that we did and this isn’t sort of set up to open quickly, so I’m just gonna have to slide through them. Then I did stuff like this because there was going to be a helicopter filming our helicopter. I’ve flown in helicopters more times than I can count, I’ve thrown up in dozens of them. I needed to have something that I could show the pilot. This circle surrounds the camera helicopter which is there and it shows the pilot “I need you to film this.”

David Read
So he knows how to behave with the cyclic.

John Gajdecki
Otherwise you just go up and you shoot stuff and it never looks the way you see it in your head. What we did here was actually really successful. Here’s a shot, we pre-vis’d that. I know somewhere in here I have the final for that. I was hoping these would turn into drone escapes maybe. Is this the final shot? Nope. That’s when it goes shooting around the room.

David Read
Yeah, it leaves the lab. Martin Wood and you guys just did stellar.

John Gajdecki
There you go, so there’s the plate. You can’t really see it. You know how we got stuck? Well for one, we couldn’t afford to paint out all the ski lines on the hill. We talked about it a lot. It’s like “god dammit.”

David Read
I didn’t notice.

John Gajdecki
Nobody noticed, I know.

David Read
We are paying attention to the action.

John Gajdecki
Yes, when the drone hits the ground, it explodes and we had all the debris coming towards us. It was white on white, you can barely see it. We never ended up going bigger.

David Read
It does the job.

John Gajdecki
It’s kind of like what James was saying, there’s always regret because you know the shot could be better. This is the final shot from Atlantis. We designed the city, this is where we started, Matthew Talbot-Kelly and I. The art department on Atlantis basically designed the city as a stand in and it looked like a dinner plate with forks. That’s as far as they went because they had to build all the sets. They knew I was coming, they knew they were going to be fine. Matthew Talbot-Kelly and I spent, and it must have been weeks, where we designed this city. It was fun. If you look at the pieces, and I’m just going to go back. When I was a kid I used to build models as I said. Models would come on sprue and I would build these cities. I probably built this as a kid where I would take the sprue and cut them off at weird angles and glue pieces on them. I got Atlantis and it’s like, “I get to do this for real.”

David Read
The whole Manhattan sized version.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. We decided that, you can’t quite see it here, but you know the shape; it’s the six things. I don’t remember what we called them but each one was the same shape. We just kind of were thinking “well, you know, here’s one of these buildings and this is a neighborhood.”

David Read
Oh, you’re talking each pier?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, that’s right. We called them piers. Each pier had its own detail. And then we built one of the piers as a gigantic metal object that we could sink in water. We lifted it up with construction cranes and that’s how we got the water to flow off them.

David Read
Wow. If you have any of those elements. That sequence of the rising is mind blowing.

John Gajdecki
I’ve got the pre-vis for this. When we were shooting on the planet, on the Wraith planet, it’s really funny, you just say something and then everybody suffers. I said “it would be really cool if it was always windy.” Somebody goes, “yeah” and then they bring out all these fans. The Wraith planet was windy because it was me but it’s just because I said something in a meeting that somebody else liked.

David Read
I just read that, I have to tell you, you may have heard this. I just read Peter Jackson’s biography and he would go in to the visual effects people and said “you know it’d be really great if such and such and so forth. You don’t have to do it.” You’d be like “really Peter? We don’t have to do it? Of course we’re going to do it.” He’s given them a challenge. Look at that, the Jumper bay.

John Gajdecki
The Jumper bay. This is the pre-vis and then we went and shot the plates to match.

David Read
How cool. Scientists.

John Gajdecki
I knew you’d like that. We pre-vis’d the entire show of Atlantis with Fisher Price figures.

David Read
Oh, that’s great.

John Gajdecki
I bet you didn’t know that.

John Gajdecki
No, I did not.

John Gajdecki
I can’t show you some of the weird stuff, not weird that way, just if you came to harm I wouldn’t want that getting out. This was really cool. This was a fun show because there was a lot of design work and a lot of creativity that we had. I really appreciate that you know the material so well.

David Read
This is one of the greatest franchises of all time.

John Gajdecki
It really is. Let’s see what else we have in here. There they go.

David Read
Spaceships, I love it.

John Gajdecki
I know. They were cool and of course we had to build these things to fit on a truck so we can take them around so the scales are always a little compromised.

David Read
The interior one that was on set, I think it was if memory serves, was a larger interior than the one that was sliced down the middle, bisected and put on location. Oh, Ingram, look at this. It’s not even Rodney yet. This is pre-McKay.

John Gajdecki
No, you’re right about the inside. It was like a Japanese car; they were bigger inside than outside.

David Read
Wow. Torri looks pretty good for a Lego.

John Gajdecki
I think they had a good life and there it appears.

David Read
“Doctor, this is why you brought me here.” That’s so cool, man.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we really worked on those shows. We worked really hard.

David Read
There’s the font. Yep. With different color and…

John Gajdecki
Oh, this is the space battle. You know, the space battle is really interesting because we had a guy who loved World War II airplanes, much like George Lucas did in Star Wars. He took about a month and he pre-vis’d this space battle and I swear it was more or less approved the first time we showed it to Brad.

David Read
Yeah, when it’s right, it’s right.

John Gajdecki
I have a folder with the space battle pre-vis in it and it’s empty. I can’t find it. I’m gonna keep looking because it is amazing how well it works as pre-vis. Then it was really just “okay everybody, this is what you’re doing.”

David Read
That’s wild. I’m interested to see if I get flagged for copyright with these because it’s straight from the episode. I’ve done that before and if it’s a straight copy of something that’s released my video will be flagged.

John Gajdecki
Should I stop?

David Read
I would stop this one, yeah. The pre-vis, there’s no reference for that online.

John Gajdecki
Sorry about that.

David Read
No, it’s okay. It’s just dawning on me now as we go forward. John, I cannot thank you enough for sharing these. These are so precious to all of fandom to get a chance to see some of this stuff.

John Gajdecki
I’m just going to show you…so this was from the party with Richard Dean Anderson. I don’t have his picture here to show you. That’s Bob Habros and that’s me and that’s Lorraine Rozon who was the coordinator at one of the facilities. We threw an enormous number of parties in those days. I actually had a lot of pictures and I can’t show…

David Read
Of course, of course.

John Gajdecki
So there you go.

David Read
This is really cool. Thank you so much for the show and tell.

John Gajdecki
Last Picture. This is us at the Emmy Awards. That’s Bob Habros, Mark Savela who went on to be a supervisor. Sandra Almond is Bob’s wife, but she was my producer on Santa Claus 2 and worked with me for many years. Christine Petrov was the lead artist, Michelle Comens of course, myself and David Alexander, who is our lead 3D artist and was the drummer for Lowest of the Low if you remember them as a Toronto band. Actually, here we are the next day after losing.

David Read
What was it like going to the Emmys? What was that experience like?

John Gajdecki
I’ve been lucky, I’ve gotten three times. I’ve lost every time. You pretend it’s not a thing but you get really nervous as your category is approaching. The first time I went, I was 27 years old. I was up for something on Friday the 13th. So my first Emmy nomination I was 27 years old and I remember walking in thinking, “this is the nicest room I’ve been in in my life.” It was amazing. What I discovered, the one trick to the Emmys if you ever get to go, you can ask the waiters to send bottles of champagne to other tables. If you know who Dan Curry is, and I’m sure you do, Dan won when we didn’t. I sent a bottle of champagne over to Dan’s table and every time I see him he brings that up. He’s like, “that was the nicest thing to do” and I said “yeah, it was free. It wasn’t that nice. I was expecting you to send one back actually. When am I getting my champagne?” I went to Dan’s house a couple years ago for dinner, we went out for dinner, and he showed me all of his Star Trek stuff. That was pretty damn cool.

David Read
Are you a Trekkie?

John Gajdecki
I’m a Trekkie from The Original Series. I did Shatner’s TekWar. If you get me drunk I have lots of really good stories for that. Here we are at one of the award shows, that’s part of the crew. We went to a lot of awards with the Stargate shows. There’s James Tichenor.

David Read
Yeah. Longer hair James.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. We went to Havana last year on a commercial drive. That’s Bruce Turner who was a supervisor on Poltergeist. He managed my Vancouver office and now he’s in Montreal somewhere. We’re holding a cheque, our first cheque on the show. We tried to buy the coffee truck but they wouldn’t sell it to us. Jean-Luc Dinsdale, myself, Simon and Bill Choi. Bill Choi worked on season two or three possibly for a while. We’re watching our monitors, we’re blowing something up. That’s me in an Outer Limits episode and there is Jonathan Glassner. Jonathan and I get together when I go to L.A, we sometimes go to lunch. We have the same initials and similar personalities, we get along really well.

David Read
He’s doing really great now with his sci-fi series. Rob Cooper…

John Gajdecki
…at one of the parties with his wife. Simon Lacey. I have a good Brad Turner photo or Brad Wright photo somewhere but don’t know where it is. But anyway, I’m sure you guys have to go.

David Read
No, no, I’ve got questions.

John Gajdecki
Oh, shit. Well go.

David Read
Yeah. If you can return to your image for me.

John Gajdecki
Going there. Okay. Stop and share.

David Read
I’ve definitely got some for you. You still have some time?

John Gajdecki
I do. I do.

David Read
Okay. All righty. Let’s see here. I’ve got questions from fans. Dwayne Haskett wants to know, John, how far has the technology changed since at Atlantis? Is your mind kind of blown or is it like, “now this is normal, this is a normal rate of development” technology wise? With the volume now, the work that’s been done on that thing, reflections are no longer green. It’s mind blowing.

John Gajdecki
Yes, technology has changed a lot. We all know Moore’s law right? Every 18 months your processing speed basically doubles. Now, in truth, that hasn’t been the case. But what has been happening is software is written more efficiently so Moore’s law continues to have effects. You’ve noticed this, I’m sure. In the Stargate days, especially when I was doing it, we would be doing shots. But now, we do scenes. In the old days on a Stargate episode, we might have 50 shots. 100 shots was a big episode. But 100 shots on Superman happens every single week. One of the reasons is, remember I told you computers cost $1 million? Those were Flames, those were Infernos and I only had five of those. Most companies didn’t have much more, although the really big companies did. PCs came out and you could buy a PC running Shake for $10,000. The barrier to entry if you wanted to get into the visual effects market wasn’t 10%, it was 1%. What I spent to put an artist in a seat, my competitors would spent 1% to put an artist in a seat. There was a writers strike, as we all know, there’s a writers strike now. There was a writers strike back around 2002, 2003. A lot of companies, including myself, we all went out of business. We had these million dollar machines, we were paying tens of thousands of dollars a month. Somebody can go in with PCs and after the strike was over they were all set to go. One of the big changes in visual effects is simply the number of machines that are out there, which means the number of artists that were out there, We struggled to find artists, very few people knew how to work this equipment, knew how to work this software. We ran training programs and it went something like we would pick for students four times a year. We set up the training so that you had to work together but right at the very beginning we tell you we’re only keeping two of you, which is kind of a dick move. But it puts a lot of pressure on people because you want to know who can survive under that kind of pressure. It forces you to work collaboratively, because that’s what we do for a living and then we want to see what we do. Over eight weeks we would teach them how to use the tools but also how to do rotoscoping, how to do arcing and things that we could use every week. But now the schools are pumping out thousands of students a year which has led to this huge explosion of visual effects; partially volume, there’s just more shots, but also in quality. On a million dollar machine you can only sort of work so many days on a shot before you’ve blown the whole budget. But on a couple of thousand dollar machine, on a $10,000 machine, you can work for a week or two or three or four if you need to, in order to make those shots absolutely great. So it’s the drop in price that brought a lot more firepower to the industry.

David Read
Do you think the barrier to entry for more creative people has lowered so it’s easier for people to get a shot?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, but I’ll tell you there’s probably a thousand jobs open in Vancouver. I mean, not right now because of the strike but traditionally, we can’t find enough people. If your fans are thinking of getting into visual effects, it’s like the rest of the known universe, it’s expanding.

David Read
Wow, that is so cool. Lockwatcher says “the kawoosh was incredible; it’s Stargate stamp. Beyond that, what effect on Stargate that either you created or after you left, do you consider to be absolutely amazing to this day?”

John Gajdecki
Well, first of all I’ll tell you a funny story. We didn’t call them kawooshs, we called them ka-chings because they were so expensive to do. We can only afford three ka-chings in a big episode. The puddle was interesting and this will also speak to the technology question. When we started doing the pass throughs, when people walked through the gate, the gate was a CG object. It was made in Maya, which might have been called Power Animator in those days, I can’t remember when the software switched, it was probably Maya. The ripples, there was a tool that did ripples but you could only get three. If you watched the early gate shots sometimes somebody would pass through and there’d be three ripples then you think, “well, there should be more.” That was a limitation of the software. We could go in and program more and do more but that became exponentially more expensive. Stargate was one of the earlier shows where we really had to institutionalize the creation of visual effects. Before that it’s like, “hey, dude, what are you doing?” “I don’t know, I’m gonna make a gate.” By the time we were into it, it’s like, “no, we need 10 of these and we need them tomorrow.” you know. I started writing software, actually, back in those days to manage the visual effects process. I found that the more I was able to use this tool, the more efficient the process became.This is actually a good way to describe it. Have you heard the saying “amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” and they’re talking about war. If you’re talking about the Gulf War or of course the Second World War, the amateurs talk, “oh, well, you know, why didn’t the Germans shoot down more bombers?” Well, the pros are like, “okay, we’re gonna bomb the ball bearing factories, it’s just logistics. We’re going to bomb the railways so they can’t get those ball bearings. We don’t have to shoot the planes down, we’re going to bomb where the fuel is made so they can’t fly them.” The British used to send people to Switzerland and buy up all the ball bearings before the Germans could. That’s how wars are won. That’s how TV is made, that’s how movies are made; it’s all about logistics. This is something I’m really good at; I’m really creative. When I see something, I see it in seconds and then I spend the next couple of months living up to what I promised Brad in that first meeting. Then it’s really, how do we get it done? I said this earlier, I tell people what order to do stuff in. I think my answer here is kind of depressing because it’s not cool tools and things, it’s actually an explosion in the ability to manage large projects that has made this possible.

David Read
Seesawian – what was the shot that caused you the most headaches on Stargate?

John Gajdecki
Can I say Atlantis instead? Okay. So in Atlantis, in the pilot, there was this matte painting. I don’t remember where it was. It was raining, we’re looking across, I think some fields and there’s a city in the distance possibly.

David Read
Oh it’s Athos. Yeah, you’re on Athos.

John Gajdecki
Can I swear? I won’t. What a dog, what a dog that shot was and we just couldn’t make it work. One of the reasons was the artist was working on it and they had a rain element, which they probably, not even gonna say that. It was just rain, rain on black. Well, it has to be really raining so they’re putting up more rain and more rain and more rain. You’d think somebody who lives in Vancouver would know what rain looks like? Rain isn’t tons of shit falling down, rain films like fog. Remember at the beginning of the call, what did I say? We’re duplicating photographic reality. Rain doesn’t film like rain, rain films like fog. If you look into the distance on a rainy day, it’s fog. There’s only a little bit of rain in the foreground. These guys just we’re not getting it. What is wrong? I’m in with Brad Wright and a couple of artists and we’re looking at the finals for the pilot. That shot comes up and Brad’s like “umm” and I start talking to him about all the good things in it. I’m lying, but we got to deliver, right? I’m talking about this shot and Brad says, “okay, okay, that’s fine, that’s fine.” We go on to the next shot, we go on to the next shot and it’s maybe a one hour meeting and then we’re done. At the end of the meeting I say, “you know, Brad, you know, that matte painting I’m still not happy with it.” Brad says “I am so glad you said that because I don’t like it either. I know that if you’re trying to sell it to me there’s a reason that I don’t know and you need to finish the shot up and I’m okay with that. I trust you 100%. I’m glad we’re gonna take another kick at it.” Cool and I feel much better because it was a dog, it was a terrible shot. Remember, no shot’s great until every shot is good. We’re walking out of the parking lot and one of the artists comes driving up to me red in the face, almost yelling, “that shot was approved and you unapproved it. You’re not allowed to unapprove shots, that shot was done.” I said, “you know it’s not a good shot.” I was disappointed by that person’s reaction. They were more of a facility guy and they’re approaching the problem from “we have to deliver everything.” I’m approaching it “from that shot’s dpg and we can do better.” That’s why I do well and I think that’s why my shows look good; I can tell when something’s not working and you can read the room. A lot of the visual effects industry, at that level, it’s actually quite political.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. I talked with Bruce Woloshyn a long time ago and he was talking about rig removal. There’s cables in shots and you have to digitally erase them. He said that was hard, but if you do it right, no one ever knows you touched it. Raj Luthra – what are some of the hardest effects to pull off?

John Gajdecki
It’s funny because we’re doing some tests for rig removal for something that I can’t talk about. On somebody’s sunglasses you can see the film set reflected and they need us to rebuild the actors eyes. These are amongst the most difficult. If a rig passes in front of an actor we often won’t even let them use that in editorial because our rig removal may change the performance and we don’t want to do that. Those are amongst the hardest shots. Spaceships shots, things like that, they’re technically difficult but they’re not really, you know what you’re gonna do. They’re all hard for their own reasons, there’s very few shots that go together instantly and you go, “that’s great.” Usually there’s something that doesn’t work out.

David Read
You have to find your way.

John Gajdecki
You do and one of the things I say to people is the answer is in the plate. If you’re looking at shot and you’re having a problem like, what color should this be? Well, the answer is in the plate. If the shots really warm, if the plate was shot really warm, well let’s try something really warm so they go together. Let’s just start there. One thing that’s interesting is, when I’m hiring artists, one of the things that I look for are people who have a musical background. What we do is we make pretty pictures through time. Here comes the ship, it’s dropping a bomb and it explodes…now. It doesn’t explode later, it doesn’t explode earlier, you have to feel it. The artists that can do that are the really good ones. Some people just have a terrible sense of timing and you struggle with their shots because they sort of bake something in and it’s like, “oh now it’s too late but we have to move everything…”

David Read
They haven’t found the tempo.

John Gajdecki
They don’t. Remember I said we used to do shots, now we do scenes. You need to cut the shots into context so that your shot has the tempo, has the timing, so that it all blends together. If it all blends together then you can get away with murder. It’s funny, you know, I did Slither, which was with James Gunn. James Gunn went off to do Guardians of the Galaxy, of course, and now he’s over at DC. There was the shot where the worms were running towards the truck and we’re following it. We’d seen it when we shot it we saw it in dailies, we saw it when we were editing with it. People tracked it, we were doing CG worms, we comped it. I swear, like a week before we were in the cinema somebody looked up, it might have been me, and said “holy shit, there’s an apple box in frame.” I don’t mean off in the corner, it was…nobody saw it.

David Read
You couldn’t see it. It wasn’t part of your process.

John Gajdecki
Correct. We all have our thing that we’re looking at. It’s like, “oh my god. Hey, Sandra, do you want to paint out an apple box tonight because it’s gonna be hard?”

David Read
Is that frame by frame?

John Gajdecki
You create what are called patches. You would look at the shot, here’s the apple box, you would take some of the grass on this side, you take some of the grass, you move it over, you blend it and then you track it. What happens is, when the shots moving, there’s parallax that happens. You start dropping in individual tufts of grass just to get some parallax in. You go until you don’t have to do it anymore. Or until someone says stop.

David Read
Until you don’t notice it?

John Gajdecki
But then the other problem is you’re focusing on it so you see it, you need somebody else to come in. Sometimes I’ll grab the producer, I’ll say “hey, can you just have a look at this?” They’ll look at and say “what?” “You see the…?” “No?” “Okay, good. We’re done.”

David Read
There you go. Exactly. Couple more for you then I’m gonna let you go. General Maximus – with all the advances in CG, John, if you were to do it all again or work on a new series would you prefer to go back to using models and practical effect or do you think you would primarily use CG? In terms of how you feel about things and how the industry has moved forward? If you had your choice?

John Gajdecki
That’s a really good question because we’ve seen an epic decline in model work. I came from models, that’s how I started. Going back to my theory that visual effects have to look like they were photographed; camera movement is a big part of the cinematic language, which sounds really pompous. The camera is always moving and models don’t work so well when the camera is always moving in. Once you’re getting into that then you need to get into motion control and once you get into motion control then you’re shooting things and you’re laying them in. The problem is not what you’re thinking. People have become so used to, and when I say people I mean producers, have become so used to being able to change things at the absolute last minute. If we had a model, you’d have to change the model, you’d have to shoot it again, we have to rent the soundstage again, we have to get all the lights back in the same place. It’s not feasible. I did Santa Claus 2 a long time ago and one thing that we did is we had Hercules C-130 flying. We built it in CG and then we took the UV map, we took the textures, we laid them out so it was like the airplane unwrapped. We sent that to the model shop, they took an eight foot by eight foot piece of ply, of course that’s two pieces put together for anyone who has tried to put in, you know you can’t even buying an eight foot, you know what I mean. We built the model flat on the plywood, photographed it, gave it back to 3D, and they wrapped it onto the CG aircraft. So we found ways of using the model shop. That’s what they did, that’s what Dave Asling did, that’s what they were doing on the Mandalorian. Some of those sets were actually models. There’s a couple of reasons. Remember what I said earlier, you can build a model, take it outside and film it and it looks real. The other thing is, it is so hard finding visual effects people but it’s easier to find model builders. Having said that, I would skew towards 3D because when I said that computers were way cheaper, it’s not just the computers themselves, but the render farms are cheaper. Of course, Amazon now, you can you can rent render power on Amazon. When I did Project Blue Book, which was a wonderful show that nobody saw, we did huge renders with Amazon. You can get almost infinite firepower to do CG. The nice thing about models, especially pyro with models and blowing up models, is there’s a lot of chaos that happens just naturally. It scales nicely, chaos is cool, it looks real. With CG, a lot of it, you have to put the chaos in, which by definition, is not chaos. It has a different feeling so you work really hard at making things look random and getting enough variation. To this day when I give artists notes my first note is usually “more variation. I need bigger, I need smaller, I need brighter, I need darker. It looks too homogenous and that’s not what the world looks like.”

David Read
I completely agree. Random final question from a viewer, Matthew Robbins – are you any relation to Robert Gajdecki? He says I used to work in TV production with one.

John Gajdecki
No. That’s a good question. When my daughters were born, you would think this has nothing to do with your question, I got their Gmail addresses right away, a.gajdecki and s.gajdecki. I didn’t have to waste my time, there’s only about 50 Gajdecki’s in the world. In fact, one day, I was sleeping after a party and somebody phones and goes, “Hello, it is Yannick Gajdecki from Poland, I’m phoning all the Gajdecki’s.” It’s like “call me later.” No, but I’d like to meet him because there’s only a few. He’s probably pretty good.

David Read
John, this has been been so insanely cool. What are you working on right now? Once the writer strike…everything’s on hold, I know you guys are dealing with that. What of your recent work are you most proudest of that we should go and take a look at?

John Gajdecki
You know, my favorite show in years was Project Blue Book. Yeah. If you guys had a chance and looked at my reel there’s a lot of Project Blue Book stuff. The battleship scene was just super cool and it was great to be able to work on shots that were at that level. We worked at a much higher level there than we did on Superman. Blue Book was a streaming show, Superman was a network show, so Superman was more about getting the work done. Superman still looks super cool and there’s a lot of good action scenes in there but really, Project Bluebook, was probably my favorite. Also the material, military 1950s, lots of environments. We would look at an airbase and they say, “well, blah, blah, blah, this episode is set at this airbase” and I can say “well, these are the aircraft that would have been flying out of that base at the time.” For the last episode there was a battleship, it was an Iowa class battleship, so I went down to L.A and I shot textures on a real battleship. At the end of the first season, there was, I think they were F-89, but it was the B model and they had one a Dayton, Ohio. I went to Dayton, Ohio and shot textures of the real airplane. I really enjoyed that, that was one of my favorite shows. Superman was a favorite show, Superman and Lois, for a different reason and that was the stories were great. It’s a really good take on the Superman and Lois franchise. The visual effects were massive and really, really supported the story. They were good for different reasons. I am less of a comic book guy, though, I skew towards the military and the history.

David Read
Perfect for Stargate? It’s both.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. I’ve heard they might make another one. I don’t know,

David Read
MGM and Amazon. I imagine it’s just a matter of time. Brad, if there is something going on he’s not going to talk about it. I hope that they’re doing something with him because otherwise anything else is criminal.

John Gajdecki
That’ll be cool. That’ll be cool. The writer’s strike, of course, is causing a lot of disruption. Superman and Lois might not go until February, they don’t think the strike is going to end. A lot of people in the industry like me, I’m not going to be very busy for the rest of the summer, possibly the rest of this year. It’s an interesting situation. That happened during COVID, I had no work for eight months. We were just about to start season three on Blue Book and it got canceled. There you go. What do you do because nothing is starting up? You make sure that your wife is in a different industry. My wife used to manage big post houses in Manhattan when we met. Now she works in a different industry, which is a really good move for I don’t know, today. That’s the thing about visual effects; there’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of work, and every few years it just vanishes because something happens. That’s just the way it is. So long as you can tolerate ambiguity, which is a really important personality trait for people in the industry, you’ll be fine. Oh, and you have to be really, really good.

David Read
Of course. This has been really cool. I’ve been following along with the chat, people are really, really tickled with all the stuff that you brought to bear, not just the visuals, but your stories as well. I would love to have you back, sir.

John Gajdecki
I would happily do it. I’ll tell you, I’m sitting here until December, possibly.

David Read
We’ll have you back.

John Gajdecki
If you can schedule me in one more time, I’ll try and find some more stuff.

David Read
All right., John, this has been such a treat. Thank you again, for your body of work. All of the stuff that you have contributed to this franchise over the years has been a huge part of why we love it so much. I really appreciate your time, sir.

John Gajdecki
It’s great that everybody loves it. It’s actually really neat to be on a show like that.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate your time. Thank you John, be well. John Gajdecki, visual effects supervisor on Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, tickled to have him for this episode. I really want to thank the folks who are involved in making this possible every single week. I’ve got Tracy and Antony who are moderating this episode. Really appreciate you guys having my back while while we make the show possible up front as well as Sommer, Jeremy, Rhys, my web developer Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he keeps Dial the Gate running. That’s what we’ve got. We have tomorrow, David Hewlett, he’s joining me to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, this explosion of content that is now at the fingertips of private citizens and how we’re beginning to watch an acceleration happening of AI being involved in more and more industry. David Hewlett, who played Rodney McKay and Stargate Atlantis, he’s going to be joining us to discuss some of those trends and how we kind of feel about things moving forward. That’s going to be tomorrow July the 9th at 12 noon, Pacific time. I hope you can join us for that one. David will also take your questions live. On Monday, July the 10th at 8am Pacific Time, Heather E. Ash, writer and story editor for Stargate SG-1, she’ll be discussing her episodes and we’ll answer your questions as well. My thanks once again to John Gajdecki for joining me for this episode, hope you guys enjoyed that one. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.