Kent Matheson, Matte Painter for Stargate SG-1, sits down with Dial the Gate in a PRE-RECORDED interview to discuss some of the dramatic vistas which brought so many of our favorite stories to life. And he’s brought quite the slideshow!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome
0:33 – Guest Introduction
1:10 – Finding the Career Path
1:32 – Kent’s Story
6:00 – Finding New Opportunities
7:47 – Evolving Tools
11:01 – Recreating the Dialing Sequence
13:38 – Matte Painting
16:02 – “Children of the Gods” and “Solitudes”
19:40 – “The Serpent’s Lair”
26:00 – “Thor’s Chariot”
33:04 – VFX from Multiple Episodes
34:24 – “Message in a Bottle”
37:24 – “Bane”
39:50 – “The Fifth Race”
45:51 – Production Rules of Thumb
47:28 – How far off was the air date?
50:09 – Sharing a Building at the Bridge Studios
52:43 – 1899
56:25 – “The Nox” and “Out of Mind”
1:00:36 – “Into the Fire”
1:04:10 – “Demons”
1:08:27 – Hard Drives in Lord of the Rings
1:09:50 – “The Devil You Know”
1:17:10 – Thank You, Kent!
1:18:05 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:19:17 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello and welcome back for another episode of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining me. Kent Matheson, matte painter for Stargate SG-1, is joining me for this episode. We’ve got quite the show for you because we have materials to show you from the evolution of his work and the series. I’m really excited about this one. Let’s go ahead and jump right in. Kent Matheson, matte painter of Stargate SG-1. Sir, it is a trip to have you. I have been so impressed with so much of your stuff over the years and this is really a delight for me. I’m thankful for you being here.

Kent Matheson:
Thanks for the kind words, man. That’s nice of you to say.

David Read:
I imagine when you were really little you started doodling. How early on did you know that this is what you wanted to do with your life?

Kent Matheson:
It’s sort of never been a question of doing anything else art-wise. The matte painting and digital effects thing I fell into, but it’s always been an art direction for me.

David Read:
How did you fall into this?

Kent Matheson:
That’s a long story. I went to school for fine art and graphic design and sculpture. Art stuff, basically. Out of school I worked as an illustrator for magazines for a while and then fell into doing graphic design for magazines. I worked for a while in Toronto, Canadian originally. I went to school in Toronto. When we moved to Vancouver, I took a job working for a local magazine. First it was Adbusters, if anybody has ever heard of that magazine. I worked there for a while, which was lovely, and then started working for a local, professional magazine, and did graphic design for a couple of years. I guess when I got bored or didn’t wanna do that anymore, a friend of mine was like, “Hey, there’s this thing going on over here, TV show they’re starting up. You should check it out.” I applied and got a job as the graphic designer for playback on the Stargate TV show.

David Read:
So, Stargate was your first?

Kent Matheson:
Stargate was my first, yeah.

David Read:
Wow. Are you in Vancouver at this point?

Kent Matheson:
Right now, I’m in San Francisco, yeah. Wait. At this point in the story, yeah, that was Vancouver. That’s where it was, yeah.

David Read:
All right.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah, it was interesting. I took my design and my illustration work over there, and I think I was aware of what they did, but not really, ’cause I was coming out of print and magazine work. I just took a bunch of work over there and ended up getting hired as the playback graphic designer. The playback is the computer screens when they, in a TV show, look at the rotating brain and scrolling text, it’s science. That’s the stuff that I did on the computers on the TV show for a year. During that period, which was fun, I noticed this other thing that was happening over there that looked really cool, which was all of the environment work that they were doing. Stargate, basically, every episode is a new world, that’s the whole idea of the show. For me, coming out of fine art and my background, did I mention that in this recording, that my background is fine art? Landscape painting was something that really interested me. When I saw the matte painting and the environments, being the science fiction nerd that I was with this graphic design background, it tweaked and I was like, “Oh my God, that looks fun. That looks really interesting.” Plus, it was the early days of 3D, really early days. I think we had a program called Electric Image. I think maybe Episode Two had come out by then, but maybe not. It was 1996/1997 when it started airing. I just fell into it and thought the 3D was fascinating. It was actually early. We had one program for modeling and another program for rendering, so it was pretty early stuff. I just found that fascinating, that I could dive into these 3D environments and build simple 3D and then paint and collage. It was just sort of a really lovely mix of a lot of things that I was really interested in.

David Read:
So, you’re exploring creatively.

Kent Matheson:
Totally. It was, dude, it was fun. It was really nice. It’s not to say that there wasn’t work that had been done before. Of course there was. I think they had a matte painter on the show who’d worked for ILM, and ILM of course is doing amazing work and matte paintings, but it really did feel like the early days for me. A lot of the techniques that we ended up using were stuff that we kind of just made up and invented. I’m remembering now, ’cause it’s been a while since I thought about this. Pardon me if I ramble.

David Read:
No, this happens quite a lot on this show. People discover stuff once they start getting back into the meat of it. The brain’s an amazing thing.

Kent Matheson:
It’s a memory game that you can play. If you remember one thing, you think about that thing and suddenly you start remembering other things. I ended up leaving after six years or five years, I forget what it was, to go to ILM, Industrial Light & Magic. Episode Two I think it was, when I brought my work down and we were showing it and talked to them, I ended up getting hired for the job. They were like, “This is interesting. These are the same techniques that we’re working with here,” that we were coming up with. That was myself, and Jeremy Hoey was the other environment artist. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to him.

David Read:
Not yet.

Kent Matheson:
He’s still actually in the business. I’ve moved into doing concept art and more art direction. Jeremy Hoey is running the environments department for Sony in Vancouver now. He’s built that up. I think Krista McLean was there for a while. She’s working with… I forget the company. Is it Rainmaker?

David Read:
Rainmaker doesn’t exist anymore. It’s turned into something else. It’s entirely possible that she was at Rainmaker for a while.

Kent Matheson:
She was, I think, been a while since I’ve seen the industry in Vancouver. It was a journey of discovery and a really interesting one for a while because so much of it was about building the image. It was early days of 3D tracking, early days of camera controls. We really kind of dug into it. It was nice. Had to do the show with a budget.

David Read:
To have a little bit of money behind it. You guys were right at the cusp of going from just straight up flat matte paintings… I’m a huge Star Trek fan, so largely everything in my knowledge in terms of visual effects are Star Trek based. For years, on TNG, DS9, there were painting shots with little people added. By coming along with SG-1, late ’90s, there’s not just slight pans over a painting; we’ve got actual movement. Digital matte paintings are coming to life. I can’t imagine the frontier that must have opened up for you that you could jump into at that point.

Kent Matheson:
It was fascinating. We started off with the flat matte paintings ’cause that was the tech at the time. They didn’t have 3D camera tracking, but they did have programmed camera movements that they could preset up, where they put the camera on a track and they dolly and move and it’s very controlled. That was really expensive, so they didn’t do that often. For the matte painting, it was mostly wide establishing shots. The shots where the hero comes over the hill and they cut in tight to his face and he goes, “Wow, look at that.” Then they cut to the fakey-looking city in the distance. It was something that was basically the shots that we were doing for the first year. I think the first shot was recreating the Abydos temple from the movie, if you remember that one, where the big pyramid first lands on the pole. It was recreating that and that was a locked-off shot with the little people walking into it for the first year.

David Read:
So, you were a part of that shot?

Kent Matheson:
Not for the movie, but for the TV.

David Read:
You were joining SG-1 in pre-production in 1996, ’97 then?

Kent Matheson:
Yep.

David Read:
I misunderstood. I thought you came in a little bit later.

Kent Matheson:
No, it was the very first year. For the first year, as I say, it was the computer playback. It was the graphics for the screens. The second year I got into the matte painting and drawing.

David Read:
Did you help develop the playback for the dialing sequence?

Kent Matheson:
Yeah.

David Read:
Dude. Holy cow.

Kent Matheson:
Probably stealing what they did from the movie.

David Read:
Yeah, but still, making it your own thing at the same time. It’s not one-to-one and you’ve got several years on top of what they did for the film. Take me back a little bit further. Did you see the film when it came out? Were you aware of Stargate?

Kent Matheson:
Yeah.

David Read:
So, you were already aware?

Kent Matheson:
Beautiful movie. I remember the way they used the environments and the matte painting there was very classic; really beautiful establishing shots. I forget who did them.

David Read:
Patrick Tatopoulos’ team was brilliant. His team there, they did some amazing stuff. There are so many people involved in that feature film and it set such a precedent for everyone else that came later.

Kent Matheson:
Agreed.

David Read:
They’re in pre-production on Stargate SG-1. What was your first project on the series? Was it the dialing sequence?

Kent Matheson:
Recreating the dialing sequence, yes.

David Read:
Oh my God. Tell me about this. This is like the thing that SG-1 was known for.

Kent Matheson:
It was super fun to do because it was a research project. We had some of the props. We had the original pyramid. We had the ships, the flying ships. Some of the props they shipped up. I don’t know what the standard is for movies, they kind of come and go. Everybody thinks, “Oh my God, movies, it’s so amazing.” They’re really fly-by-night. They’re really seat-of-the-pants when it comes to stuff; not a lot is kept usually. Things are created and used and then generally discarded. Some stuff is kept. They didn’t keep, or we didn’t have access to, any of the files that were used to create any of the playback, or any of the computer screens, or of course, any of the matte paintings ’cause that probably was all done by third-party companies. I think we made a brief attempt but gave up. It was basically a case of watching the movie and recreating the stuff from scratch. I think we did it with vector art, originally using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. At that point I think we were animating in, eventually it was After Effects. First, we tried another program. We tried briefly to create a little computer program so that they could actually plug the keyboard and actually have it assemble sort of properly. We gave up after a while, thought that would just take too long. I’m not a programmer and things are running quickly. We ended up doing pre-animated sequences for each dialogue, where they’re doing spin, screen. It was all vector art and graphics animated, I think, through After Effects and then pre-rendered out.

David Read:
It’s what that original show is known for. That puddle, everything involved in the dialing sequence, that was the beginning of adventure. You go through it and blank canvas.

Kent Matheson:
Totally.

David Read:
Absolutely wild. You were involved in playback for Season One.

Kent Matheson:
I did a couple of the matte paintings. During that first season they had a matte painter who was working remotely. His name was Eric Chauvin, who came out of ILM, and he was doing wonderful work, but I think he was, I think he had Blackpool Studios at the time. I think it might be gone now. Really cool guy. I got a sense on some of the matte paintings that he did that he was probably maybe a little overbooked. He was doing really beautiful work for film and then for a couple of projects he would come in and they’d be like, “Mm, OK.”

David Read:
How much time was spent.

Kent Matheson:
Again, he does beautiful, beautiful work. But for me, it was an opportunity. I was looking at this stuff and I was thinking in my heart of hearts, my little jerk self, thinking “I could do better. I want to do this.”

David Read:
When you see an opportunity for yourself, if you can do the job…

Kent Matheson:
It was a thing that really sparked. I ended up talking my way into doing a couple of the matte paintings for them. I did a test, where I took one of the matte paintings at one point that Eric had done and rebuilt it, using 3D. It really, I think, sold that whole process to the team and got me kicked off. The second year they moved me into being a full-time matte painter and hired someone else that was overseeing to do the playback. That’s how it all started.

David Read:
You say that you took one that had already been done and added some 3D. There is a matte painting change from Season One to the Season Two finale with the Nox planet, with the city floating in the sky.

Kent Matheson:
That’s the one. Yep. That was the one.

David Read:
Wow. I always wondered, why did they go out of their way to do that? It’s like, “well, if he went ahead and did it, why not?” It was like night and day. Motion was added to it and everything. Wow, that grew out from that. Is this too early to go into show and tell?

Kent Matheson:
Jump in, man. It’s whatever you want to do.

David Read:
Let’s pull this up here. Was this the first one you did? It was not. Ugh. What was the first one you did?

Kent Matheson:
Almost the first one that I did. The first one was the pyramid shot.

David Read:
Oh, from the pilot.

Kent Matheson:
Yep. From the first.

David Read:
Wow, OK. You said you used vector art and Photoshop and After Effects.

Kent Matheson:
Only for the graphics. For these, it was Photoshop, basically.

David Read:
Wow, OK. This is from “Solitudes,” from the back half of Season One. I always thought that they flew up further north to get this shot and you created this?

Kent Matheson:
I totally created that. I’m looking right now to see if I actually have a plate for that.

David Read:
I remember hearing a story about this episode, ’cause it was all done on a sound stage, the ice planet. They refrigerated the set. This is Martin Wood’s episode. I think it may have been his first as director. She comes out of the hole, and they get this wide shot and I was always under the impression that they went up there and got this photographed. The fact that you did this, for nearly 25 years, completely went over my head. I thought that this was a real image. That’s really cool.

Kent Matheson:
Let me share my screen here. I think they did go a little further north. I forget exactly where, but let me show you the plate.

David Read:
OK, so that’s real.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah, there it is. This is the shot that they took for that. Locked-off shot, so it was a case of taking this and basically merging the created stuff. Let me see if I can flip between them. Hang on. There we go.

David Read:
Wow. Night and day.

Kent Matheson:
You can see some of it is the original and then at some point, we just took over completely.

David Read:
That is wild. The horizon, the sky, daylight is leaving. It makes it really emotional, considering, “Oh, they’re screwed.” It’s that point in the episode.

Kent Matheson:
They were trapped in an ice cave, I think. How do I stop sharing? This was the point that she climbs up, right? It’s coming back to me.

David Read:
The Stargate has failed to dial, there’s gotta be something nearby and we find out that they’re basically not gonna make it. Stop participant sharing, there we go. That’s just a wild scene and I always was under the assumption that that was not a matte painting. That’s really cool.

Kent Matheson:
That’s the thing. That’s what we always used to say about matte painting, is when you’ve done your job properly, nobody notices.

David Read:
That’s it. This is done from a piece of concept art that I believe Ken Rabehl did.

Kent Matheson:
I think the art director was Richard Hudolin.

David Read:
Yep. That’s correct. Production designer.

Kent Matheson:
Production designer, yep, and then Ken.

David Read:
You brought this to life. Now, this image is far more complicated.

Kent Matheson:
This one’s interesting because this was beyond my 3D skill at that time. We actually hired someone to build it in 3D and I supervised them for building that one. I think they built it in the early Maya program, which is a 3D program. It’s funny, I look at these now and there’s things I’d do differently.

David Read:
Oh, of course. The artist in you, there’s always gonna be an itch to change something. It’s like with the technology that you have now, why not?

Kent Matheson:
Also, skill and different style and time. The other thing to think about too is that these shows are always done with a really tight timeline, with a lot of different episodes and images going on concurrently.

David Read:
Of course.

Kent Matheson:
That’s a thing that nobody watching it should ever have to care about. Again, if we’ve done our job well, you don’t and shouldn’t. It’s always interesting to look back on this and think about the time constraints and how if you’d had more time, you would have done this. If you’d had more time, you would have done that.

David Read:
Of course.

Kent Matheson:
It’s the context, the backend, that we, who made these things, see that you guys, who enjoyed them or watched them originally probably aren’t aware of.

David Read:
Of course.

Kent Matheson:
It’s a fun journey for me to look back on these now. I’d do it differently now ’cause the technology is different but they’re fun images, aren’t they?

David Read:
How many man hours am I looking at here?

Kent Matheson:
No idea. I don’t remember. Probably not as many as you’d think.

David Read:
So, not weeks? He sighs.

Kent Matheson:
It’s hard to say.

David Read:
OK, that’s fair.

Kent Matheson:
I’m thinking about it here now.

David Read:
A, you have a great concept artist. I’ve got the original if you wanna see it. Let me pull it up.

Kent Matheson:
All right. I haven’t seen that for many years.

David Read:
Give me a minute here. There. Can you see that?

Kent Matheson:
Yep. Awesome.

David Read:
It’s, uh, it’s largely there.

Kent Matheson:
He’s working in pencil at this point. This is almost pre-digital days. It’s just amazing.

David Read:
He’s using Wite-Out for the lights.

Kent Matheson:
Totally. Gouache, Wite-Out, exactly. That’s the production flow; they do these designs, get them approved by the art director or Richard Hudolin or the show runners. I think it was Glassner, Jonathan Glassner.

David Read:
Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright.

Kent Matheson:
Brad Wright, yep. Then they come to us and we’re part of a flow. Our job is to create the images that they sketch out. They sketch out these ideas and then the plates are shot. Like you saw with the “Solitudes” matte painting, the plates were shot and then they say, in this case it was Richard Dean Anderson, I think, leaning over a balcony, looking at a blue screen throwing a couple of grenades or something.

David Read:
And Tony Amendola. If you’re doing your job right, I suppose it’s just a matter of continuing to evolve it and never having to go, “Nope, stop. Completely start over.” The only thing that’s really different is the angle. This is kind of more akin to what the final look was. They’re on a bridge, like a causeway, overlooking the engine and mechanics. Just one little grenade takes out this entire ship.

Kent Matheson:
As they do. You know what I mean?

David Read:
It’s low tech.

Kent Matheson:
They’re fragile things, those alien spaceships. So, the final angle, I think there were two or three different angles that we did of this, different cuts in the edit. The way of selling the physicality and the reality, supposedly, of these totally fake environments, is you have to match the camera angle and the camera perspective and the camera lens. That really dictates what we can do in the final. The key art Ken did is used to drive the filming basically. We wouldn’t do the matte paintings or the 3D environments before the plates were shot. What would happen is they would take these sketches and these things, they’d go on set and they would build the sets that they need to support these plans. Then they’d bring the cameras in and they would shoot the plates for them. In this case, Richard Dean Anderson and the other actor leaning over a balcony. Once the plates are shot, they get scanned and they come into our system where they would match moves basically. We take them into a 3D program, sometimes, and determine the camera angles that we have to match. This is what would drive, at that point, the 3D. I think that’s still the process now; you match the camera, you build the 3D, you get the rough approved and then you move forward to doing the final image. In this case, this was a sketch to design the idea and to tell, inform the director what was supposed to happen. The set would be built, the plate would be shot and then it would come to us. Our work on the final was totally driven by whatever the plate was and this was always the case.

David Read:
So, much goes into just telling a story.

Kent Matheson:
It’s true.

David Read:
It’s absolutely wild. Let’s see here. “Thor’s Chariot.” This is also early on in Season Two. You guys have taken the design of the Goa’uld’s pyramid ships from the film and we’re beginning to finally start to see that design in the show. This was interesting because there are a couple of shots of this in the episode where there’s a little bit of a tighter shot, kind of off to the side, where you kind of see the ships being built. If you look really closely, it’s kind of wild what’s happening there. They’re kind of coming together like a reverse domino effect, almost like Legos. I can’t imagine what that must have been like to design.

Kent Matheson:
This one.

David Read:
Let me stop sharing. That’s it. Wow.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah, that was fun. The design of this was based on the original movie prop.

David Read:
Yep.

Kent Matheson:
Then we built this in 3D, really early 3D.

David Read:
Just need the gist of it.

Kent Matheson:
The animation and the assembly were done using compositing. Here’s different elements and plates. There was a 3D render right there. These are the alphas that we created. That’s it. I think that’s all I have.

David Read:
That’s still really cool. Wow. OK, there you go. You got the camp.

Kent Matheson:
So, the camp is all matte painting. There’s, I think that was the plate that was shot.

David Read:
So, they found a location with those vehicle paths?

Kent Matheson:
Yes, I think. It’s all coming back to me now.

David Read:
It’s OK. It’s only 25 years ago, Kent. On top of that, you’ve got people moving around. In that circumstance, does it just really come down to, “OK, this is as much time as…” Oh, wow, look at that.

Kent Matheson:
There you go.

David Read:
“This is as much time as I have to commit to this, so I’m gonna give it as much detail as I can before I have to hand it off.”

Kent Matheson:
Basically, yeah. It’s planning the shot and how it’s gonna be composited ’cause, as you were saying, in this case, the compositing, the assembly of the matte painting is done by another person, and they use elements and plans that we make and set up for them. How long this would have taken? Dude, I wanna say a couple days, a few days. ‘Cause again, you’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re bringing together.

David Read:
That’s fast. So, various stages of completion as we go back to it throughout the episode.

Kent Matheson:
I think so, that’s right. Exactly.

David Read:
The action was mostly taking place offsite. They’re running around in caves and in the woods, but this is Heru’ur’s main base of operations. Thor comes along and smashes it all to hell later on. Gosh, this is a great scene. Do you have any reference of the Asgard ship? I guess that was done digitally.

Kent Matheson:
That was built. What I do have, let’s have a look here. Remind me the episode again.

David Read:
This is “Thor’s Chariot.”

Kent Matheson:
“Thor’s Chariot.”

David Read:
208, I believe.

Kent Matheson:
Let me share it. Take the journey with me.

David Read:
This is the second Asgard episode. This is the second time we return to Cimmeria and the first time that we see, that we actually encounter, rather, not just a hologram and an Asgard answering machine, but we actually get a look at an Asgard mothership, which has only been described in Jaffa legend.

Kent Matheson:
There are some earlier renders.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
There you can see some of the painting and retouching is done. We build these things very simply and texture them and then rework them. Here it is coming together. There are some floating tents.

David Read:
Goa’uld magic.

Kent Matheson:
I know. Here’s some of the plates.

David Read:
Wow. OK.

Kent Matheson:
It’s north of Vancouver. So, many alien planets were shot just north of Vancouver.

David Read:
You go with what you have.

Kent Matheson:
You do. Exactly. I think that’s it. The alien ship was a different episode.

David Read:
“Thor’s Chariot.” The mothership was introduced in “Thor’s Chariot” for sure.

Kent Matheson:
It was, OK, yeah.

David Read:
I can show you the illustrations if you’d like.

Kent Matheson:
I’d love to see them.

David Read:
OK, let’s show them to you. Absolutely.

Kent Matheson:
Cool.

David Read:
Several runs were done of this one.

Kent Matheson:
I think that was the one with Ken and Richard again, right?

David Read:
This is Ken, yeah.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah.

David Read:
This is the first one, it’s radically different. Or maybe this was the second, I’m not sure. The 9th of April and then… OK, so this was earlier. The 16th of March. The first time I saw this one, I was like, “This is damn cool.”

Kent Matheson:
It ended up looking a lot less interesting in the final, didn’t it?

David Read:
Yeah.

Kent Matheson:
There it is right there.

David Read:
There you go. That’s the image that Stargate fans know. We saw that again in early Season Three, flying over Earth, and then in late Season Three, plummeting into the Pacific Ocean. You can see this kind of central engine system design coming from this influence here.

Kent Matheson:
Totally.

David Read:
They move it over into the main body. I love the idea and you can see this throughout the illustration work. Something being done somewhere else, them putting it aside, not using it, but then coming along later on and saying, “This idea that we had over here, let’s move it into this.” Very few ideas are ever wasted, if any, ’cause it helps you evolve the process.

Kent Matheson:
Also ’cause we’re working fast.

David Read:
That’s true too.

Kent Matheson:
There you go.

David Read:
“Serpent’s Lair.” There’s so much happening here. There was a cheat in this episode. We got the Horus helmets, modified from the feature film. They couldn’t afford doing the effect on screen, so they cut away to Daniel and then cut back. There’s your matte painting. We cut back to Heru’ur with the helmet off and we just traded it in for sound effects. Later on in this season in an episode called “Secrets” we see it done with a tighter shot on Teal’c’s face.

Kent Matheson:
Nice.

David Read:
There’s that put together. Yep.

Kent Matheson:
I remember that moment from the film. When the helmet first came off. It retracted into the costume.

David Read:
That was so wild.

Kent Matheson:
I was probably 12 or something, or 10. I forget. I just remember going, “Oh my God, that’s so cool.”

David Read:
That’s it. All right. “Message in a Bottle.” This was cool. I’ve got the art.

Kent Matheson:
What you’re looking at right there is a physical model that was built.

David Read:
Oh, it is?

Kent Matheson:
Actually, no. It is partially a physical model. What episode is this again?

David Read:
This is 207, “Message in a Bottle.”

Kent Matheson:
“Message in a Bottle.” Let me call up some of the photos.

David Read:
They had several designs for this structure.

Kent Matheson:
The structure we built in 3D and we did a 3D render, a camera move on that one. The background was, I’m looking through my files here to find them. The background that we’re looking at there was a physical model in the center. Maybe the center third of it is a plate of an actual built moonscape. We extended, we built it out on the top and the bottom and the sides as a matte painting. The center third of that is the model and the rest of it is all extended matte painting, I think. John will correct me, he might still have the plates for that. Maybe the top was a matte painting. I kind of forget, but we made it huge for the time. What we ended up doing was rendering the foreground tower in 3D with the camera move pulling back and then we used, in compositing, this plate, and shifted and scaled it to make it look like it was… There you go. This one. Great.

David Read:
I have to say, it gets the job done and it tells the story. In many respects, this simple shot here alone looks more realistic to me.

Kent Matheson:
They always tweak it and their goal is to tell the story, not to represent our work best.

David Read:
It’s not all about you? It’s about the story. That’s cool. That’s really cool.

Kent Matheson:
They do what they think is proper to tell the story.

David Read:
Absolutely. “Bane.”

Kent Matheson:
“Bane.”

David Read:
So, very early on, we had very few technologically advanced planets that we explored.
Descendants.

Kent Matheson:
North Vancouver.

David Read:
I imagine there’s some North Vancouver in here somewhere, or some Vancouver downtown in this image somewhere. Let me see if I can pull the original image for this.

Kent Matheson:
Water is the only thing that’s real.

David Read:
Several different designs were done.

Kent Matheson:
Yep.

David Read:
This is Ken.

Kent Matheson:
I like the designs better than I like the final.

David Read:
Gosh. He was a genius. He was absolutely brilliant. According to Richard, he was fastidious. You had to tear him away from his work because he just wanted to keep on refining. At a certain time, at least once or twice, Richard had to just pull it out of his art board. “It’s time to do the presentation, man. We’re taking this in.” That’s another one where it’s an establishing shot from the intro, the very top of the episode.

Kent Matheson:
The thing is, what I see when I look at this and I’m pretty critical about these things. What I see are all the mistakes, in ways that we made and the limitations of early compositing and the time, of course, that we had to work on these things.

David Read:
You only have so much time. If you had more time, you’d probably add the impact of the water hitting these panels.

Kent Matheson:
Exactly.

David Read:
That’s exactly it. You see it a little bit here on the one underneath the Stargate. There’s a little bit of some action happening and then one in the immediate foreground here, just a little bit. You gotta move onto the next thing; production is demanding it. Considering the time that you had, it sells the story. You definitely pull it off.

Kent Matheson:
Thank you. This one was a complete photo collage at the time. This is one of my favorites. It’s one of the simpler ones, but I really enjoyed doing this one.

David Read:
It’s one of the most important to the franchise.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah, it is.

David Read:
This is our first encounter with one of our most important allies.

Kent Matheson:
That’s right, isn’t it?

David Read:
The Asgard were with us through the rest of the show and they committed mass suicide…

Kent Matheson:
What?

David Read:
…by the end of the series in Season 10.

Kent Matheson:
That’s really sad. What happened?

David Read:
They couldn’t get past their cloning problem, and it began to deteriorate their physical bodies. Instead of allowing all of their technology to fall into enemy hands, they blew themselves up and they invited us to witness the event in orbit. It was really sad. Who would have done this?

Kent Matheson:
No idea.

David Read:
OK.

Kent Matheson:
I’ve never seen it.

David Read:
That’s perfectly fair.

Kent Matheson:
I don’t remember seeing it. I’m sure I must have, but I don’t remember seeing that. What’s the episode again?

David Read:
This is 215, “The Fifth Race.”

Kent Matheson:
“The Fifth Race,” OK. See what I can find.

David Read:
There are two shots of this. This is the first one and I don’t know if I set aside the next shot. Yes, there it is. There’s the other shot. Right there. You got a little lens flare happening here.

Kent Matheson:
The foreground, the single foreground piece that they’re standing in front of, is a set. The two feet coming down to the one top piece there on both left and the right, that is a set.

David Read:
Then the rest is an extension.

Kent Matheson:
The rest is an extension.

David Read:
I gotta say these little Asgard are more than enough for nightmare fuel.

Kent Matheson:
You’re freaking me out with that too. I’d remember if I saw it. Oh, there it is. Hang on. OK. There’s the plate, there’s the matte painting. There’s the plate that was shot on set.

David Read:
Wow, so the first two were real. OK. Wow, look at that. You can see the back of the stage wall. That’s definitely a bridge. Wow, OK. A lot more was real than I anticipated.

Kent Matheson:
It’s good that you can’t tell.

David Read:
That’s the thing. Does the customer know the difference? No. Wow. How cool.

Kent Matheson:
It’s fun to see, isn’t it, in this kind of context?

David Read:
Nowadays they would throw up a volume in that space and you could move the camera independently of the shot. You had to lock off the camera. There’s a tilt up after O’Neill gets off the floor and he’s holding the… Wow, look at that. Different lighting configurations.

Kent Matheson:
That was the render that was done in 3D for that plate.

David Read:
You rendered on top of what was created on the set for those shots? I guess, to match, to match them up.

Kent Matheson:
We take the plates and you can see the perspective and the camera lens distorts the image. It would have to be matched and then we render it to match that plate. Here’s the plate that was shot. I don’t know if I have the 3D for that.

David Read:
It’s been 25 years, I’m thankful you have anything.

Kent Matheson:
I know. Need to find that. I’ll go back to the other one.

David Read:
This is 26 years.

Kent Matheson:
So, this one?

David Read:
Yep, that’s the entrance. Wow, that is so cool that we can see this. Yeah, he flies through the gate.

Kent Matheson:
Here’s the plate. You can see, obviously, it’s a real physical thing. The perspective lines and everything have to be matched in order for it to sit in properly.

David Read:
Just crazy the amount of content that goes into completing just a few shots of a show to tell a story.

Kent Matheson:
Nobody thinks about it. Ideally, at this point you’re thinking about the little guys and the character of Richard Dean Anderson standing up, underneath him. That’s what you really wanna be focusing on. Everything else is there just to support that.

David Read:
You believe that he’s in this place.

Kent Matheson:
Ideally, exactly.

David Read:
The thing that would bother me would be the reflections on the floor there of the original, of the stage wall. Part of me would wanna rebuild it from scratch. But again, it comes down to time. Of course, the longer that you stare at something, the more you’re going to notice certain issues.

Kent Matheson:
Actually, that’s exactly it. You make it as perfect as you can, but you make it for the context in which it’s shown, which is a quick panning shot or a look-up, or a thing. There are always things that you can pick apart in anything. The goal at the time is to sell the moment at that moment in the show. If it does its job, hopefully it doesn’t look too fakey, but if it does its job, that’s all that matters.

David Read:
What rules of thumb are you living by at this point in production, working on this stuff 25 years ago? To keep yourself from getting swept away in one specific shot, do you give yourself X amount of hours to work on something? Or do you have a specific deadline on a date for each shot to hand it off? How is this working internally at this point?

Kent Matheson:
We’re totally part of a production system, always. The way it’s working is that we have several shots going on at any one time. The show’s released once a week. I think we had a development process of three weeks or something, or a month for each show, in the whole thing. We’d have several shows going on concurrently. Realistically speaking, we probably only spent the equivalent of a week on any episode, in totality, but that would’ve been stretched over the period of a month. You’re working on different things at the same time. How long do these things take? Several days. It’s a case of work on it for a little bit, move on to something else, come back to it, get it done. Of course, there are deadlines because everything has to fit into the production system and get delivered down the line so that nothing is waiting, because it really is, for lack of a better term, a sausage factory.

David Read:
I imagine Joel Goldsmith and the folks at Sharpe Sound aren’t working with a finished plate. I imagine they’re probably working with something that’s somewhere along the way that at least has the timing locked off and an idea of what they’re looking at. How far along was air from a lot of the shots that you would hand out? Was it weeks? Was it days?

Kent Matheson:
I don’t know. There’s a lot that happens after. There’s the editing, there’s the assembly; it’s all happening at the same time. What we do is we deliver rough edits or they would have placeholders for our shots, ’cause they film everything and it was filmed back then. They would film everything cut by cut by cut and then scan it and then begin to assemble it in editing. What they would do for our shots, of course, they’d been planned out like you talked about from Richard and Ken. They had the plates that they would shoot on set and they would put them in as placeholders. As we would wrap our work in, we would hand it back to them, or on to them, with our rough edits in place, basically. Sometimes we’d give them just the 3D that they would drop in and then after that it would go on to compositing and the finals would be delivered back to them and inserted. It’s interesting because there’s a lot to consider. Doing environments and the matte painting, it’s more than just the image itself. You have to look at the cuts and consider the context of which it’s shown. The lighting, the feel, the color timing. The shots, again, have to tell the story. They have to blend in and just tell that moment and then move on with the story. The color has to match, the lighting has to match, everything has to be part of that flow.

David Read:
So, much, man.

Kent Matheson:
It was fun to do. At times I remember getting annoyed or just tired and burned out. It is a constant thing and you get a bit cynical, I suppose, in any system. You’re just, again, churning it out.

David Read:
There’s not enough time.

Kent Matheson:
You don’t have enough time to finish things to your preference. You have to move on. Then there’s money and there’s technical constraints. Looking back, it was a fun opportunity, it was a really fun process just because of that churn, because of that “get it done, move on to something else” feeling. I remember once, we shared a building, we worked on the bridge set, the visual effects team. We’d go to the sound stages and we’d come back; it was all part of the mix.

David Read:
So, you’re in house?

Kent Matheson:
Totally in house. Some of the work wasn’t. John Gajdecki had his separate studio where the compositing was done, that was downtown. We had an office, James Tichenor and I forget her name.

David Read:
Michelle Comens?

Kent Matheson:
Michelle Comens, yep. We all worked in a building together, on the same floor, which we actually shared with The Outer Limits as well. That was in the building. Downstairs was the prop house and downstairs was also where the bathroom was. We were going downstairs. The bathroom was separated by a little sort of open fence, a chicken wire fence or something, with a little door in it and the prop guys were on the other side. I remember coming down once to go to the bathroom, I remember hearing them and they couldn’t tell that people were there so they were just talking their normal way. They were going, “I could never do visual effects, my standards are just too high. I look at the stuff that they do and it looks kinda fakey. I could never do that ’cause I wouldn’t be able to accept the kind of work that…”

David Read:
And you’re in the john hearing this?

Kent Matheson:
I’m listening to this and it’s interesting. In a lot of cases, sure, the stuff does end up looking fakey and there’s no excuse for that. But it’s interesting, I think, to consider the constraints. These things were done, a lot of times, for technical, time constraints. Just see it all in context. I think where we did sometimes make those shots that didn’t look fakey, and I think Stargate had a really high-quality standard, generally, for TV shows. Now it’s through the fucking roof, if I can say that. You look at what they’re doing on any TV show. The famous ones being, what’s the throwback show where they have the… Stranger Things?

David Read:
Yeah. I haven’t seen it since Season Two. I’m waiting for it to finish and then I’ll mow it down. I just watched, just crushed that they canceled it, 1899.

Kent Matheson:
A German show.

David Read:
Dark’s spinoff, yes. They used the volume on a turntable and was able to move the background scenery in real time with the action in the front.

Kent Matheson:
That’s the most amazing technology in the last 20 years.

David Read:
Unreal 5. You can render photorealism in real time.

Kent Matheson:
Amazing. That’s ILM. I think that was Andy Proctor overseeing that. They first, as I know, anyway, brought it in for The Mandalorian?

David Read:
Of course. Star Wars is gonna set the precedent.

Kent Matheson:
That’s the next leap in matte painting. Pulling it into 3D, extensively, and tracking with the camera. It’s just fucking amazing.

David Read:
‘Cause he’s chrome. He’s made of chrome and that alone, the realism of shooting an element behind him so that reflections are correct.

Kent Matheson:
That’s it. The lighting and the reflections. What they’re doing is they’re building it with LEDs, which it’s possible to get the high dynamic lighting. What they’re doing is they’re creating a 3D environment in Unreal and representing all of the lighting in that environment properly. They light for the foreground, they have the set, they track it and all of the reflections, all of the lighting that comes from the back is real to that environment. This is exactly one of the fakey things that we could never do. Back then it was, like you’ve seen, the green screens. You put the characters in front of a green screen and then you track the camera and you replace it after. The great thing about The Mandalorian sets is that you’re basically front-loading the environments. You’re building them, so it’s all a much more considered and holistic process. You don’t try and fix some shit that was filmed poorly on set. You don’t have to try and match lighting that was never gonna look real in the first place. A lot of times you see in these old shows, the characters will be standing outside, in theory, but it’s obviously been filmed on a green screen with the weird set light in it. There’s no way to make that thing look good.

David Read:
You can only guess.

Kent Matheson:
Exactly. That’s fun stuff, man. I wish we’d had that when we were a show.

David Read:
I got a couple responses to that. Number one, you better make sure that you’ve got it right, because once it’s in the can, if it’s not correct, you gotta go back to the set and do it over again. The other part of it is, old guys like you and me, we’re looking for those details and while we’re saying to ourselves, “Wow, that’s cool. That’s amazing. Look how realistic it is,” part of us honestly is being pulled out of the story.

Kent Matheson:
Totally.

David Read:
We’re spending our time on that because we’re so mesmerized by the technology that we have to remind ourselves, “Oh yeah, let’s go back to the story and watch the story.” Whereas kids and people, their minds are still spent so much in a dream phase. Kids are magic, they can be anything. They have unlimited potential. They’re seeing all this stuff, whether it’s “The Fifth Race” with O’Neill shaking hands with the Asgard or the Mandalorian and Grogu, the same ideas get born out of the kids’ minds because it’s where it needs to be for them. It was then, it is now, it’s just more refined.

Kent Matheson:
Imagination? You’re freeing the imagination. Totally, yep.

David Read:
Yep, absolutely. So, this was the Nox in early Season One. Did you go back in there on your own originally or was this a mandate to refine this image for the flashback at the end of Season Two?

Kent Matheson:
Well, as I recall, let me find the… What was the episode again?

David Read:
This is 222, “Out of Mind.”

Kent Matheson:
“Out of Mind,” yep. OK, so…

David Read:
I’ve got many a piece of concept art for this one if you’d like to see the originals before we move over.

Kent Matheson:
As I recall, this one was one of Eric’s matte paintings originally, by Eric Chauvin. Let’s see. Beautiful, beautiful work. This was one that I think no one was ultimately happy with because it lacked what you’re saying now is that next step: the physicality. It felt like a matte painting because of what I’ve described. Let me actually share my screen.

David Read:
OK.

Kent Matheson:
I’ve got a couple of things here. It was one of those shots that was never going to look good.

David Read:
I would argue it would never look amazing.

Kent Matheson:
This was the original.

David Read:
That’s the episode.

Kent Matheson:
Yeah, and this is the way it was first aired. I remember this is what aired and when it came back around, I forget the episode that we did it for. They cut it back into the original.

David Read:
This is “Out of Mind,” yeah, 2.22. Hathor is pulling their memories to get information.

Kent Matheson:
That’s exactly it. It was one of those shows where, as you were saying, they do the memory tour?

David Read:
Yep.

Kent Matheson:
“Remember the time?” and “Remember the time?” The reason they do those shows is ’cause it saves budget. If they’re out of budget, they’ll write a show like that so that they don’t have to do any new effects. On this one, we had the shot that was coming up, “Oh, remember the Nox? blabbity-blabbity?” We had the shot coming up and all of us were saying, “We were never really happy with the way that looked.” They found a bit of money in the budget to have me spend some time and do compositing and basically to recreate the shot. This was the first time that I really explored doing this in 3D.

David Read:
I think this is Stargate’s first example of retconning.

Kent Matheson:
Retcon, what’s… Remind me.

David Read:
Retroactive continuity. You’re creating something new and saying that this was how it was then. You were just remembering a little different… Yes, there we go.

Kent Matheson:
I think that was the concept art.

David Read:
I’ve got a couple to compare to that too. Let me show you mine. You’ve shown me yours. Real quick here. Yeah, that’s basically it though. Let me pull this here. OK, there’s mine.

Kent Matheson:
Take over. I’m not seeing it. I’m still sharing my screen.

David Read:
OK. I’m sorry.

Kent Matheson:
There you go, OK. Nice.

David Read:
They basically pulled the asset that you needed to see there, but then they actually developed an alternate there.

Kent Matheson:
I never, I don’t remember that one. That’s interesting.

David Read:
The Fenri. Then we actually got to go into the city.

Kent Matheson:
Nice.

David Read:
Ken did a concept of what it would actually look like in the city which would have blown out the budget at that point.

Kent Matheson:
I remember, I don’t think we did that one.

David Read:
No, but it’s cool to see it.

Kent Matheson:
The whole idea was, “We want to do this.” We were never happy with the way it looked, so we took the time to rebuild it in 3D. This was fun for me ’cause this is one of the first times I was doing anything this extensive.

David Read:
You took the model and then…

Kent Matheson:
I built it and then we took it and animated a slow rotation.

David Read:
What work. Next episode, 3.01, “Into the Fire.” I love this because you take advantage of the existing set, which you pulled, they could pull the walls back and there was a green screen behind it for when they would shoot people coming through the Stargate and instead you incorporated that into the story.

Kent Matheson:
Exactly.

David Read:
Ken Rabehl did an amazing piece of art for this, which is one of my favorites that he did here. That is just cool.

Kent Matheson:
It has a nice graphic quality to it, doesn’t it?

David Read:
Also, he was at the start of the season so he could spend more time coloring. Absolutely amazing. You’ve got the pattern here. This was also, this pattern, the visual effect that you did was actually used a little bit again in a Season Four episode called “The Other Side,” where we had space white supremacists led by René Auberjonois.

Kent Matheson:
I remember that one. It had the big city flyover. We used the generator again with the wall reveal.

David Read:
It’s for the generator and then you had a different one for composite for the stasis pod area. Look at that. I didn’t even realize the little cylindrical thing. You guys did create that. I’d never noticed that before. I’m always paying attention to this larger archway.

Kent Matheson:
Trying to find something.

David Read:
Then detonating it. Are these just stock explosions?

Kent Matheson:
They were layered on. Christine Petrov, I think, was the compositor on that one and we did lighting passes. We rendered it, I rendered it. At this point, I’m working in a program called LightWave. We moved out of sort of the early Form-Z and Electric Image and into LightWave, which gave us sort of a more physical rendering model. You could model and animate and build in the same package, which was very exciting at the time. What we did here was we rendered out, we created, we matched the cameras with the 3D and then we rendered what we call several passes. One was a color pass and then various different lighting passes, where we’d set the lights up and render them in black and white. These were layered on and controlled and matted out in compositing to create an actual lighting that matched the explosion as it happened.

David Read:
For these fireballs, would these have been filmed by Stargate Productions? Or would these have been purchased?

Kent Matheson:
I honestly don’t know.

David Read:
Definitely some elements were shot.

Kent Matheson:
You’d have to ask John where he got his elements from, but I think he probably did. He had a film company? They were located in Toronto. He was working with, I think, the guy who runs Rocket Science now. I forget his name. They shot a lot of movies, and they shot a lot of elements in a lot of plates. It could be that John shot the elements for this.

David Read:
OK.

Kent Matheson:
I don’t know.

David Read:
If you use his company for something, you also get his assets and his library.

Kent Matheson:
He’d bring it in. Exactly.

David Read:
That’s awesome. Very cool. I just talked with the art director for this episode here, Doug McLean. This was built on the effects stage and he complained that you couldn’t shoot too high because you would then get a studio ceiling.

Kent Matheson:
Let me find the plate for that. I know I’ve got it. Remind me the episode?

David Read:
This is 3.08, “Demons” and I’ve got the concept art for it.

Kent Matheson:
Cool. Let’s see.

David Read:
Nice.

Kent Matheson:
It looks a lot like the final.

David Read:
Very much so.

Kent Matheson:
Sometimes they deviated. I think Ken was never happy when we changed …

David Read:
He puts all this work in it. It’s important to remember he’s still inspiring you guys.

Kent Matheson:
Totally. He’s directing in a lot of ways.

David Read:
Even the roses that are hanging over these archways here in this shot, you can see them in the final. They’re right there.

Kent Matheson:
What you’re looking at there is a set, I’m trying to find the plates here. Hang on. So, they built this.

David Read:
The sky is obviously an extension?

Kent Matheson:
There you go. Let me share my screen. So, the plate is that. Right there.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
They get that soft lighting. They stretched…

David Read:
A sheet.

Kent Matheson:
…a few feet above. There’s the other one right there.

David Read:
Wow, to make it a truly cloudy day. That’s, wow. Wow, that is so cool.

Kent Matheson:
These were locked off shots. What we did was we just extended the top. We took all the sets. I was on set and I would film the textures, basically. Shoot photographs of the textures so that we could match them properly.

David Read:
Are you taking the photographs into the software and using it to essentially copy and paste the textures?

Kent Matheson:
Basically. There’s a lot of tweaking in Photoshop that happens.

David Read:
Absolutely, but you gotta start from somewhere.

Kent Matheson:
I’ll see if we can find some of those textures. I’m amazed actually looking back on it now. The resolution that we were working with at the time was nowhere near the resolution in film.

David Read:
Yeah, look at these. Half a megabyte in some cases. That was the resolution then.

Kent Matheson:
Yep, exactly.

David Read:
Wow, look at all those.

Kent Matheson:
I know. The backup quality, ’cause it’s crap.

David Read:
Oh, come on. That’s what you guys had.

Kent Matheson:
It’s crap. Let’s see. Here we go.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
Sky element. This is interesting too, what they used to do to save memory is they would squeeze the images. You can see how it’s compressed.

David Read:
Yes, it’s basically into a four by three.

Kent Matheson:
Yep. This is the way that we would often work. We’d work proper resolution, but we would deliver it compressed like this. This is a way that they would use to save memory and space back then. When you expand them out, information that’s lost visually is not really something you can tell.

David Read:
I had that conversation with John Gajdecki. He was shown, from Atlantis Season One, these shots that were basically four by three. I’m like, “Everyone’s squeezed.” He’s like, “Yeah, we would do that to save money and then pull it sideways.” I have to admit, I was shocked. I was really, really surprised that something that was that state-of-the-art in 2004 was being delivered compressed that way. I had no clue. Even Atlantis was up-res’d to a degree that first season.

Kent Matheson:
Totally, yep. Here’s a fun story which you may have heard before. Weta worked on the first Lord of the Rings movie.

David Read:
Yeah, they did the trilogies.

Kent Matheson:
I forget what year they did the first episode.

David Read:
First one was in production September of… or January of 2000.

Kent Matheson:
2000, there you go. All digital, right? Everything was digital at the time. It was filmed, but then they’d scan it. All the work was done digitally and it was delivered. It was one of the first movies, I think, that was delivered to theaters digitally. I could be wrong and maybe there were others, but it was one of the first, I think. It was cheaper for them to, and quicker, for them to put a bunch of hard drives in a suitcase and fly a guy from New Zealand to America with the hard drives than it was to actually send the stuff through the intertubes.

David Read:
Than it was to actually send it over fiber?

Kent Matheson:
Yeah. That’s how they did it. They put a bunch of hard drives in a suitcase…

David Read:
Oh my God.

Kent Matheson:
… and carried it in an airplane from New Zealand to America and that’s how they delivered it.

David Read:
Hope you had the overhead space ’cause you ain’t putting that underneath the plane. Can you imagine if it got lost? Wow, I did not know that.

Kent Matheson:
I think it was a guy with a handcuff, a suitcase.

David Read:
Yeah, like the nuclear football.

Kent Matheson:
Exactly.

David Read:
That is wild. All right, a couple more. This is one of my favorites. This is a wider shot here and you had a lot of stuff happening. There were cars moving around, flying around. This was an advanced Goa’uld civilization. Whatever Sokar was doing, he was working it.

Kent Matheson:
That was his palace, the view from his palace.

David Read:
Absolutely. You had these beams of light into the sky and then you had Netu in the background. This is Delmak.

Kent Matheson:
The planet.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
What was the episode?

David Read:
This? I apologize. This is 3.12 and 3.13, “Jolinar’s Memories” and “The Devil You Know.”

Kent Matheson:
There you go. OK, cool. That was interesting ’cause, again, going back to the early days of, not early, but it was different. We didn’t have the storage, we didn’t have the memory, we didn’t have the computing power to render something like that, or we hadn’t figured it out yet. I think at ILM they were figuring out how to render cityscapes. I think Yosei did amazing, obviously, work for Episode One and then we did the same thing in Episode Two. This was before then. The way that we figured out to make this cityscape, Sokar’s planet, was we actually built a physical model of the city.

David Read:
We’ve got the cityscape with the Ha’tak in front and then the city in the background and the moon. There’s a lot of business going on, and also, you’re trying to establish Delmak’s location in the star system with Netu as well ’cause that’s gonna become very important to the story.

Kent Matheson:
That’s right. Here are the original matte paintings that were done for that episode.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
I’ll put it this away.

David Read:
Look at that. That is so cool.

Kent Matheson:
I can’t get rid of this. I don’t know what I’m doing.

David Read:
There’s an X on the top left.

Kent Matheson:
Ah, there we go. OK. These are the original matte paintings that we did.

David Read:
Wow.

Kent Matheson:
Yes.

David Read:
Look at that.

Kent Matheson:
Thank you.

David Read:
This is a very advanced Goa’uld planet by comparison.

Kent Matheson:
I think we kind of got a bit carried away ’cause the whole idea was that they were really oppressive. The Goa’uld leader or whatever his name was, I forget. Apophis?

David Read:
Sokar. Apophis definitely really kept his people in the dumps, except for his few higher-up lords, who lived in the great cities.

Kent Matheson:
This, we sort of got carried away on. Part of the storytelling in here would have been a dumpy, sort of, lower-level city with these plinths, which were the landing pads for the spaceships. Again, here, I even see a missed opportunity. It would have been nice to make a reference to the original movie and have pyramids here, large pyramids.

David Read:
I was wondering that myself.

Kent Matheson:
A lot happens. Choices are made in production ’cause we’re moving quickly. In this case, what we did was we built a physical model that was about a meter by a meter, with these tiny little buildings and we put them on a sound stage and we mapped out the sound stage in a grid. We photographed them with sun lighting in these positions. We would move it and rotate it and move it and rotate it. I’m trying to find some of these photographs here. I’m sure I’ve gotta have them.

David Read:
I would be so scared to be a citizen of this planet living in this advanced city. Wanting to mind your Ps and Qs because if you screw up, you look up in the night sky, that’s gonna be your destination.

Kent Matheson:
That was the prison planet up there, wasn’t it?

David Read:
Yep. I hope this is a satisfying process and not a frustrating one.

Kent Matheson:
No, this is fun. I maybe should have prepared.

David Read:
No, it’s OK. We’ve been really blessed by your time and your assets.

Kent Matheson:
Thanks.

David Read:
You have very nice assets.

Kent Matheson:
Thank you. I’ve heard. Let’s see. I don’t have the original.

David Read:
It’s all right.

Kent Matheson:
Another time. It was a model and then the foreground. I guess the foreground was actually the 3D that we did with that.

David Read:
I just remember being so blown away by the quality of this. Not that previous episodes weren’t, but it was such an intensely different look. Yep, there’s the surface of… So, we’ve switched now. This is the surface of Netu where the escape pods crash into the upper surface and they have to go into the caves. There’s a door right there. I’ve never seen that, never noticed that before. The idea is occasionally Sokar comes around with his mothership and beats the hell out of this planet and creates new fissures.

Kent Matheson:
Really?

David Read:
There’s always smoke and debris in the air. If you are sent to the surface, you don’t make it. That’s the ultimate punishment. You’re sent to live in the city below, as long as you behave, because if you don’t, Bynarr sends you to the surface and you die very quickly.

Kent Matheson:
You’ll see elements of the foreground.

David Read:
They pull back in the final shot of “The Devil You Know” and Apophis has taken over, so you see more of the palace in the foreground.

Kent Matheson:
That’s right, exactly. It was the same way that we did the moon with a plate in the background and then a 3D pull-through render in the foreground. That’s what I wanna see. There it is.

David Read:
There you go. That episode launched GateWorld.

Kent Matheson:
Really?

David Read:
Yep. There was no GateWorld before “Jolinar’s Memories,” the first half. Peter Williams takes his helmet off, reveals that he’s not Na’onak but he is Apophis. Darren Sumner went and set up the first version of GateWorld that night. He was a web designer at that point and he says, “I’ve gotta create this, pay homage to this with a website online.” That’s what he did and it’s gonna be 25 years old this October? Isn’t that wild?

Kent Matheson:
It is, actually. It really is. The show was really popular, wasn’t it?

David Read:
The point is you inspire people with your art. Art begets more art. Some of it good, some of it not so good. It’s the creative process. Kent, this has been really cool and I look forward to having you back to explore more. There’s so much here in those early years of SG-1 that you guys established, not just for the rest of the franchise, but techniques that the industry continued to evolve from. This is really cool.

Kent Matheson:
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

David Read:
That was Kent Matheson, matte painter for Stargate SG-1. I really appreciate his insight into this particular area of artistry where the show is involved. There are so many pieces that make what we see on screen come to life and I really enjoyed his perspective on the show. Hoping we’ll have him back to explain a few more shots that you haven’t seen before, or that you haven’t seen in this kind of level of detail because we definitely didn’t get to all the ones that I wanted to talk about. There’s more to come. Before we go, if you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, click the Like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. If you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. Clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the GateWorld.net YouTube channel. My thanks once again to Kent for making this episode possible. I love talking with the artists from the show, these guys are absolutely fantastic. My appreciation to my moderating team, Sommer, Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, Marcia for making this possible. Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, our web developer at Dial the Gate. Brice Ors, Matt Wilson, EagleSG. I don’t make the show in a vacuum and churning out these episodes week after week, especially one like this when I’m technically away from the keyboard, is a privilege to do for you guys. I appreciate you so much. Check out DialtheGate.com for all the upcoming episodes. We got a number of them heading your way this season. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, I’ll see you on the other side.