225: Reece Thompson, “Jinto” in Stargate Atlantis (Interview)

At 15 he helped launched the Stargate television franchise into its first beloved spin-off with Atlantis. Now Reece Thompson, the actor behind “Jinto,” joins us to talk about the first three episodes of the series, as well as his career!

Share This Video ► https://youtube.com/live/jj-jNBsE6Zg
The Press Guardian ► https://www.thepressguardian.com/

Visit DialtheGate ► http://www.dialthegate.com
on Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/dialthegate
on Instagram ► https://instagram.com/dialthegateshow
on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/dial_the_gate
Visit Wormhole X-Tremists ► https://www.youtube.com/WormholeXTremists

SUBSCRIBE!
https://youtube.com/dialthegate/

Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:22 – Opening Credits
00:47 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:58 – Welcoming Reece
03:02 – Industry Beginnings and Science Fiction
07:56 – A Challenging Role and Professional Influences
10:53 – “Dreamcatcher”
12:05 – “Rocket Science”
14:56 – Stargate Atlantis
23:45 – “I am Jinto!”
24:31 – Stargate’s Set, Novels and Fandom
27:14 – Stargate’s Impact on Reece
29:47 – Getting into Character and Visual Effects
35:34 – Web site and Writing
39:56 – Wrapping up with Reece
41:26 – Post Interview Housekeeping
42:50 – End Credits

***

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

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
#TurtleTimeline

 

TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 225 of Dial the Gate. My name is David Read, you are watching the Stargate Oral History Project. Reece Thompson who played Jinto in Stargate Atlantis, the pilot episode Rising and in Hide and Seek, is joining us for this episode. He’s going to tell us a little about his time on the show and his career and his life. Before we bring him in, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this available on YouTube, click that like button. It makes a difference with the algorithm and will help the show continue to 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 live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live show, if you are in the YouTube chat, go ahead and submit questions to the moderators for Reece. They’ll hand them over to me and I’ll ask some of them from him in the second half of the show. In the meantime, we’re gonna get to know each other a little. Reece Thompson who played Jinto in Stargate Atlantis. Welcome, sir. Welcome to the show.

Reece Thompson
Hello, thanks for having me.

David Read
Thank you for being here. Where are you right now?

Reece Thompson
I’m in Santa Clarita, California.

David Read
Okay. Are you WGA? Excuse me, are you in SAG?

Reece Thompson
I am. I’m not WGA but I’m doing a lot more writing now.

David Read
Has it been just wild watching everything unfold?

Reece Thompson
Oh, it’s been nice.

David Read
Yeah?

Reece Thompson
Well, yeah cuz we don’t get breaks you know? A lot of times it’s like you’re always on a break but you’re also never on a break. I’ve learned to take the breaks when they come. I think the strikes are necessary and I’m hopeful about the results. But yeah, I’m enjoying time off.

David Read
For sure. Absolutely. Have you rewatched the show? Have you seen Stargate since the episode aired? I’m curious to see what your thoughts are about looking back on your 15 year old self?

Reece Thompson
I don’t know if I ever watched it.

Reece Thompson
I remember seeing one of the episodes maybe when it was on. My dad is a pretty big Stargate fan so he really liked SG-1 a lot so I watched that with him. I really liked the movie a lot. When I booked it I remember my dad was pretty excited about it. He would come to set with me. It was cool to work with Robert Patrick because we knew of him from Terminator and stuff.

David Read
Okay.

David Read
Absolutely. He had a stint in the X-Files for a while up there too.

Reece Thompson
Right. Yeah, I was too young for that I think. I didn’t really get in to it. I should get into X-Files now I think. I keep hearing it still holds up.

David Read
You want to talk about an interesting fan base, an interesting community. They’re passionate and some of them, a very paranoid group of people.

Reece Thompson
Oh really?

David Read
Yeah. Did you always know that you wanted to act? Was this your idea? Was this something your folks pushed you into? Where did it?

Reece Thompson
I was kind of doing it already.

David Read
Okay.

Reece Thompson
Every time I watched a movie or something I would become that character for a while. My parents had to screen movies for me because they knew that they’d have to deal with whatever character was in that movie for the next little while. So yeah, I was just kind of doing it and my parents are both teachers. In the summertime they started doing background acting and then I went to set with them at one point and was just like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could get paid to play pretend. That’s what I like doing.” I was never bad in school but I just didn’t enjoy it. It was always like, “oh, recess is my time to go and be creative.” It was always like me and my friends be Power Rangers or X-Men or whatever. Then I was like, “Oh, I could do that and get paid to do that. That’s pretty fucking cool.” My parents introduced it to me but I wanted it.

David Read
Okay, so you continued to pursue it. Yeah, it’s interesting the paths that our parents help set us on. I know my father always wanted me to be a pilot like him, he’s a helicopter pilot. There are certain things that…I just wasn’t in love with it, but I share his love for motorcycles. There are certain ways that we find connections with our folks; sometimes it’s in the work and sometimes it’s just personal life, if we’re lucky at all.

Reece Thompson
Well, maybe if it was spaceships that your dad was flying you’d be there.

David Read
Right, exactly. Well, it’s his interest in sci-fi that got me interested so I guess there’s that. That’s a pretty big deal, yeah.

Reece Thompson
What does he like?

David Read
In terms of science fiction?

Reece Thompson
Yeah.

David Read
He’s a big Star Trek fan, classic Star Trek.

Reece Thompson
My dad likes Star Trek too, Next Generation. That’s the one with Picard?

David Read
That’s it. Yeah. And Battlestar Galactica more recently. Galactica is a good show.

Reece Thompson
I don’t think my dad watches much sci-fi anymore but he definitely when I was a kid was big into Star Trek, Stargate. He wasn’t a fanboy or anything, he didn’t buy merch or anything, but definitely those were the shows that he would gravitate towards for sure.

David Read
Yeah. It’s stuff that you can watch on the surface and enjoy but also you can come back to it as an adult and go, “Whoa, I didn’t see that at all.” Some stuff is more relevant now than it was.

Reece Thompson
In Star Trek?

David Read
Yeah. And several episodes of Stargate where they’re talking about artificial intelligence and how it interfaces with humanity and all these topics that we’ll continually have to deal with as we move down the timeline. It’s certainly not going to be boring.

Reece Thompson
Well, you know how Gene Roddenberry came up with it?

David Read
He was a beat cop in Los Angeles.

Reece Thompson
Yeah. So he kind of came up with his ideal version of society where there’s no money and all that.

David Read
Everyone just does what they’re meant to do. Is there a role that you took on that pushed you in ways that you didn’t anticipate or challenged you in ways that you didn’t expect? Or just made you interface with the material in a way that was just like, “wow, this was great.”

Reece Thompson
Yeah, when I was 16 I got my first American project, it was called Rocket Science. I had to learn how to have a stuttering problem and that was the lead of a feature film for the first time. That definitely pushed me and also changed my perspective on what acting could be. Before that I was just excited to be there, I was just happy to be on set and have a job and everything. But once I did that I was like, “Oh, this could actually mean something.”

David Read
Anna Kendrick.

Reece Thompson
Yeah.

David Read
Wow. When you look back on your body of work are there any people in particular that you have worked with that have stood out to you over the years as kind of like signposts to imitate? Or something that you took away from another performer or perhaps someone behind the camera who helped to influence you in ways that you didn’t necessarily anticipate years later?

Reece Thompson
Yeah, so in rocket science there’s this guy, Vincent Piazza, who’s a really great actor. He’s one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with. He went on to play Lucky Luciano in Boardwalk Empire and stuff like that but he wanted to change his appearance so much. I like doing that too but he took it to another level. It was just really cool to see. I worked with him a second time because I recommended him to the director of movie called Assassination of a High School President and he got hired for that. Again, totally just a chameleon, just really cool and that’s kind of what I wanted to do. Having him around inspired me a lot. I worked with this guy, Logan Huffman, on this movie Final Girl and he was a very eccentric guy. He was very into vaudeville and dancing and all this physical stuff. I took a lot from him which was really cool. He’s since moved to Australia so I don’t get to talk to him as much anymore. I’m trying to think of who else? Those are the two that come to mind. If I think of anybody else I’ll bring it up.

David Read
Do you have any memories from Dreamcatcher?

Reece Thompson
Yeah, I do. I remember it was the first time I had deep fried turkey.

David Read
Okay.

Reece Thompson
Yeah. It was great. They deep fried a whole turkey and then we had sandwich like rolls. You’d eat it with the roll, it was really good.

David Read
Was this craft service?

Reece Thompson
Yeah, it was I guess like a snack. It wasn’t lunch I don’t think. But yeah, it was really good if you haven’t had it. I remember at one point there was a line that we were gonna use from Star Wars or something like that.

David Read
In Dreamcatcher?

Reece Thompson
A little Easter egg. I can’t remember what the line was specifically but I just remember Lawrence Kasdan being like, “I don’t know if we’ll get in trouble for using that line but fuck it, I wrote it.”

David Read
Right, exactly. The dude wrote it. That’s funny. Rocket Science, did you find any elevation in terms of responsibility, in terms of what is expected of you as a lead, un a film that was different from previous gigs. Was your conduct more monitored? Were you expected to do X, Y, or Z? What was different about that film for you?

Reece Thompson
Um, in terms of my preparation?

David Read
Yeah.

Reece Thompson
Not really. I was was always professional and had my lines down and everything before. I think that was the first time that I didn’t really work with my mom because my mom was always there to read lines with me and stuff like that. I had a coach to help me with the stutter, who was actually a speech pathologist. She thought it was amusing that she was teaching me how to stutter and not how not to. So I had that to work with and we did rehearsals and everything like that so by the time we got there everyone was ready to go, ready to shoot. I like doing rehearsals and that was the first time I had kind of done them I think. Usually on television they don’t have time for that.

David Read
Yeah, you have to jump in and go. What was that like, taking on a different speech pattern? You’ve clearly got someone on the set who’s there to help you portray it accurately.

Reece Thompson
She was only there in the preparation.

David Read
Oh, okay.

Reece Thompson
Yeah, but it was hard to drop it.

David Read
I was gonna ask. Did it get stuck?

Reece Thompson
No, it went away eventually. It’s interesting because people who stutter, they know what words they’re going to stutter on so you work around it. I would actually go through the script and I would find words…I would see the stutters were written into the script. I would think about the alternative to what I was trying to say that I couldn’t say. It’s more mental than anything, right? I think a lot of times people think a stutter is like [unable to get words out] and it can be but if you know that you’re going to block that on a word, you can work around it.

David Read
You’re trying to get an idea across and there’s more than one set of words to do it. That would have been just such a trip, geez. Tell me about it. So your dad was excited that you landed Atlantis. It was a brand new show, a spin off of an existing show. Tell me about the process for getting the pilot and filming that if you don’t mind.

Reece Thompson
I don’t remember auditioning and stuff. Just gonna grab another drink, I’ll be right here. Um, I remember I hated my hair cut. My memory of that time was pretty fuzzy. Joe Flanigan was a pro skater before, right?

Reece Thompson
I don’t remember.

David Read
That is entirely possible because he was definitely on his skateboard all the time.

David Read
You don’t?

Reece Thompson
I’m pretty sure he told me that he was a Pro Skater before, or at least a big skater. He had this skateboard that I think he invented called a “sports stick.” I think he had a skate shop or something, I maybe totally wrong about all this. He had this skateboard that was shaped kind of like a fish shape and the trucks would go almost completely vertical. I was just on that all day long because it worked like a surfboard almost. I was never a big skate or anything but I loved that thing. I kept trying to find one and I couldn’t find one anywhere. So, tragic.

David Read
Well it’s good? It’s good that you have those memories.

Reece Thompson
Oh no, it’s just tragic that I could never find one and live up to my skating potential.

David Read
I saw one. It was unlike any board I had seen before just in terms of its shape. But man, that guy could get around on that thing. Any memories of working with Robert Patrick or Christopher Heyerdahl?

Reece Thompson
Yeah, Chris Heyerdahl was really cool. He’s from Vancouver, not from Vancouver I don’t think but I’d see him around. He’s always a super cool dude. I feel like I have more questions for you.

David Read
Sure, yeah, absolutely. You’re setting up the second of what would ultimately be three very long running and profitable television series.

Reece Thompson
There’s a third one?

David Read
Yeah. Stargate Universe.

Reece Thompson
Oh, right. Okay.

David Read
Yeah. Was there any kind of pressure at all to get this right or were you just going and doing your job and having fun?

Reece Thompson
Well yeah, I think that’s why they got rid of me. Atlantis was so different from SG-1 where they were not on Earth; they were on this other planet. I think the fans didn’t like that, the tribal, those characters.

David Read
The Athosians.

Reece Thompson
In the beginning. I think they had to do some mixing around of cast and stuff like that to get the right balance of it. I think they were sort of setting up Heyerdahl and my characters of being bigger on the show and people didn’t want that family aspect.

David Read
Which people? Fans or production?

Reece Thompson
What is the name of the race that we were part of?

David Read
The Athosians.

Reece Thompson
The Athosians. From what I understand the fans in the beginning didn’t want them there.

David Read
Interesting.

Reece Thompson
I remember reading message boards and fans being like “get them out of there. We just want the soldier characters.” They had to kind of find the right balance of how that worked to make everybody happy I think and I think they just didn’t want a kid running around. They just weren’t interested in that.

David Read
I never did get that impression, it may have been.

Reece Thompson
After the fact because it was only the first three episodes and then they just moved on from that. There was a lot of mixing around of cast in that first [season] right? Rainbow left. You know why Rainbow left?

David Read
He is unsure specifically. I can only guess that it had something to do with the character just not working.

Reece Thompson
That’s what I’m guessing too for myself.

David Read
There are practical matters. Casting is purely subjective and whether or not a character is working is purely subjective. Sometimes perfectly good actors get the axe and there’s only so much that can be done about that. The ingredients that have been put into the pot to make the thing work, they have to work as a group, they can’t work just individually.

Reece Thompson
In fact I would say it’s not subjective. Have you ever watched Parks and Rec[reation]?

David Read
I watched the whole thing.

Reece Thompson
Okay, so the first season of that show, there’s something about it that just doesn’t really work.

David Read
A couple of the cast left and then you had a Chris Pratt who was a guest star who became a regular.

Reece Thompson
Okay. There was one guy in the mix, was a great actor, Paul Schneider, that for some reason it just affected the whole dynamic. He’s a great actor but he just didn’t fit. I think the same thing with me on the show, I wasn’t the right fit and so it didn’t work.

David Read
I’m really sorry that you feel that way.

Reece Thompson
That’s okay.

David Read
It makes me feel bad.

Reece Thompson
That’s the business though. It’s not that I feel that way. We were paying attention to what the fans were saying and they didn’t want me there.

David Read
Well, most of those episodes were filmed before anyone got a first look at the show.

Reece Thompson
I think they shot the pilot and then they started shooting the other episodes and then they released them. I know it was close.

David Read
Yeah. Production spun up in February or March and the show was airing by August/September. When I was up there in August/September, for a convention at the same time, the same week that Atlantis was dropping, the visual effects people were working on at that point episodes 10 and 11. So that had been shot. Another example, take a look at Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future.

David Read
Oh yeah. He was good in it.

David Read
He was a perfectly good actor who had some, I think, some really interesting ideas about the story. But that’s not what that story was. His ideas would have been perfectly good in a different film but it’s a hand up comedy. It just didn’t work and they got Michael back.

Reece Thompson
That’s just the nature of the game and I don’t have any animosity about it. I went on to do other things and I’m happy with the way things went.

David Read
Absolutely. You win some, you lose some and you do the work that you can and you move forward.

Reece Thompson
“I am Jinto” became a thing in Vancouver though.

David Read
“I am Jinto.”

Reece Thompson
I worked with a guy who said he was a third camera assistant, he would mark the actors and stuff. He’s kind of a funny guy, a bald guy. He had a very funny sense of humor and he was like, “Yo, I’ve had so many nicknames. They used to call me Jinto.” I was like, “I am Jinto!” He’s like “what?” I’m like “that’s me! I said that.” But it was on other shows that he was on.

David Read
Oh, that’s wild. “She’s pleased to meet you.” I have got some fan questions for you. Lockwatcher wants to know – did anything about that crew or even that set surprise you? It’s quite an operation.

Reece Thompson
Did anything surprise me? Yeah, it was pretty cool. I wonder if that was the first time I’ve been on a set like that? Yeah, it was q pretty cool set. It might have been the first time I was on a set like that. Another thing is that, I forget the girl’s name…

David Read
Rachel Luttrell, Teyla?

Reece Thompson
Is that her name? Yeah. She was training in Kali, her character used these Kali sticks. I started doing it too because the stunt coordinator was there. When she was on set and training I would train with him and stuff.

David Read
James Bamford.

Reece Thompson
Yeah, I was getting ready. I was getting ready. I was preparing to become a man on the show.

David Read
Did you know that there are Stargate novels that feature the character?

Reece Thompson
No, that’s cool.

David Read
Yeah, and as an adult. There are one or two. I was reading it here, let me pull this up.

Reece Thompson
That’s so cool, I didn’t know that. Yeah,

David Read
I haven’t managed to read all of the novels, I’ve read a few of them. There’s one story, you may get a kick out of this. A short story from Stargate Atlantis: Far Horizons: a future Jinto returned through time to the Battle of Atlantis at the end of season one as part of…

Reece Thompson
A bit like Enzo from ReBoot.

David Read
Yeah, yes. Exactly. Sent to ensure Dr. Zelenka survives to repair the control chair in time to save the city. So yeah, it’s about 20 years distant, Jinto has grown up and has a PhD in mechanical engineering from an unnamed university on Earth. He apparently developed a bond with Zelenka and on Earth he goes by the name Dr. Hallingson. That’s the thing that I love about fandom, they take content that was set in place on the show and they bring it new life in works of fiction, in novels, in a number of different mediums. You guys kind of live on forever in one way or another.

Reece Thompson
Yeah, of course.

David Read
I’ve got timmy the squirrel here, excuse me, timmy that squirrel – Did Stargate have any kind of impact on your life from the work that you did? Was it just “this is the job that I’m working on this week?”

Reece Thompson
Uh? Hmm. I’m sure it did, everything does. I don’t know, I just remember having a lot of fun. It was very fun. Everybody was running around with guns and playing soldier and stuff. I was kind of doing that as the character, trying to emulate my heroes in the show. I just remember it being a lot of fun. Everybody was happy to be there because it’s the beginning of the show so everybody’s happy to have a job. It was a very good environment, good energy to be around, you know what I mean? There’s my dad being a fan of SG-1 and him being very excited to be there. There’s a lot of good energy just around the entire project.

David Read
I remember when the show launched and how much anticipation there was in this thing that you guys were creating. There were a lot of people who had a lot riding on it. It was a departure from SG-1 in terms of it was more action oriented and it had a broader visual effects scope. It kind of opened up the world in ways that fans didn’t really expect it. There’s some divide on this in terms of, right down to this day, in terms of what type of show that it was trying to be because every season had almost a different style.

Reece Thompson
I think that’s kind of what I was talking about with my character being pushed out. They weren’t sure what it was; they wanted to make it different from SG-1 but they weren’t sure how so they were kind of experimenting with it.

David Read
Absolutely. General Maximus wanted to know – you were one of the first people to experience the Atlantis set. I kind of already asked you about this in terms of the production value but that Stargate and those corridors and the lighting! As a kid, I would have just been in awe of that space, especially the room where the gate was in. Is it easier to get into character when you’re enveloped in the kind of environment like that? Or are you busy kind of sucking all the detail in and it’s like, “well, I need to do my job while I’m here.”

Reece Thompson
No, it’s so much easier. I don’t know how these Marvel actors do that with all the green screen and stuff. You can do it obviously but I’ve heard from actors that say how they pictured it one way and then it was completely different when they saw the final product. “I wass picturing the wrong thing.” Sometimes that was because they told them it was gonna look like this but then they changed it to something else. I definitely think having the practical set makes our jobs a lot easier and it’s way more fun because it gives you things to actually look at. It’s not like a tennis ball or it’s not like people are looking the wrong [direction]. You have to make sure everyone’s looking at the right thing at the right time, it’s all there, you know?

David Read
What do you think about this move in visual effects, especially toward technology like the Volume where you’re literally enveloped in a space in front of these giant monitors? It’s got to be extremely freeing as a performer?

Reece Thompson
Oh, you mean the…

David Read
LED walls, yeah.

Reece Thompson
Those are awesome. Those are great. I’ve actually tested them out and they’re really cool. It’s a game changer.

David Read
Absolutely.

Reece Thompson
I think there’s also a move happening towards practical effects also, especially with AI technology coming out. I just watched a fan film the other day where it was a post credit scene of Andrew Garfield Spider Man with Spider Gwen. They can totally face swap those actors on to other actors and put them in the world of Spider Man and stuff. What I think is cool about that is that it makes fan films and it makes indie projects go up to the level of a Marvel movie. If we can make a Marvel movie, or make something that’s on the scale of a Marvel movie, for not $300 million or however many much it costs, then the studios are going to be forced to start doing things with practical effects again. They have been doing that, the new Dungeons & Dragons movie had a lot of practical effects. I think also Doctor Strange did a lot of practical effects. People respond to it like, “oh wow! That’s a real thing.” It’s cool to see. I also think with the advancement in animatronics as well, my girlfriend and I just went to Disneyland, I don’t know if you’ve been to the Star Wars world.

David Read
Do they have baby Yoda yet?

Reece Thompson
I don’t know.

David Read
Okay, the animatronics are insane.

Reece Thompson
Grogu?

David Read
Grogu, that’s right.

Reece Thompson
On the Star Wars ride there was an animatronic that at first I thought it was an actor. I want to see more of that, I want to see more of that in the big movies; more animatronics, more real effects and stuff. I think that will set the studio pictures apart from the fanmade indie projects that are coming out.

David Read
It’s absolutely wild the stuff that’s coming out, especially Rise of the Resistance.

Reece Thompson
That’s the one, yeah.

David Read
Actors have been replaced by animatronics in some of these sequences. The cars go into the bridge of the Destroyer and there’s people up there that are moving and talking but they’re robots.

Reece Thompson
They’re not replaced.

David Read
That’s true.

Reece Thompson
You go into some of the older rides they still have, Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s all animatronics. It’s not replacing anybody, that’s just what…you know.

David Read
Yeah, one hasn’t been substituted. That’s correct.

Reece Thompson
In fact, that ride actually had some of the most actors on it. There were Generals that came in and stuff like that so that ridet actually had more actors than a lot of the rides.

David Read
Because you have to have people moved around to control the crowds and keep the story moving and acting. It’s one of the most amazing things that I’ve ever experienced, anyone who gets the chance to do it.

Reece Thompson
Yes definitely. You were talking about the scope of the Atlantis set, the scope of that ride blew my mind.

David Read
It uses every trick in Disney’s book in terms of everything that they’ve learned over 60, 70 years of ride making, is executed in 15 minutes. It’s absolutely wild. Tracy wanted to know – in your free time, what genre do you prefer to watch or read or play?

Reece Thompson
I write. I actually have a website now, I’ve created my own universe, okay. It’s based off of Marvel and DC and I’ve just kind of reverse engineered the whole format of that. They never planned on these characters ever interacting with one another, they were creating standalone characters and individual stories and then eventually decided to combine them. In a sense it’s kind of a mess because everybody has a different thing. Thor’s hammer is made out of a different metal than Captain America’s shield and so is Wolverines claws even though they’re all kind of the same thing.

David Read
Adamantium, Vibranium or something. Can you share the website with me so I can see it?

Reece Thompson
Yeah, it’s called the thepressguardian.com. The storyline is that, it’s not revealed on the website, but the backstory is that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs brought this element to Earth that then created all of these beings with different abilities. I broke down every type of superhero into six types; human, mutant, AI, E.T, Mystic and freak. A freak is if you get your powers from a freak accident or a medical experiment, like that.

David Read
News from Another Universe, is this it?

Reece Thompson
Yeah.

David Read
This is cool man.

Reece Thompson
Thanks. Once the AI art came out the technology caught up with where I was at. I was always having a hard time, I was like, “I don’t know what to do with this. How to do it as a comic book or…all this stuff.” Once Midjourney came out I was able to actually creat everything myself.

David Read
This is I think what the frontier of creativity looks like, where we use artificial intelligence to help illustrate the ideas that are in our head. I love this one, Mollusk, the Champion of Peace: A Transformative Act in Troubled Times. You got this alien creature standing on the ground surrounded by police.

Reece Thompson
Yes, so he’s the first ever pacifist superhero and he’s also the first mutant in my universe. His backstory is that he was a caterpillar forming a chrysalis when the asteroid hit and a fragment of amorphite, which is my element, got into his chrysalis. He evolved into a humanoid and then crawled his way out of the Earth and then joined society.

David Read
Wow. Are our these done like newsreels in terms of set in the world of this world?

Reece Thompson
Yeah. The next article I’m working on right now is about an ultra marathon sprint. I’m gonna do it as an article but I’m going to use it to pitch a game as well which is a racing game where they’re running.

David Read
Okay, dude, this is really cool. I’m going to share this in our video feed. I’m going to publish this. If anyone wants to find out more information about that they can click it in the description below by the time they watch this. I know we’re live right now but people will pick it up later. That’s really awesome. So how far away are you from developing the game?

Reece Thompson
I’m not like a programmer or anything like that. I’m gonna put the article out and then use that to send to somebody and try and find somebody to make it for me.

David Read
Absolutely. That’s legit man. The frontier for creativity is approaching boundlessness. As long as you have the right people, and you can find them anywhere online in terms of hooking up with someone who has your similar creative taste and a direction that you want to go in; you can pretty much pull anything off. So can they reach you through this portal at the press guardian?

Reece Thompson
Yeah.

David Read
Okay, cool, man. Absolutely. This is great. Well, Reece, it has been really awesome to have you on and to explore your creativity as a person a little bit. I’m really thankful that you brought this website up. I’m going to go down the rabbit hole here and read some of these.

Reece Thompson
Nice.

David Read
It’s so important to have a creative outlet which you can sink your creative juices into because sometimes it’s like, especially with everything that we’ve been going through the past couple of years here, we’ve got to do something. We’ve all been hunkered down. Alright brother, I appreciate you coming on and sharing this.

Reece Thompson
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

David Read
I appreciate your time. Thank you. I’m gonna go ahead and wrap up the show on this end here. Thank you again for stopping by.

Reece Thompson
Yeah, of course. Anytime.

David Read
Be well Reece.

Reece Thompson
You too.

David Read
Reece Thompson, Jinto in Stargate Atlantis.

Reece Thompson
I am Jinto. I am Jinto.

David Read
This was really cool. There is a lot here so if you were in the chat, if you’re in the YouTube chat, you can go ahead and follow the link over to thepressguardian.com. I will go ahead and put a link to that in the description below. We’ve got a number of shows coming up for you on Dial the Gate as we move into the last month of season three in production. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the content that we’ve been putting out over these extra four months as we’ve extended the show. I certainly enjoyed making it but I am ready for a break. That’s the direction that we’re gonna be heading. My appreciation to my moderating team; Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, Reece, Sommer. You guys are the best, you guys make the show possible. My archivist team, they’re doing a wonderful job transcribing the show right now. We’ve got a number of interesting episodes coming up for you and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you. My Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey and my web developer, Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he keeps Dial the Gate up and running. Stick around on Dial the Gate because we’ve got more heading your way for October. My name is David Read and I’ll see you on the other side.