‘BABYLON 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in the Dark’ Production diary
In the first installment of this three part
production series, we covered the concept art and green screen
production of J. Michael Straczynski’s ‘Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in
the Dark’. Now the task of creating digital environments begins, in the hands of Atmosphere Visual Effects.
From plates to completion, the team at Atmosphere had just six weeks to finish 150 shots, and in that time had to build everything from scratch in HighDef detail. “Nobody does NTSC anymore,” said VFX Supervisor Andrew Karr. “It’s good, and it’s bad. Obviously the images look spectacular, but with NTSC you can get away with certain things. In HD you can’t get away with anything.”
Karr supervised the pipeline, breaking the teams into sequences to manage the load. He had one team concentrate on the interior of the docking bay, a huge sequence of roughly 50 green screen shots that were entirely virtual. “We had three departments working simultaneously on the one sequence, while I had freelance artists building models, and one team working on animatics for the Starfury sequence. When a sequence finished, a team would go on to something else and so on, sort of leap-frogging through scenes.”
Atmosphere’s experience with both green screen and virtual backgrounds helped launch them into this particular job, but this was the first time they tackled a virtual environment to this extent. “The tough thing was keeping it organized and staying on top of it. That’s my main focus on the jobs. We’ve never delivered a show late.” Karr had two coordinators helping with the project while he made sure everything ran smoothly.
The biggest challenge was the short schedule, especially since several of the artists – including 3D Lead Alec McClymont and Modeler Daniel Osaki – were huge fans of the show and went above and beyond requirements to add their stamp to the stunning visuals. “We were working with a pretty strict budget, so I could only approve a certain amount of overtime,” said Karr. So McClymont and Osaki put in time after hours, maybe three or four hours a night. “That’s what happens when you are a fan of the show.”
One of the grandest additions is the Babylon 5 docking bay, which is no longer a barely-glimpsed space beyond the view of the camera. It is now a full fledged - and enormous - functioning environment.
The interior was one of the first things to be modeled and textured and was completed in the first three weeks. “We took all the camera information,” said Karr, “camera height, angles - which in this case didn’t necessarily always work - and basically mimicked the CG camera to what we had on set.”
After discussing how the bay would function, how ships would enter, what devices would be used to move things around, and how people would embark and disembark, Osaki went to work. The environment was originally planned as series of matte paintings, but Osaki built the whole thing in 3D, based on the old set from the original show, offering the capability to shoot in whatever direction was needed.
“The original show has a sequence where we see the platforms and elevators and a large ring where the platforms go. I took the original model for the proportions to be sure the docking bay set would fit in the station. We got something that looks bigger, and because the original was built 15 years ago, looks nicer using the tools we have now.”
Built entirely in LightWave, the finished interior consists of 1,177,000 polys and measures a whopping 820 feet, and each platform is about 259 feet long. The deck to the end of the docking bay is 600 feet. Everything is designed to work.
The platforms uses a rotational system to take advantage of the station’s own rotation: spaceships enter via the front of the station, pass through two airlocks, and dock onto a large platform that then descends into the docking bay, a concept from the original show. (The platforms are designed with interlocking mechanisms that can adjust to differing sizes of ships, from Starfuries to freighters and Earth Alliance transports.)
From the elevator, a huge rotating ring moves the platform into the main docking bay area. Every animated platform is almost as big as a city block, with details added to give it scale, and the docking bay is designed to hold 20 platforms, though in the rendered shots only three or four are visible. The result is a small spaceport inside a large space station, with walkways and other set up for passengers and crew, with cargo boxes and technical instruments for the spaceships.
Once everything was modeled, the task was to figure out the camera angles based on the plates and practical camera movements. Karr explains, “When we initially budgeted it out we had fewer angles, but ended up with over seventeen. A lot of areas weren’t detailed for close-ups, so Osaki had to add fine 3D details, then we took every static shot into Photoshop and added more.”
Logistically it was a challenge figuring out where the camera was, and what the actors and audience was looking at. As actors walked, stopped, and turned against a green screen, cameras moved to accommodate, each time creating a completely different angle. “That took a couple of tries. We would sit down with everyone to make sure that it felt natural and real. These weren’t the finished renders, but we could get a feel for if it was working.”
