By Marcel Damen and Steve Fronczek
11 February 2008

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Yeah, I don't seem to get the easy shows. (chuckle)

This is the first show in a lot of ways that compares to the X-Files in terms of what I feel... certainly not in the budget. The budget was almost unlimited on the X-files just because it was the flagship show on a main network. It was the number one show in the world at the time when we did it, so money wasn't an object. You had all the money you needed you just didn't have as much time as you'd like sometimes. From that stand point it's completely different. The one major similarity between the X-Files and Battlestar is the commitment to quality from the people at the top; from the top down. The executive producers, the writers, the producers. The one thing about these two shows is that everybody has the same goal in mind. There's no other agenda other than making the best show possible. That's very refreshing.

I watched it. It was released here in Canada as a feature film. I saw it one Saturday morning at 10:00 AM at a multiplex. That was my first look at Battlestar Galactica. It was interesting and it seemed to me like it was a little to much a "nod-of-the-head" to Star Wars in a lot the ways. Capitalizing on the Star Wars popularity which is fine that's what it was there for. A lot of the stuff was interesting but a lot of the stuff was really hokey. If you look at it now it looks very dated only because the technology is so much better now. The original flight helmets in Battlestar Galactica were made of wood. I'm sure they cost a lot less than what ours do. (big laugh) I don't think you'd get away with wood today somehow.

There are some nods to it a little bit, but we try not too. It's a completely different look. We really go for a very realistic look on this Battlestar Galactica. The big thing for me is taking things that are familiar to the audience and giving a little bit of a twist rather than doing things completely from scratch. Which we do sometimes. Sometimes the props will be a "pure design" kind of thing, but most of the time we try to take existing things and give them a look that people are familiar with then give it our own Battlestar slant. We call it Galactiguising.

It's very exciting. It's very rewarding. Every show you work on is hard work and this show is certainly no easier than any others. In some ways it's harder than others. The reward is knowing the work is going to be up on screen and you're actually going to see it. We don't need atta-boys or don't need pats on the back but know the hard work is appreciated because the people at the top, the executive producer and the writers are appreciative of the extra effort that we put in. You do need to put in extra effort on a show like this. It's not a punch the clock nine-to-five kind of job. You hit the ground running every morning and you're putting out fires all day and trying to make something new and interesting looking all day, but it's very rewarding. It's a great looking show.

You know what, that's really impossible. Quite honestly I run into this problem all the time. The show is a serial; it's on going. I don't even think of Battlestar as individual episodes it's just one big episode to me.

The two parters we've done have been spectacular. Razor was obviously a great challenge. We got to do some really interesting stuff there. We don't have a lite episode as such, they're all challenging, and they’re all great. The good thing about it too is that we get scripts well enough in advance so we can be working on things for a couple of episodes down the road. It all kind of blends in. I couldn't really say. Those two parters have been great. It's always great to see them outside of the studio.

Oh gawd... actually, this is an odd thing. It's not that I'm a gun nut or anything, but it always pleases me when I see the battle scenes we do because they look so realistic. I know how much work has gone into choosing weapons that don't look like they just came off the six O'clock news and people aren't particularly familiar with in North America. All of the modifications we make are to make them look different without them becoming huge bulky things you see in so many sci-fi movies. You can tell what they've done; they've taken an existing gun and they built it up so it's now the size of a Mack truck because they added so many things to it. I'm very please with the minimalistic way we've been able to make the show look unique and not look cumbersome. It looks slick and it looks real, because these look like objects that soldiers would really be carrying. These look like things the pilots would really be having. Those kinds of things appeal to me more than any kind of unique sort of sci-fi kind of prop.

We don't do sci-fi. We don't have lasers, we don't have laser guns, and we don't have any of that kind of stuff. We did a nuclear bomb for an episode. I was very please with how it turned out. It went really well; looked really good. It was a good amalgamation of found objects and design. I like that. I really get off on incorporating found objects into design. I think it's a really cool way to do things. I really like the military aspect of it. The military aspect looks real because you never loose track of the fact these are soldiers and pilots and they're in a war. Particularly in this point in our history you don't want that part of it to look cheesy.

Well, you know it's one of those things. As I've said, we have some people who aren't with the show anymore cause they just didn't get it. It's a really hard thing to pin down. I can't describe it to you. I know it when I see it. Sometimes I'll go the Richard and say "I'm not sure about this, what do you think?" and I've been right 99.9 percent of the time but it's a really hard thing to describe. You either know it or you don't. It's a high-tech, low-tech, analog, but cool not to sci-fi kind of look. And I don't know how else to describe it to anybody but I definitely know it when I see it. Even when I go out shopping at flea markets or where ever, I find something and I look at it and go "That's Galactica, I can use that. That's part of Galactica. That looks like Galactica." It's easier when you're designing from scratch because you can design those sensibilities into it right away. But, to try and translate to some people what that is or to quantify it or describe it is next to impossible. You either know it or you don't.

We had to redesign some of the stuff, no reflection necessarily on the people who designed the original stuff. The colonial side arms had to be redesigned because they didn't do enough. Plus they weren’t practical they didn't fire enough shots. So if we got into a fire fight situation they weren't going to fire enough shots for the directors to get the level of action they wanted. There were no rifles for the show. We didn't have any Marines in the original Miniseries so we had to come up with a look for the Marines that looked edgy, looked nasty and looked menacing. We had to come up with all their gear plus we had to come up with the weapons for them. That was just for the Marines on the ship. Then we had to carry that forward when we got into the Marines on the land and in the big fire fights or what ever we had to come up with even more weapons because now they have even more applications they have to have. We had to come up with heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, bazookas, mines, grenades and explosives. All those things you'd normally have in a combat situation we had to re-imagine it all to make it work for show.

There were things like the flight helmets that had to be totally redesigned because they just never did work. They weren't designed by somebody who knew anything about how things are supposed to work. They had to be designed to be practical as well as aesthetically pleasing. It was very difficult because if I was going to change them I had to make them look like they were in the same family so they didn't look radically completely different from what was in the Miniseries and the first Seasons. So, that was difficult.

We also had to add a lot of things that weren't thought of. The usability of certain things like all the little details on the pilot’s uniforms. They didn't have that much in the original Miniseries because they weren't scripted and nobody thought of them. We had to really take a look at real pilots’ uniforms to see what kind of the things they have. We also had to take into account that these are supposed to be space suits too. It's not just a pilots uniform. These also have to be not just pressure suits but space suits too. We had to take all that into account and work all that into the design of everything we did. All of that kind of stuff needed to be changed from the miniseries.

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