From fires on the SG-1 set to the inspiration for Wraith Darts, this interview covers a lot of ground. We are proud to welcome Bridget McGuire, the award-winning production designer and art director, to share memories of bringing some of your favorite sets in SG-1 and Atlantis to life!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
00:25 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:09 – Welcoming Bridget and Discussing the Stargate
08:02 – Building the Stargate and the Sets
11:40 – The Bridge Studios Fire
16:33 – Making the Gate and Model Shops Work
20:01 – Stargate’s Role in the Vancouver Film Industry
22:23 – Bridget’s Background and Start in the Industry
24:50 – Creating Stargate Magic
27:33 – Lead time in Creating the Prometheus Set
31:51 – Standing Sets Like the Cargo Ship
34:02 – Off-site Sets
36:08 – The Village Set
39:18 – Bridget’s Team
41:30 – Scenery and Structure
43:43 – Abyss Set
47:17 – Descent Set
49:51 – Solitudes Set
50:41 – The Number of Seasons
53:55 – Building Atlantis
59:40 – The Atlantis Grand Staircase
1:00:50 – Integrating the Blade Sets
1:02:49 – Challenging Sets
1:09:38 – Window of Opportunity Set
1:13:56 – The Puddle Jumper
1:17:09 – F-302
1:19:20 – Wrapping up with Bridget
1:22:16 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:23:53 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello, my name is David Read. Thank you for tuning in to Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project, this is episode 210. Thank you so much for joining me. Bridget McGuire started off as an art director on Stargate SG-1, she became production designer on both SG-1 and Atlantis. She’s an award winning production designer for the show and I am honored to have her on for this episode. We’re going to discuss a number of different facets of the show. This was a really cool interview and I think you’re gonna really enjoy it. Before we get into the thick of it, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click that like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow its audience. 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 a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. Clips from this pre-recorded episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a pre-recorded show the moderators in the YouTube chat are just there to have fun and enjoy the show with you. Don’t submit them questions for Bridget, hopefully we’ll have Bridget on at some point again in the future. Her body of work is enormous for Stargate and we got to scratch the surface on a few different things. I really just wanted to paint a portrait of her and let you guys get to meet her, I would love to have her back again. But you know what? I can’t wait to have you hear some of these stories, some really, really amazing stories from production. Let’s go ahead and bring Bridget McGuire in. Bridget McGuire, production designer, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis and art director as well. Bridget, I am thrilled to have you on the show. It is such an oversight that it’s taken us so long to get together, I apologize for that. I’m privileged to have you now, you’re such an integral player to this whole franchise that we love so much. It’s good to have you on.

Bridget McGuire
It’s great to be here. Glad to be invited and I’m glad I’ve had time to do this.

David Read
Absolutely. If fans were paying close attention in Wormhole X-treme!, you were the lead dresser Inga van Schnitzel on Wormhole X-treme!

Bridget McGuire
No I wasn’t. That’s not true.

David Read
Are you sure?

Bridget McGuire
I’m absolutely [sure]. Somebody would have to show me myself on screen to believe that. I was never in front of the camera.

David Read
Let me see this here.

Bridget McGuire
This will be funny, I love that episode.

David Read
Oh, it’s amazing.

Bridget McGuire
Oh, that was so much fun to do. Oh, there okay. Yes.

David Read
Is that you?

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, but that’s just paper.

David Read
Yes, but it’s still in the final product.

Bridget McGuire
There’s me and then on the other lower right hand corner is Ivana Vasek who was one of the art directors. I’ve worked with her, actually, she was over here just the other weekend. She’s an amazing, amazing designer, she’s a really good friend, still really close with her.

David Read
I’m not surprised how many of the production people in front of and behind the camera come on the show and say “it’s one of the greatest things” or “the greatest thing I worked on. I’m still in touch with X, Y, and Z. These people were an important part of my life and it was just a great show.” I think it’s one of the reasons why we as fans love it as much as we do because it was genuine.

Bridget McGuire
I think everybody pretty much had to want to be there. It was pretty intense, long hours and a lot of asks. There was a lot of stuff that we were doing that just really had not been done in TV yet. When I think back when we were starting on the pilot, we had the effects stage and we had all this stuff brought up from the feature, that was leftover from the feature. Part of that was the original Stargate and it was laid out on the floor there in all its many, many pieces and stuff like that. We were just looking at it going “well, how did they even build it?” That was probably the first time we got to see something that had been built with CNC, our Computer Numeric Controlled routing. Sometime during the the series the guy who actually built the original Stargate came up and talked to us. We were like, “so what did you do?” They literally CNC’d each piece and then they put them all together. It was hugely labor intensive and it was just right on the cusp of what could be done. I think we pretty much kept that wave going with everything that we built, pretty much everything that was done on that show. It was sort of like, “well, can we do this? Let’s give it our best shot.”

David Read
A circle, you think a circle, the most natural shape in the universe, is easy to make. The larger that it gets, especially considering you’re building materials, can be really hard.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah. We had the circle and then we also had the moving pieces in the inside of the circle so that circle needed to stay true and there was no hub to it. Just building that mechanism so that the glyphs could rotate was a bit of engineering.

David Read
What kind of pieces were you left with? I remember Richard Hudolin saying that it was kept in a box in the desert somewhere, you guys brought the pieces up? What did you have to work with?

Bridget McGuire
We had the original casts which were like a hard plastic, I don’t know if we were given the superstructure, the framework. We were given bits and pieces and then we rebuilt everything over and over and over again. I don’t know how many Stargates were actually built, nobody kept track of that. We had the traveling gate, we had the Gate room gate, then we had the Atlantis gate, then we had that whatever, mini gates and then gates that went to trade shows and stuff like that. We had bits and pieces, we just pretty much had bits and pieces and an idea that it could be done, we just had to figure out how to do it.

David Read
You guys had that thing up and running inside of a month and a half, from one end of production to the other, when you guys started building it if my memory is correct, based on what Jonathan and Robert has said.

Bridget McGuire
If they say it was a month and a half then it was a month and a half. One thing that was super crazy about it was that we built it all. We built the Gate room, we built the tunnels, we built the multipurpose room, we built the second level, we built it all in the effects stage. I think the first three episodes were shot there because stage five and six weren’t built yet. They were just holes in the ground when we got there.

David Read
Those were the chief Stargate production offices for the run of the rest of the franchise.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, we started up in the little baby stage, our production office was up there. We were using the effects stage which is like 300 feet by 100 feet by whatever, nice and big. We built this thing, when I say “we” I don’t mean me. This was all Ken Wallace and his team, who’s our construction coordinator, amazing crew, amazing crew, I can’t say enough about them. Anyway, we shot the first three or four episodes and then there was some sort of little break. I can’t remember what it is, it was like a matter of days. They took all of that scenery and it was a massive, massive, massive thing, took it down and we assembled it in stage five.

David Read
Piece by piece, that whole facility.

Bridget McGuire
The whole thing. The stage doors, I think they were only 12 feet high. Maybe 10 feet wide by 12 feet high, so each piece had to fit through those doorways. They did it, it was just like magic, it was like magic. I still can’t believe that it happened.

David Read
Did they dismantle the Stargate to move it or did they build the thing around it?

Bridget McGuire
They had to.

David Read
Oh my god! What if it stopped working?

Bridget McGuire
It had to come apart, it had to.

David Read
Wow. It’s a steel frame.

Bridget McGuire
Yes it is but it had bolts on the inside. That was our effects guys who had to make that happen. Plus everything else, there’s all the computers and the lighting and everything else that goes into making a set.

David Read
The BLUs, the blinky light units, all of those things had to all be on wheels and just cart it over.

Bridget McGuire
Those are on wheels so that sort of stuff moves anyways. It wasn’t even like it was a set. It was the whole complex, that set filled stage five. The walls of the studio were the walls of the tunnel in some places.

David Read
I remember when SGU was over, I’ve shared this story I think once before, I went into stage five, John Lenic took me down there. The only thing left standing in stage five was the spiral staircase from floor to ceiling. Everything else had been taken away. I knew that the show had been gone at that point because Stargate Command remained for a long time and served a couple of other functions but my heart just sank. It was then that it was over for me.

Bridget McGuire
I don’t think I’ve been back in that stage. I can actually…the interesting…I can still smell it. That was the other thing that happened, I think it was a long weekend, it was in the first season, you probably know their story. I don’t know how I found out but I found out that our stages were on on fire.

David Read
I did not know this!

Bridget McGuire
Oh you don’t know this story?

David Read
First season, SG-1?

Bridget McGuire
I know it was the first season, we had just shot the glacier episode.

David Read
Yes, Solitudes near the end of season one.

Bridget McGuire
Solitudes. Solitudes was shot in stage six and that was a huge glacier set, all foam and everything. It filled the stage, it literally filled the stage. Fortunately it had just been struck. The way it works is you fill up the stage and then you finish shooting, you wait a day or two and then you rip it all out. Thank goodness we did that because there was a stumble light, one of these halogen lights, that light the little barrier between the stages. It got knocked, it was right up against the drywall and it ignited a fire inside of the stage wall. The barrier wall between the two stages was two by six and it ignited. They found it, the fire department came, they opened it up and as soon as they opened it up it started to take off. They knocked it out, fortunately the glacier set was now gone. The whole of stage six was full of fire trucks and firemen getting this fire that’s in this interior wall out. You can maybe check with John Lenic because I think he was in charge of it. They worked on it for a couple of days and they ended up ripping out that whole dividing wall between the two stages.

David Read
So a part of Stargate Command had to be torn out?

Bridget McGuire
No, no. When you were standing where the upper command was…

David Read
Yes, so like Hammond’s office and the briefing room.

Bridget McGuire
There was like this much space [1 foot] between our set and the studio wall. The studio wall was gone and our set was still there. Forever and ever and ever you walked into that stage and you could just smell a little bit of campfire kind of smell.

David Read
For the rest of the time.

Bridget McGuire
For the rest of the time, yep, the smoke just got into everything. We were so lucky, if we had lost that set at that point I don’t think the show would have survived. It was literally [15 cm] that much space between the wall that was on fire and had to be taken out and our set. The set was just one by four and skin ply, it would have gone up just like that.

David Read
Well, look at the irony behind that; out of the icebox and into the fire. You had just done Antarctica.

Bridget McGuire
We were so lucky. That’s set was all foam and if that had gone up that would have been, just horrific to even think about it, I can’t even imagine what would have happened. We were so lucky, we wee so lucky and it was all just one little stumble light.

David Read
It was supposed to happen. I want to get back to the Stargate just for a moment more. It was probably season nine or ten that I was on the set. I always knew that the effect was achieved somehow but there was a gear underneath the ramp attached to the gate that cranked that thing around. It never missed a glyph in ten seasons and two movies.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, it’s a big machine, they did a really good job of it. That was Ray who is not with us anymore unfortunately.

David Read
The number of people we’ve missed in interviewing. We have to give them credit where it’s due because these people were artisans and magicians.

Bridget McGuire
When we started we were looking at this stuff and going like “how do we do this?” Tom put together a model shop, Tom wells, and it started in a tent behind the effects stage and just mixing goop. Trying to make things set in the winter in a tent didn’t work so well. By the end, I don’t know if you ever got to see it, by the end they could have been building stuff for NASA. The people who were in there, the team that Gord put together, every time there was a new technology they just got right on it and became experts in it. Right from the beginning with the CNC, the first thing they did was like, “well, we’re going to need a CNC machine.” I don’t know how many they ended up with, they ended up doing three dimensional routing. When 3d printing came in they’re like, “this is going to be great.”

David Read
Do you have one minute? I want to show you something, it applies immediately to this. You ready?

Bridget McGuire
Yep.

David Read
[holds up Ancient hand weapon] 3d CNC’d metal and how many years? It still lights up, the same battery. The production quality of this…the magnets. That James Robbins was able to draw this in Photoshop and that the production team was able to will it into solid reality! This is metal carved out of water. And this one, I love the attention to detail, “made in China” it says in Ancient, I’ll never forget that. This one lights up to still, you guys had a great sense of humor. It’s ridiculous the technology that you had.

Bridget McGuire
That was Paco. Paco came out of Gords crew and he has a great shop and he did everything that we built for Arrow. It’s amazing how the technology has changed.

David Read
I think that we cannot at all underestimate the important role that Stargate played in helping to build out that Vancouver film community.

Bridget McGuire
Absolutely. Richard Hudolin who was see production designer for the first five seasons, he went on to do Battlestar. I went off and did Sanctuary and then after that we got back together again. He’s like, “do you want to do a pilot?” I’m like, “okay, I’ll do a pilot. I’m not doing anything right now.” We did the Arrow pilot. I did not know at the time that it would be another eight season venture and that we were going to spin-off another franchise, it was just something to do. It was January, it was dark, there’s nothing else going on so why not do a pilot?

David Read
And you’re being creative with people you enjoy working with?

Bridget McGuire
Absolutely. That team was a mash up of Stargate, X-Files, Battlestar. That was probably a mash up of all of those people.

David Read
And the skills that you learned along the way?

Bridget McGuire
Oh, yeah. Every time you do a show, at least these sorts of shows, you’re not doing the same thing, you can’t be doing the same thing over and over and over. Every episode you up the bar a little bit and after 500 episodes the bar gets pretty high.

David Read
Absolutely. When did you know that this was the thing that you wanted to do for the rest of your life? Art directing, production designing, what was the trigger for you that made you fall in love with this? You have a lot of different interests, equestrian being one of them. You love horses.

Bridget McGuire
I do, I have a few out there taking a look at me right now.

Bridget McGuire
They’re gonna be shouting at me pretty soon. I did theater in university, I took a bachelor’s in theater design thinking I was going to be an architect. I was thinking, “well, this will be useful” because I needed to get a bachelor’s in something. They said “we don’t care what you get it in, get it in anything.” I was taking look at theater design and I thought, “well that’s kind of like architecture because there’s lighting so I’ll do that.” Before that I started in graphic design and I took one course in film, it was an elective. I picked it because I thought “well, that might be interesting” and we did a little little film project. I really liked that, I like working together with a team on something. I like the idea that you bring what you can bring to the table and then the other people bring what they can bring and what you end up with is better than what any of us could do on our own. None of this happens on our own, there isn’t one person who produces any of this stuff. This is all such a collaborative art and that’s what I really like about it; to go to work and be able to work with amazing talented people who are all just as committed to delivering they’re part of the puzzle. It’s just so much fun. Every time there’s a new episode there’s a new problem to solve. I remember when I first started it was sort of like “how are we gonna do that? We can’t do that, right? We can’t.” Your first instinct is “well, that’s impossible.” You keep doing it over and over and over and over again and you just start going “all right, god, okay. Don’t know how it’s going to be done, don’t know the answer right now but this is what’s being asked and we’re going to figure it out. We’re a group people, we’re all going to sit down, we’re all going to put our best thoughts into solving this problem or this puzzle. It’s going to be great, it’s going to be better than you could imagine if you were going to try to figure it out on your own.”

David Read
What you doin?

David Read
A couple of things, in creating things like this [Ancient hand weapon] or the naquadah reactor behind me here.

Bridget McGuire
I’m looking at your little shelf going “oh yeah, oh yeah”. The staffs, the problem with those is that they are so long and bendy.

David Read
They would bend over time and you had to refine that as you went along. The fact that it could go from a two dimensional drawing and be willed into solid reality, and that’s just the props, and be so exact and specific to what they had envisioned. James Robbins for instance, he could never get over that. It was like, “I just thought of that and here it exists, right here in front of me.” I was talking with John Gajdecki, he said, “you can’t really say no, you’re not an industry of no. It’s yes or yes…but” that’s what he said.

Bridget McGuire
Well, Tom would always say it’s time. What is it? Good, fast or cheap, pick any two.

David Read
If you want it good and you want it cheap you’re not gonna have it fast.

Bridget McGuire
It is true. It is true. That’s the whole balancing act all the time because we’re shooting a new episode every seven days. That’s the reality of episodic TV. One of the really nice things about being on Stargate was that we had a decent amount of lead time so that we could start planning these things weeks in advance, but it was weeks in advance, it wasn’t months. Even the biggest builds, I think Prometheus, from the time I got caught in the hallway, I forget whether it was Brad, I think it was probably Brad going “so Bridget, coud you build us a spaceship?” Five weeks later, we had a spaceship.

David Read
Were you told for instance for Prometheus at the top of season six? Or was that somewhere into season six that that was coming about?

Bridget McGuire
No, no, no, no. No, no, no. No, no. No, no, no, no. Five weeks from they catch you while you’re having a coffee and “by the way, do you think you could..?” And of course the answer has to be “we’ll do what we can.” To be fair, I think we must have done it in two stages because the initial cockpit was in stage six.

David Read
Oh, so it wasn’t always at Norco, the off-site facility?

Bridget McGuire
This is going back more than five years. We built what we needed for the episode and that was the cockpit and a bit of corridor and then we brought it over to Norco and flushed it out and added all the Jefferies tubes and the multipurpose room that we changed into whatever we needed. It was the beginning of the next season I think that they introduced, they call it the Daedalus? No, they pronounced it differently. I say Daedalus.

David Read
Daedalus came in in Atlanta season two, Prometheus was built in SG-1 season six. You guys were able to gak it out along the way; add stuff to it, layers, the plexes came in later. I have one in my garage. You just made it bigger and better.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah. Did we have to go back? No we didn’t have to go back and forth between the two. We started with Prometheus and we turned it into the Daedalus..

David Read
You did go back and forth a little bit. Season nine of SG-1 was still Prometheus and that was shooting at the same time that season two with Mitch Pileggi was on Atlantis with the Daedalus. Then Prometheus became Odyssey, within one episode. We lost that poor thing in orbit of a planet and the very next episode later, here’s the Odyssey. It was just like, somewhere some weird placed underground, we were cooking these things out like cookies, you know.

Bridget McGuire
Little shop in the back corner, yeah. Even seeing that, having five weeks to build something, we couldn’t do it if we were getting the episodes on the first date, our concept meeting, there’s no way. We’d have our concept meeting and we’d be handing out all these drawings to the director, poor director who’s just coming in, “here’s what’s being built. You can look at the drawings or you can come down and take a look at it on stage and make some changes.” We were always open to changes but there’s no way that those builds could have been done in a shorter time.

David Read
You probably had no idea that a set like the Prometheus set would be shown for 11 seasons of television or a set like the cargo ship set. You guys introduced that in season three and then all the sudden it’s a staple on the show; it just opened up hugh possibilities for stories.

Bridget McGuire
It’s great. The thing is, it wasn’t built as a standing set, it was built for one episode. There’s things that you do when you’re building a standing set to just facilitate filming, like wild walls and things that fly. The windshield was a big massive thing. To get the pilot shot it had to be physically lifted out and taken out. It was rebuilt I don’t know how many times because they said it just got turned into Swiss cheese with all the screw holes from being taken off and put back on and taken off and put back on. The door, I remember somebody asking me “why is this not a practical door?” The door was a visual effect. The door goes in, you do the before and you do the after.

David Read
Not the door from the front to the ring room but on the side of the ship?

Bridget McGuire
Right, from the interior to the exterior. They’re like, “why didn’t you make this a practical door?” We’re like, “it was only going to open once.” It was one time, the guy gets out and that’s it. Doors like that are tricky so it’s like “we’ll just do it as a visual effect, it’ll be fine.”

David Read
Lo and behold it’s used in the next seven years. When the writters get onto something, it’s like, “oh, that works.”

Bridget McGuire
Well we’ll need it. You need it. You need it. You need it, you do need it. It’s sort of like once you’re given a toy…it’s true.

David Read
When was Norco acquired? I’m assuming at some point you were running out of space for a lot of this stuff. When production was going on Brigitte Prochaska and Carole Appleby told us “do not tell anyone about this off-site set.” I’m assuming the security wasn’t a thing.

Bridget McGuire
We had no security, no.

David Read
They were like “don’t tell anyone that this exists” and when the show was over it was like, “yeah, it’s over.” At a certain point you guys had to have acquired that like along the run saying, “we’ve got to put the goa’uld ship, we’ve got to put the Prometheus and…”

Bridget McGuire
I think we had it right off the hop. I’m trying to think if there were sets that we put in. We did a lot of building in there. The Red Sky village was in there, the light…

David Read
The goa’uld opium den.

Bridget McGuire
The episode that we got the Gemini for.

David Read
The Gemini, okay.

Bridget McGuire
It’s a little confusing for me because I went and did Sanctuary in those three stages. I have little pictures of different sets in those spaces and I have to sort of separate stuff.

David Read
One show from another.

Bridget McGuire
We used Norco a lot. A lot of the temples that we did were in there.

David Read
Taller ceilings, or I guess just more space to grow?

Bridget McGuire
No. Every episode had sort of a big build and then usually two smaller builds so you sort of juggle everything. Stage one wasn’t a great stage, it was only 21 feet, the ceiling, whereas the the other stages I think are 30 or 40.

David Read
Wow. Like where the village ended up. It was way up there.

Bridget McGuire
Oh, the village, oh yeah, that was in the effects stage. Yeah, that was a nice build. That was fun. That was one that we built at the beginning of the season. So that came in, I think that was…

David Read
Season nine for the Ori. That was the same year that…

Bridget McGuire
Okay, right. Because we were introducing…

David Read
In the caves and Vala was coming back, Claudia was coming back, for the first half of the season while Amanda was gone.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, that’s right because Amanda was off having her baby.

David Read
Yep.

Bridget McGuire
I remember that was a thing. It was like, “well if Amanda would have her baby then we would be able to schedule this stuff.”

David Read
Brad had said it was always frustrating for him to have a script and “and they come upon a village” and he would be like, [sighs] “here we go.” You built one and you were able to shoot it from all different angles with all different lights and make it look like 30 different worlds.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, that was a nice set, that was fun. It started the season before. At the very end of the season there was a big site, it was big site and then a wall and then a sort of a taverny thing.

David Read
Okay, it definitely had a tavern.

Bridget McGuire
We expanded on that. It was so fun to have the tavern, it had the two levels, it had a real roof, you could shoot it from the outside, a real finished exterior.

David Read
And you had a bridge too for a while there that was used.

Bridget McGuire
Yep, I think that went in towards the end. I only had that set for…I know it lived on beyond me. I remember we added sort of an aqueduct, in my brain it was an aqueduct. That was fun because you could go in there and you could just rip things apart, nothing’s precious. Everything was built really to be repurposed or built out or built into. We had two, three, I think three good interiors, that you could do anything with.

David Read
You weren’t wedded to it, once it served its purpose you could manipulate it and make it look a little like something else.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, and then if worse came to worse and we had to go back we had the wherewithal to repurpose it backwards into one of its more original incarnations. That was fun. That was nice. It was a nice scale to, it had enough height and enough length that you didn’t feel like you were in a stage.

David Read
I want to talk about your team for a little bit if I may. Who are some of the people that you really leaned on? I know that you started in there with with Richard Hudolin, who I would love to get on the show, and then your team?

Bridget McGuire
So that original crew amazing. It started with Richard and I was his art director, I became the supervising art director. Ivana, Doug and Ken Rabehl, that was it. Was that it?

David Read
Wow. Ken, I don’t think he’s with us anymore?

Bridget McGuire
No, He was with us on Arrow but he developed ALS.

David Read
Man oh man. What a genius. What an artist.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, he was just amazing. The way his mind worked, every detail had to be there, it had to be in there. It would drive us crazy because it was like, “no, I’m still working on this.”

David Read
A perfectionist. He was also responsible for a number of the ships on Battlestar Galactica.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah. Have I missed somebody? Anyways, that was sort of our core team on for the first five seasons and then they all left. The construction crew, Tom Wells and his team are just absolutely amazing. The fact that we would go, “well, we need to build this” and they’d go, “all right, okay, let’s go.” Just super fantastic craftspeople, geniuses, really geniuses. A lot of the builds that we did were really large builds, big. They had a method of doing that where you’d start with the superstructure and then the scenery would essentially be hung off a superstructure. The superstructure was metal, like trusses, which were repurposable so they sort of build up the truss and then you hang all the scenery off of that.

Bridget McGuire
Well, it’s scenery, right? You don’t want two by six walls in scenery. You want your wall to look like granite but be light as a feather.

David Read
It’s an illusion.

David Read
Like as the SGC was. Darren and I of Gate World remember putting our hands up to it and it’s like “it’s fake.”

Bridget McGuire
A lot of that was canvas. In that set a lot of the upper walls were just canvas, painted.

David Read
When you watch the cargo ship set, if you’re looking really closely and an actor throws another actor into it, you can see it give. I’m sure they’ll be like, “okay, can I hit this without destroying it?” and I’m sure a couple of times it had to be rebuilt.

Bridget McGuire
When you’re putting an episode together one of the questions is to the stunt crew “what do you want to hit in here?” because it’s all scenery, nothing is built to take a hit. You don’t want anything moving around. We try to plan for that but sometimes things happen on set that go out of the scope of planning.

David Read
Yeah, the director wants a shot or something. I think of some of the amazing sets that were built like with Abyss with the gravity prison. It was on a gimbal wasn’t it?

Bridget McGuire
That was one of my favorite episodes to do. I had just started on as the production designer, I had just taken over the reins. I was like “I want to do this.” It all came out of the dancing on the walls thing and I love practical effects. I love any time that you can do something practical like you can put fire on set or when you can put people underwater and all that sort of thing.

David Read
You sank some of the goa’uld sets early in that season in Descent.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, we did. For the cell we built, we built one horizontally with the corridor and then we built the vertical one for most of the…

Bridget McGuire
It’s a tiny little space, it was only maybe eight foot by eight foot at the bottom, maybe. So you need it to be able to wild that apart. The actual tipping set needed to be structural enough so that they could be on the walls that became the ceiling and also be able to structurally hold itself as they did that. That was fun. The gravity pit that he’s up against was all built in forced perspective and that was fun. And that was before, I’m just thinking about what was being done in computer, those were done in computer.

David Read
Jack talking with Daniel.

David Read
Yes. A couple of weeks ago we actually showed the exact shot of all those elements that were used. Cliff as Ba’al is on the left and then Richard is on the right on the gravity wall. Sometimes it was Dan Shea depending on who was available. It’s an illusion to pull it off but I remember watching that episode just being absolutely a) terrified at Cliff Simon because he’s brilliant and b) just watching the magic happen of Rick being sent away into this pit, Jack, and the effect of the movement. It’s a magical show.

Bridget McGuire
There’s a shot of Jack in the bottom of the pit looking up at the woman who’s looking down at him. That was a composite shot, shot in two different and then put together. I think that was the only sort of visual effect shot in the episode.

David Read
I know at one point she was laying her chest on something to get the shot down. But when you see her up there you just assemble it all together and it works.

Bridget McGuire
It was fun. I love that sort of stuff, I could do that stuff until the cows come home.

David Read
Or horses.

Bridget McGuire
Or the horses, yeah. The thinking of the ship…

David Read
How did you do that in Descent? How did you keep from electrocuting everybody?

Bridget McGuire
Well, they use lights that don’t electrocute people.

David Read
There we go.

Bridget McGuire
There’s special underwater lights, it’s the same sort of lighting that you have in pools and stuff like that. It was at the University of British Columbia, they had something called the wave tank. It was fun, it was just a great big tank of water that was all painted black. They never used it so they were happy for us to come and build stuff. There’s all sorts of things when you’re filming with water that makes your heart sort of go like, “ah” [pause for thought]. Things that are happy underwater, like plastic, generally don’t like to have paint stay to them when they get wet. When you’re building scenery that has to stay underwater, if you use plywood, it’s going to swell. You have to think that everything that you put in that tank will end up in the water. For paint and for construction we did tests. I think that was built out of vacuform or a heavy, heavy vacuform plastic and then they found a paint that would seriously adhere to the vacuform. After that it’s just a matter of building the superstructure, adding the pieces and then putting that on and whatever mechanism to make it fly up and down. That was the one, it was sinking?

David Read
Yeah, the ship was sinking into the ocean.

Bridget McGuire
Sinking and they had some air.

David Read
On the very top there. I’m assuming your actors would have to have wetsuits and everything.

Bridget McGuire
They’re in the water and then you have to think the camera’s in the water too. It’s a challenge for every single department. Lenses like to fog up when you get into that sort of environment. It’s tricky but it’s worth doing. In the glacier set, I think we chilled that set and that was a learning curve.

David Read
For season one? Yeah, Martin Wood said it was actually cold.

Bridget McGuire
It was really cold. We chilled the whole set, we were hoping to get the condensation that you get from your breath. The science of it is to get air that cold, they draw moisture out. So when you draw moisture out, you don’t get condensation so we just ended up with a cold set. You learn.

David Read
Absolutely. You got to have things evolve from your learning experience. Were there ever significant challenges in staying on budget and making sure you brought the vision to life? Like, “oh, I have this great idea,” John Lenic is like, “well, you’ve got this dollar figure.”

Bridget McGuire
All the time. When I took over, you know the whole story with Stargate, the show was bought, the first 44 episodes were paid for when we started before the pilot. I remember, we were barely into it, I think they had just started airing it and they made the announcement that they bought another two seasons so they had like four years.

David Read
This never happens.

Bridget McGuire
It never happens.

David Read
It will never happen again.

Bridget McGuire
It will never happen again. When I took over and this is part of the reason why there was the exodus [of crew], it was only going to be for a season. I remember when I was hiring my people, Rodrigo, that’s when I hired James, Peter Bodnarus, everyone, they’re all doing great. I remember sitting down with him and going “guys, don’t be thinking that this is a long term thing. We’re going to do this season and then that’s it.”

David Read
Syfy’s bought one year, they bought season six.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, “they bought one season so if you’re planning on making big investments just don’t count on this being more than a season.” What, how many? Another six?

David Read
You had another four seasons of SG-1. Before the end of season seven they had already agreed to pick up season eight and season one of Atlantis. There was four after that and then two of six, seven, eight, nine, ten, five of Atlantis, so 12 more years. 12 more television years. At one point you had in three years 120 hours of TV. This is ridiculous.

Bridget McGuire
I know. I was doing the maths sort of adding it up and I think I did 260 episodes.

David Read
Yeah, the total was around 350. Oh for you?

Bridget McGuire
For me. That was as production designer so that doesn’t even count the first five years as art director, so 240 episodes between Stargate and Atlantis. If you ask me specific questions about one episode I might not be able to answer it.

David Read
Absolutely. I do want to touch on building the city of the Ancients. What a challenge. I know there was some going back and forth until they arrived at the snowflake design. Frank Lloyd Wright, was he an automatic inspiration pretty early on or did that come in later? Tell me about building the city.

Bridget McGuire
Well, it evolved a little bit because when we did Lost City we did not know that we were doing Atlantis. I didn’t know, it was a surprise to me. I got a phone call about six weeks after we had finished that season going “hey, would you like to do Atlantis?” and I’m like, “yes, please.” I guess I had already come across the neutron microscopic photographs of snowflakes. There’s this huge variety of shapes, that one you have on your shelf there, it’s just what they look like. It’s really cool. They’re really cool. For Frank Lloyd Wright, we did our little light, dit, dit, dit, dit dit.

David Read
Chiclets?

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, I think we introduced those in Lost City so that became a little element. Then we had all these different shapes of the snowflakes. Frank Lloyd Wright built, I forget the name of the building, but that set is built on a triangle footprint. Most buildings are built to a square and that one is built 30, 30, 30.

David Read
Wow.

Bridget McGuire
There are no 90 degree angles in it. I shouldn’t say that, if you look horizontally there’s 90 degree angles but the basic layout of it is all either at 60 or 90.

David Read
So you had the outpost set that was originally used on the lava planet, Praclarush Taonas, and then Antarctica in the same episode. You could build out so this is a part of a larger city so you had at least a direction.

Bridget McGuire
You know what the Ancient text was and the Ancient architecture was. It was creeping in so by the time I came to do Atlantis we had a little bit of stuff going on and then it just had to be expanded from that. I’m just looking at a picture of it right now. I still love this set.

David Read
It’s absolutely amazing. I have a set of the red and brown larger block pieces that line some of the halls and then they have the chiclet lights in the middle. It’s sections of styrofoam glued on into different geometric shapes.

Bridget McGuire
Those are built by the Davidson’s

David Read
Mark Davidson and his brother, great guy.

Bridget McGuire
They literally just went out and scavenged all these styrofoam packaging and started gluing it all together and put a light in there. They’re like “what do you think about that?”

David Read
Some of them have water in them and I imagine that could be an issue over years and years?

Bridget McGuire
I think just for wheight probably. The bubbley units, we had to make sure that things like that didn’t make any noise. Also back then, this is before LED lighting, we were limited to either a fluorescent or halogen, which are so hot that you set things on fire like our stages. MRs, we use these little MR lights sometimes. I remember building these, I forgot what it was for, but it was like a box that you had to put somebody in with a window, like some sort of stasis chamber, I don’t remember. We put these little lights in there because you have to light the person.

David Read
Jack was the first one in Lost City at the end of it. They did the effect where they frozen him.

Bridget McGuire
Like an Easy Bake oven right? It’s so hot in there. After that, it was just like okay, “if we’re using these things, we have to…” Even in that case, we didn’t send it to set like that. Now we have to build in ventilation and it is so much easier now with LEDs.

David Read
The technology has just gone by leaps and bounds. The stuff that you were able to achieve, the staircase in the gatetrium as it was called.

Bridget McGuire
Is that what they called it?

David Read
They called it the Gatetrium, the actors did, yeah. Stargate atrium is a poem, it’s greeting people.

Bridget McGuire
In Atlanstis? Yeah, that was really nice, that was really nice. Do you mean the one…?

David Read
The main staircase once you come through the Stargate yeah.

Bridget McGuire
There’s a main set of like…and then there was the side stairs.

David Read
Off to the sides.

Bridget McGuire
A little spooky, I have to admit, a little scary because they are just sort of floating treads. Then we have a spiral staircase, I think we just put it in there for practical reasons because we needed to get people in and out. A spiral staircase takes up a very small footprint.

David Read
Yeah. When did the Blade set get added? That was season one of Atlantis wasn’t it? Wasn’t it purchased for $1?

Bridget McGuire
Yes. It was a bit of a white elephant, we got a lot of use out of it. I wasn’t around for the strike of that, I’m pretty happy about that.

David Read
Why? Was it just the materials just harder?

Bridget McGuire
It was a massive build. It was all metal, it was structural steel, it had to be because it was, was it four levels?

David Read
It was high up against, I know the bridge that Sheppard walks across in The Storm is high above the soundstage. I’ve never actually mentioned this to listeners so I should bring it up. Blade, I think it was Blade Trinity, was filmed at Bridge Studios with Wesley Snipes and instead of striking it Stargate productions bought it for $1 if my memory serves me correctly. You guys incorporated much of it into the Atlantis sets.

Bridget McGuire
It became sort of our swing space for Atlantis. We had our standing set which was the control room, the circular room with the…

David Read
Briefing room and the holo room, yeah.

Bridget McGuire
Then sort of a multipurpose area underneath and then the Blade set became everything else. Because it had levels and stairs we could add to that and make it into part of our world. We used it, it was good, I think we got good use out of it.

David Read
I would say so.

Bridget McGuire
I think so. Yeah.

David Read
Which sets for you were the most creatively taxing. Creatively taxing, are there any you wish you could go back and tweak?

Bridget McGuire
Oh, I’d like to go back and tweak everything. Oh, yeah. Don’t get me wrong, watching it it’s like, “oh gosh, should we have…?” But you don’t have time. All of these decisions are being done at pace. Even the things that were tricky, I liked that. Probably the hardest part of doing those shows, was honest to god, just the scheduling. We have the two shows going, plus second unit, we had eight stages plus locations. We’d have to be planning say five weeks in advance, that’s before you have any schedules or scripts. There were certain sets that had to be being turned over all the time, it was the only way to get a show like this done; take what you have and turn it into something else. That was pretty intricate.

David Read
Yeah, for an example I remember you had Thor’s ship, the Biliskner, one section of it was created for season three.

Bridget McGuire
This one? It had the red and silver…

David Read
Right, exactly. Everything was very apple core shaped.

Bridget McGuire
Very, very hard to store.

David Read
I suspect so. Then it was brought back at the end of season three with, I believe, Nemesis, then season four for Small Victories in the beginning. It became the Gadmeer set, it was all painted pretty much white for the Enkaren episode, so it’s the same set but it’s been completely redone.

Bridget McGuire
That’s one example, we did that all the time. You keep some superstructure and then you build a new set using decks and stuff like. A deck is a deck because the deck, you can make it higher and lower. We did a lot of that. A lot of times, if it was something like the Red Sky village…

David Read
K’tau.

Bridget McGuire
It was so distinctive.

David Read
Very distinctive.

Bridget McGuire
Those were all facades, right? That was in Norco. Norco was only like that wide, that high and it’s like a bowling alley. It seriously is. That set, as soon as we’re done with it, that all goes into the bin and the next thing is coming along. The other trick when you’re…I’m sure the fans are [yawning].

David Read
No, not at all, we’re eating this up, believe me.

Bridget McGuire
You can’t actually start the changeover on a set before it’s been shot. Sometimes it’s better just to do all your pre-building offset in the shop. As soon as you’re done shooting just broom that all out and bring in the new set which hopefully you can get it most of the way there. Space is always an issue.

David Read
What happens if there are pickups? What happens if they need to reshoot something? What do you do if it’s gone?

Bridget McGuire
We recreate it. No it’s true.

David Read
I guess you’ve got the plans for it.

Bridget McGuire
We’ve built it before, we can build it again.

David Read
That’s true.

Bridget McGuire
The trick comes if you do something on location. You go to a location and then you have to recreate what was existing on location. That becomes a little bit trickier.

David Read
I suspect that didn’t have to happen too often.

Bridget McGuire
No it didn’t. Mostly what we would do would be like insert shots, fussy little prop things. Things opening up or little dials turning. That sort of stuff will be shot second unit.

David Read
You don’t really need the actors for that, you just need stand-ins.

Bridget McGuire
You certainly don’t need the actors to be standing around waiting for a little thing to…they’re just not that interested.

David Read
The more that I learn about this kind of thing, the more I watch some of these episodes. In a lot of the tighter shots it’s like, “that’s not Daniel, there’s no reason for it to be Daniel, that’s his stand-in pushing that button or whatever.” They want to have more time to finesse and everything else and the actor could be reading his lines on the next show.

Bridget McGuire
Or it could be shot weeks after. Yeah. Before us was MacGyver and the whole idea of “MacGyvering” a thing was established on that show. I think Amanda even says, “well, I have to MacGyver this at some point.”

David Read
In the pilot, yeah, “it took us X supercomputers to MacGyver a way to do this” and Rick is like [shrugs]. One of my favorite worlds is the Window of Opportunity planet in season four. The wider shot is green screen, you’ve got this red and yellow and gold haze. You got the Stargate, you got the Ancient temple and then the pillars with the holes in them where the beam goes through to shoot at the gate. You were art director on that in season four, where do you draw the line between practical and then extension? I mean, there’s literally a line in there.

Bridget McGuire
That was a whole evolution for us. When we started, I remember on the pilot, we had a two day meeting about visual effects. The cutting edge was to put two cameras side by side, shoot whatever your plate was and then you could get a pan. That was a big deal; a pan with a visual effect. Basically a steel plate that you’re adding the visual effect to and now it’s affordable. Wwhereas if it’s an in-camer, blah, blah, blah.

David Read
It can be done but it’s prohibitively expensive.

Bridget McGuire
It’s just not doable in a TV budget. It’s what you do in a feature film but we were a TV show. A lot of times, what we would do is…we’re going back over 20 years ago.

David Read
I appreciate your frustration.

Bridget McGuire
I would have to expect, somebody could tell me I’m wrong there. I know the set that you’re talking about. I think there was a psych, so a psych is a piece of cotton that you light and you can get a hue on it. I could almost guarantee you that for 90% of those shots you we’re looking into a psych. For the big Y we would probably not even bring in a green screen. If you’re actors stay within the set, if these are the actors and if this is the mat line, you don’t need a green screen. It’s only if your actors cross off of the scenery…

David Read
The pillars yeah.

Bridget McGuire
They have to bring in a green screen. It’s a lot of trickery like that. We did a lot of this in Sanctuary where I would build…

David Read
Talk about cutting edge.

Bridget McGuire
180 degrees.

David Read
Half of the room.

Bridget McGuire
Everything looking back this way is practical practical practical. You do one shot this way “oh look, we’re in London” and everybody believes it.

David Read
It sells the shot.

Bridget McGuire
Once you show the audience the expanse of where you’re at then you go into the practical set and they believe you’re still there. It’s all about how much money you want to spend. Sometimes they’ll go back and do another another visual effects shot to sort of button the scene. I think the cargo bay was pretty much like that. We had a puddle jumper, we had a wall and then all the rest was just extension.

David Read
John Gajdecki showed us some of those shots, those little Lego guys, it was so cute. I had no idea, one said Dr. Weir and one said Dr. Ingram, before McKay came on. Tell me about the Puddle Jumper, it is many a fan their favorite ship. Tell me about bringing that little green loaf of bread to life. That was my first instinct when I saw it, it’s like “is that a loaf of bread flying through the gate?”

Bridget McGuire
In a sewing machine there’s a little shuttle, it’s got that shape. That was where it came from. For me, everything sort of starts with a thing. The Wraith dart came from a hummingbird, the skull of a hummingbird. That’s the whole Wraith organic thing, I love that sort of stuff. It had to be round because it was going through the Stargate, we had to be able to see the actors, we also had to travel it.

David Read
I think it was a smaller one wasn’t it that you had to take outdoors? You faked it a little bit.

Bridget McGuire
We faked it? Yes, we did. I think we went a little bit too far and then I think we went a little bit backwards. There was a little adjustment somewhere.

David Read
It was cut down the center. You could see the line where it came apart.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah, it had to travel on the road. Yeah, it was a good little thing, it served a lot of purposes. W did entire stories in there, where poor Joe…what happened to Joe?

David Read
The Iratus bug bit him in 38 minutes and the poor guy was laying in the back of the craft for the entire episode with a bug stuck on him. McKay was envisioning Carter while he was underwater in Grace Under Pressure. Some of the best shows were contained in that little ship, the gap boxes that came down with the lights, what a masterful little set. In season one to season two you evolved the console and added some lights on the walls.

Bridget McGuire
We built it with all of these sorts of places where you could open and find something. It’s sort of an efficient box because we knew we didn’t want to see everything that we needed. We want to be able to open these things up and go “oh, look, here’s the thing and now we have to do a thing.” There was that vehicle, there was our fighter. What was our little fighter called? The F…

David Read
The F-302. Yeah.

Bridget McGuire
That was a nice little piece of scenery.

David Read
It’s just a cockpit in like the size of it and then the wings were digital.

Bridget McGuire
I remember when we first built that and we had it out on a runway, we shot it practically. It was wide enough that you could see enough of the fighter that you believed that the rest of it was there. It was on a flat deck that they were dragging around and it was great because you got all the clouds. I don’t think we took it outside after that, after that we just shot it in the stage.

David Read
Yeah, I remember a big giant cylinder with a cloud painted on it. You just spin the cylinder for the overhead shots when it was shooting at the canopy and then the canopy the reflection would go up.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah. In that case we made sure all the surfaces on that little fighter were flat. That was partly so that we could…well it’s based on…

David Read
Is it just an F-18?

Bridget McGuire
No, it’s based on a stealth fighter that has all the flat planes.

David Read
Oh I know what you’re talking about.

Bridget McGuire
Yeah so that’s sort of where that sort of started from.

David Read
It’s the Nighthawk. Wild, absolutely wild the stuff that you were able to create.

Bridget McGuire
Everybody enjoys the Puddle Jumper.

David Read
Oh, man. It’s one of the iconic elements of the franchise. You look at that and you know exactly what you’re watchingl in profile, whatever, it can’t be anything else. The iconography of that show has just withstood the test of time. You can see it across the room and go “oh, that’s Atlantis” or “oh, that’s SG-1.” Tell us about your love of horses. How long have you been a horseback rider?

Bridget McGuire
Every minute of my life. One of my earliest memories was seeing a horse being ridden down the road and just thinking that was it.

David Read
How many do you have?

Bridget McGuire
I only have three.

David Read
You only have three. Wow.

Bridget McGuire
One’s old. I have a 27 year old, he’s actually that guy there. I have two brothers, they are half brothers. One is four and one’s 12. The four year old is just being trained right now, that’s what I’m doing in my time off. The 12 year old I’m showing.

David Read
They are markable animals.

Bridget McGuire
They are, they are.

David Read
It’s very special.

Bridget McGuire
When you start to think about what you’re doing with them it sort of becomes kind of like, “well, that doesn’t seem like a good idea” but if you think about too many things to much it never seems like such a good idea.

David Read
Well, it’s a good juxtaposition for you because you can spend all your time creatively on developing these amazing series and just the little facets. There’s this great picture of you just in front of an Ancient facade with a cuneiform look and just bring these things to life and then you can go outside and go on a run with your babies. That’s great. Bridget, I am thrilled to have had this time to talk with you. I’d love to have you back at some point in the future to discuss more little details. You are a wealth of knowledge, the work that you guys have created is appreciated so much by continuing generations of people who are continuing to watch and find the show. There’s a little bit of immortality there.

David Read
Well, thank you. It was quite the journey, it was an incredible experience. I’ve been really, really fortunate to work with Brad and Jonathan and Robert and John. They put such a good team together.

David Read
Joseph Mallozzi, Paul Mullie. These guys, they’re amazing. There’s a reason that they’re hard to get a hold of because they’re always busy. Their work is being appreciated.

Bridget McGuire
Exactly. Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to meet you and chat.

David Read
This was a pleasure. Thanks so much to Bridget McGuire for joining me on this episode of Dial the Gate. It’s long overdue for me to interview her and I really appreciate her time and her thoughtfulness and her passion about the work that she created. I really appreciate you tuning in. If you enjoy the episode please click that like button, it helps with the show and the expanding of the audience. As MGM and Amazon continue to develop more Stargate content for the future we are going to be there talking about it every step of the way. My sincere thanks to my Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey, she’s helping me on a lot of things behind the scenes right now. She’s such a pleasure to have. My moderating team Tracy, Jeremy, Antony, Sommer, Rhys, you guys make the show continue to be possible every single week as we go into this extended third season. Thanks goes to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb for continuing to keep dialthegate.com up and running. We have the remainder of our shows for this season, check it out on dialthegate.com, that’s where it’ll be posted typically first, if I can get my act together and sit down and do all those. Next week, I think we’ve already got another episode on the books planned already, so you can see that listed on the website. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. My thanks once again to Bridget McGuire for joining me for this episode. We’ll see you on the other side.