The visual effects supervisor behind Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis returns to Dial the Gate to present animatics from “Rising,” images from production, and share more stories about working in his industry.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:01 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome and Episode Outline
2:03 – Welcome Back, John!
2:26 – Working Despite the Strikes
4:11 – Vanishing Work
5:58 – Getting People Back After Strikes
7:35 – Digital Slaves
9:44 – Finding the Right Talent
11:20 – Is the Industry Getting Better or Worse?
13:45 – Time Given to Work on Visual Effects
17:51 – Clean-Up Shots
22:40 – Stepping Toward Perfection
25:36 – Ignoring Notes
27:40 – The Velcro Dog
32:13 – Archival Atlantis Content
35:52 – Wraith Hive Ship
37:06 – Atlantis Underwater
40:15 – Sky Patterns
42:44 – The Puddle Jumper
44:04 – Shooting Water Elements
46:52 – Setting off Fires
47:53 – Test Colors and ADR Problems
51:24 – The Wraith Keeper’s First Victim
52:36 – Wraith Ghost Elements
54:17 – Practical Atlantis Piers
56:46 – Stargate’s Group Picture
58:20 – Ray Tracing the Elevator Shaft
1:01:00 – Rendering Shots
1:01:52 – Long Shots in Atlantis
1:04:00 – Construction Cranes
1:08:48 – Additional Atlantis Photography
1:14:15 – Water from Practical Piers
1:16:37 – Water from Practical Piers Part 2
1:17:58 – In-House VFX Team
1:18:58 – Additional Atlantis Photography Part 2
1:19:30 – “Rising” Advertising in Los Angeles
1:21:06 – Up-Res Resolution for the Atlantis Pilot
1:23:10 – Animatics for “Rising”
1:28:50 – Pre-Viz of the City Rising
1:41:11 – Image Composition
1:42:30 – No Location Gate for Atlantis
1:44:44 – Practical LED Glyphs
1:49:56 – Long-Lasting Relationships
1:51:30 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:52:15 – End Credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Welcome to Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. John Gajdecki, visual effects supervisor for Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis is back and he’s got some Atlantis treats to show you, having to do mostly with the pilot for Stargate Atlantis, Rising. The stuff that we are going to show you is gonna blow your mind. A lot of animatics, a lot of behind the scenes footage, he’s been really good about sharing this content with us. But before I bring him in, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this available 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 guests changes. Clips from this stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. This is a pre-recorded show because John had a lot of assets to show us and I wanted to make sure that we got the maximum quality available. You’re not gonna be able to ask him questions because this is, from your perspective, all in the past. The moderators will just be hanging out with you to enjoy the show with you. We’ll have John back later on, probably back in season four, to do another direct Q&A. For this episode, this is much of a show and tell so let’s go ahead and bring him in. John Gajdecki, visual effects supervisor, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis. Sir, welcome back. I am thrilled to have you back. I had such a good time the last time you were around. It was just like a matter of time, “pkay, we got to get this guy on the show because he’s just way too much fun.” Thank you for being here.

John Gajdecki
Sorry it took us so long to get back together.

David Read
No, it’s all good. The WGA strike is evidently resolving. SAG is another story. How is work for you right now? Do you have any updates on your front in terms of the movement of stuff, in terms of how this has continued to affect your world? I’m really interested in your perspective on this.

John Gajdecki
Well, screaming nightmare was the term that came to mind. This isn’t my first strike, I’ve been doing this for a while. Every 10 years or so the industry absolutely shits itself and this is just one of those many, many events. It was a problem because the writers and the actors went at the same time, other years it was the directors. Sometimes they didn’t even need to strike, just the threat of the strike back, 10 or 20 years ago, threw the industry into such a tizzy that everybody started stockpiling product. Even if there was no strike, it was still slow afterwards. One of the strikes led to reality TV which was an unexpected consequence that I think everybody came to regret, except for, I don’t know, my wife and your wife and everybody’s families who watch the stuff. The writers strike, the actors strike, was a problem for us, it shut down most of North American production. Last year I was on Superman and Lois, the show came to an end and there’s no word whether it’s coming back. I’m sure it’s coming back but some shows are just gone. What happened to me personally was we had…there was just a complete…the work just vanished for a while. That was great because I had finished Superman and Lois, it was an intense year. We, the family and I, we rented a house to kind of take the summer off. We were going to visit London and Paris this summer but instead we went to this little town, Point Roberts, because it was way less expensive. You just have to start thinking in a completely different way. We did work on an Apple show, a show called Bad Monkey, which will be coming out. Normally we don’t do cleanups, they had a lot of cleanups, the producers. I knew them from a long time ago; we worked on a bunch of MGM shows actually. Stargate and Atlantis and Outer Limits, they all came back to save me again because some of those producers were on this show. We did three episodes in total just and it kept a couple of the artists busy. We are working on First Nations feature right now. Normally they wouldn’t be able to do this amount of visual effects work but they caught us at a good time. My crew and I were like, “well, we can give these guys a deal and do something fun” and that’s what we’re doing. They’re getting more shots, we think it’s going really well and I’m keeping my artists busy. Which for me is really the most important thing, keeping that team busy so when the industry comes back full force they haven’t scattered and gone to other companies and things. That’s on everybody’s mind because so many companies have had to let so many people go that way. We know with the strikes ending there’s probably going to be a boom, “can we get our people back?” Just that same team, there’s that chemistry that builds up over years that you don’t want to start building up again.

David Read
Right. Absolutely. If you’ve got the talent,you want to make sure that you can keep the talent but they’ve got to feed their families. You can’t blame them for going out and finding work and if they happen to fall in love with wherever they are in terms of scheduling or in terms of the amount of hours that are put in or what have you, what can you do? There’s only so much you can do, you have to start from square one.

John Gajdecki
The visual effects industry is famous, justly and unjustly, for the crazy work hours. I know that it’s been a problem worldwide, basically since it started. In part because expectations are really high, in part because some times you can’t make people stop working and in part because production puts so much pressure on you to do this outstanding work. You’re afraid that if we don’t do it, someone else is going to do it. There’s all kinds of reasons why we work the hours that we do. Of course, now we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum. Don’t really remember where I was going with that.

David Read
Feast or famine did. Are you aware of the film Sausage Party?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
So you heard about the practical slave conditions that some of those visual effects guys were under? I heard it was just like one of the worst.

John Gajdecki
I believe it, a friend of mine had a company that they called Digital Slaves. Every shot, this was maybe 15, 20 years ago, every shot was $1,000, it didn’t matter what it was. From a producer’s point of view you go there, you know you’re getting people who are just out of school and off you go. It’s funny because I’ve found that giving people better working conditions is more successful than taking advantage of them. There was a movie we did a long time ago where I ended up working six days straight, I didn’t go home for six days. The overtime that we paid was astronomical but that’s what it took to get it done. I suspect when the industry kicks off again there’s going to be that kind of pressure again to work these hours to hit these deadlines for shows that are way behind schedule. I think there’s a much greater awareness now that that’s not good for people. It’s not, what’s the word, legal. In fact, on Superman and Lois, the show that we just did, there was incredible efforts where and they were always successful. We’re not doing overtime, you need permission to do overtime, you’re not allowed to work the weekend. You can’t do that without permission and any work that you do obviously you get paid for that time. Track your hours, we want to make sure everyone’s taken care of. I tend to find people on their way to Star Wars and on their way back from Star Wars. That’s kind of how I phrase it, Star Wars is really just a metaphor. All these people who are starting out, I look for the really talented artists. The ones who are just out of school, those people who just have it but haven’t been discovered by the big companies. We look for those people because I can pay them to do overtime on the weekend and they’re still cheaper than my lead artists who we keep to 40 hours. We find these people, we nurture them, they might work with me for three years, five years, six years, and then they go off to ILM, they go off to DD, they work on these really big movies where we know the hours can be extremely long. They do that for five years, 10 years, whatever and then I catch them on their way back. Now we have lots of experience, now I have lots of talent and a track record and “I have a family. I don’t want to work weekends, I don’t want to work nights” and I’m like, “absolutely, this is how we’re going to structure your deal.” So we’ve got the young people starting out and we’ve got the really experienced people coming back and that’s sort of how I structure my teams.

David Read
Okay, because they are at two different points in their life with two different sets of life needs and two different sets of life experiences which weave into the work.

John Gajdecki
Correct, so you you use them in different ways. You know what? If people are happy, they do good work and that’s all it is.

David Read
With the advances in the technology and the internal politics of the studios and everything that you deal with as it is, are things going to get better in your mind or worse? You can you can produce far more content, far more amazing visuals, far faster than you ever did before. But is the workload keeping up with that? Is it scaling together ir are you finding it to be untenable long term?

John Gajdecki
No. Good question. The arc of history bends towards justice,

David Read
It does. MLK, absolutely.

John Gajdecki
Well, okay, it used to be and I believe it will again. I’m not talking about the visual effects industry there. There’s been a long term push to make the industry more sustainable and that’s going to continue, it has to continue. In part, that’s part of the Western experience. We do pay people fairly and we do take care of people and we build systems and we put systems in place that do that. Especially with the big US shows that I work on, there’s a lot of effort that’s put into making sure…there’s no appetite for taking advantage of people, it’s just not there. There’s no upscale to them to do this because of a whole bunch of reasons. It’s the right thing to do, bad PR, which we’ve seen, and quite frankly when people are taken advantage of they often don’t do great work in the long run. We know as a society that taking care of people is the right way to go; making sure that they’re paid for all of their hours, because that’s one thing that comes up a lot. Making sure that they’re not working ridiculous hours, making sure that there’s time off; that leads to quality on the screen. But the other thing that leads to quality is time and that’s where streaming shows really have the network shows beat. They will say, “well, we’re going to spend a year doing the show.” When I was working on Project Bluebook, there’s a picture from it back there, one of my favorite shows of all time to work on with A&E. We had a year, we had X amount of money to work on this show, it was 10 episodes, we could really made sure that everything looked great. You work on something and you “huh [uncertain], I’m going to put that away and work on something else, I’ll come back to that on Monday.” And then we look at it again and go “oh, well clearly that’s the problem,” something that you don’t see when you’re buried in it. Sometimes on network shows when the deadlines are so tight you’re just going, going, going, going, going and you don’t have that time to reflect. Again, when we did Superman last year we tried to leapfrog episodes with teams. This team is working on the forest fire scene from episode six and they’re not going to work on episode five and they’re not going to work on episode seven and maybe not even eight. We could set small task forces, small Tiger Teams, whatever want to call it, and give them a chunk and absolutely do your best not to bug them when the shit is hitting the fan on some other episode. You’ve got to resist the “Oh, can everybody jump on this for a few minutes?” and of course sometimes you do. But you know, there’s ways of structuring projects. It’s interesting the conversation we’re having because in light of the Ukrainian war something you hear a lot is “professionals talk about logistics whereas amateurs talk about strategy.” “Oh, why didn’t they attack here? Why didn’t they do that?” My daughter makes fun of me when I watch World War II documentaries, she’s like, “is every dad on Earth studying for some exam that’s coming up that we don’t know about?”

David Read
My father, the exact same example can apply to him in terms of “what are you studying for? All this absorption, what is this coming to fruition to?”

John Gajdecki
Really funny because I can’t help it. I’m a big fan of the logistics behind D-day for instance, that’s kind of one of my things. The professionals talk about logistics and that’s really, in a lot of ways, what visual effects is. That’s certainly what filmmaking is. It’s “how are we going to schedule it to get the most out of our people? How are we going to schedule their hours to get the best performance? When are we going to shoot things so that we have time to test?” The art, I find, happens very quickly at the very beginning. We talk about the show, I know what it’s going to look like and then I spend the rest of the year living up to what I promised all those months ago through the medium of money and people and times.I really like doing that, that’s actually one of my favorite things. It’s not just, “let’s make the Stargate a little brighter.” I don’t tell people what to do, in a lot of ways. I tell people what order to do it. “You need to work on the gate because they need it to do this.” We need this, so once everyone knows that, the system actually works fairly smoothly. I remember many times being out with my friends and they’re like, “aren’t you delivering this week?” I said, “yeah, everything’s going great.” If you organize the shit out of it at the beginning, aside from the crazy, unexpected things that guaranteed is going to happen, you’re more or less going to have a smooth delivery.

David Read
Begin with the end in mind, that’s the axiom that I live by. The things that you don’t anticipate, clean up shots?

John Gajdecki
You always know there’s gonna be some of them.

David Read
Oh, so you build that into the equation?

John Gajdecki
God, some producers hate that. I’ll put in $20,000. “I’ve got $20,000 for cleanup.” They’re like, “what’s this?” “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to need cleanup but I know there’s going to be some.” Some producers are like, “yep, okay” and others are like “no, take it out because we want to approve it later.” It’s like “sure, absolutely, good idea, whatever you want.”

David Read
Yeah. “Yes or yes, but…” John. I had a conversation with Bruce Woloshyn.

John Gajdecki
There you go, that’s why all these cliches are all familiar to me.

David Read
About 20 years ago now and I had a mindset of, “whatever money is pumped at you it ends up on the screen in a spectacular way.” He said, “no, it’s not true.” A lot of of their work was rig removal, there were cables in shots and they had to digitally erase them. He said, “that’s hard and if you do it right, no one will ever know that you touched it.” I have to wonder how often that comes into the equation for you guys where it’s like, “there are shots here that we’ve got to take these elements out. This can’t exist.” And if there are moving elements behind it, oh my god! You have no point of reference? How do you just not want to just bash your head into a wall sometimes?

John Gajdecki
Well, sometimes questionable decisions are made for honorable reasons. There was this project I was on, there was going to be a lot of water. They got these plastic green screens and they put them all up. We shot on these plastic green screens and they didn’t look as good as fabric ones except if they got wet, the plastic greenskins would have looked better than the fabric ones. Turns out they really didn’t get wet. So we had these wrinkly green screens, which means they’re not really green screens, which means an enormous amount of work went out for roto. We know why we made the decision, we expected there to be more water. There wasn’t but now we were going down the roto route anyway. Probably 10% of that episode’s budget just went to roto. Not only that, there’s the time involved. It was a huge episode so I had to hire a roto producer just to come in…That’s a crazy title; roto producer, but that was essentially what they did. Their job was make sure that every piece of roto got packaged up, sent to a vendor, bid. Did they get the full res plates? Have they come back? Have they been checked? That whole process has to happen before the artists really get into their shots too far. It was a full time job for about six weeks for one person.

David Read
So you’re talking about rotoscoping?

John Gajdecki
Just managing sending the roto out to companies that would do it. The way I structure my teams; my teams do the art. It’s not worth me working on cleanup. It’s not what I’m hired for, it’s not what I’m good at. We send that out, there’s great companies in India, there’s great companies all over the world now; they do a fantastic job, the price is good. They’re not eligible for tax credits which is a part of the moviemaking equation but you run the numbers and you say these “guys are going to do it, they’re going to do it in time. We’re not going to do it in time, this is the solution.” Now of course we use them for bigger things because they’ve grown up and they have more experience and that’s worked out. But honest to god, full time job for six weeks just managing the roto. But yeah, what Bruce is saying is true. The Bad Monkey project was essentially all cleanup. The character wore sunglasses, it was just part of the character, well now there’s a camera crew reflected in the sunglasses. There’s nothing you can do about that except shoot a clean plate and know that visual effects is going to deal with it later. That’s the character, that’s what they want, that’s what they can have. It’s a process and of course you’re right, the audience will never see it. They’ll just look at that and go “oh look, it’s my favorite actor so and so.”

David Read
Exactly. You look at a number of old film and television shows, you got a number of them wearing sunglasses, you see the behind the scenes people, you see the light rigs. Is it just because we’re in such high resolution now that they care more or because we have the bandwidth to care more because the visual effects are sophisticated enough to go in there and really scoop them out and replace the plate on these lenses that people are wearing?

John Gajdecki
That’s a really good question because when you watch Jurassic Park there’s rain on the windshield, there’s not rain on the windshield. Here comes the T. rex and rain on the windshield again. Nobody cares! But now, of course somebody’s gonna see it in editorial and they’re gonna say…Oh, your Enterprise is glowing. The green light. That’s hilarious.

David Read
It’s the starboard anti-collision pylon. Squirrel, John. That’s funny,

John Gajdecki
Me and my dog. It’s a weird thing that some of the stuff we fix…I get it. It’s one step towards perfection but I tend to focus more on the art than the technical stuff. What I found on different projects is when I start getting technical notes, in other words, I submit a shot for review and I get a note and honest to god a note we got, it’s like, “there’s micro blocking in the highlight compression.”

David Read
Oh for heaven’s sake.

John Gajdecki
Yes. For “heaven’s sake,” those are the exact words that I used. You have to resist getting angry and what I found over the years is the reason they’re saying that is there’s something wrong with the shot but they don’t know what to say. That’s not a mental process that they’re going through, they’re not aware of it. There’s something wrong with “oh look, there’s microblocking, if we clean up the compression, the shot will look good.” Nooo. “If we make it lighter or darker, that might get what you want.” Maybe we want more contrast, artistic things. Whenever I start getting technical notes I’m very aware that the client doesn’t like the shot but they can’t say what it is. Those are really some of the most difficult things because your job of course is to deliver what’s in their mind. The reason you work with certain people is because you’re good at divining that. On Stargate and Atlantis I liked working with Brad, Brad liked working with me. Over the years and probably from the get go, his aesthetic is similar to my aesthetic. “Oh, you want it like this, this and this.” Oh, I have a picture right here. Brad Wright, Robert Cooper, Bruce Woloshyn. Back to where we were a minute ago.

David Read
Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
That’s us looking at, clearly by the smile, some of our successful shots on Atlantis.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
But yeah, it’s when I start getting those technical notes, that’s when I realize something’s up, nobody knows what’s wrong and I’m gonna have to dig into this.

David Read
Have you ever ignored a note? “Oh okay, they’re venting. I know these guys. I’ve been working with them for a while now. All right, we’re just going to file this under ‘they’re venting’?”

John Gajdecki
Oh, there’s me and Robert, probably after I parked in his parking spot. He came upstairs one day “some asshole’s in my parking spot.” I get it because there’s not a lot of parking spots. And I didn’t [inaudible], told him really quickly, ran upstairs and it’s like “ah, busted!” Do we ignore notes? We try not to, of course, because there’s always a reason for the notes. Sometimes I will try and talk people out of the notes because sometimes we’re going down a certain creative path and they’ll say, “well, hey, let’s change this from red to blue.” In your head you’re going “this impacts 25 shots. Are you sure you want to do that? Let me tell you why.” I found that that’s a really successful way to approach it is, “do we want to do it? Let me tell you why and then if you need to of course we’ll do it. But these are the consequences.” As you said a few minutes ago, the only two right answers in the film business are “yes and yes, but…” You can have anything you want………..but…

David Read
It’s gonna cost ya.

John Gajdecki
Gonna deliver late, it’s going to impact all of these other shots down the road. One gentleman, Jeff Kleiser, who worked with us on Slither many years ago. He had this thing he called the velcro dog, that was what they called it. He would put something into a shot so the producers see it and ask him to remove it. So it’s Velcro and it’s the dog, it’s there deliberately to be removed so that they get to have some input on a shot.

David Read
Oh my gosh.

John Gajdecki
So that’s a secret, share, I just told a million people. But that’s sort of what we came to call it, it’s like, “oh, what a great name.”

David Read
No, absolutely. We have all been in situations where we have worked with someone or we’ve dealt with someone who…They may not be intending it as such but from our perspective it’s very much “okay, what you just did is solely, from my point of view, to justify your own employment.” Because there are some people who are uncomfortable with saying, “I have no feedback on this X, Y or Z,” and you have to throw that Velcro dog at them so that they can say, “okay, yes, that.” Now the flip side of that is, what do you do if they didn’t catch it? “I’ll just go ahead and take that out. But I like that velcro dog.”

John Gajdecki
Yes, there’s a 5%, 10%, chance that you’re going to absolutely screw yourself that way. What I do in those cases is I’ll say, “hey, there’s this thing we were thinking of fixing. We’ve probably already fixed it, we took this thing out. What do you think of that?” And they’re going “oh, yeah, okay.”

David Read
That’s funny John.

John Gajdecki
What you were saying a minute ago, there’s another way of looking at it. It’s not that they have nothing to add but the way the industry is structured is producers who are on their way up can often only say “no.” In other words, they don’t have the authority yet to approve something but you have to go through them to get to the people who approve things. You get to this one person and they’re like, “nope, I don’t like this”. “Okay, let me try…” “Nope, I don’t like that.” Then when they’re done saying no, I can show it to the showrunners. By that point the shot is sometimes no longer what was originally discussed. What I do to deal with that because it’s a very real thing, is I’ll say in one of the very first meetings, we’re talking about the budget, we’re talking about what we’re going to cost, this is what we estimate it’s going to be, we’ve included all of the rig removal and cleanup allowances and everything. What I say and it works so well, I say, “for every person in the approval chain, increase the budget by 5%.” You see the whole room just come to a halt and they’re like, “yeah.” They talk and “so and so’s in charge.”

David Read
Yep. It’s politics, you have to play the game.

John Gajdecki
Yes and it only works if you do it right at the beginning.

David Read
Okay. Yeah, you’re establishing expectations.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. That’s right. As you’re aware, it’s all politics. The art happens pretty quickly, it’s logistics and politics and if you’re working with people that you like, that’s when these shows are fun. That’s when these shows are fun. If you get in a group where it’s like, “ah, I am not enjoying this,” it’s mostly because someone’s trying to figure out if they get you coffee or you get them coffee. It’s like, “no, you give me coffee, that’s the way it is.” Except I’ve never had a coffee.

David Read
Richard Hudolin and I had a similar conversation a few months ago. It’s like, “as long as the work gets done I’ll go get you the coffee, I don’t care.” Geez, that’s funny. What do you have to show for us? I’m curious to see what you’ve dug around and found.

John Gajdecki
After we did the Stargate thing I was digging around, I was doing a seminar at one of the local schools. When it’s not busy I like to go to the schools and talk to the students because I can tell them things about the business and it keeps me busy, but it’s also good for them. I found some Atlantis stuff, not a lot, but a bit. I thought I would show it to you. Let me show you first just some of the pictures because they’re kind of fun to look at.

David Read
This is one of the original concepts for the city.

John Gajdecki
This was the first concept art for the city of Atlantis

David Read
Is this James Robbins?

John Gajdecki
It would have come from the art department, I don’t know who, it was not signed. Okay, basically they said, “we took a plate, we put some buildings on it. We knew that you’re on the show and you’re going to take it and you’re going to run with it so good luck with that.” It was a stand in peace, they never intended the city to look like this. This was just an early early concept art.

David Read
I can see some of the some of the smaller slanted buildings though. They were beginning to get that Frank Lloyd Wright influence.

John Gajdecki
That’s right, you see a lot of that and just lots of the detail. We ended up with a much bigger city, much smaller buildings overall.

David Read
Yes.

John Gajdecki
But yeah, this was the first thing that I saw really when I started the show. This is where we started taking it. Matthew Talbot-Kelly is an artist here in Vancouver and I hired him, we had worked together many times. There was a shot in Stargate, I remember we looked at it last time, where the helmet opened up.

David Read
Yes.

John Gajdecki
Matthew Talbot-Kelly was the one who did that shot. He and I designed the city and this was just one of our sort of sketches. There is a snowflake book that the art department had, I don’t remember who the author was. It became the inspiration for a lot of the design work on the show, so we were looking at these different things.

David Read
Bridget was talking about that influence.

John Gajdecki
That’s right, yeah. We’re just kind of taking the model and then rendering out interesting frames. They would have been taking the model. We probably sent them our model and they would have started doing these concept pieces with them.

David Read
Wow. Look at that.

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
Getting some Coruscant vibes.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, way before they had it. Where do you go with this stuff, right? There’s only so many ways to go.

David Read
That’s it. It’s a futuristic looking city.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. It’s funny, because futuristic cities, they always imagine that they’re futuristic cities without…Blade Runner more than anything got it. You’re gonna keep building buildings but 90% of what’s here is from 100, 200 years ago. It’s the way it goes. There’s the

David Read
The hive.

John Gajdecki
Hive. Yep.

David Read
Absolutely. It was there so long the mountainside grew on top of it.

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
It was a great idea.

John Gajdecki
Which is really 30 or 40 years. During the Second World War there was the Empire Flying School where Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, they all started training pilots to send to England as fast as we could. There’s one just a few miles from where I live, all the buildings are gone but the roads are still there and it’s all covered in trees.

David Read
Yeah, it happens fast.

John Gajdecki
It happens fast. It’s spectacular and they’ll have pictures. “Here’s a picture, here’s the building, here’s the hurricanes that were lined up.” Of course we didn’t get Spitfires here because they were needed where you guys were. But yeah, it’s just fascinating how quickly nature takes it back.

David Read
The Wraith fhive ship is an organic ship so I’m sure that its nature contributed to the acceleration. It all makes sense.

John Gajdecki
Underwater. Yeah, that was pretty fun.

David Read
We talked with Cooper and I talked with Brad Wright about it at some point where it’s like, “we’d love to see a window into the outer world at some point in this first season.” By the time they got to the end of it, getting ready for the Battle of Atlantis, they couldn’t afford to put a window in.

John Gajdecki
They actually had one window shot in the pilot.

David Read
The pilot, yes.

John Gajdecki
You see it and then there’s this explosion and some bubbles come up. The thing about visual effects is that for every shot there’s a look development that’s attached to it. You can say, “oh, it’s just one shot” but really creating the look might be nine tenths of the budget. At that point you might as well put in four more shots because we’ve done all the design work and that’s where the real money is. That’s one of the other things that I talk about when we’re in production meetings, especially early ones. Every new look, there’s a cost associated with it. If you want to save money you can’t just cut one shot out of every one. You really want to cut one entire look, whether it’s a location we go to or a window we’re looking out of or something that we’re flying around in. Whatever it is, to really affect the budget you got to cut one of those.

David Read
Because it in itself has a whole design process.

John Gajdecki
Correct and that’s takes time to get it right.

David Read
The rising.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. The sky is interesting because that’s a picture that I shot. I think it was in San Diego and we used it.

David Read
I think it’s in the show.

John Gajdecki
Oh, it’s totally in the show.

David Read
Yeah. Once the city is on the surface, that wide shot, that looks exactly like that.

John Gajdecki
Well, I’ll tell you because that was all very deliberate. When I designed the scene of the city rising…because this picture was sun over here but blue over there. We deliberately started all the shots into the blue as if the sun hadn’t come up yet. We started there and as the scene progressed the camera…So the camera’s always coming around, it’s always moving, is always circling and by the end we’ve got this beautiful sunrise shot. That was very deliberate, that didn’t happen by accident.

David Read
Wow. So that’s San Diego sky?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
Probably.

David Read
Probably?

John Gajdecki
I shoot a lot of skies. There’s one that I remember and it was just beautiful and that’s the one we used here.

David Read
My favorite shot from that whole sequence – you have a shot underwater, it’s a view, it’s like a first person perspective. Someone might as well be standing on the top of one of the buildings, pointing a camera up as it’s breaking through the water. That is my favorite shot from that entire sequence because it’s just “wow.”

John Gajdecki
This is one of the skies that we were kicking around. I think what we did is we basically did a whole series of sky treatments then we went to Brad and Robert and said, “here’s some different looks and this is the one we like. This one didn’t work as well for X number of reasons so we probably use it somewhere else.” The beginning of these shows, that’s when they’re really fun because you’re spending all this time doing the design work, on creating the look and getting them set up.

David Read
Can you zoom in a little?

John Gajdecki
Oh sorry, yeah.

David Read
Thanks man. Wow. Yeah, that’s it’s. That’s 99% of the way there.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, there’s these big radiator fins that we had on three of the six piers, we called them. There’s the gaps in the piers, the buildings, there was that recess. The building in the middle is taller, I think we ended up a little taller in the end. But yeah, that’s kind of it.

David Read
Wow. That’s really spectacular.

John Gajdecki
It was fun.

David Read
End shot of the pilot.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. These were all just sketches that we did early on and then we sort of assigned them to different places in the episode.

David Read
Wow. That was a major feat, that two hour pilot. I can’t imagine how much that must have cost. I know that Star Trek was given anywhere, some episodes, $3 milion or $4 million. I know in some cases Atlantis had in the neighborhood of two and change. That’s not a lot of wiggle room in the scheme of things.

John Gajdecki
No, you can’t make a lot of mistakes. You have to get to the art pretty quickly and I think because we all worked together before that, it was easier for us.

David Read
Yeah. There’s a shorthand that saves time and money.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. Time is more important than money.

David Read
For sure.

John Gajdecki
For sure.

David Read
Beautiful.

John Gajdecki
These are sketches from the art department.

David Read
Absolutely. Bridget’s ship based on a shuttle in a loom.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, just genius. It’s interesting because the one that we built, as always in the movie business, it’s bigger on the inside. It’s like a Japanese car; it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

David Read
You got to film inside of it.

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
Wow, very cool.

John Gajdecki
That’s pretty cool.

David Read
Yeah, it was just an elevation of the technical sophistication of everything that had been built up. Oh, look at this. We’ve got it…okay.

John Gajdecki
Surprised I have some of this stuff. This is pretty interesting, you can see they put it on wheels so they can move it around the soundstage. All the practical considerations.

David Read
It was cut in half, I think as well, wasn’t it? Doesn’t it divide into two?

John Gajdecki
Yeah.

David Read
It had to get on a truck.

John Gajdecki
It sure did and I have some pictures of it on location shortly.

David Read
Okay. Hey John.

John Gajdecki
That’s an Arri[flex] 35-III on its side. We were probably shooting water falling. This is me in the parking lot, I’ve got my Stargate hat, that’s the Bridge studios in the background. I’m setting up the shot, blearly enjoying what I’m doing that day.

David Read
Does that say “fat bastard?”

John Gajdecki
It sure does.

David Read
So you shot water elements for the pilot?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
Wait till you see some of the pictures, you’ll go “I get it, I see what you did.”

David Read
Hello Martin Wood and there’s a T-1000 right there.

John Gajdecki
Yep, there sure is. Me in the background. Look at that movie camera. Look how big they were.

David Read
It’s enormous. So this is HD right?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, it’s the lenses. Most people today shoot on Primes but back in the old film days we’d have these enormous zoom lenses because the cameras with 1000 foot mag were so big. Camera assitants were chosen because they had arms like tree trunks to carry these things around.

David Read
Yeah, they had to be able to handle it throughout the day and not need a chiropractor every other day.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. For me, I could barely do it and I’m 6ft 4. There’s definitely been a change in the composition of the camera department now that we’ve gone digital. A lot more women in the department, a lot more people who are not enormous because lifting these huge cameras isn’t a thing anymore.

David Read
Yeah, the technology evolves.

John Gajdecki
Now this is in the Wraith…I don’t remember the name of the set.

David Read
It’s like a dining room. It’s where the keeper/queen was. He’s about to get his life sucked out of him.

John Gajdecki
Yup. Interesting story and I can’t show you, I haven’t found the quicktime yet. The set was round when they designed it. I remember, I got the plans, I gave it to one of my 3d people, they built the set, I took the camera, I set it up, I remember that they wanted that long shot where it’s somebody’s POV. I showed them, they said, “we’re not going to be able to get that shot.” But then I showed them a different pre-vis where I stretched the set and they said, “if we can afford to make the set longer i gives us a way better shot.” That was just a cool example of the visual effects department pre-vising something and helping production out.

David Read
Wow. Okay.

John Gajdecki
So that’s what we did. Special effects. This was the Wraith planet after the Wraith ship crashed. This was back before climate change where you could set off a fire in a forest like this and the city wouldn’t just shut you down two seconds later.

David Read
So this is not allowed anymore?

John Gajdecki
No.

David Read
So it’s all digital now?

John Gajdecki
We’ve done it. We did something like this last year but you have to clean the forest out so there’s really no fuel. It’s not that you have to be safer, we were safe back then too. It’s just in Vancouver when it rains nothing can burn rights. It doesn’t rain as much as it used to so you just have to be much more aware of it.

David Read
Well, ever since the whole baby gender reveal everyone is hyper vigilant about that now. That’s all there is to it. Oh wow, look at that.

John Gajdecki
There’s the ship. Jinnie Pak, she’s very successful in the visual effects industry here in Vancouver.

David Read
Is this one of those color palettes that have to be kept in the dark at all times so it doesn’t reduce its…

John Gajdecki
It fades over time fades very quickly so you close it up. The one that I have, do I have it? Mine’s in this wooden box. It’s got the Macbeth at the top and the chip charts at the bottom, the grey scales. That’s the standard test colors for everything, we still use it today.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
So this was on the Wraith planet and I remember during the production, the tech scout, we were just walking along and I said “you know, it would be really cool if it was a really windy planet.” They’re like “yeah, yeah, yeah.” So they bring in all these fans on the shoot day and then it’s like, “Gajdecki, we can’t hear any of the dialogue. We’re gonna take the money out of the effects department to pay for ADR.” Like, “yeah, okay, my fault.”

David Read
Oh, geez.

John Gajdecki
Here the ship is probably a little bit smaller because we only see the outside. Of course the set on the inside is much bigger because you need to get around.

David Read
You can fake it.

John Gajdecki
Absolutely.

David Read
If Star Trek’s shuttlecraft can be two thirds scale on the outside, you guys can too. Wow, that is so cool.

John Gajdecki
There it is. Nice paint job to do. Nice patina, edges look nice. This is a cool looking ship, I like it.

David Read
Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
There you go, there’s the fans, it’s my fault. Visual effects taking notes. I think that’s Martin Wood right there.

David Read
It is. You got Christopher Heyerdahl all over there. Cool location. I always love at the beginning of every Stargate season that all the locations were going to be very wintry and very cold and as the season progressed, the season would also progress. That’s funny.

John Gajdecki
There’s a funny story that Hudson tells, Hudson Hickman. He explained it to me one day because we were just talking about writing emails, right? He said that he learned a lesson on Stargate because after the third episode that had all taken place in the forest around Vancouver. He wrote a little email to, this would have been Stargate, probably Brad and Jonathan. He said, “hey, can we not shoot in the rain forest planet anymore? And that was the end of it. But the response he got taught him that what people read is, “hey, can we not shoot in the rain forest planet anymore you assholes?” He said, “whenever he writes an email, and I do this to this day, I put the words ‘you assholes’ at the end of it and then I reread it. I go, ‘okay, I got to tone this down'” because of the way people are going to interpret it.

David Read
Wow. It’s politics, people are going to hear what they’re going to hear. We see this all the time in text messages; people freaking out over text messages and then later on it’s like, “yeah, but he didn’t mean it that way.” Ah, here we are, the first victim from the Wraith queen.

John Gajdecki
That was a nice sculpture.

David Read
That’s really cool.

John Gajdecki
It was really well done. Yeah.

David Read
That look at that, look at all the detail. What is that made of? Do you know?

John Gajdecki
It’s hard to say. It’s probably a lot of leather in there. Leather is good because you can wet it and it shrinks. But definitely a good sculptor did this.

David Read
Who’s this? Is this Hamish?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
It says in the top left, Hamish.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, he was with the effects department. What do they say, “an excess of personality?”

David Read
Okay. A bit of an overbite on this poor soul that’s gone now.

John Gajdecki
Could have been the fire. Look at that.

David Read
Geez.

John Gajdecki
It’s funny how much work you do and then sometimes you see it and sometimes you just don’t.

David Read
Right!

John Gajdecki
So these are the Wraith…

David Read
In tights?

John Gajdecki
In tights. These are some tests we did, this might be the actual footage we use for some of them. We gave them white and black streamers, we hit them with fans, we shot them on blue screen and then you could lay them in and the white and the black would allow you to distort them.

David Read
Are these for when they were using their psionic abilities on the surface to make people see things that aren’t there.

John Gajdecki
I think so, yeah.

David Read
That’s the element that’s being shot. Wow, Wraith in tights.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we hit them with huge fans to kick this stuff in but it never really worked exactly the way you want. You can see the camera is up on a couple of risers at the top of the dolly. We had them up on the platform so that we weren’t shooting into the corner or the bottom of the blue screen. You can see the lights are across the bottom. We just filmed, running left, running left, running fast, running slowly, close up, wide shot, diagonals. For the first episodes we would have shot some custom and then we would have shot a library that we used to build the effect with.

David Read
Yeah, this is one of the things that disappointed me about the show, that we really didn’t go further into. They did it a little bit, but not a lot. You’ve got to start somewhere in terms of getting a library of shots in and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. It could be that it just didn’t work the way they imagined it, you know?

David Read
Yeah, for sure.

John Gajdecki
So that’s that. That’s me in my Arc’teryx raincoat and hat. You can see there’s something underwater.

David Read
What is this?

John Gajdecki
It’s one of the piers.

David Read
Really, you made a practical pier?

John Gajdecki
We built a practical pier out of steel…

David Read
I didn’t know this.

John Gajdecki
And then we lifted it out of the water. In those days the computing power to do all the water was just beyond our show’s budget.

David Read
So the particle effects could have been done but they would have just blown your budget?

John Gajdecki
We did a lot of particle effects for the close ups but for the distance shots it was this element.

David Read
Oh, wow. And then you guys just painted out the rig?

John Gajdecki
Yup, painted out the rig.

David Read
Wow, look at that.

John Gajdecki
There’s some more pictures, we’ll come back to that one. So there’s the camera, the camera’s under here.

David Read
Look at the poor guy, holding his hand up on his face.

John Gajdecki
The blue screen is over here because it was a perfect sunny day and we use the sky as a blue screen. In the summer in Vancouver you get just perfect…In fact today, it’s almost perfect, there’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s just that perfect blue screen color.

David Read
So you can just photograph it?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, that’s what we did. We had the 20 by [screen size] here which we were going to use but I want it to be wider and it would have forced the screen to be too close. They were like, “you know what? Move it out of the way. What happens if we move it out of the way?”

David Read
Hey, god’s already provided you with the perfect palette.

John Gajdecki
Nailed it. It was just water.

David Read
Sure, absolutely.

John Gajdecki
Everywhere was water. That could have been for the shot of us, the sea.

David Read
Yeah, going through.

John Gajdecki
Probably what we used it for. For almost every shot we shot custom elements that we would lay in. We had the CG of the city based on the previous and then boom, we dropped these elements in. The CG at the time could do the particles but not these stringy things and not all the different sizes and not the highlights and shadows. They focused on the city and they focused on that stuff, I made sure that we photographed all of these elements and we dropped it all into 2d.

David Read
It’s amazing how much work goes into individual shots.

John Gajdecki
This is most of the crew. I couldn’t get everybody together because we worked days, we worked nights, some people worked a little bit. I said, “okay, we’re going in the bathroom. I can control the lighting, it’ll always be the same.” I set the camera up. There’s Wes Sargent and Peter Hunt is in here somewhere. Some people I could only get by the doors. But yeah, it’s basic…

David Read
Wraith self portrait. How long did it take to get everyone in there to get the shot?

John Gajdecki
I probably spend about a week. You’re really cajoling people, it’s like “we got to go to the bathroom, we got to shoot this picture.” I try and shoot a group picture on every show that I do. It’s a big team effort doing this shit. Couldn’t get Jinnie in here.

David Read
I’ve seen 16 People in this shot; that’s quite the crowd. I met Wes. Wes was cool.

John Gajdecki
Wes was good. I can’t remember his name, he was an up and coming 2d artist. Everybody would have gone home and he and I were left. We would just stay and work on the shots. He’s on his way to Star Wars, right? He was just getting started and he knew that if he put these hours in and he came up with his cool shots, it’s gonna, you know?

David Read
For sure.

John Gajdecki
It works for him. She worked with me at my company and then came over to Rainmaker when I did this, Peter Hunt’s not here, we went dog walking yesterday. He was one of the 3d guys. He did the, I’ve got an example of it. The high angle looking down the elevator going down the iceshaft.

David Read
Yes, Antarctica, yep.

John Gajdecki
Yes. So we had some concept work for that, it’s clear what it had to be. Back in those days we weren’t allowed to turn on ray tracing. Ray tracing is a computational tool that tracks reflections off of objects. If you’re doing ice you want everything to be super reflective so we put a light way at the bottom. The studios like “you’re not allowed to use ray tracing, we don’t do ray tracing here.” We were constantly trying to fake the reflections and all it did was look like wet cement.

David Read
Why don’t they allow it?

John Gajdecki
Well, because in those days…

David Read
Is it a horsepower thing?

John Gajdecki
Super super intensive. Now it’s on a graphics card and it’s basically real time but back in those days it would take all weekend to render something so they wouldn’t let us do it. So one day me and this other guy were like, “okay, we’re going to turn on ray tracing Friday night and we’re not going to tell anybody and they can shit all over us on Monday but the render will be done and it’ll be beautiful.” That’s exactly what we did. It’s just one of those examples where institutions lose focus. They’d happily pay us for weeks to try and do this one way rather than pay us for a weekend to do it another way.

David Read
Was that for the shot of the elevator descending? That ray tracing was turned on? Wow.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. I got it somewhere. There it is.

David Read
Oh, wow. That’s with ray tracing turned on. Yeah, you can see the ice, it’s like glass.

John Gajdecki
Imagine the ice was wet cement instead. That’s what I was looking at and it just wasn’t working and it wasn’t working. Then we just turned it on and we kept that light and we let it go dark and then we added the little snow falling down.

David Read
Yeah.

John Gajdecki
This was a beautiful shot.

David Read
From the shot to the show.

John Gajdecki
Yep. Going back to the head. But yeah, that was just a funny ray tracing story with this shot. We shot the actors overhead and then we map them into the elevator, they barely moved. Looked cool. Also just the nice reflections on the structure.

David Read
Yeah, the shadows.

John Gajdecki
We knew this was going to be a beautiful shot. We just kept it dark and just let the light ripple on everything. It was just so good.

David Read
And this shot rendered over the weekend?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Were they only rendering individual shots over the weekend or are a lot of shots rendering over the weekend?

John Gajdecki
We’d kick off big renders. Let’s see, I’ve got some more. This is my demo from 2011 or something. This was the shot where the city left.

David Read
Yep. Sure was.

John Gajdecki
We made a decision for Atlantis to make the shots really long, at least at the beginning. We just liked the feeling of these really long shots rather than lots of quick cuts.

David Read
It lets you take in the scope of the magnitude of the city.

John Gajdecki
It really does and the city was built to a really high standard so it held up. I remember seeing these spotlights on it, thinking “where did those come from?”

David Read
Right, something’s left on the ground to generate that.

John Gajdecki
The guy who lit it was a good friend of mine and it was really near the end of the delivery and this was almost the only chance we got. He lit it with these spotlights and I’m like, “Hmm, not really what we talked about but it looks kind of cool.”

David Read
Yeah, it does.

John Gajdecki
You’ve got to reward people when they take their own initiative otherwise everything just gets stuck with you doing it. But really nice shot, I don’t know if there’s any more in here. Oh, no, no. Oh, there we go.

David Read
Huge body of work, John.

John Gajdecki
I found the previous for the space battle scene.

David Read
Okay.

John Gajdecki
So we can we can go there. You know, let’s just blast through some of the last pictures.

David Read
Sure.

John Gajdecki
This is a different set of them. I’m going to go quickly and we can stop on what we want to stop on.

David Read
Sure.

John Gajdecki
We saw that. There you go. There you go, laddie.

David Read
What am I looking at?

John Gajdecki
Boom. It’s one of the piers. This is the pier that we dropped into the water.

David Read
Okay. Is that up in the air?

John Gajdecki
Up in the air?

David Read
Okay.

John Gajdecki
We suspended it from a construction crane. It’s fun to be on shows where you say “okay, and I’m going to need 100 foot construction crane” and they’re like, “okay” because that’s what you do. Of course, later in the season that’s not so much of an option but for the pilot you can definitely do that stuff.

David Read
And in the background there I think is the the glass building. What was its name? What was it called? In the show was the J.R Reed Space Terminal that it was used in 2010 and also in Bane but it’s now a casino. What is that building called? The Plaza of Nations.

John Gajdecki
Yeah.

David Read
Plaza of Nations. That’s it.

John Gajdecki
You’re right. You’re really good at this.

David Read
Thank you. Wow. Rachel and her get up.

John Gajdecki
Yep. Late at night. A little late in the sky.

David Read
Stargate didn’t shoot very often at night. That was a pretty big deal that happened. The drone!

John Gajdecki
The drone. So this is how we lit the drone to light it evenly to get CG textures.

David Read
Okay, I wondered how you did that.

John Gajdecki
Yeah there’s POP board everywhere, lights bouncing everywhere, the light is super soft. We shoot the stills of it and then we give those to the 3d artists.

David Read
Okay.

John Gajdecki
So that’s what that is. There’s the angle, pretty well from the camera that we’re shooting it with. It looks like we shot it on a movie camera as as well. Saw that one. Oh, this was a test, a render test of the city at night.

David Read
The layers, you have these layers, those went away as the show went along and the model changed. I love this look because it makes it look like it was carved out of the ice and the rock face. They just didn’t stay with that model, they departed from it and it was really obvious to the naked eye.

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
What was the pouring thing?

John Gajdecki
I think that’s from an…what would that have been?

David Read
Is it the Wraith feeding on someone?

John Gajdecki
Maybe?

David Read
It’s a chest.

John Gajdecki
It’s vacuform figure. We’re pouring this goop on and then we would have tracked it on…Yeah, I jumped over it.

David Read
Interesting. They didn’t really have anything like that in the show.

John Gajdecki
No. It could have been a test for something that ended up not being in.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely.

John Gajdecki
The ship again. So that’s the setup for the pier. So we listed it out. What we wanted it for was just the water rolling off the sides.

David Read
Is this just a quarry that you went and filmed in?

John Gajdecki
Yep. This is right across, there’s the stadium, Plaza of Nations is there. There’s 50 million more buildings like…this would have been a building site. I’m sure what happened is I told locations, “I need a quarry about 100 feet long” and this building was being constructed and for all we knew it was…I don’t know.

David Read
Yeah, you don’t have to drive very far probably. It’s in town.

John Gajdecki
No, it’s right around the corner from where I live, that’s for sure.

David Read
You’ve got overcast sky so your light is even. It does the job. Hello.

John Gajdecki
Hello.

David Read
Hey, Martin.

John Gajdecki
Martin. This is me giving him the budget.

David Read
That’s funny. That set was cool. I’m so glad we’ve got better cameras now that don’t have this blur to them if you don’t have them perfectly lit. So that is a masstige head from the feature film that was also in the pilot of Children of the Gods and they were sure to bring that into the pilot for Atlantis. Look at Andee’s makeup. Wow.

John Gajdecki
It was really distinctive.

David Read
For sure. Wow, that’s cool. The M.A.L.P. I sold that at Propworx. This is Hide and Seek, Dave Hewlett is gonna go and throw the box into the gate. Really cool. Those effects, that was a really cool sequence with the chunks of crystal floating around in the air, the inside of the creature. That was a really cool idea. Oh, look at that, look at the strips. They definitely did use some of those elements in the pilot. It looks familiar now. Okay.

John Gajdecki
We put some blue in there so that it would include the white in the black. It just wanted to look random, right?

David Read
Yeah, absolutely.

John Gajdecki
And exposure running. Pretty cool.

David Read
Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
We knew there was something cool in here but maybe we didn’t capture it all, you know?

David Read
How often do you approach a situation like this where it’s like, “okay, we do want to get some extra stuff so that we can build some kind of a library for the future?”

John Gajdecki
Every show. Every show. Anything that seems like it’s going to repeat, I try and burry in the pilot’s budget, enough money to build up elements that we’re going to use. On the pilot the purse strings are relatively open so structuring a show, you try and push as much into that as you can because it’s more likely to get approved. Later in the season they’re into tighter patterns.

David Read
Yeah, their vision is more specific as to what they want.

John Gajdecki
That’s true, that’s true, too. There’s that shot, we saw that, running. This was…

David Read
That’s the rear projection for the puddle.

John Gajdecki
That’s right.

David Read
That’s so cool. Look at that. Those two computers, look at the horsepower.

John Gajdecki
I think those are projectors.

David Read
Oh, they’re projectors. You’re right, John. You’re absolutely right.

John Gajdecki
The power we needed. One projector wasn’t bright enough back in those days so we had to have two of them.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely.

John Gajdecki
These are the floor grips, putting the little wedges…I’m probably on the other side going “a little to the left.”

David Read
Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
“Almost there, the top corner’s out of alignment.”

David Read
Yeah, you just got to make sure that both of the projectors are…they’re probably being fed the same frames at the same time. Wow, very cool.

John Gajdecki
It’s the puddle. It was a little forgiving.

David Read
Look at Andee, this is great. I got to show this to her, she’s gonna flip out.

John Gajdecki
I found a lot, because I’ve been digging up these pictures, people don’t know that I have them. Somebody contacted me through LinkedIn and I just immediately sent them a picture back of them like 30 years ago. They’re like, “where did you get this?”

David Read
That’s the thing that I love about things like this. In the foreground here is the gun over the shoulder and there’s the button on the front. You can see where the trigger finger is and then on the very front is where it would light and the visual effects people would go, “oh, no.”

John Gajdecki
That’s right. Pretty fun.

David Read
That’s wild.

John Gajdecki
That’s my wife and family at the shoot. This is somebody else; they’re proud of their work, probably the DP. I don’t recognize this gentleman so he mustn’t have been in all the time.

David Read
Dave [Hewlett], yeah.

John Gajdecki
So he got mad at me one day.

David Read
Oh, yeah?

John Gajdecki
Yeah. and he was totally right. We were doing a scene and I was standing in his eyeline which I shouldn’t have done, you try not to do that. He did something and it was funny and I started laughing and shaking and it threw him off. He came up to me and he says, “you can’t stand in my eyeline and then laugh at my jokes.” He was really good about it but I totally was busted. When we’re filming we always try and turn away so we never catch the actors eyes.

David Read
Yep. I did that once with Rachel. They weren’t filming, they were in rehearsal. I thought that she and I just had a brief moment and I got away with it but the publicist saw it and came over afterwards. She was like, “hey, just so you know, don’t make don’t make eye contact with them.” I was like “Okay, that’s fair.” Rachel smiled back at me and it felt good but at the same time, “she’s doing her job, leave her alone.”

John Gajdecki
Yeah. So here’s the Command Centre.

David Read
Yep.

John Gajdecki
I guess we had to do a quick green screen. Sometimes instead of going to the green screen stage we would just set something up on the side.

David Read
For sure. Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
But you can see how big…these soundstages were huge. You can’t really see it but it goes up and up and up. Big studio.

David Read
Absolutely. It was an amazing space.

John Gajdecki
There’s the crane operator. Hamish. Again, you get a sense for how high we had the camera and then lifting up the pier. Let’s see if we have, I think it was playback, not sure. Jumping in for a quick cameo.

David Read
Is that you?

John Gajdecki
When we lowered it in, of course, the water would bubble like that and then we’d have to lift it up. It was a pain painting of the cables but it was the only way we would get it.

David Read
Yeah, exactly. You’re not going to have any kind of apparatus that you can put under with it that will raise it out.

John Gajdecki
No, absolutely not. Oh, I guess I’m having a good day. I don’t know what this is.

David Read
Fragmenting of of the picture data.

John Gajdecki
Don’t kow why I have a hockey stick.

David Read
That’s funny. Oh, there we go. I sold those [drones] and it was extremely cool.

John Gajdecki
That’s funny.

David Read
There were two of them.

John Gajdecki
She was one of the artists on the show. We would try and bring the artists on set so they’re not just working on this stuff and don’t know where it came from.

David Read
Right, or what became of it. Yeah.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. Can see how enormous these cameras are.

David Read
That’s wild.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, they don’t do that anymore.

David Read
Grow that big?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, the cameras are smaller and you tend to go with Prime lenses and you don’t need all this shit on it.

David Read
Are the lens is getting smaller?

John Gajdecki
Lenses? Oh, there you go.

David Read
Hey.

John Gajdecki
It’s funny,when we were on Superman we shot anamorphic. What they did, which I thought was really clever, is they spent a year as they were in prep finding all of these old 1960s, 1970s period lenses that had a very unique look. We shot with these lenses exclusively so we had no zoom lenses at all. On that show it was a small camera, small lens, off we go. There’s that thing we were pouring coffee over, whatever it is.

David Read
Yeah, there’s the puddle jumper bay.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. We had that big establishing shot in there.

David Read
“Doctor, this is why you brought me here.”

John Gajdecki
There you go.

David Read
Look at that! Were you pulling it out really fast and then shooting it at a fast frame rate?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we’re shooting as fast as we could, lifting it up as fast as we could.

David Read
Yeah.

John Gajdecki
Not only did we get the water but we got those ripples coming off of it.

David Read
Yep.

John Gajdecki
Then we just lift it straight up.

David Read
Is it a matter of just math in terms of time passing? “Okay, this building is going to be about this size so we need it to be at about this speed coming out and we need the cameras to be about this fast so that we get the right number of frames?”

John Gajdecki
Yes and no. You generally always shoot as fast as you can. You can always slow it down but it’s really hard speeding it up.

David Read
That’s true.

John Gajdecki
You can always slow down the camera. So yeah, we shoot as fast as we could.

David Read
Okay.

John Gajdecki
This is in the old VFX building and these were the pre-vis artists.

David Read
Is this at Bridge?

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Okay, so this is the team, okay, got it. This is in house.

John Gajdecki
Yep. Top floor, back corner.

David Read
Okay, wow

John Gajdecki
Yep.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
Here’s the server on the ground. We would basically set this up and off we go.

David Read
Do what you got to do.

John Gajdecki
Yep. So there’s that picture.

David Read
Wow, there’s the team.

John Gajdecki
It’s funny, back in those days, shelves with binders and our three inch laptops. That’s just what was in my camera bag.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
Back in those days. I don’t think I carry any of this stuff anymore.

David Read
Yeah, so much of it’s just not needed. It’s all part of a larger apparatus.

John Gajdecki
Normally on the shows that I do now I probably have a three or a four person on-set team so they carry all this stuff.

David Read
Okay.

John Gajdecki
Me showing you how big it is. This is in L.A, right at Hollywood and something probably.

David Read
Very cool.

John Gajdecki
I don’t know what we’re shooting here, it’s probably water. Oh yeah, this was a gloss black surface and we were pouring water down. We probably used it for water on the windows or something like that. There’s a window rig where we let the water overflow. This would have been a tank of some sort. I think it was a very narrow tank about four inches deep and again, we were just shooting different water elements.

David Read
I can almost see this as being a part of the Rising.

John Gajdecki
I’m sure it was.

David Read
You shot element after element.

John Gajdecki
We would have had a black behind it so that obviously you don’t see the set and the weird roof of the Bridge studios.

David Read
Yep.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, so these are the artists.

David Read
Eating while working.

John Gajdecki
Eating while working. What’s that?

David Read
It looks like a tower?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, it does. Buzz Lightyear.

David Read
Absolutely, and an enormous monitor. Look how far we’ve come on.

John Gajdecki
We were talking about the budget earlier and one of the compromises that we made on Atlantis was we did all the effects at standard resolution and upres’d them instead of going HD. HD was just coming out and we had the choice of going HD but we knew that the pipeline was going to eat about 15% of the budget. Things move through the pipeline slower, renders happen slower, the artists sit around a little more. We talked with Brad and we talked with Robert and we did some tests. We did the test at HD and then we did some tests at SD and blew them up. The blow ups were so convincing that we decided that “let’s put that extra 15% into new shots.”

David Read
Yeah, so save the horsepower for additional takes, for additional shots.

John Gajdecki
Yes.

David Read
Wow, I did not know that John. That’s wild.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we probably didn’t tell many people about that.

David Read
By the end of the shows run that was probably not the case anymore.

John Gajdecki
No, even a year or so, maybe even at the end of the first season. The technology was changing so fast. When confronted with the, “you can have 200 shots or you can have 230 shots…”

David Read
Or more.

John Gajdecki
Discovery is better served with more shots.

David Read
That’s true. Absolutely.

John Gajdecki
At the beginning of our call we were talking about the logistics of production and things like that. I said that I’m more into the art than the tech and I I’m happy to go at a lower resolution and get more shots than have the absolute highest technical quality but really maybe not be able to support the story the way we should have.

David Read
With the TVs in all of our homes now you wouldn’t be able to pull that off so easily.

John Gajdecki
No, not anymore.

David Read
You talked about animatics.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, let’s have a look. So the animatic..

David Read
Oh no.

John Gajdecki
Yes, you know where we’re going with this. Oh, wrong one.

David Read
Still cool though. Wow.

John Gajdecki
Here it is. This is what we planned versus what we shot. So it turned out to be a little different, they’re on opposite sides. We found a forest where they could run down the middle of a path. In this one there’s the two beats where the first one misses them and the second one gets them.

John Gajdecki
And gets Ford to, yeah.

John Gajdecki
In the show we got them the first time.

David Read
Wow. It’s crazy to see them like this. But it gets the job across, or the idea across.

John Gajdecki
I’m always looking for something that’s amusing. I think in part it makes people pay attention too.

David Read
Little Lego guys. That is so cool.

John Gajdecki
We’ll look at the pre-vis of this because I know we can’t show the whole…

David Read
The finished episode, yeah. There’s no information for this online so it’s…Wow.

John Gajdecki
I thought you’d like this.

David Read
This is crazy.

John Gajdecki
Isn’t this cool?

David Read
The dialogue? Wow, look at that. Wow. How much time is involved in creating something like this? The squib?

John Gajdecki
A lot.

David Read
Are we talking weeks?

John Gajdecki
No, months.

John Gajdecki
We had one or two artists on this for months. The gentleman who did the majority of the work, it was right up his alley. He would bring in these World War II fighter books, history of Second World War dogfights. I’ve got to tell you, we would work on it. I’d love to say that I controlled everything, but I really didn’t. He was so good. We did this pre-vis, he laid it out, we cut it together. I imagine when we went to show it to Brad and Robert, they’re like, “lock, done” because it’s just so good. He was really, really good. One of the things about doing work like this is if you can plan it early, because this is probably much bigger than they had in mind…

David Read
Months!

David Read
It’s pretty darn close, shot for shot.

John Gajdecki
It’s very close to what’s in the show, there’s no doubt about it, but I think this is bigger than what they had in mind when we imagined the scene. But because we nailed it so early if we can get it into production it becomes a machine in a lot of ways. It turned out to be really good scene.

David Read
Yeah, there was never a puddle jumper, dog fight sequence that was this dynamic really ever in the show. There was an asteroid sequence at the beginning of season four that was really, really good and really cool but this really set the bar.

John Gajdecki
Well, we had the time because it was the pilot. You can do a lot of stuff in the pilot that you can’t do anywhere else. When I did the pilot for Stargate, again, it was the same thing. We just had a lot of a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of support.

David Read
SG-1, yeah, for sure. It gives the effects people something to just perfectly map because it’s what’s been approved.

John Gajdecki
Oh, yeah. No, this was really good. I’ve got to say the artist who worked on this was just super. I think a lot of it, for me, was staying out of the way.

David Read
Yeah? Just letting them do what they’re good at?

John Gajdecki
Once you find people who are really nailing it, it doesn’t help for me to get in the middle.

David Read
Right.

John Gajdecki
That’s just something you learn as you go through life; you don’t need the glory all the time because people are gonna give it to you anyway.

David Read
Thank you John, that was really special.

John Gajdecki
That was really cool. I can show you a little bit of the real scene but that’s up to you.

David Read
It’s all good, we know where it goes. Do you have anything of the pre-vis of the rising itself?

John Gajdecki
Of course but it’s not organized like that. I was trying to cut it together this morning and I just ran out of time.

David Read
That’s okay.

John Gajdecki
City rising? Oh, look at this. Let’s start here.

David Read
You should be able to play them all simultaneously.

John Gajdecki
They’re in an old codec so I can’t just click and play them. I’ve got to use an old viewer. That’s the problem that I’m having. Now, this shot…you can see the camera went right through it.

David Read
Right through it. Now we have a clipping issue.

John Gajdecki
So what we did and what I like to do is I previous longer and then I give it to editorial. The editors edit the scene and then they give it back to us and say “this is the approved cut.”

David Read
Bruce would say that you would build handles into shots so that they could move things around.

John Gajdecki
Yeah but this is like 10 seconds long whereas it’s probably three seconds in the show.

David Read
Yep.

John Gajdecki
You kind of want to respect what they do for a living and give them…When we’re doing work like this we can do versions really quickly. We would have given them a close up and a wide shot and one from the side and one from the top and then they probably use them all. Then we’ll work on it, will budget it and say, “yes, we can do this. Oh, we’re gonna have to lose two of these.” Or “do we keep these in and lose something from somewhere else in the show?” It sounds crazy but those are the conversations that happen. This was always a good shot. Sometimes you do these shots and you just go “Oh yeah, this is great.”

David Read
You can see it working even when it looks like Stargate Atlantis Minecraft.

John Gajdecki
You know this is going to be good. They can take this and get this over to the sound effects people and music right away.

David Read
Yep. I can hear Joel’s music as we’re looking at it.

John Gajdecki
So basically wider and closer. Similar shot, move the camera over so we don’t hit the building.

David Read
Yeah, but it’s breaking the water too, the surface.

John Gajdecki
And if you notice…right…

David Read
Yes, the balcony.

John Gajdecki
It’s the balcony.

David Read
For sure.

John Gajdecki
Right at the top. We probably didn’t have that there and then it became a thing. It’s like, “okay, let’s put it in.” So yeah, another good shot. We ended up not using that one and going with the one before. You can see there’s a hint of the city underwater.

David Read
Yeah, it’s not opaque.

John Gajdecki
It’s those interactions when everything goes through; that’s really what scared us the most. Those are amongst the hardest things whereas now you can run those simulations and you’ll be fine. But back in those days we were shooting the pier lifting up and I bet you we use those elements in all kinds of places.

David Read
Well, you’ve got so many things coming through. Not only is the water interacting with them but it’s got to interact with the collisions from the other objects that are coming out. There was a similar frustration that was made in the Stargate feature film where James Spader goes up to the gate and puts his hands on the puddle and it makes these continual ripples. The visual effects people were like, “okay, you want us to hold that for how long?” It was seconds and seconds and it’s like, “okay, the ripples are going to collide with other ripples and make baby ripples of their own.” They were pulling their hair out. The longer they sustained that shot the more complex it gets. It was wild.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. In situations like that you go into the producers and you say, “well, this is way harder than we thought.” And then it’s “do you have more money or what do you want to lose to get it?”

David Read
Well, you can be upfront and honest. It’s like, “okay, look, this is where we’re at. This is what we had envisioned, this is where we’re at.” Obviously in a shot like this it’s not depicting all the particle effects from all the water that’s running off of these buildings.

John Gajdecki
That’s right which we’ll see in a second. You can see the camera move how the background is sliding from night to day. That was all very deliberate. It was just such a pretty sky.

David Read
It sure was, yeah. I remember that shot.

John Gajdecki
At this point the background is not moving. The process would be something like after it got approved we would then go in and start the camera and make sure that all the shots go together,

David Read
Of course. It’s not many cities rising, it’s one with many buildings. Wow.

John Gajdecki
Here we go. So basically the same shot but we tilted up so we don’t see the water.

David Read
Yes.

John Gajdecki
Probably what we would do is we go to Brad and say, “you can have five of these for every one of those.”

David Read
Right, because the collision with the water is just going to take more rendering.

John Gajdecki
That’s why. A couple of times we don’t see the water and that was deliberate just so we could increase the shot count and tell more of the story. It’s kind of interesting to see all the compromises that we have to make. When we see it on the day it’s like “oh that’s spectacular” but then we go back and look at all the struggles.

David Read
And we’re starting to see some particle-isation. Look at that!

John Gajdecki
Early tests. It was fun. I think we had one person on the particles the whole time. It was probably a horrible job.

David Read
Absolutely. I think this next one, if that frame is any indication, it’s probably my favorite shot. Ah, cool. That’s my favorite.

John Gajdecki
Yeah.

David Read
How cool is that?

John Gajdecki
It’s funny. Interstellar, everyone’s made – the camera locked to the vehicle has become this thing now- but here we were doing it then.

David Read
Absolutely right, yeah. You’re going for a ride.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. Not to take anything away from Interstellar which was spectacular.

David Read
Yeah.

John Gajdecki
I don’t know if this one was in the show.

David Read
Yes it was because the camera’s rotating. I remember that, that was definitely a shot. The camera is having a bit of a pan effect because you can see that the buildings are twisting. It’s in the show, it’s near the end. These are pretty much in order.

John Gajdecki
That’s cool.

David Read
There were wider shots later on. Yeah, see there we go. There’s the wider…yep. Wow.

John Gajdecki
Going down.

David Read
Yep. I’m gonna have to go back and look at the finished sequence myself. I’m curious to see if my mind is playing tricks on me.

John Gajdecki
I’ve got part of it in one of my demos. I can bring that up.

David Read
Yeah, it’s where they go outside and look out over the balcony.

John Gajdecki
Scene 105 if I recall. Oh, that’s right, this is the wide shot.

David Read
The wave dissipating.

John Gajdecki
So this is version eight of the shot.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
So this shot wasn’t in initially and I just said to Brad, “it would be super cool to just cut really big and wide and see that ring coming out.”

David Read
Yep, it’s now arrived.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. So this was sort of a last minute, not a last minute, but not part of the original design. I’ve got that one as a full res QuickTime, I can show you some of those. There’s some…oh, what’s this? There’s a second shot.

David Read
It’s right after the first one looking down with the city rising. Very cool.

John Gajdecki
Towards us. Yeah, that was a good shot.

David Read
Just spectacular.

John Gajdecki
The end.

David Read
This is just amazing to see.

John Gajdecki
It kind of shows you that once the pre-vis was done then really you’re fighting to make it look real but the art and the timing and everything is basically there.

David Read
It’s locked in the pre-vis.

John Gajdecki
Let’s see…is it here? Here’s your shot.

David Read
Right, there it is.

John Gajdecki
I just went to this because this is my demo. What’s interesting about that last shot and I’ll see if it picks up. This is from Slither. There we go. One thing we struggled with the underwater shots is banding. The colors are so close together that you see. We had to break it up, we put more green in the water because then you’re using blue and green pixels which helps reduce the blending. We use a lot of noise which also helps to break it up. If you see the water here, there’s these shapes where it’s lighter and darker and lighter and darker. Those weren’t in there initially. We looked at the shots like, “well that looks cool” and I think it got approved but I said, “you know, something doesn’t feel right.” I had flown to Salt Spring Island, one of the local islands here and I had a picture of essentially the ocean. It had these regions and I don’t know if it’s different temperatures of water or what it is…

David Read
I think it’s wind.

John Gajdecki
It could be wind but when we put these in you don’t really notice them but it just makes it feel more like water.

David Read
Yeah. You grasp the scale of the shot.

John Gajdecki
The ships are at crazy angles. In other words, we had them lined up and it just looked boring. We started bringing them really close and then we needed to angle them up and angle them down. This guy down here is probably pointing way more down than he should be and this one is pointing way further over but it works within the shot.

David Read
Correct. It’s not about their attack strategy, it’s about the composition of the image.

John Gajdecki
That’s right. It’s something that you also get from some artists, you get pushback on where they’re like, “well, that’s not right.”

David Read
Well, what’s right is not always what’s right. The take off after we’ve woken up the hive and they are upset. Good shot.

John Gajdecki
It was initially going to be a sunny day and we decided that the highest planet would always be overcast and angry. I think that was a good call.

David Read
Yep and they go back to it in 38 minutes. Well done.

John Gajdecki
It was a fun show. It was a good group of people and it was just a fun show to work on.

David Read
I can only imagine. That’s the shot where the Dart arrives on Athos.

John Gajdecki
I think this one is going away. Let’s have a look.

David Read
Oh yeah, they’re leaving. Look at that. CG gate.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, definitely. The gate itself…no, maybe it’s a CG gate. Yeah, it must be a CG gate.

David Read
They never made a location gate for Atlantis. They made a third of one that was later used but it always burnt me because the show was called Stargate Atlantis but you never have the gate in a lot of these background shots when they’re on location because they didn’t manufacture one. They just had the one on site in the gate room. One of the things that I loved about SG-1 was the gate was in the background out of focus in a lot of shots so its presence was always felt. In Atlantis you just didn’t have that.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, you’re right. You’d have to spend money to put it in there.

David Read
That’s right, exactly. It would take a day to install and a day to take away.

John Gajdecki
Yeah.

David Read
Wow.

John Gajdecki
There you go. That’s how we imagined it.

David Read
A lot tighter.

John Gajdecki
It was a horrible day. It was raining cats and dogs, it was a horrible day and nobody wanted to be here. This was the last shot, you’re there all day long and they’re just “there’s no hill, well shoot it here.” They lit through the field, I think there was a hill but it was way over there. It’s just “no, we’re gonna shoot it here. You’re putting the gate in anyway, right?” “Yep, sure, okay.”

David Read
It gets the job done. It worked.

John Gajdecki
It does. The audience doesn’t know, except now of course they know. It’s just one of those things. So here’s just lots of individual shots.

David Read
Yeah, these are finished.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we didn’t really talk about the helicopter. I had some good pre-vis for the helicopter but it wasn’t that big a moment.

David Read
You showed us those in the previous one.

John Gajdecki
We did. We did. Here’s the gate firing up.

David Read
Were the glyphs a visual effect or were those practical? So that right there, is that?

John Gajdecki
It sure looks like it’s practical doesn’t it?

David Read
It fades and they become like what they were before. I’m trying to remember if the glyphs were visual effects when it was going around like that. I think that they were practically done. I think I think LEDs were programmed.

John Gajdecki
They look like LEDs. It looks like somebody programmed them. It’s not spinning like it did in the in the movie. It is what it is. I’m pretty sure they were practical.

David Read
Very cool.

John Gajdecki
You see the gate of course is not round because the image hasn’t been stretched to 16 by 9.

David Read
Did you guys render them this way?

John Gajdecki
Yeah, we rendered them this way and then we stretch them at the last minute.

David Read
Why? Budget?

John Gajdecki
Faster, yeah.

David Read
Wow. I never knew that.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. 16 by 9 was the distribution format. It’s funny, because in Stargate everything was 16 by 9 but most of the episodes were aired 4 by 3 and you just don’t have the 16 by 9 versions out there.

David Read
Yeah. They take the 4 by 3 from the 16 by 9 and remove information from either side.

John Gajdecki
Yeah, see, it’s 4 by 3. It’s funny, this is the height of our abilities at the time. It would be so much better if we could do it now.

David Read
Of course, woulda shoulda coulda. You guys did yourselves proud with what you had then to work with.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. Puddle jumper takeoff, that’s probably the…

David Read
What we just saw from the animatic. Yep, there it is. I think we saw Wes Sargent working on it in a photo.

John Gajdecki
Yes, you’re right.

David Read
Cuz it’s a transition from a model that’s on the ground to a digital effect. Probably just paint out the model. Wow.

John Gajdecki
It’s nice to have it there for real because it gives you the lighting and the position and the focal length and everything.

David Read
Correct.

John Gajdecki
Most of these we would have seen. Gate. Oh here we go, I think this is the window. There it is.

David Read
And boom.

John Gajdecki
It always drove us crazy because he points before it happens.

David Read
Well, what can you do?

John Gajdecki
You can’t. It is what it is. We’ve got his little reflection in there. That’s a water element. These bubbles would have been an element that we shot somewhere.

David Read
Man, so much work goes into something just as simple as that.

John Gajdecki
Yep. Provided you plan it out everything goes smoothly, everything’s going to be great. I could just opened these all day long.

David Read
I know.

John Gajdecki
Oh, the balcony. This shot was really hard. The lens was so wide that it didn’t matter. Nobody could agree on what angle those piers should be down there. They don’t look right but everything else we did looked even worse. I don’t think it really bumps for anybody.

David Read
I think it works. I think it gets the job done.

John Gajdecki
Yeah. Could have had a better sky. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

David Read
Look at all the Star Trek feature films with the Enterprise E in particular. They’re in the observation lounge and they’re having their briefing, it’s like, “you guys, you’re Nacelles are gone. Where’s the ships warp engines?” It’s just not a consideration. Well done, very cool.

John Gajdecki
There you go.

David Read
Bring me back to you or bring you back to me. That was spectacular. There’s so much work that goes into developing just one hour, in this case with the Atlantis pilot, two hours of television. The end result has got to be so rewarding for you to look back and see that “we pulled we this off.” We had the budget that we had which I’m sure was actually pretty good for a pilot.

John Gajdecki
Pretty good.

David Read
And you guys pulled it off and did yourselves proud.

John Gajdecki
It’s not just that, of course the people and some of these people become your friends. Yesterday I went for a dog walk with the guy who did the ice shaft. So even 20, 25 years later, we still keep in touch.

David Read
You’ve built long lasting relationships and the work is just an extension of that. It’s a privilege for me to have you guys on to discuss these stories and share them with the broader community who is still finding the show and falling in love with the characters and all the elements that bring it together, so thank you.

John Gajdecki
Absolutely.

David Read
John Gajdecki, visual effects supervisor. I always enjoy sitting down with John and picking his brain. He’s a wonderful guy, he has so many insights to provide about the industry and just so many cool things to look at. John, really appreciate you coming back for this episode. October, we’re gonna be wrapping up season three of Dial the Gate so keep it on dialthegate.com to see the complete list of all the shows as they’re developing. Some guests have had to drop off, a couple are coming on so dialthegate.com is where it’s going to be at. My thanks to my production team; Linda “GateGabber” Furey. My moderators, Tracy, Antony, Sommer, Jeremy, Rhys; you guys make the show possible week after week. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he’s my web developer that keeps dialthegate.com up and running. That’s what we’ve got for you. Keep it on our channel as we continue to stream more content for the rest of the month then I’m going to take a break. Until then, we’ve got a few more episodes to do. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.