Hi, l'm Peter DeLuise from Stargate SG-1.
l'm a director, as well as a coproducer, on the show.
Myself, along with Martin Wood,
are going to be showing you some behind-the-scenes of the show.
Sort of the way the machine works, if you will.
Hope you enjoy it.
Come on behind the scenes.
This is my office that l work out of. l'm very proud of it.
lt's got quite a lot of colour.
lt's an assault on the senses, l admit.
On the wall of my office l have many concept drawings
which l use to help inspire me
and to remind me about all the crazy cool stuff we have on the show.
During the episode ''Descent'',
this is how we go to the computer core of the mothership,
where Thor's engrams are being stored.
We defragment his essence onto one of these little zip drives,
and we take off with them.
Here's a concept drawing of a prehistoric Goa'uld,
a primordial symbiote, if you will.
This was something that we saw in ''The First Ones''.
Just above it there's a concept drawing of the entity.
lt was right there that it says ''Child's Play''. That was the working title.
Then it became known as ''The Entity''.
That is the matrix, the supercomputer for the alien mainframe brain
that came in and started wreaking havoc on the base.
This is also a concept drawing of the incredible ship
from ''Wormhole X-Treme!''
Great colour. lt's very artistic, and that's why l like to keep them on my wall.
This is Teal'c's wind gun. This is from ''The Fifth Man'', where they take the gun.
This has become a handy weapon for Teal'c
when he wants to kick major butt.
And this is a concept sketch from ''The Tomb'',
a very fun episode in which the Russian team in SG-1 got stuck in a ziggurat.
Also one of my favourite horror-type episodes.
This, you may remember, is the body from the original pilot
in which Sha're was Goa'ulded.
The Jaffa came out of the pouch. The woman put her head up here
and pretended that she was going through some anxiety.
This is quite a typical sight in the Stargate upper office,
everybody hanging out in the hallways.
This happens to be the moments just preceding the first production meeting.
ln two days the sixth season will officially start.
This is my special walk. ''O'Neill, come after me.''
''Watch my butt, O'Neill.''
This is day-one prep of ''Descent''. This is a concept meeting.
l get to sit at the head of the table.
We've gone through the script
and we basically say ''How are we gonna do that?''
This is Anubis's command chair,
with Anubis's blanket.
His blanky is still on his command chair.
This is what it looks like from the outside. These lights light the hallway grid pattern.
lf you recall, this set was first being built
in an episode entitled ''Wormhole X-Treme!''.
Martin came through that door and he turned the corner.
At the time, there was a little hole right there. This was all wood.
They actually penetrated right into the hallway,
and then went down the length of the hallway,
and O'Neill and Martin came back and that was the end of the act,
where they had the standoff with the men in black.
This is what a starfield looks like up close. This is in its folded little box.
lt's hung all the way up in the rafters.
lf you look really close,
you can see that each one of these beautiful stars is, in fact,
just this little weird, metallic, reflective thing.
When it's spread out it looks just like a field of stars.
This particular piece is called ''the jukebox''.
lt's the command console, for the official name, but we refer to it as the jukebox.
This piece goes up here and the guys place their hands here.
The big joke, of course, is that it's absolutely featureless.
Our poor actors had to, you know...
sort of put their hands in there and say all sorts of weird gunk
that equates to them operating the ship.
This is strange.
Part of the effect that we're going for here
is that we're on a platform in a much larger room.
So the set design is such that they put this mirror here,
and, at a very steep angle...
Hello!
..you can start to see that it loses its illusion.
But here, as you can see,
we start to get the feeling that the wall continues down
and that we're on a platform.
This is Amy, one of the most hardest-working,
underpaid people on the planet.
lt's her job to keep changing these damn numbers
which nobody knows what the hell they mean anyway.
And...
action!
Whoa.
What is this that you're doing here?
This is a propane cannon that we're using to give a nice flame ball down the hall.
- ls this a beer keg? - ln a former life it might have been.
Yeah, it's just a container.
We pump in the propane through a valve,
check on our gauge, when we hit the switch - open the valve -
propane rushes out, hits our ignition down over here...
- Down this pipe. - So that's like your pilot light.
Then we get a nice flame ball about 12 feet wide, about 15 feet long.
Then the flame ball goes up and out.
lt's a beautiful thing.
And action!
Ready, go!
Whoo! That was loud.
What?
And cut.
That's one half a hole. Theoretically impossible.
There's no such thing as a half a hole, and yet there it is.
There's the other half of the hole.
This is what's known as a matte extension shot,
in which we film the actors over a chroma green
and it tells the computer the exact outline of our characters,
and we're free to put any picture we want behind them.
This is fantastic!
The seIf-destruct has been activated. We need to get as far away as possibIe.
Hang, and then jump down. All right?
And action!
Jacob, this is Teal'c. We're on board the ship.
Let me have all the words, and just pretend to plop down
and don't break anything.
- ''Jacob, this is Teal'c'', and action. - Jacob, this is Teal'c.
It's two IeveIs down this way.
- You wait here. - Yes, sir.
We're at the wave pool here.
There are the wave-makers. We won't be using wave-makers today,
but, essentially, what this pool is for is to make waves
and to test the integrity of various ships, of boats.
But we're using it to submerge a set.
This is the giant room, or what looks like a corridor,
and it's being submerged into the set.
This is where Richard Dean Anderson and Amanda Tapping will be.
When this gets lowered, the illusion will be that the water is rising in the room
when, in fact, the room is being lowered into the water.
That's Amanda Tapping. She's a good sport today.
We soaked her with water and we've made her prune up.
l'm sorry, sir. l can't bypass the system locally.
Jacob.
Without the proper codes, I can't access the security program.
I'm gonna try to find a back door to the program.
How long's that gonna take? We're looking at some major shrinkage here.
Give me a few minutes.
How long do you figure we got?
A few more minutes.
Cut!
This is very taxing because the water steals your heat.
lt's hard enough just to learn your lines when you're dry,
but when your cadoodies are underwater,
it's especially hard.
- Cadoodies? - lt's a medical term.
Next time we crash our brand-new mothership, let's do it in the tropics, huh?
Actually, it wouldn't make a difference.
At this depth all water is ice-cold.
- Shallower water, then. - Yes, sir, l'll keep that in mind.
These are the greatest people l've worked with, today.
When you're working with elements like water and people,
you can run into problems.
lt's tantamount to working with kids. And animals.
And action! Go up.
(Carter coughs and spIutters)
Dad, this is Sam. We're OK.
We're in stage six today. Usually, we're in stage five.
That's at the Cheyenne mountain set.
But this giant piece of set has also been brought here and set up.
This is our death glider.
The death glider has no wings, as you can see.
These wings, we animate them in 3-D.
Our actors have to climb in there, and sit in the seats there.
ln this scene l'm trying to replicate a scene...
You might see a scene like...
this, in which you see two heads.
Or you might see maybe a three-quarter.
Or in ''Tangent'' you saw lots of these kinds of shots.
Nothing's working back here.
This is a cloud tumbler. lt has a pattern of clouds on it.
lt's spun, and hopefully reflected in the glass there.
This is the Megamount.
lt goes all the way around.
That's crazy cool.
There we go. Turn the camera upside down so you can do it like a puppet.
lf l had two eyes there, and a mouth...
- Nose. - No nose. Oh, yeah.
We have to do that.
(Peter) Have you ever done that? That is the funniest thing.
This is a scene involving a glider sequence.
We have Richard Dean Anderson and Corin Nemec jumping into the glider.
They're about to make their final getaway out of the glider-bay doors.
And... action!
lt was not so great. Corin Nemec's seat was shaking a lot and giving it away.
So we asked him not to shake quite as much.
And, also, Richard Dean Anderson was doing this with a very hurt knee.
So, even something that would be seemingly as easy as this
has the potential for utter catastrophe.
And could, in fact, alter all our livelihood.
And action!
Listen, if we don't survive this,
- thanks. - You're welcome.
Amanda, be looking at Bill off the top.
And...
And... action.
- Everybody all right? - Yes, sir. We're fine.
And cut. Lovely.
Hang on.
AII members of SG-1 present and accounted for.
TeaI'c, take Ieave.
ENHOH