Thursday, July 31, 2008

Stargate Atlantis - Alex Levine's Blog Update July 31 '08

From Alex Levine's SciFi Channel's Stargate Atlantis blog update for July 31, 2008:

(Please follow the link for the complete blog update.)

July 31, 2008

Slow Day Mish Mash

...Just before lunch, I spoke with Alan McCullough about Friday's episode, "The Daedalus Variations." The working title for this one was "The Flying Dutchman", which refers to the legend of a ghost ship that can never go home, and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. In this one our intrepid team finds another Daedalus with an inter-dimensional drive that sends them jumping through alternate realities. That's not a spoiler, by the way, that's Sci-fi's log line and it's on the front of this website. So don't blame me for letting the cat out of the bag!!!

In any case, the original story Alan pitched was about a room in Atlantis that shifts into alternate realities, but that scenario creates issues such as: what if there was no Atlantis in another reality? Would the room simply exist, in that example, in the middle of the ocean? So as you can see that permutation became a bit unwieldy. That is, until Robert Cooper spun it around and suggested using the Daedalus (good with ideas, that guy). And that's how the story developed. After that little gem of a turn, all the guys had to do was decide what kind of cool stuff the team would run into in the other realities. They had a lot of fun narrowing it down, as you'll see....

...Lastly, The Daedalus Variations had one of the most expensive VFX budgets we've ever had, right up there with Be All My Sins, Adrift, and Rising (the pilot). Because the show was 99% shot on the Daedalus, an abundance of VFX really opens up the episode.

Enjoy!

ATL

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