Author Topic: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread  (Read 75542 times)

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Offline YIIMM

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far. You kind of lose a sense of scale when the background in every shot is something of finite size.


Also, mourn the physical sets:


 

Offline newman

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far.

Yep. One of my hobby being amateur astronomy, Zoic's version of space is much closer to what it really looks like. The colorful nebulae everywhere.. yea no. Space is mostly empty, but when you find something beautiful in it it just means so much more because of it. Filling it with oversaturated crap in every pixel of the shot just doesn't feel right to me.
You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here! - Jayne Cobb

 

Offline The E

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
And yet, the sparseness and bleakness of the first two seasons VFX helped reinforce the reality of the show. I don't need all the colour everywhere all the time, I want the graphics and action to be clean and, for lack of a better word, realistic (As any astronomer will tell you, colours in space are a deliberate abstraction, generated by mapping UV or IR radiation into the visible spectrum). The action in Zoic's scenes was always readable, it was always clear what was going on, who was firing on whom, and what the ships were actually doing, the later scenes lost this.

Add to that the lack of consistency issues, and it's clear to see why Zoic's stuff is preferable to the inhouse stuff.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
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Offline Aesaar

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far.

Yep. One of my hobby being amateur astronomy, Zoic's version of space is much closer to what it really looks like. The colorful nebulae everywhere.. yea no. Space is mostly empty, but when you find something beautiful in it it just means so much more because of it. Filling it with oversaturated crap in every pixel of the shot just doesn't feel right to me.
You guys must hate the backgrounds in Homeworld...

Unless this is BSG-specific.

 

Offline The E

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Different aesthetics. Homeworld works because it's basically fantasy anyway; In a strongly realistic drama setting like BSG, it's out of place because it doesn't fit the mood, as it were.

In addition, it's a big stylistic shift whichever way you go. They basically changed the visual formula established in S1 and S2, which is a ... questionable decision.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
That makes sense.  I don't really have a strong opinion either way, myself.

 

Offline SypheDMar

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Same here. I didn't pay attention to the background in BSG as much since there were other bigger problems since Zoic left.

 
Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Pegasus spontaneously sprouts an extra turret mid battle.... Even New Caprica when compared to prior work shows a dramatic drop in overall quality.  While NC has lots of showy crap going on like the atmo jump and the Pegasus ramming if you actually compare the details between the zoic's work and inhouse you can see it easily.

"Exodus" was the last episode before they went totally in-house. It was done by Atmosphere VFX, who also did a lot of Centurion work in season two and "The Hand of God," among other shots spread around throughout the first two seasons. It's hard to get an exact itemization, especially in episodes where multiple companies may have contributed shots. For instance, Atmosphere got an Emmy nomination for "Resurrection Ship, Part 1," but does that mean they did the whole thing? I don't know. There aren't any shots from it in their reel, nor in the portfolio of an artist I know who works there.

My point is, let's not start fetishizing the first half of the show. It's not like Zoic or Atmosphere never screwed anything up. I can think of three shots off the top of my head there were obviously roughs that never should've made it to air. One of theme was a stock shot used several times before, so the use of an unfinished version was totally inexcusable. There were also a few cases of pieces of battlestars missing in certain shots. Maybe Pegasus's extra turret was to make up for its missing flight-pod struts. Or the fact that it didn't get a flight deck until "Razor" (remember the really tight camera work on the Vipers landing in "The Captain's Hand"?).

As for the Babylon 5-ification of space in the latter half of the series, I'm not sure how much of that you can blame on the actual artists. For one thing, there were a lot more motivated appearances of weird space stuff. The New Caprica nebula, the Lion's Head nebula, the star cluster, the Eye of Jupiter nova, the Ionian Nebula, the trinary star system, and the black hole were all written in the scripts. While there were other instances of colored space just for the hell of it (though they were sometimes also motivated, like to visually differentiate different areas of space, as when Boomer was jumping to the Colony or when Gaeta was lost in his Raptor), I'd say at least half, possibly more, were the writers' doing. Also, let's not forget that the first two seasons weren't exactly 2001. The miniseries had Ragnar, and didn't even bother to say (or clearly depict) if it was a planet or just a negative space wedgie. Then there's the "Hand of God" asteroid thicket, the "Home" asteroid thicket, the "Scar" asteroid thicket, the "Hand of God" dust cloud, and the New Caprica nebula.

There were also a couple of shots in "The Plan" that perfectly matched the first season aesthetic, so the change in style was definitely a deliberate choice and not a case of incompetence or inability.

 

Offline Ace

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
From the panoramic skybox shots it's easy to make out Ragnar as a gas giant, but it's a bit trickier to do that from just the show.
Ace
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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
From the panoramic skybox shots it's easy to make out Ragnar as a gas giant, but it's a bit trickier to do that from just the show.

In most of the shots, it looks like it just stops a few miles away from the eye of the storm. Never mind the idea of a funnel cloud stable enough to fly a mile-long starship through, to the point where they're numbering the kinks in it.

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
So the latest episodes are up on the tube...

Hahah heh heh heh

I'm fairly convinced they hired the team who does all those ****ty Saturday SyFy movies like sharktopus to make B&C.
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
dat bad huh

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Your standards for the show proper are good but your standards for the battles are too lax. BSG hasn't had any good battles since the beginning of Season 3, and I'm including Blood and Chrome.

Whaaaaa? Come on, what about the first parts of the finale battle? Or the battle for the Resurrection Hub? And the season 4 opener, while it had its problems, was at least 'good' by most standards.

Still, yeah; BSG was at its best when it was furthest from that stupid religious/mythological/jigsaw puzzle supernatural crap. 'God did it', apparently, and that would make God a complete monster who fuels xenocide for fun.

Those battles were all terrible (though perhaps only because we had the godly artistic movement of the Res Ship battle to compare to). I'm with Starslayer here - I'm guilty of fetishizing the battle from Res Ship 2 as one of the pinnacles of CGI, a nigh-perfect convergence of artistic direction, technical excellence, and narrative catharsis. I think it deserves all the praise it gets.

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Haven't watched yet, does something like this happen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBizgLZX7W0 :p

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Pretty much, a giant toasterconda rears up from the planet below and eats the Osiris.

Actually something to add onto Battuta's comment is that by and large the battles in the first two seasons where much simpler affairs.  Yes, Hand of God had Lee pull a pretty fancy piece of flying, but otherwise they were without any flashiness beyond being very well executed.  Ragnar, 33, Scattered, Rez, Captain's Hand where all straight up gun/missile duels with clear objectives and play our in a believable fashion.  Starting with New Caprica we start to seeing battles more about some kind of "wow moment" gimmicks.  Belly flopping battlestars, crazy ramming scenes, tow roping Vipers, Raptor rocket volleys, Shadow battlecrabs.  All this crap that really was like condiments meant to distract you from the fact that the Prime Rib had been swapped out for Salisbury Steak. 

Rez is poetry in motion, but it also was straightforward and grounded enough that the overarching tension of Lee's crisis, the fate of the Fleet in the face of Cain and Adama's conflict was always looming like a spetcre over the proceedings. 
« Last Edit: November 23, 2012, 01:43:53 pm by StarSlayer »
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”

 
Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Oh God, 2 minutes in and where in the hell did the Cylons get missiles that can punch straight through a battlestar without exploding or at the least fragmenting into tiny pieces?

This is awful.  I was expecting the Osiris to at least put up a decent battle but who the hell is writing this thing?
17:37:02   Quanto: I want to have sexual intercourse with every space elf in existence
17:37:11   SpardaSon21: even the males?
17:37:22   Quanto: its not gay if its an elf

[21:51] <@Droid803> I now realize
[21:51] <@Droid803> this will be SLIIIIIGHTLY awkward
[21:51] <@Droid803> as this rich psychic girl will now be tsundere for a loli.
[21:51] <@Droid803> OH WELLL.

See what you're missing in #WoD and #Fsquest?

[07:57:32] <Caiaphas> inspired by HerraTohtori i built a supermaneuverable plane in ksp
[07:57:43] <Caiaphas> i just killed my pilots with a high-g maneuver
[07:58:19] <Caiaphas> apparently people can't take 20 gees for 5 continuous seconds
[08:00:11] <Caiaphas> the plane however performed admirably, and only crashed because it no longer had any guidance systems

  
Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
This is awful.  I was expecting the Osiris to at least put up a decent battle but who the hell is writing this thing?

Blood and Chrome was written by Michael Taylor, credited writer for the Galactica episodes, "Unfinished Business," "Taking a Break From All Your Worries," "Crossroads, Part I," "Razor," "The Ties That Bind," "Sine Qua Non," and "Islanded in a Stream of Stars," the Caprica episodes "Ghosts in the Machine" and "End of Line," and the Deep Space Nine episodes, "The Visitor" and "In the Pale Moonlight."

The story was developed by David Eick (exec producer for Galactica, credited with story for "Kobol's Last Gleaming I and II," and credited writer for "Home I and II" and "Hero"), and the writing team Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, (who together are credited writers for "Act of Contrition," "The Hand of God," "Scattered," "Valley of Darkness," "Flight of the Phoenix," "Scar," "Downloaded," "The Resistance" (the webisodes), "Exodus I and II," "Rapture," "Maelstrom," "He That Believeth In Me," "Revelations," "Sometimes a Great Notion," and "Someone to Watch Over Me").

The director was Jonas Pate, who directed "Colonial Day" and "Rebirth."

 
Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
You do realize that was a completely rhetorical statement, right?
17:37:02   Quanto: I want to have sexual intercourse with every space elf in existence
17:37:11   SpardaSon21: even the males?
17:37:22   Quanto: its not gay if its an elf

[21:51] <@Droid803> I now realize
[21:51] <@Droid803> this will be SLIIIIIGHTLY awkward
[21:51] <@Droid803> as this rich psychic girl will now be tsundere for a loli.
[21:51] <@Droid803> OH WELLL.

See what you're missing in #WoD and #Fsquest?

[07:57:32] <Caiaphas> inspired by HerraTohtori i built a supermaneuverable plane in ksp
[07:57:43] <Caiaphas> i just killed my pilots with a high-g maneuver
[07:58:19] <Caiaphas> apparently people can't take 20 gees for 5 continuous seconds
[08:00:11] <Caiaphas> the plane however performed admirably, and only crashed because it no longer had any guidance systems

 
Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Yes. And it's rhetorical purpose was to imply that B&C was a quick cash-in slapped together by untalented hacks that the suits pulled off the street after the dramaturgical gods among men that made nuBSG moved on to bigger and better things. "The Organization" to nuBSG's "In the Heat of the Night." It was the second post today to make the same point, in fact.

The sad, terrible fact of it is that pretty much everyone involved with B&C except for the kid playing Adama worked on the parent show. And on the good episodes, too, not just meandering, pointless garbage like "Litmus," "Black Market," or "A Day in the Life."

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
"In the Pale Moonlight."

I'm not sure I believe you. Hell, I'm not sure I believe them.
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