Whoa. Who allowed them access?
Colonel O'Neill did, sir.
- Great! Why wasn't l told about this? - l believe a memo was sent, sir.
Oh.
Hello. l'm Dr Fraiser. This is General Hammond. Welcome.
Pleased to meet you.
We understand that you have permission...
..to view some highly classified information regarding the Stargate.
This isn't normal operating procedure.
Usually we'd go through government red tape...
..before you'd even get within 100 miles of the SGC.
With all due respect, sir, l wouldn't worry. l mean, they look harmless.
Right this way.
OK. Here you go. We'll check back with you a bit later.
Now, this is highly classified material.
Yes, so please be sure not to touch anything.
Sir.
l'm the visual effects producer.
This is a breakdown of how we do visual effects shots from ''Deadman's Switch''.
We needed to put this spaceship behind the green of the trees on the set -
this is the original plate.
But this was a cliff that was about 35 or 40 feet high,...
..and we had to balance this blue screen over the edge of a cliff.
This is an element that we then shot on our stage of the interior of the cargo ship.
The orange tracking balls actually track the camera as it lowers down on the set,...
..but then we apply that to the model.
You can see here there's a wire frame and what's called a low-res polygon render,...
..and then our closer final render of the ship.
And now this is the shot cut into the sequence.
You'll see if you look closely at the ship - as it rises you can look in the windows...
You'll see the guy looking at us.
More importantly, you see the perspective shifting on the inside of the ship.
And that's real. Everything around it is CG.
So we actually blend the real set in with the CG spaceship.
ln this shot we had to create a CG snake that gets snapped in half.
We hung a prosthetic piece that our alien man could grab,...
..and then we painted it out.
And then this is the CG element. The black part is where the hands go.
And then we put it into the shot and timed it all with the grab,...
..so it's something real and something fake.
This was tricky. We needed the sense of speed - being fast, superhero creatures.
Actually, they're not creatures. They're our heroes with superhero powers.
That was the background plate for one side of the shot. ln fact we shot two sides.
We shot two cameras, did all the action,...
..then we had stand-ins of our lead characters run through the set...
..and mime where they were hitting the Jaffa guards.
Then we had to tile the two plates together, cos we wanted to do a pan.
So that's a clean plate where we painted out all the various actors and extras...
..and rigging and all of that stuff to create the pan.
This is a CG Stargate, and also the puddle element.
We always render those flat and then put them in two-dimensionally...
..to fit the perspective of the shot - it gives us a lot more control.
That's your streak element,...
..and a time-warp on the actors running from the gate and streaking through.
One of the tricks to the streak was using previous frames of the actors...
..and leaving them on the screen long enough...
..so that it feels like that streak is coming from the actors - and that's the final shot.
One of the tricks that we need to rely on sometimes is stock footage.
This is a stock-footage photograph of Moscow.
We couldn't fly to Moscow and shoot some plates of people,...
..so what we did is we took a stock photo, painted out the people in the photo...
..and then added some of our own people.
All of these people actually work in the visual effects department.
That's Shannon Gurney, one of our coordinators,...
..and an undefined person - l'm not sure who it is.
And Michelle Comens and Ted, who's one of our camera assistants.
And they're on green screen, so we shrink them down...
..and put them into that stock photograph.
Now we have movement in the frame that we didn't have before,...
..and suddenly it's starting to feel like it's coming alive.
You have what looks like a frame...
..that might have run through a motion-picture camera at some point.
And then we had a bunch of elements.
These were timing explosions,...
..stock footage again of explosions that were ''temped'' in...
..so that we could get our timing of what happens at what point.
And then, with a lot of fine-tuning and a lot of CG additions,...
..and a big white flash at the end,...
..you have a shot of Moscow blowing up ''on the economical'', we like to say.
This is a foreground plate we just shot from our first episode, ''Enemies''.
This shows a practical set that's been built...
..for the engine room of Goa'uld mother ship.
We have two plates here. We shot two tiled up, top and bottom.
This is gonna be a set extension, where l virtually extend the set in 3-D.
We'll bring this into Photoshop, which l have open now.
And what we'll be doing is timing these so that we can do a virtual camera move.
Now l can start to manipulate the images...
..and remove the distortion inherent in the tilted-up camera angle.
As l go l can start placing these elements, removing the green.
l'm also blocking out roughly in Photoshop...
..some of the other elements l need to create.
So we'll have a walkway going off, and there'll be a central area in here.
And this large blue blob is gonna be the big granddaddy bug.
And what we'll do eventually - this shows the area of the camera -
is we will start high up here and slowly pan to reveal the whole extent of the bug.
Oh, crap.
What the heII is that?
That... is a big bug.
We started out by doing the kawoosh...
..by using a giant water tank, putting a camera under it.
They used several different methods.
At one point they put a small jet engine into the water and turned it on.
And it went whoosh, and that was composited into the Stargate.
They also dropped things in there to get different versions of it.
But we couldn't keep doing that...
..because that was a very expensive, costly, pain-in-the-behind process to do.
You're going to step through... that.
Fortunately, the wizards of our digital domain...
..figured out a way to duplicate that effect digitally in a 3-D environment,...
..so that we could digitally move the camera around the kawoosh...
..and have it going where we want.
Over the course of Stargate, software has been developed...
..by visual effects people to accommodate tracking points now on the set...
..so we don't have to use motion control - they create that with our live-action shot.
So that's been a huge breakthrough, and has taken the handcuffs off us...
..and enabled us to do great shots.
That and also having matte artists who are very detailed in their work...
..and create the depth, the three-dimensional depth that we need...
..to present a world out there in space that's believable.
It's beautifuI.
l was looking at some visual effects for a show we did called ''Nemesis''...
..where Thor's ship crashes into the ocean.
The subsequent shot had parts of that ship floating in the water...
..and the whole shot was CG.
Our visual effects supervisor at the time, James Tichenor, said to me:
''lf you ever want to do a water show...''
And l said ''Funny you should say that'' and l pulled out this outline...
..and l showed it to him, and he said ''We could do that.''
The seventh address we successfuIIy diaIIed...
..Ied to a Stargate entireIy submerged under water.
That doesn't seem possibIe.
ln this shot we used the camera to mimic the motion of the sub as it passed by.
So what we actually did is we pushed the camera past our cast on set...
..and then created a CG shell, the shell of the sub, to go around them.
You'll see in this next example the various stages of how that was done.
Using the camera in this way is an innovative way of creating motion...
..out of a set that is basically static,...
..so that we don't have to push a big set around.
One of the things we also had to do was add a lot of motion blur in...
..as the ship passes by to try and simulate some of the diffusion through the dome,...
..which was actually a CG dome,...
..and then obviously the virtual world all around it.
So Iet's have that Iook around.
You can see here also in the background there's a lot of virtual world there.
lt's an amazing build - basically a 180-degree view.
And just peeping through the holes...
Because that set was open in the plate, we got to see a view of the actors...
..and could position the ports in the side of the ship perfectly.
- Wow! - It is quite beautifuI.
When we were doing the episode ''Serpent's Lair'', l had killed...
..the character of Klorel.
Because of the time-lag and how long it takes to produce a television show,...
..part one of that episode, ''Serpent's Grasp'', had just aired.
We saw from fan reaction to the character how much they loved seeing him back...
..and looked forward to future stories about him.
Jonathan had directed the episode, l'd written it, and we'd killed him.
Don't!
So Jonathan came up with this great idea.
He said ''l have a shot of Apophis being ringed away, and we have one of Klorel.''
''So, instead of dying, we just cut the scene.''
And when Apophis escapes, we cut and pasted Klorel...
..and stuck him beside Apophis, and he escaped too.
That wasn't the way it was written or even shot, but that's the way it was edited.
That was also a visual effect, of course.
But that's a case of the postproduction process changing the story.
The hardest scenes to shoot, at least for the actors,...
..are scenes that involve blue or green screens,...
..because so often they're acting with something that isn't there.
We did one episode at the end of the third season, called ''Nemesis'',...
..where there were thousands of little mechanical bugs coming after them.
Let's go, Carter!
Those bugs were computer generated. They weren't there.
The actors and the camera crew had to imagine where they were...
..and frame everything that way - they had to behave towards nothing.
We did this shot where the four of us are lined up,...
..watching this crystal cave cave in on itself.
Of course it's not really happening, so they described the effect to us.
Then we say ''lt's phenomenal!''
- CheI nok. - Direct transIation: very cooI.
''You're not gonna believe it when it caves in!''
''We wanna see some of that in your faces.''
l was the only one who took it to heart,...
..because they panned down the line...
Christopher at that point was still a very stoic Teal'c,...
..and Michael was going...
..and Rick was doing this.
And l was...
And l looked like Cindy Brady.
That episode... l won't go into The Brady Bunch, but...
..l looked like Bambi in headlights.
When we saw the final cut, l was like ''Damn, you guys didn't react!''
''l look like an idiot.'' They were like ''Yeah, sister.''
Those kind of things... l've now learned to not listen so much to directors...
..when they tell me what's happening on the blue screen.
OK. Time to wrap it up. SG-1 is preparing for another big mission.
Yes, and we can't have any unescorted civilians on base,...
- ..so you'll have to log on another time. - With the proper clearance.
Next time, a little advance warning would be nice.
Right, sir.