Archive for the ‘VFX’ Category

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Battlestar Switcheroo

July 21, 2008

Being sneaky, eh? While a group of 13th Colonists were out this past weekend scouting around for shooting locations in one of the parks on Vancouver’s North Shore mountains, we discovered something interesting. One of the most famous features of the North Shore mountains are “The Lions” named because when they are covered in snow, they look like two reclining lions. Our beautiful Lions Gate Bridge is named after this natural formation, as is our local CFL football team, the BC Lions.

In the world of Battlestar Galactica, it appears on Kobol and is seen as below:

In actual fact, they’ve pulled a switch on us, reversing the shot from how it appears in nature, as seen from this picture we took from the north end of Capilano Park, near the Cleveland Dam.

Ha!  Very clever, but we’re on to you…and as a result of our most recent foray into the woods, we’ve also closed in a couple more shooting locations, so stay tuned and we’ll have more pics for you in the coming weeks.

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BSG Visual FX Mojo

May 12, 2008

by spacepug

Cylon VFXMost of the 13th Colonists (I’m speaking of the Vancouver BSG Fan Club variety) already have an idea of how much I love “the old guys.” I carried my old style Cylon Centurion mini-mate with me to nearly all of our events for the first year of the club, until his arms would no longer stay in their sockets. Now they’re stuck in permanently thanks to powerful glue, but the old guy sits on the shelf, as much a museum piece as the antique we saw destined for the Galactica museum at the beginning of the miniseries.

So imagine my thrill when I came across this blog by Darth Mojo, a member of the VFX team for the new Battlestar Galactica. He describes the process of re-creating and updating the old style Cylons for Razor, with anecdotes and pictures from designer Pierre Drolet.

Their results were certainly amazing. When our crowd gathered to watch Razor, they let out an incredible cheer when they saw and heard the old-style Centurions. You just know when something turns out that RIGHT, that true geek love went into the making of it. Thanks very much for sharing, Darth Mojo.

BSG fans have to check out his insider’s story about winning the Visual Effects Emmy last year. And if you’re a fan of Babylon 5, there’s some interesting behind-the-scenes tales from that show as well. Worth adding to your daily blog rounds.