- Cursios, Foiled Again! -

While working on a landscape for a forthcoming project at Ninjaneer Studios, I found that the animated reflections in some open water took prohibitively long to render thanks to a combination of the reflections and the diffused lighting of the scene. There had to be a quicker process that gave similar results, so I began investigating alternatives.

Render With Full Lighting and Raytraced Reflections

I found that Adobe After Effects has a filter called Displacement Map, allowing me to distort one layer based on another. One big drawback to this filter is the way it displaces, resulting in artifacts at the edge of the screen and other transparent areas where it attempts to sample data that is out-of-frame. This was easy enough to solve, but required some creative shot breakout.

Displacement Map (Note the ragged edges along the bottom and left sides)

Returning to Lightwave, I rendered out a reflection pass of the foreground elements. I changed the surfacing of the water so it was mirrored, deleted everything except the foreground elements, and set the foreground element to be unseen by the camera. This gave a pass consisting only of the reflection of the foreground, accounting for the perspective distortion in the reflection.

Thanks to the distance, there wasn’t enough perspective difference between the background and sky and their reflections to require a true reflection pass to be rendered, so I just reused those, flipped vertically. The clouds were a single panoramic plate, slowly receding, so those were likewise flipped vertically and layered into the basic reflection composite.

With the reflected version of the scene now created, all that remained was to make it look like water. I returned to Lightwave and rendered out basic diffusion and specularity passes from the original water object. To get the input for the distortion map, I created a duplicate of the water object and took surfacing in the bump channel and reapplied to to the color channel. After zeroing out the other channels and setting luminosity to 100%, I rendered it out, creating a shifting cloud pattern which corresponded perfectly to the diffusion and specularity passes I rendered earlier.

Diffusion, Specularity, and Bump Passes

Back in After Effects, I brought these passes in and layered them over the reflection composite I had created. I hid the bump layer and added an adjustment layer between the reflection elements and the diffuse and specularity layers. I applied a displacement map to it and set the bump layer as the input. All that remained was to tweak the horizontal and vertical displacement to make the reflection appropriately wavy.

The Final Post-Production Reflection

A version of this post appeared on the official Ninjaneer Studios blog.

Posted in After Effects, Lightwave, Ninjaneer Studios, Write-Up

Over at Foundation3D, a new downloads category opened up for unfinished models. A couple days after seeing the thread, I remembered that I had a very rough version of the hangar deck from the 2003 version of Battlestar Galactica, and also the foundation for the Halo: Reach version of the Pillar of Autumn. I’d finished the initial work for both, which is usually the part of modeling that gives me the most trouble, but I’d also burned out on them getting that far and moved on to other things.

I uploaded both of them. The Autumn includes a large number of screencaps from Reach, a few downloaded from the internet, but most I took myself to use as reference for the project.

The hangar was actually for a school assignment, to match a professionally made 3D rendered environment, either a virtual set or something from an animated film.

You can download the Pillar of Autumn and hangar from Foundation3D. The models are in Lightwave format, though I included OBJ versions for users of other packages. All I ask is that if you let me know if you do anything with them. I still have a few images in mind that I’d like to make with these objects.

As an aside, the reason I was looking at my hangar model was that I was playing with some of the new BSG designs from Blood and Chrome and comparing them to the parent show. While doing that, I did some scaling with the new Viper (based on a production diagram posted by Doug Drexler) and found out that it’s a big sucker (10.6 meters long, with a 6.8 meter wingspan). I thought I may have made a mistake, but the cockpit matches the size of the cockpit on the Mark II version, and they seem to be using the second Mark II cockpit set from BSG without any modifications, so they should take up the same space.

Posted in Battlestar Galactica, Downloads, Halo, Lightwave, Model, Model Commentary, Write-Up

Today’s update is a fairly straightforward sequence. We’ve now reached Act 2 of the episode, which begins with one of the common season 1 establishing shots of the station.

The stock shots of the station were something I wondered about earlier in this project. On the one hand, part of the philosophical basis for doing this is to give the show a more unified appearance, rather than the variations from shifting styles and evolving technology during the original run. On the other hand, I would like it if each chapter of the show had it’s own style (more than just how many and what kind of spaceships are loitering around Babylon 5). This didn’t quite occur in the original run, with very early stock footage being used in later episodes where the look of the show had evolved into something totally different, so what I’m shooting for can be described as stylistic evolution over the five seasons, but technical consistency for the run of the show. Another concern was the ever-present question of when I want to make a direct recreation of the original shot, and when I think I have my own idea for how to set it up. It’s hard to think of a “better” way to do any given generic, interchangeable establishing shot, as opposed to something with a more specific context.

What I think I’ll end up doing is to try to preserve the “feel” of the original establishing shots, while recreating them in my own idiom. For instance, a lot of the establishing shots in the first season of B5, including this one, either started from came to a complete stop, with a very spline-y acceleration or deceleration that screams “early computer graphics.” Eliminating that, along with framing it from the start in 16×9, makes the shot feel a lot more comfortable and cinematic than the version on the DVD.

Assuming this project continues on, I’ll probably make adjusted versions of early shots when they pop up in later seasons to fit in better with those episodes. A good example of this is one of my favorite touches from the new Battlestar Galactica. There was one particular establishing shot of the ship which was used throughout the series, and in later appearances, as the Galactica became more beat-up, new versions of the exact same shot appeared with the additional weathering. It was a fun twist on the concept of stock footage, and something I’d like to do myself.

The other segment in this update is from (the first half of) Sheridan’s good-luck speech in the Observation Dome. There are two shots out the window, one of which had a pivot and a zoom, and the other which was locked off. I found that the first shot was more difficult for After Effects to track than I had anticipated, so I’m going to mark that as another one to revisit down the line. The locked-off shot looks gorgeous, though. I only wish it lasted more than a second or two so I could appreciate the spinning stars while the observation drones pretend to be amused by anecdotes about the Dali Lama.

I’ve also been having a lot of trouble with the Premiere file I’d been using, so there’s an odd editing issue with the first Observation Dome window shot, and there are no crossfades or subtitles in this batch. I’ll probably just recreate the project file within the next couple of updates. Hopefully it’s just the Premiere file that’s gone bad, and the program itself isn’t reacting to something in the source videos.

Next up is another establishing shot of the station (which I’ll probably swap out for continuity reasons I’ll go into when I post it), then the Battle of the Line flashback, which will be preceded by what I’m sure will be an epic dissertation on just what happened during the Battle of the Line.

Model Credits:

Babylon 5: Ed Giddings
“Epsilon 3”: Nick Stevens
Epsilon Nebula: Amras
Starfury: Mark Kane
Starfury Wingart: Chris Guinn
Shuttle: Alexander Shareef

Posted in After Effects, Animation, Babylon 5, Lightwave, Points of Departure Effects Update, Write-Up

It’s been a while since I updated this project, but a few weeks ago, it came back up in conversation. I realized at the time that I was now spending a lot of time sitting by a high-power desktop that wasn’t usually doing anything, and decided to take advantage of it.

I did end up trying Autodesk MatchMover. It handled the shot of Ivanova and Corwin from the last update with aplomb, but choked on the closing shot of the episode, which I expected to be the sharp, pointy crown jewel of difficulty on this project, containing both a lengthy camera move and a focal-length change.

I used the spare computer to re-render the second shot of the Agamemnon from the episode’s teaser, removing the odd tweening error I’d hoped no one would notice but which someone did. I then re-rendered it again when I got frustrated with the jump point opening effect. Yuri Parovin’s “A Call to Arms” jump point used a pre-made animated image map to accomplish the sparking that occurs before the point opens. Unfortunately, it was set for 30 frames per second, and I’m rendering the shots for this episode at 24 FPS. Lightwave appears to make an odd choice when it comes to splitting the difference in this case, keeping the timing correct by holding on the nearest frame, rather than making the transition within frames. The upshot was that the texture would hold for two frames, then skip a frame, then proceed normally for a time, giving the effect a noticeable stutter.

I asked around at the office, and figured out a plan of attack to recreate the effect procedurally. In Lightwave, it’s using “Previous Layer” as the input to a gradient shader, and in Maya, it’s called a Ramp Shader. Whatever it’s named, the way it works is to take a source image and redefine what its colors output as. In this case, grey becomes white, and both black and white become black.

I’d seen this technique described before, in a presentation by Bungie Studios (“Blowing S#!t Up the Bungie Way”) describing how they were able to get everything from flaming explosions to electrical arcing from one or two grayscale textures, and recognized it as how that jump point texture had to have been done, but I hadn’t realized until speaking with bottomless font of wisdom Chris Brown how to translate that technique into the programs I use.

I tried a purely procedural solution, but it didn’t quite look right. The “energy ring” was too even, and it didn’t crinkle up at the center of the cone object the way the image map did. I eventually created a map in Photoshop to use as a baseline, and animated the “Previous layer” gradient instead. I threw in a semi-transparent layer of fractal turbulence in Lightwave which was gradually animated just so the energy effect wouldn’t repeat precisely every time. This was also the most contact I’ve had with Lightwave’s node-based surfacing, and I finally used some of the features that set it apart from the traditional surfacing options. The ability to directly feed one texture into multiple channels was a revelation, compared to the old way of having to copy-and-paste texture layers from color to specularity to glow to transparency and so on.

The upshot is, the new jump point now looks smooth opening up even at 24 FPS. Here’s the updated version of the shot.

I took another pass at the lighting rig for Rhys Salcombe‘s Minbari Warcruiser, brightening it considerably and switching the lights between the bottom ribs to single points rather than pairs of spots. I experimented with doing the effect with a luminance map, but it didn’t quite achieve the goal, so I stuck with doing it with lights. I also created a beaten-up version of the ship to represent the Trigati, to give some visual credence to the idea that the ship had been square in the middle of the biggest battle of the Earth-Minbari War when it deserted and hadn’t been able to make port for repairs in the twelve years since, and to differentiate it from the second Warcruiser that shows up at the end. It’s the first time I’ve done modeled damage on a spaceship, so that was fun.

The top fin has a blast mark on both sides, inspired by one of the shots of the Battle of the Line in “In the Beginning,” where a Starfury crashes into that section of a Minbari ship and blows out through the other side. I chewed away the lower left fin, and added a fairly large hole on the right side of the main hull, as if the right forward gun on the ship had misfired. I put a layer of procedural dirt over the whole ship, as well. I’m sure some people will think I’m overdoing it, given how much the Minbari outmatched Earth during the war, but there were a fair few shots of damaged Minbari ships in ITB, and I figured a Warrior Caste ship would be more likely than most to wade into the middle of the fight where they might take a few blows.

Babylon 5: The Complete Second Season is available on DVD.

Posted in After Effects, Animation, Babylon 5, Lightwave, Points of Departure Effects Update, Write-Up

Recently, my company, Ninjaneer Studios, was invited to exhibit at the Otronicon event. We decided to set up a small-scale 3D projection mapping show. My specific contribution was the cityscape at the end of the show.

While Ninjaneer generally uses Maya for 3D work, I use LightWave occasionally, especially in projects where I’m working solo. This was my first big test of a cross-platform workflow, since the template for the stage and projector set-up was a Maya file, I wanted to model the city buildings in Lightwave so I could work with the greatest speed, and my scene would have to go back to Maya for rendering by my colleague Christopher Brown, who was in charge implementing the show. It was much easier than I expected, though it helped that thanks to time constraints and the nature of the final output, I elected not to give the buildings more than the simplest of surfaces.

Design doodles

The first step was to do research. I had five-and-a-half rectangular silhouettes, and needed to make each building as distinct and interesting as possible. The first building from the left was inspired by a computer-animated video showing the construction of the replacement World Trade Center tower in New York. I took advantage of the transparent design to incorporate an elevator at each corner, adding some life to the building.

Building two was primarily based on the Flatiron Building, also in New York. It was the last or second-to-last I did, and I felt I was being a bit too modernist with the others, and that “Otron City” (as no one else called it) needed some older architecture. I also wanted to make a small reference to the apartment building which was the setting of my University class’s graduation project, the animated short “Squeaky Business.”

Building three was a lucky break during research, coming from a Google image search. I eventually learned it was a (new? Proposed? I never found a detailed description) building in Miami. I actually decided building four would just be a concrete cube with some fans in it before  I found out how the practical boxes would be arranged, since it was the only thing I could think of for something so small. It ended up fitting perfectly on top of number three as if it were a machine room. The inclusion of the fans added some more animation to buildings.

Building five was loosely based on the Swiss Re building in London (which I had never actually noticed before the most recent season finale of “Doctor Who,” where I briefly thought it was a special effect because it was so aggressively modern).

Building six is my personal favorite, and is based on the HSBC Building in Hong Kong. I became aware of it during the research process, while I was looking through a coffee table book I got on clearance some years ago in case something like this happened, Masterpieces of Modern Architecture.

Our template 3D set

I exported the Maya template scene for the show’s setup as a Collada file, and brought it into LightWave Modeler. I modeled the six buildings and sent them back to Maya using LightWave’s FBX exporter, since I wanted to try all the interoperability. Due to time constraints and the way the fact that fine detail wouldn’t be very apparent in the final output, the Maya versions had just simple values set for the shading. I set up a basic scene with duplicate buildings filling out the background and a skydome rotating around the scene to give the illusion that the time of day was changing and really sell the simulated depth of the projection, as well as animating the fans on building four and the elevators on building one in a cycle so the whole thing could be looped.

The Maya version of the cityscape being projected

During the course of Otronicon, there were periods of downtime where I returned to the LightWave version of the city. I  added texture maps to the window boxes of the buildings, gave the rest of the buildings more complicated procedural textures, and added basic lighting setups. Once I was done, I rendered the “sweetened” version of the city as a still in day and night versions, to be used on our idle screen in between shows.

The LightWave daytime version of the city being projected

The LightWave night version of the city being projected

A version of this post appeared on the official Ninjaneer Studios blog.

Posted in Lightwave, Maya, Ninjaneer Studios, Write-Up

Let it be known that boredom, inspiration, and graphic design experience are a dangerous combination. In a recent episode of “Doctor Who,” we learned that the Doctor’s now-former companion, Amy Pond, had made it big as some sort of cosmetics or fashion designer, complete with her own line of perfume. On the TrekBBS, Samurai8472 made a post saying that this perfume ad would be a pretty good design for an Amy Pond ad.

I immediately saw where he was going with that (I hope), and started trolling the web for the necessary images (note to Karen Gillian: Please be photographed more in full body shots, against solid-colored backgrounds, while looking towards the camera. My options ended up a little limited). The central elements ended up being photos used for cardboard standees of Amy Pond and the TARDIS, this HDR image of London and this TARDIS inkbottle, which may or may not be a Photoshop. A few pixels pushed, et voilà.

Posted in Doctor Who, Photoshop

I’ve finally gone through with beginning to create a new homepage. Or is it “blog,” now? Vanity-internet-place-with-my-words-and-pictures. And it only took three and a quarter years.

I chose WordPress because it combined versatility with ease of use. Most importantly, it would give me an easy way to include primarily written articles in addition to image galleries, as I saw with sites like Modelers Miniatures and Magic and Craig Clark’s site. I’m looking forward to squaring the circle on that one, and using a blogging platform to host a site whose flagship feature will be image galleries, video files, and 3D model downloads.

My current plan for the site is to begin by duplicating and updating the content of my old site.

1. Upload still image galleries
2. Upload movie galleries
3. Upload 3D models (I should probably check that the archives are up-to-date)
4. Copy over any remaining oddball pages from the old site, such as my build-a-Stargate guide

Posted in Site Business

And here comes the really ambitious part. I’ve decided to fill in an appropriately spinning starscape into the Observation Dome window. The first scene in the C’n'C was next up in the episode. One of the shots was locked off and at an angle, so there were no reflections, characters, or preexisting felt-and-rindstone star-fields to worry about. The other had all of those, as well as a relatively sweeping camera move that I had to match in Lightwave, rather than just rendering the view outside from the angle where you could see the most out the window and match-moving it in After Effects. In fact, it’s probably tied for the most difficult such shot in the episode. In light of that, I just temped it in here, superimposing the exterior render on top of the episode footage. I’ll come back later after I’ve done more of the simpler ones and gotten a better handle on how things work. Not to mention that I didn’t do the best job eyeballing the match move in Lightwave, and missed rendering one frame. Whoops.

Actually, I just remembered that my student copy of Maya is good for a while longer, and it included the unimaginatively named MatchMover. So, that should at least solve my “shots with big camera moves” problem. That only leaves the “thundering pain in the butt rotoscoping” problem. Why couldn’t the Earthforce uniforms have been, like, powder blue instead of navy? Why couldn’t Ivanova be blonde?

Anyway, here’s the scene in question, in glorious 720p. Even though that slightly uprezzes my 3D stuff, and drastically uprezzes the footage from the DVDs, it’s the only thing that I can think of that’ll stop YouTube from compressing it to death when I upload something at anything less. There’s also a photoshopped mockup for what the difficult shot might look like once it’s properly masked, and a modeler screenshot of the low-detail C’n'C I built so I could match the shots to exactly the right position and angle on B5.

I built it by matching camera angles to DVD screencaps in layout then shifting points in modeler until everything lined up. It’s a bit weird, probably since I had to guess about the original camera FoVs, but as long as the window was close, it was good enough. I’ll come back to it later and try to adjust the whole thing to be in proportion, especially the right side. The captain’s station is so screwed up, I don’t even know how it’s all supposed to fit together in the same space as the left side.

I was also really surprised when I figured out that the left wall wasn’t perpendicular to anything, not to mention how much bigger the room is in scale to the station than the corresponding part of the show model was.

Babylon 5: The Complete Second Season is available on DVD.

Posted in After Effects, Animation, Babylon 5, Lightwave, Points of Departure Effects Update, Write-Up

Reel Breakdown:
“Squeaky Business” (April 2011) Group short: Camera layout, Cityscape environment in Autodesk Maya, high-res exterior brick texture in Adobe Photoshop. Composited in Autodesk Composite. “Squeaky Business” © University of Central Florida

“Compositing and Motion-Tracking Exercise” (Nov 2009) Student Project: Camera tracking, chromakeying and matte cleanup, compositing in Apple Shake

“Puddle Jumper” (Aug 2007) Personal Project: Modeling and texturing in Newtek Lightwave and Adobe Photoshop. Commentary  Model Gallery  Puddle Jumper design and Stargate Atlantis © MGM

“Tulip Chair” (Sep 2009) Student Project: Modeled in Newtek Lightwave, UV mapped in Autodesk Maya.

“Run Cycle” (Oct 2010) Student Project: Animation in Autodesk Maya

“Battlestar Firing” (Feb 2011) Personal Project: Lighting, animation, camera, effects in Newtek Lightwave. Composited in Adobe After Effects. Battlestar model by “tan.j”  Commentary  Battlestar Galactica © NBC Universal

Music: “Under the Wing” by Bear McCreary

Posted in Demo Reel

So, I’ve still been fiddling with this in the background, conducting some research and prep-stuff. Just to make myself happy, I found an on-line calculator for centrifugal artificial gravity and got a spin-rate for B5 that I could use with authority (once every 90 seconds). I added more of a self-lighting rig on Rhys Salcombe’s Minbari Warcruiser based on Sheridan’s ship in “The Lost Tales,” with lights in the recesses between the ribs, and one of B5 Scrolls’ interviews mentioned how the high deffy Epsilon 3 map was made for TLT (a recolored Mars with a bunch of gouges added from topographical surveys of the Grand Canyon so there’s somewhere for the Great Machine to go) so I shamelessly ripped off that tactic because I don’t trust my own painting ability and it looked fine in the movie.

I noticed something while splitting out the rest of the shots for this episode which amused me. The last establishing shot before the rogue Minbari ship arrives is the sun going down behind B5 and the station lights coming on. The first one after the Minbari are taken care of is the sun coming up. So, I have three choices, near as I can tell.

1- I can ignore it, like they did in the episode. 2- I can keep the establishing shots and redo all the scenes with the Minbari ships to be in local night, which will look cool and/or be an enormous pain in the butt, or 3- I can flip the establishing shots so it’s morning when Lennier explains Season One to Sheridan and Ivanova and evening when everyone meets up at the officer’s club and Sheridan gives his speech to an empty C’n'C. I’m leaning towards the last one as making the most logical sense.

Yesterday I cranked out the next shot in the episode, an establisher of Babylon 5. When I was looking at it, I realized that, as nice and proportional as Ed Giddings’ B5 is (the benefit of being the first one released after plan drawings of the original were released, IIRC), it’s really ’90s in terms of detailing. Since I’d want to replace it as soon as I could with a HD-level version anyway, I decided to phone it in a little and not do a proper shot breakout for this one yet, and just use it as a placeholder for now. Since I didn’t go through all that work, it meant I wasn’t really that upset when I looked at the finished product and found that I’d forgotten to reset my fake nebula radiosity from 30 fps to 24 fps, so the fill light is flickering, and that the red light in the center docking bay has shadow casting on, so the bay flickers off then back on when the little shuttle flies through it.

Babylon 5: Ed Giddings
“Epsilon 3″: Starbase1
Epsilon Nebula: Amras
Starfury: Mark Kane
Starfury Wingart: Chris Guinn
Freighter: Dave Hribarm
Shuttle: Alexander Shareef

Babylon 5: The Complete Second Season is available on DVD.

Posted in After Effects, Animation, Babylon 5, Lightwave, Points of Departure Effects Update, Write-Up

So, something I’ve talked about more than once is the pie-in-the-sky idea of an HD transfer of Babylon 5 which, by necessity, would require all-new visual effects, not unlike what was recently done with the original Star Trek series. A couple weeks ago, after school died down, I decided to relax with some nice, simple spaceship layouts, and begin attacking an episode of B5, possibly eventually doing the entire thing. For the moment, though, I’ve just done two visual effects shots in the teaser.

The episode I picked was the season two premiere, and the sequence is the very beginning, the introduction of Captain Sheridan aboard his soon-to-be-former command, the Agamemnon. I never seriously considered trying to be exceedingly faithful to the original shots, mostly because that’d be no fun. I mocked up a couple of images to show what such a recreation might look like, and, who knows, if someone was paying me I’d certainly be open to trying to match the originals as close as possible. But since it’s just me, I figure, why not indulge myself?

I’m not sure if I’m going to move forward on this anytime soon (I certainly haven’t ever completed a long-term solo production yet), but I prefer to live in hope. If I do, I’ll likely revisit earlier shots as I go along to adjust them.

Without further adieu, here’s the shot.

Omega Destroyer by Rhys Salcombe
Freighter by Dave Hribarm
Jumppoint by Yuri A. Parovin
Planet and Rings by Björn Jónsson

As a bonus, here’s a 1080p still from the sequence.

Babylon 5: The Complete Second Season is available on DVD.

Posted in After Effects, Animation, Babylon 5, Lightwave, Points of Departure Effects Update, Write-Up

TWISTING AND TURNING, YOUR FEELINGS ARE BURNING, YOU’RE BREAKING THE GIRL

I don’t know if I was just feeling off when I watched this one, or it’s because there was a six-week gap between me watching this, starting to write about it, then watching it again and actually writing about it, or what, but it didn’t seem nearly as great as the first time I saw it. It might have to do with the fact that so much of it relies on tension and not knowing how Joseph and Daniel are going to react to the continued frustration of their daughters’ refusal to contact them.

Joseph, perhaps unsurprisingly given his history, has the more drastic fall. At first, exploring the V-World version of his apartment (inhabited by a shabby man with a probably-coincidental resemblance to Saul Tigh in that flashback where he was setting fire to his medals with a hooker on his bed in another Room 3), Joe absolutely freaks out when he’s pointing a gun at a thug who’s messing with him because, hey, it’s New Cap. That scene really played differently after seeing “The Dirteaters,” where we saw the last time Joe Adama held a gun, he was about ten years old and shot his own father to end his suffering, right after hearing his mother be tortured to death in the next room. It also make’s Sam’s reaction to Joe asking how to kill someone take on some additional shading (or does it? I don’t remember if little Sam had already escaped by that point. Maybe he doesn’t know exactly what happened in the end). In any event, Joe completely fails to avoid Cerberus, the transvestite MC, on his next trip to New Cap, and shows no interest in trying to answer a riddle, which I will briefly digress upon.

“As the Gods overthrew the Titans, so has Man overthrown the Gods. But when Man visits his sins upon his children, how shall he be repaid?”

This is fairly opaque in the cut, but seeing the deleted scenes and learning more about Cerberus’s patter has given me some clues. Cerberus, like certain other people of our acquaintance, is married to the Cycle of Time, reenacting the fall of the Titans and rise of the Olympians every night, but expressing the hope that one day, someone will crack the riddle, break the cycle, and something different will happen. Sadly, on purely statistical grounds, its unlikely that Cerberus managed to survive the collapse of New Cap, the Cylon Wars, 40 years of aging, the attack and the exodus to actually see his dream come true. We don’t even know if it all worked out yet, anyway. (Also, the “your-anus” pun is apparently older than human civilization)

Back to Joe in the nightclub. After being reduced to a pouting, foot-stamping mockery of himself, he gets ticked off at being called a coward, and decides to do something about it when he sees the flower and realizes Cerberus was bullshitting him about Tamara. He then does the coolest thing an Adama is going to do until Bill goes around Galactica shooting mutineers with a gun in each hand. That whole guns akimbo thing gets to be cool again when it’s done in a show that’s typically more realistic in style.

After they see that Tamara has been tagging all of New Cap with her flower (I noticed in a deleted scene that there was at least one hidden earlier in the episode), Evelyn/Emmanuelle advises Joe to give up. This whole strange relationship they have leads to some interesting questions. Not just how she orchestrated her appearance, or why she was playing New Cap in the first place, but did she ever, you know, tell Joe what she did? And even if she didn’t, did she ever give him back his money?

JUST DON’T ASK ME HOW I AM

Then we have Zoe and Daniel. Daniel doesn’t care to wait her out, or use the carrot (but, then, what can he give her?). Granted, I get irritated when people don’t take my calls, too, but I’ve never had someone I needed as much as a dead daughter. If someone avoids me, I generally take the hint even if I don’t want to. Oddly, Daniel almost seems to be enjoying himself when he’s thinking of new ways to get a rise out of Zoe. I guess, like Sam says, you turn it into a game so you aren’t stopped by the horror of what you’re doing.

Speaking of that line, I wonder if one of the places Caprica was going was dealing with the Cylon-on-Cylon wars. That may have been the ultimate cause for the revolution. Clarice had an army of monotheist “dumb” cylons (or maybe it was another colony with a bunch of sub-sentient Cylons), and to fight them off, Daniel and Zoe had to make sentient versions that could outthink them using the Avatar program, and then the smart ones ended up being convinced by Clarice and left the Colonials worse off than the were before.

Back to the war of the wills, Daniel reveals more of himself than he means just before he sets the robot on fire (it looks like I was wrong when I guessed that it might’ve been tylium when it first aired— the can specifically said “gasoline”), when he talks about Zoe running away. “You have to make decisions like that, and sometimes you make the wrong ones and you have to keep going anyway.” All of this business with Zoe and Vergis and Amanda has Daniel swimming like a shark, afraid to drown on air if he ever slows down.

Just to close with a little more Tauron culture, when Vergis tells Amanda about Daniel having the MCP stolen, he implies that he would’ve respected him more if he’d stolen the chip and killed the scientists personally. I mean, come on, Tommy. You and Daniel are rich men. You have people for that sort of thing.

Caprica: Season 1.0 is available on DVD.

Posted in Battlestar Galactica Retro-Review

AND WE WERE INTERESTED IN HER AND HER CLIENTELE

So, what’s the giveaway with Clarice? At the beginning of the episode, a construction worker immediately pegs her as a member of the clergy, despite the fact that she’s in plain clothes and hasn’t said anything. My best guess is that giant ring she wears. I don’t think we ever saw any of the priests later on wearing anything like that, though.

Clarice’s attempts to ingratiate herself with Amanda go off swimmingly, aided by Amanda’s nervous breakdown. And, might I say, the fact that the Darius storyline doesn’t go anywhere is a frakking mercy compared to the original concept that Vergis hired an actor to impersonate Amanda’s dead brother in the hopes of provoking a mental breakdown as part of his campaign of vengeance against Daniel. I mean, Jesus. We were really spared some awful, awful things thanks to further consideration, weren’t we? I’m not even going to talk about Saul and Ellen’s marriage almost becoming the lynchpin of the finale. Yet. Anyway, after Amanda and Clarice go out to the Dive, Clarice begins telling her how she needs to trust in God, and Amanda obliviously asks which of the gods she’s talking about. In light of that drunk-dialing deleted scene I talked about before, I think we can conclusively say that Clarice is the worst secret terrorist ever. Amanda isn’t doing much better, since she’ll be utterly shocked once Durham tells her the Willow family is one giant STO cell. In the deleted scenes, Clarice snaps out of it with admirable swiftness and fingers Zeus as the god in question. Yep, just go to Zeus with all your problems. He’s the guy you need.

There’s an interesting moment after Daniel comes home and he’s so distracted that he repeatedly almost notices that Amanda had someone over, and once it finally sinks in, he asks if he should be jealous. Amanda say’s she isn’t sure yet. I don’t recall if there was ever any compelling indications that Clarice and Amanda actually got it on at any point. I suppose if it happened, it was probably while they were in her secret love cabin after the suicide attempt. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that when I get there.

WHO MAKES THE RULES? SOMEONE ELSE

There was also a deleted subplot with the GDD using their new facial recognition software (acquired in an earlier episode’s deleted scene) to mass-screen the spectators of a Pyramid game. There’s some stuff with Durham going after a guy who’s 75% likely to be an old-hand STO bomber who’s served his time and been released, arresting him because he looks like he might be an ex-con at a sporting event. The real meat is another one of Durham’s cracking anti-Monad speeches. I always loved how twisted these were, ever since a quote from his first one in “Pilot” was put into an early review about the dangers of a single God who could, on a whim, decide that murder or theft were morally virtuous. More or less, he says today that “Monotheists are weak people who need God to tell them right and wrong because they have no sense of personal conscience or respect for law.” Can’t say I never met someone religiously or politically doctrinaire enough to have that description apply to them. I may use it sometime myself.

SHE’S GOING TO SMILE TO MAKE YOU FROWN, WHAT A CLOWN

Zoe and Philo go on a date where, in her attempts to sweet-talk him into taking the robot on a field trip to Gemenon, she accidentally explains why her chip is different from all other chips. There’s a bit of eyecandy with proto-Vipers that, interestingly, have Greystone logos painted on them. That’s probably because they’re in a computer game, and not because Greystone actually manufactures Vipers. I’m curious about what all those off-shore platforms were for, though. Do you need to get that much petroleum if you aren’t burning it for fuel? Zoe’s loose lips, along with Vergis taunting him about how the chip he stole was a lemon, finally let Daniel put two and two together and realize Zoe-A faked her death and is still in the U-87. It’s still odd to me that no one ever commented on how the robot’s eye would go crazy whenever someone talked about Zoe, but I guess no one pays attention to the help.

Lacy continues her attempt to get the STO to take the robot to Gemenon through the magic of flirting (it’s a shame she doesn’t know how much they want killer robots. It’d make things so simple to just ship Zoe with a batch of other U-87s. Of course, the others won’t work until she abandons the chip to give them a duplicatable operating system, so it’s a bit of a catch 22, there). Ben’s friend explains the holocafe bombings are being prompted by the fact that V-World allows people to go and sin against God’s will without having to face the consequences of their amoral behavior as they would in the real world. This is actually pretty similar to the reason Zoe-A will condemn V-World heaven in the finale, but it also opens up an interesting philosophical question: are evil acts still evil if they’re divorced from their negative effects? And, if they aren’t, then what’s the intrinsic problem with V-World depravity? I mean, there’s the concern that it can lead to acting out in the real world, the theory Baxter Sarno advanced, but Zoe and Barnabus were offended that people would even contemplate doing the sorts of things seen in V-World, even if the reasons they were wrong didn’t exist there, just leaving the theater and spectacle of it all.

It’s a complex question, and I’m a little surprised they never had anyone challenge Zoe-A to explain why, for instance, a human sacrifice was so bad if no one actually died in it?

SHE WAS A GIRL, SOFT BUT ESTRANGED

Joe begins his wild trip through V-World. When he’s talking to Tad and convincing him to help him look for Tamara, he seems really fuzzy on the relationship between the Avatar and the original. This despite the fact that Tamara-A is so obviously not the same person as Tamara. I’m going to chalk this one up to his mind being clouded by grief, as well as Daniel’s attempt to up-sell the realness and perfectibility of the Avatars. Still, the makes me wonder whether Adama would’ve bought Clarice’s spiel about V-Heaven.

There’s a hilarious deleted scene where he tells Tad/Heracles to stop calling him “Joe,” and when Tad says “Or what?” Joe reaches up and yanks his holoband off, making him scream and cry like a little girl since “That’s connected to my brain! You don’t go ripping things off people’s brains!” Don’t be a baby. Adama didn’t blubber like that when Daniel yanked off his holoband a few weeks ago. The whole bit is something to think about and smile the next time a keyboard warrior starts getting under your skin.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in these reviews yet, but I’ve always wondered about the blimp in New Cap City. Is it an in-game hazard, or is there some asshole who’s been playing the game for months or years, saved his cubits, and then went and bought a blimp and just uses it to grief the other players? I have to say, I’m personally a fan of the asshole theory. Anyway, Tad gets blasted by the blimp, leaving an opening for Emmanuelle to show up. It’s never really gone into, but we get another look at the kind of person who plays New Cap. Evelyn is a professional adult, but she’s evidently quite experienced with the game, and can play the role of disinterested guide for Adama to the hilt, enough so that it didn’t seem likely to me that she might be someone Adama knows until well into the next episode (also, I’m looking at the DVD, and I’m surprised that this whole arc is only three episodes. The second quarter of the season feels a lot more dense, story-wise, than the first quarter).

Caprica: Season 1.0 is available on DVD.

Posted in Battlestar Galactica Retro-Review

STEP FROM THE ROAD TO THE SEA TO THE SKY

This episode suffered a bit of Caprica-itis. Too many running plotlines, and no real through-line for the episode. The closest thing to a main plot was Tomas Vergis’s introduction, but it didn’t really coalesce into a complete something that you could call an “episode.” The troublesome part is, having everything on DVD means that I could indulge the show in its desperate, desperate desire to be a couple of ten-hour movies. My desire to just smash through the whole thing almost makes me regret starting this project. Of course, that might just be because I delayed writing about the last two episodes, and there isn’t much meaty stuff to sink into in this one.

There’s a small bit of Adama with Joe buying a holoband, Daniel visiting him, paranoid that Joe sold him out, rather than Vergis simply not being an idiot and figuring out that Greystone was responsible when there was a break-in at his lab and the device stolen just happened to start showing up in Greystone products, and Joe and Evelyn finding the kid from the last episode who was hanging around with Tamara. The most interesting part was Daniel mentioning that Ruth let him in. This, despite the fact that she recognized him on-sight a few episodes ago as “that man you don’t like.” Ruth just don’t give a frak. I think I may have laughed out loud at how sanguine Willy was about being woken up in the middle of the night by his father arguing with the richest man in the universe in their living room.

There’s a little bit of Tauron culture when Vergis is having lunch with Daniel. He cuts his food with his fork and knife, but actually eats it with his fingers. I think this is also our first indication that Clarice and Amanda are both immigrants. I don’t remember if we ever found out which planets they were from originally, but they do both seem to have a taste for Scorpian booze. Oddly, Daniel later tells Vergis it might be easier to win over Capricans by marrying a Caprican woman “if you dare.” Well, how in the hell would you know, Daniel?

There’s more of Daniel and Amanda being all married and shit when she picks up on the fact that there’s something wrong with Vegis. And might I add that Vergis is… wow. I give major kudos to the actor, because he really sells that part. With the PR Lady and Tauron mobster, I still see or hear Kat and Duck, but I really have to be reminded that this is the same guy who played Asshole Pegasus CAG on BSG. Of course, Asshole Pegasus CAG was in one episode, but, still. Vergis. Man. That whole closing scene is something else, the way he just straight up declares his intent to Daniel to destroy him piece by piece, but he still seems so genuinely happy for Daniel when talking about his childhood dream of being a sports star.

I’d forgotten that little bit where it’s confirmed that Barnabus was, indeed, responsible for the train bombing. I wonder if we ever would’ve found out how the cells all were before the bombing. My assumption would’ve been that Zoe and Ben just dealt with Clarice, but apparently not, at least in Ben’s case.

SHE’S ONLY EIGHTEEN, DON’T LIKE THE ROLLING STONES

There’s some interesting robo-human relations. Clarice is extremely put-off by Serge, and thinks the U-87 is scary looking (I’ll assume she’s gotten past that once she starts performing sacraments with them). Philomon got caught flirting with the robot by Daniel, who thinks it’s weird (because it is).

(Quick aside: I just remembered that during the whole “You can’t rape a machine” debate during the Resurrection Ship trilogy, a line I used more than once was that I’d buy that theory the day Lt. Thorne or the Sunshine Boys bent over a centurion, dropped trow, and gave it what-for. It’s not even so much the fact that Philo is feminizing and sweet-talking the U-87 as that he does it while it’s standing there, suspended. It’s like macking on someone while they’re asleep. I wonder if there was someone in the Fleet (or one of the Humanoid Models, for that matter) who actually would’ve contemplated a tender moment with a centurion.)

Probably because she can’t see what it looks like to an outside observer, Zoe-A thinks it’s sweet, and concocts a fake on-line profile to flirt with Philo at OkEros.cap. Despite those giant blocky fingers, the U-87 touch-types surprisingly well. I had some freeze-frame fun with that. “Rachel” is a 21 year old Caprican University student who loves playing the cello (quite possibly the most overtly underplayed aspect of her backstory), Sci-Fi novels, Software Beta testing (oh, you so funny), and the Nicky Casino TV show. Normally, lying about your age to get dates with men on the internet is a bit earlier on the path to juvenile delinquency than running away to another planet, but, what the hell. You’re only a horny teenage robot once. On the actual date, she adopts this ridiculous shy geek girl persona, apparently to put Philo at ease, but she might overplay it a little. I think she might’ve actually snorted when she laughed. She also mentions that she was “cash poor” while concocting her cover story about why she looked like Zoe and couldn’t change her avatar again. I wonder if that means avatar changes are a paid service, and V-World is Free-to-Play like Farmville or something, or if there’s some kind of in-game currency or points you can accumulate that allow you to switch faces, like the customizable armor in Halo.

Caprica: Season 1.0 is available on DVD.

Posted in Battlestar Galactica Retro-Review