J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in the Dark - Part 3
CGSociety Production Focus
By Renee Dunlop
The postproduction of ‘Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in the Dark’ was in it’s final stages. As the spring days grew longer in Vancouver, so did the hours at Atmosphere Visual Effects.
Babylon 5 Creator J. Michael Straczynski was flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Vancouver while continuing his multitude of other projects “writing the next draft of the ‘Silver Surfer’ standalone movie for Fox, finishing up the next revision on ‘World War Z’ for Paramount, and starting up on the script for ‘They Marched Into Sunlight,’ based on the Pulitzer-nominated book of the same name.” All of this is aside from his routine projects for Marvel Comics, website blogs, his almost daily meetings, and fielding offers that seem to come more often than the days that contain them. “I don't sleep much.” No kidding!
With a deadline of March 1st and still so much to do, the team at Atmosphere wasn’t sleeping much either. Compositing Supervisor Brenda Campbell and her team were tackling the Docking Bay and the destruction of New York. A new battle scene was added. Modeling was in final stages. Shots were crisscrossing through the pipeline trying to find their way out the door.
The late addition of a space battle scene required the unexpected development of enough ships to fill the skies for over 500 frames. Straczynski, a stickler for a good storyline, felt the addition was an important one, and his career in entertainment goes back to '84 when he started in animation, so he knew the work involved was doable.
“The story is and was designed to be very self-contained, two small, personal short stories centered around each character. The danger in going too far with that, however, is that it can become a bit too quiet… and as a SciFi fan myself who likes battle sequences as much as the next guy, I began to feel the lack of action. So I included that section a bit late in the game but I think it adds to the sense of the stakes involved.”
3D Lead Alec McClymont, a huge fan of Babylon 5, was in charge of getting the elements needed for the scene. “The battle scene kind of came out of nowhere, but I think it turned out well. There were quite a few ships.
We had the animatic done and waiting to be worked on, so it eventually became an issue of who was going to work on it, who was going to finish what they were already on and would have time to get it done by the end of the show.” Artist Paul Hegg took on most of the shot, with help from short term hire Jeremy Hampton.
The scene required nine or ten large ships and at least five or six principle fighters that required enough detail to be close to the camera, and many more to fill the background space. They started only with the Starfury and one Centauri ship used in a few other shots, but everything else needed to be scrounged or created.
They added the “Warlock”, an additional earth warship, a Centauri fighter that wasn’t originally planned for, and filled the background with models from the old series.
One of the grander and more luxurious spaceships was Sheridan’s IA 1, a new addition that acts as the presidential ship, a space version of Air Force One. In the storyline, the ship was designed by the Minbari’s. The model was a combination of ideas from Modeler Daniel Osaki, 3D Lead Alec McClymont, and of course Straczynski. “The first designs were very Earth-centric, too hard in their lines, and given the tradition of this ship as part of the Minbari design sensibility, I wanted something a bit more fluid,” Straczynski commented.
“At one point, I seem to recall taking the design of this ship and, as with Trek, ended up turning it upside down to get what we have now.” Osaki designed the spaceship to look like a shark, mean with sexy angles, using shark bones and cartilages for reference. The result is a beautiful 100,000 polycount ship 900 meters long (2,950 feet) with a wingspan is 370 meters (or 1,213 feet). Though Osaki only modeled the outside, in one of the opening scenes the camera pans by the windows showing a digital crew inside, visible in HD but probably lost in NTSC.
According to McClymont, the heaviest scene was the docking bay, with several long shots, especially on the comp end. Though there were bigger individual shots, that sequence was the most involved. Using Digital Fusion, Brenda Campbell worked with four compositors, keying the 44 shots in sequence.
“The challenge with that one was making sure the keys and suppressions flowed smoothly and maintained continuity. The suppression is to remove the green light that spills from the greenscreen onto the object. What the controls do in the compositing package is take that green out without making it look gray and flat.” The Centauri characters hair is feathered in the back, which tended to be problematic, but Campbell’s team developed keying techniques to manage the challenge.
Working back and forth with Straczynski, the bay was prepped for the final steps. "One of the main changes I made to the docking bay CGI background was in a way a compliment to the individual animators. When it was first delivered, there was a heavy wash of gray over the whole scene, which made individual elements disappear entirely and destroyed the depth of field.
So I went to the Atmosphere offices and had them start peeling away the layers one at a time until suddenly the scene was clear. 'That's the one,' I said, and that's the final look. The wash was an artistic choice by somebody, but it obliterated all of the detail work that had gone into the bay."
The next obstacle was getting the virtual set camera angles right and making sure the positions flowed smoothly throughout the sequence. Comping the live action actors into an entirely virtual set can be difficult at times, since the smallest discrepancy of camera angles can throw off the experience for the viewer.
