Douglas McLean, Stargate SG-1 Art Director From Season One to Season Five, joins Dial the Gate in a PRE-RECORDED interview to reveal insights into some of the franchise’s most iconic sets (including some rarely-seen original set photography)!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome
0:32 – Guest Introduction
2:08 – Five Seasons with SG-1
4:12 – Adapting the Missile Silo
6:06 – Stargate Command on the Effects Stage
8:58 – Adapting the Movie Assets
12:38 – Adaptable Sets from Stargate Command
14:38 – Movie Magic
18:09 – Stargate’s Longevity
19:40 – The Right People
20:40 – Doug’s Favorite Sets
24:47 – Making the Budget Work
27:10 – Preserving, Not Trashing, Assets
32:00 – K’tau in “Red Sky”
34:44 – Kheb in “Maternal Instinct”
38:08 – Fast, Cheap or Good
41:20 – Growing the Asgard Aesthetic
45:08 – Different Training Backgrounds
47:09 – Security in Five Seasons
52:40 – Knowing Your Directors
54:28 – Knowing Richard Hudolin’s Shorthand
58:52 – Censoring Your Own Ideas
1:00:49 – Cyclorama Trickery in “Window of Opportunity”
1:06:08 – Pushing Yourself
1:07:02 – Unreal 5 and Modern Technology
1:09:30 – “I’m Not an Illustrator”
1:11:40 – Art Department is a Human-form AI
1:13:03 – Art Director Credit in “Jolinar’s Memories”
1:15:26 – When Doug Talked with ChatGPT
1:17:58 – AI Artists Can’t Beat Humans
1:21:46 – Technology Disrupts
1:24:59 – Current and Future Concerns
1:29:16 – An Accelerating Spiral
1:36:44 – Well-Spent Time
1:40:45 – Thank You, Douglas!
1:42:14 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:43:40 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello. I’m David Read for Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. I appreciate you tuning in. Douglas McLean, art director on Stargate SG-1, was a part of production from Seasons One to Five, is joining us for this episode to share some stories about making the early seasons of one of our favorite shows. I’ve been blessed, I’ve been privileged to have these folks; so many of the people responsible for making the show on Dial the Gate. This one I owe tremendous thanks to Bridget McGuire, as I do many of these. John Smith, these episodes are really special and I’m thankful to have the folks who’ve helped bring Stargate to life. This is a pre-recorded episode so the moderator’s not gonna be taking questions for Doug. We’ve got a great episode in store for you. I appreciate you being here and let’s hear some stories from the early years of production. I’m talking with Douglas McLean, assistant art director and then art director for Stargate SG-1, Seasons One through Five. Sir, this is a privilege to have you on. I’m a huge fan of your work and it means so much to spend a little bit of time with you here.

Douglas McLean:
Thank you very much. It’s very kind of you to say so.

David Read:
It has been almost 30 years since SG-1 started.

Douglas McLean:
Ouch.

David Read:
That’s always a great lead-in. How old am I?

Douglas McLean:
I’ll tell you upfront, 74.

David Read:
Almost 41.

Douglas McLean:
People don’t have to guess.

David Read:
That’s funny. When you look back on those five seasons that you were with SG-1, do you look back on that period with pride?

Douglas McLean:
Yeah.

David Read:
Do you look back on that period with, “Phew, I’m glad that’s over with?”

Douglas McLean:
No.

David Read:
What feelings are stirred up?

Douglas McLean:
SG-1 was great. I had just moved out to Vancouver, and I had worked with Richard in Toronto.

David Read:
Richard Hudolin.

Douglas McLean:
In 1986, I think, on a show called Outbreak: Manhattan, which was a miniseries for CBS, and he was art director on it. I had just started getting into film work. I started in theater originally and Richard hired me to work on Manhattan. We got along and we did a couple of other shows together in Montreal and in Edmonton, or Calgary. I was still living in Toronto; he had moved out to Vancouver. We kept in touch and then in ’96 my wife and I decided we were gonna move out to Vancouver, so we did. I gave Richard a call and said, “Hey, I live here now.” He was going, “Oh, I’m starting up on this show.” I was not fully in the union yet; I was a permittee. I said, “I’ll deal with that” and we just worked from home because they didn’t have the studios yet, they weren’t set up for production. He said, “Maybe four or five weeks’ work, it’ll be good. It’ll help you get in the union.” Then five years later, we finally went, “OK, our four or five weeks is up. We’re leaving.” We worked out of my workroom at home and his house, and we were basically building the standing set, or drawing up the standing set, adapting the idea and the look from the movie because that’s what it all came out of. We didn’t wanna totally go, “Oh, we’ll just do something totally new and different.” But of course, that was a big major feature, and we were a TV show, so we just started to adapt. It was great fun and we did that for about a month and then they started up production and we moved into offices and Richard got on the show. Like I said, it was five years before I left, before we left. So, that’s when I met Bridget and Ivana and Ken Rabehl, and everybody really. It was a great experience and the show was fun. It was a great bunch of people, talented bunch of people and I managed to fool them into letting me stay. It was just good. We were never at loggerheads. Production, Brad Wright was an awesome writer/creator and line producer along with Jonathan. John Smith was great and Thom Wells was our construction coordinator. He was our construction coordinator and that was an awesome crew. Pretty much whatever we wanted, he would create and we filled stages edge-to-edge. When we started originally, we were in the FX stage, which is a big, long, 200 and some odd foot by 100-foot stage. We built everything in there while they were building the Stargate studios.

David Read:
That’s stage Four and Five.

Douglas McLean:
Four and Five.

David Read:
Which included production offices above SGC. That all came later. Stargate Command was, for the pilot, built in the FX stage, which was later the village and these other iconic locations in SG-1 Atlantis, is that right?

Douglas McLean:
There wasn’t really even a pilot because we knew right at the start we had a full season. I don’t remember the exact episode when they finished the stages, but we had to basically chop up the set and move it over.

David Read:
So, at some point, in the early episodes of Season One, Stargate Command came down and then went back up again.

Douglas McLean:
Went back up again.

David Read:
With the Stargate.

Douglas McLean:
100 feet away or 100 yards away. The offices, when we were starting up, were in what was called the baby stage, which was a small stage down at the other end of the lot, which had production offices above. We started there and everything moved: production office, the sets, pretty much everything.

David Read:
How much time was taken off to disassemble and reassemble Stargate Command?

Douglas McLean:
I wish I could remember. I feel like it was nothing. I feel like we just moved where we sort of did an episode where it would be, “OK, we’ll start in the Gate room, shoot the stuff in the Gate room and now we’ll go to another set.”

David Read:
Pull it apart.

Douglas McLean:
“We’ll go to locations” but there probably was a gap in there. I really do not remember because I didn’t have to physically move it.

David Read:
There were people for that.

Douglas McLean:
You can ask Thom Wells. He can probably remember exactly how many days they had; it was not enough. It was designed to be moved into that space. It wasn’t suddenly like “Oh, oh gosh, it’s eight feet too long.”

David Read:
It’s probably just a great big Lego set.

Douglas McLean:
Not to understate it, it was a huge move. It was a lot of guys working very hard. It worked well and it went in there and the picture you see behind me is in the… I’m pretty sure we’d moved it by then.

David Read:
Wow, that’s the permanent location?

Douglas McLean:
Yeah.

David Read:
What were the challenges of adapting the movie space and prop, the big one, for the TV show? I know that you guys had a couple of assets rotting in the desert that you were able to bring in.

Douglas McLean:
We brought the pieces of the Gate, but I don’t think any of them were actually used in the Gate that we built because it had to really be functional for one thing. I don’t remember how much they did in the movie in terms of what was real and what was effects afterwards. They built the Gate and all those things happened. It spun around; it stopped. That was a masterpiece of engineering by Thom and his crew, it was a big thing. I think we may have cast some of the pieces of the Gate to use. I don’t think we changed the Gate size or anything. Again, I don’t recall it specifically.

David Read:
No, it’s identical; 22 feet across.

Douglas McLean:
We had some of the original drawings. I could work from those; I didn’t have to redraw everything. I didn’t have to figure out Gate measurements. I think we kept pretty close to the original size of the rooms. We went with a two-level control room and a room above. I can’t remember exactly what was in the original room above. I think the last time I watched Stargate the movie was a couple of weeks before I started making things.

David Read:
You have Hammond’s office and then the briefing room and the room above. Then you got the spiral staircase that leads into the control room. Then all of the front of it is the Gate room. You can look at the movie and the TV show and say, “Yeah, that’s convincingly the same space.” There’s a few tweaks that are different. The round corridors, that’s all elements that you pulled in from the movie and adapted to the show.

Douglas McLean:
No, it wasn’t that we wanted to reinvent it when we didn’t have to. They had permission to do it. We pulled in the ideas and I started. I was working mainly on the Gate room, I think Ivana did the corridors, those round corridors which were great. Originally it was all in one space. The Gate room itself took one stage and when we moved, the corridors were in another. I can’t remember where the corridors were actually. Five was kind of a swing stage and the corridors went up and stayed up, so we might have had them in… We kept moving and going, “We need more space. We need another stage.”

David Read:
A lot of the corridor went around on the outside of the Gate room.

Douglas McLean:
The square corridor did but the round ones were separate piece.

David Read:
The amount of sets that you could pull off just in those, those two, that adjoining hallway and that gate room. You shoot it at a different angle, it’s a gym. You go to the side hallway, it’s either the corridor next to the Stargate or it’s the med bay, or you got the observation room. The amount of pre-planning built into something like this, I would think, would increase exponentially; your ability to get different spaces out of the same space, by hiding stuff, by sleight of hand.

Douglas McLean:
The meeting room and Hammond’s office and there was a bit of corridor up there. Those would double for other things, and I think we probably had a plug that you could put in the window that looked over the Gate room so that you didn’t accidentally go, “Hey, wait a second.” That was a principle that Richard liked and we took it forward into Battlestar in an even more major way, where we had what we called multipurpose rooms. It works when you’re in something like a military facility, a spaceship. It’s like you’re gonna be in this space so the walls are likely to be the same. You can change, reconfigure things a little bit. You lengthen something, you move out a riser, it changes and you believe you’re in the same facility but in a different room. Directors become experts at, “We shoot the hallway this way, we shoot the hallway this way. You run around here, you come out that end. You go over here, you come out the door of this room.” You just believe that the corridors are endless, not 100 feet of them.

David Read:
You count on the human mind making assumptions to pull off a lot of this stuff and it then becomes seamless. You accept the reality which you’re given. When you see this stuff on screen and you let yourself be swept away in a narrative, it’s magic, it’s movie magic.

Douglas McLean:
I always like that. If you can create a convincing world, it doesn’t have to necessarily be a totally accurate world. You don’t have to have everything. If you can convince people that it’s real, that it keeps within its own set of rules. It’s pretty classic; we go into space all the time and we’re not weightless. We hear sounds, we have explosions happen. But it fits with the world that’s created and as long as you remain consistent to the world, you believe it. It’s when you get those anomalies that people go, “Wait a second.”

David Read:
I remember watching a lot of Star Trek with my dad growing up. I would turn to him and be like, “OK, come on. Seriously? X, Y, Z?” He would go, “You’ve gotta buy it.” We’re watching this fiction. You can’t draw the line here. This is a bridge too far. Come on.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly. It worked and it always seemed to do well. Every planet we went to seemed to have an awful lot of fern trees on it. Quite miraculous.

David Read:
That’s what you gotta work with.

Douglas McLean:
You go, “OK, what can we do that gets us out of planet GVRD, the forest, and gets us into something different?” We had things where we went, there used to be sulfur piles on the north shore, big yellow piles. So, that became a planet one time.

David Read:
The crystal planet.

Douglas McLean:
You go in and you shoot it in such a way that, “Well, we’re not seeing the Lions Gate Bridge over there, are we? So, it’s another planet.” You work at that. The stuff worked and I think it worked largely because you bought the narrative. The show really found its balance between being serious and having fun and making fun of itself. I think every show finds that. You do your first season, and it can be a little rocky.

David Read:
You’re finding your voice.

Douglas McLean:
You’re all finding your voice. Your characters are finding their characters; they’re finding their relationships and the crew is finding its relationship. The second season, OK, you’re comfortable with your basic character and narrative and now you start to embellish. Then by Season Three, it’s like, “Oh, this is exactly…” Generally, it just runs and grows, and Stargate ran and grew forever, it seemed.

David Read:
It doesn’t normally grow for 17 seasons.

Douglas McLean:
No.

David Read:
What do you think was the secret sauce?

Douglas McLean:
If I knew that, I would have bottled it and been selling it. It’s a good combination of them. It didn’t go for 17 years of being just Stargate SG-1.

David Read:
No.

Douglas McLean:
It went quite a long time as that and when we left, Bridget took over. I think, in a funny way, I think there’s a kind of magic to some people leaving a show, characters changing and new directors coming in. They’re not totally wed to, “Well, in Season 4 Episode 13, we did this and we said that.” It’s like, “Well, OK. But what can we do that’s new?” Bridget took the show and ran with it. Then they went into it a lot, opened up the Atlantis franchise and then it went into Universe. They seemed to relate them together and found their way to not make it something totally different, still keep the core magic. Again, I think seriousness but not taking yourself too seriously. I think that’s probably what kept it going. It kept continuity through. You had Brad there from the beginning, all the way, and Robert Cooper and John Smith, and most of the construction crew remained. The Davidsons, I think these are the only people…

David Read:
Mark and Robert.

Douglas McLean:
… who were part of a very select group who went from episode 1 to episode 3,908 or whatever it was. John Smith, I think, was there all the way through. John Lenic, I think, was around.

David Read:
John Lenic. He grew up on that show. I think he was a kid when they started.

Douglas McLean:
Yes. John went from being the guy that they pushed down the hallway to the art department to talk to Richard when they had bad news, “You go tell him.” “Why?” “Because you’re the lowest eye on the totem pole.” He went on and became production manager.

David Read:
What were some of the sets that you were most proud of? What’s some of the stuff that you were most proud of pulling off for those first five seasons?

Douglas McLean:
Wow. I can’t even remember some of them.

David Read:
You and Ivana… you guys rotated through episodes, right?

Douglas McLean:
A little bit, although we overlapped and sometimes, we’d both be working on an episode. You wrote me a quick note last night going, “Oh, do you have a list of the episodes that you were art director on?” I went, “Uh, no.” I’m not even sure whether we were credited that way or whether it always came up as production designer, supervising art… because originally it came up production designer, art director and then whether the assistant art director got credit. I don’t remember. When we were credited, I think we were all just credited as art directors for whatever the episode was. I think that just showed up. It wasn’t truly split evenly that way. The art direction credit really, for me, was a testament to Richard and Jon and Brad Wright and John Smith going to bat for us because it came about on “Jolinar’s Memories.”

David Read:
Season Three, mid-season two-parter.

Douglas McLean:
Which is one of the shows that I can say I was proudest of and I had a lot to do with that set. That was one of the ones that was in stage five, I guess, which was our big stage that we got to use. It was always a big set in there and Richard would go, “OK, we don’t wanna tear that down. We wanna make it into whatever we’re gonna do.” I would go in, I’m like, “OK, what can I leave standing?” It was also one of those ones where he said, “Go over and see what we’ve got in stock.” It was what Ivana and I always called dumpster design. It’s like, “What have we got? What have we got?” Because it was gonna be huge. We were going to Hell in a hand basket or not.

David Read:
Hell in an escape pod.

Douglas McLean:
Yes. I went around and started looking at arch units and things, and I’m, “OK, well, OK, I can use that and that and that and we’ll use the bases of this set.” I can’t remember whether there was a big riser at the end or whether that went in for Jolinar, but we used it and hung the big cage above the stage and fire and brimstone.

David Read:
There was a whole pit that you threw people into.

Douglas McLean:
I think the big thing went up because we wanted that feeling that there was depth and there was height. You went off and then you were picked up by another set of corridors that were next to the set, but you didn’t walk directly. Walked out here, walked in there and then long corridors that went into whatever the room of our demon was.

David Read:
Bynarr had a lair.

Douglas McLean:
Bynarr.

David Read:
That’s it. One-eyed Bynarr.

Douglas McLean:
It was the lair, so that was another set. It was great. It was huge. It was epic but it was not a mammoth build like the Stargate build. “OK, you’re starting from scratch. You’re building a lot. It’s huge. It costs a lot of money.” Still, it was a two-parter, so you’ve got the money from two episodes. We’re stealing stuff from other things that we had. Thom and his guys always seemed to work miracles. It would be, “OK, well, we’ll push that off into that episode and steal money from there” and they worked magical things. Otherwise, on an episodic budget, you’re just going, “We can be in a room.”

David Read:
The stuff that you pulled off, the set extensions alone. Every time we turned around, there’s this big space that we’re cutting to. You built that all in. It was all baked into the cake.

Douglas McLean:
A lot of it was in there. Stargate was still in that phase when you built things. There were no volume stages. There were set extensions that you could do in VisFX, but VisFX shots cost you money. Again, there’s savings that you can get there. It’s like, OK, the whoosh from the gate, “Well, you’re gonna shoot it from this angle or you’re gonna shoot it from this angle?” “Can we shoot it from over here?” “Well, if you wanna spend the 40,000 to do…”

David Read:
Yeah, “We didn’t shoot reference for that.”

Douglas McLean:
Definitely… a different one. We built a lot of big stuff on Stargate. We filled stages. When we used the swing stage, it was rarely half the stage. Occasionally it was, but most of the time it was, “Now, we’re going big here.” You’d go out for an episode and, “Well, it’s over to the Davidsons. It’s a tent village, guys. Have a nice week. We’re getting ready for the next one.”

David Read:
Those set decorators, man.

Douglas McLean:
They were miracle workers as well. Everybody was. It was effects, special effects, visual effects, they all pulled rabbits out of their hats and it was a great show to work on because everyone pulled above their weight.

David Read:
I imagine you wouldn’t want to do dumpster diving too often to tear…There would be a situation, I would think, where it would be, “I don’t wanna lose this. “Can we build in front of it?” In Season Five, there was an episode called “The Tomb.” You had the Goa’uld sets which were like this typically, over the ceilings, and you guys put brick in front of it to substitute that set. You didn’t have to destroy anything behind it and it also enclosed the set and made it smaller and more suffocating and claustrophobic.

Douglas McLean:
That was another one that was one of my favorites to do, ’cause that was my episode. It was fabulous. We had quite a long time to do the change to it, we knew it was coming up. It was, “OK, so we wanna be inside a ziggurat. It’s like, “I don’t know that ziggurats have insides.” I think you just go up the outside to the top.

David Read:
This is an alien planet ziggurat.

Douglas McLean:
It’s like, “OK.”

David Read:
We’re gonna stretch this a little bit.

Douglas McLean:
That’s why we wanted to go with that shape and step everything inwards and that is, in fact, the same big space. The big room is exactly where “Jolinar’s Memories” was and exactly where half a dozen other episodes I can’t remember were. So, that room, I think I did some big leaning pieces that went in and then the guys in the model shop did these absolutely fabulous sculptural pieces that went on the walls. It gave you a kind of triangular shape. That set was totally open at the top. You went up 25, 30 feet, but you didn’t feel it. It felt closed.

David Read:
No, it felt closed in.

Douglas McLean:
The hallways closed down and blocked the cameras and so forth. But again, between them, you can go straight up to whatever line’s up there. What was really fun was it was a completely enclosed set. When you came in the doors, you were in a long hallway and that hallway led you around and into the main room. It was fun to work on because it got more and more finished. As it became more and more finished, when you went in, people got quieter and quieter in their work. We weren’t running huge saws; it was sculpting, painting and whatever. Set dec came in and brought in a ton of sand that we filled the floor with, literally a ton, several tons. We had to take some of it out because it was too much. It was a little hard slogging through it. When people walked in, it was magic because you felt like you were somewhere where you had to be a little bit aware of what, “There should be a fire here.”

David Read:
You respond to the space that you’re in. Your nervous system just adjusts.

Douglas McLean:
Yep.

David Read:
Or you’re one of those obnoxious people who don’t. But the end result is magic.

Douglas McLean:
It was dark in there by nature of the set…closed it down so that light filtered only from the top. Plus the work lights. That was another one that, if I had to say, “Oh, I’m really proud of this set,” I’d be like “Oh, that was a good one.” Stargate just kept getting better. You kept finding more interesting things to do and it was great. We were there for five seasons. We went on to a few other shows and then into Battlestar. Someone once asked what my favorite episode of Battlestar was, and I go, “Oh, the next one.” It was always, “This is gonna get better.” I think Stargate was the same thing. It got better and better as it went on. Everyone got better at their jobs; they were more comfortable. It kept going.

David Read:
I loved Pegasus. I could talk to you forever about it, but I can’t.

Douglas McLean:
You can’t, that’s another show.

David Read:
I’m curious if this was your episode as well. One of the sets in Season Five that blew me away was “Red Sky,” the Norse planet with all the houses close together.

Douglas McLean:
I think that was Ivana.

David Read:
OK. I’ll go back and talk with her.

Douglas McLean:
I can’t remember because we had a couple of villages, but they were staged. There was a medieval one.

David Read:
That was Season Three, that’s right.

Douglas McLean:
That was me.

David Read:
“Demons.” What was that like?

Douglas McLean:
It was great fun to do because the only thing that really bugged me about it was, I don’t remember which stage it was in. It was probably over at Norco. There were only like 20 feet to the grid or something, so I was like, “Ah.” You built this long, long set and it’s like, “Yeah, keep the camera…”

David Read:
“Keep the camera low.”

Douglas McLean:
“… tilted down.”

David Read:
Don’t wanna insert a sky.

Douglas McLean:
That was a great one.

David Read:
In a situation like that, how much reference are you doing? How many books are you opening up to look at concepts? It’s obviously 2,000 years or 1,000 years, in this case, since. You can take it in a direction, but how much are you drawn to source material to put forward?

Douglas McLean:
You definitely do and I’m glad you said books because we had to use books then. Someone had to go to the library and go, “Get us everything you can on Norse.” Or, “Get us everything you can on Chinese.”

David Read:
Medieval Christian.

Douglas McLean:
It would be quite researched. Then you went with, “OK, here’s what we’re gonna have to do.” I can’t remember actually, for the Norse one, whether they had done the Norse movie here. I can’t remember what it was called.

David Read:
There’s so many; Vikings the series.

Douglas McLean:
We might have gotten some props and weapons and things from them which would help. The village would have been Ivana ’cause I don’t think that was me. I did the medieval one, then I did the Asian one that was in the same space with the half-moon gate.

David Read:
OK. That was from “Maternal Instinct.”

Douglas McLean:
Yes. I think it was.

David Read:
That was also a location that was melded with a set as well, with the star on the floor with Daniel and the monk sitting in between. How beautiful.

Douglas McLean:
It was a fun one to do and again, that was in the same space, so you go, “Wait a second?” It was nice because that’s where you’re building on top of. Quite often it would be a little bit of sleight of hand in the sense of production would be going, “OK, we have to reuse this set.” Thom Wells would be going, “Yeah, whatever. Just do what you want here.” “We’re reusing those platforms in here.” He would go, “Yeah, sure we are. Yep, we are.” He’d rebuild them new because it’s gonna be faster and cheaper for me to tear this out and rebuild that platform new than to make the 900 adjustments that you want made.

David Read:
It’s just not worth it.

Douglas McLean:
“Just tell them we’re using it and we’ll rebuild it.” A lot of times it would be we’d clad over; you’d change the facades. Ultimately, all sets are just plywood with two-by-fours or one-by-threes behind them and then some magic done on the front. You can change the magic on the front, not change the shape completely, and people will go, “Yeah, we’re in a different world.” Whether you run up stone stairs, or wooden stairs, or metal stairs, you don’t really go, “That’s a four-foot platform.” You’re going up this stone thing to a balcony. How you shoot it and what happens… There’s a lot of reuses; there’s a lot of hiding stuff and then sometimes it comes back and you never know. Unfortunately, when people go, “Oh, you’re doing a series, you can do all this pre-planning.” Yeah, to a certain extent. We didn’t know that in Season Eight we would pull back and go into this room that we swore we’d never go back into again. “You can tear it down.” “OK, good, we’re gonna tear it down ’cause we need the space. We need to do another set.”

David Read:
There were instances where, in Season Five I can remember, they returned to a planet from Season One but there was a match shot that was the same, they had to adjust a few things with the undergrowth and they painted the sky different because it was an opportunity to see it in a different light, but everything else was gone. What was your bigger enemy Doug, time or money?

Douglas McLean:
Thom Wells used to have a Venn diagram thing up in his office that, fast, cheap, or good? You can take two. You can have it fast and cheap; it probably won’t be that good. You can have fast and good and it won’t be cheap, it’s probably not gonna be cheap. Again, it’s working with production. Richard would go down to the other end of the building and talk with Brad and go, “Just give me 10 words to tell me what you’re gonna do two episodes from now…”

David Read:
What a genius. To be able to budget pretty well that way.

Douglas McLean:
“…and we’ll start working on it.” We can either back the set into the writing, or you can back the writing into the set. They were not totally precious about, “I wrote that he comes in a door on the left.” It’s like, “Well, your set has a door on the right.”

David Read:
How willing are you to make this work?

Douglas McLean:
There, we’re done. There was not any fighting that way. They would come, Richard would take stuff and go, “Here’s where we’re going. It’s not the finished thing but here’s the look and rough layout.” The writers were still writing, so it would be, “OK, well, we can adjust that,” or, “Oh, can you adjust this?” “Well, we haven’t built it yet, so yes.”

David Read:
It’s remarkable how, given those constraints, how internally consistent the show is when we, as fans, look back and watch it, because that’s a lot of balls in the air. To make sure that they’re all gonna line up and fit in the right pieces, in the right way, at the right time.

Douglas McLean:
It’s always retrofitting into things. It’s like, in whatever episode we established “this is the look of the Goa’uld,” for example, which came out of the original, that’s their look. With Thor, we established his spaceship, the small one, just the one we first meet him in. Then it’s like, “OK, now we wanna do a huge thing with all of them,” and it’s like, “Oh, OK.” And we don’t have a lot of money. Did I mention we don’t have a lot of money?

David Read:
“We wanna see the whole planet surface. Can you pull that off?” “Uh.”

Douglas McLean:
It was a standing set, I remember. I think you remember episodes far better than I do.

David Read:
He first appears in a Season Three episode that has just one room of the Asgard set. By the end of the season, that room has expanded into multiple spaces. You have to build out from what you’ve established.

Douglas McLean:
That room, which was the kind of cockpit of his spaceship that he was sitting in, that was fun. I got to design that. That was a lot of fun. We had that piece that was at the front of the ship from something else.

David Read:
The Plexi. It’s just a window.

Douglas McLean:
OK, start there. I was starting to get into modeling, 3D modeling, learning the start of it. We didn’t use it all that much and we didn’t do full design with CAD drawings being part of it. If anything, I eventually got to the point where I could model an entire set and then print out some quick elevation things from it that I would then put under a piece of trace paper. I would redraw it, do my dimensions and get the sense of the look of it through that. With Thor’s spaceship, I modeled that completely and I think I might have done some of that hybrid drafting to get them the sizes. Then you just sort of forgot about it: “Hey, Thor is good.” I think it was in “Nemesis” where suddenly we had to have a whole ship. We had a ship; we had a room and hallways. It might not have even had the hallways; it might have just had the room. It was a white room with all the DNA specimens.

David Read:
The Gadmeer terraforming ship, the Asgard craft, the Bilskirnir, became that in Season Four. That was absolutely wild ’cause it was all white and it’s the same set. You just add a few bells and whistles here. The DNA samples and everything and the bubbles.

Douglas McLean:
I don’t remember which came first. Which came first, that one or Thor’s?

David Read:
That was later on in Season Four. That was the episode… Just let me pull it up. I was able to pull these up in my brain just a few months ago and now my brain is just bleh. That was “Scorched Earth.” That’s aboard the terraforming ship.

Douglas McLean:
So, that had been Thor’s ship, I guess. We just painted it white, glossy white. I can’t remember what Thor’s ship came out of for “Nemesis.” That may have been a new build. That was probably Ivana.

David Read:
That ship was designed for scale for Thor’s height. All the controls were lower to the ground; the doorways could just fit a human because the Asgard were shorter than us. You had to think of it in that way.

Douglas McLean:
That may have been Ivana taking the basic idea of, “Well, what did we have for that little cockpit? What were the colors?” It was black and red and shiny metal. Those nice swooping curves that were in that set just scream Ivana Vasak to me. That doesn’t sound like Doug McLean.

David Read:
She does more organic shapes then? That’s kind of her thing.

Douglas McLean:
Ivana’s training is as an architect, mine’s as a theater designer. There’s a difference. To me, the ideal designer would be someone who trained as an architect and went into the theater to do their apprenticeship and then came out and did film and television. Or the reverse. You could do theater but then you should go and train as an architect and then come out and do it. They’re different, they train different parts of you. Theater is much more make do with what you’ve got. What can you do for next to nothing? When you’re a designer in the theater sector, when you’re starting out, you’re also the set painter, the set decorator, the props man, you’re doing all of it. It’s like, “OK, so you’ve designed this. Guess who has to paint it now?” You kind have learned enough about all of those crafts that when you are designing or art directing, you kind of know what you’re putting people through. There’s not that sort of, “Just do this.” You know what the word “just” means. When you say to me, “Just do,” it’s like, “no, there’s no just.” “Just give me a quick sketch of this.” No, there’s no just. It takes time. You have to think. You have to know, even to do that fast sketch, you have to know where it’s going.

David Read:
There was also some security there, I would imagine, because you weren’t just doing one season. You guys had four seasons out of the gate and then quickly you had five. Did that assist in terms of amortization of assets that you were creating?

Douglas McLean:
I think so, for sure. Although, in many ways, if you’re doing something that you know is gonna pay off, like the standing set of the gate, OK, you can spend whatever, half a million dollars or close to a million. I don’t know what we paid for it. It was big old, it’s gonna come back every episode. You wanna build a second gate ’cause you need to go to other planets. That becomes something. A lot of the sets, you had to gamble: OK, if we build hallways that go into a room, we’re gonna have hallways going into a room somewhere. We’ll revamp them. Whether they get finished with, like the hallways from, I think they were in Thor’s ship, but they were certainly in the “Nemesis” episode. Then they come back in…

David Read:
“Small Victories.”

Douglas McLean:
When they come in for the big meeting. They had some big summit. I think that’s the host conference center.

David Read:
In Season Five there’s a Goa’uld summit.

Douglas McLean:
Yes.

David Read:
That’s a two-parter. That was an amazing set with the space station.

Douglas McLean:
That set is the same set that was used for the “Nemesis” episode. It was the same physical space. I said, “OK, we have to pull this out, we have to change this, that room. Those nice swoopy things can’t be there anymore.” They’ve become too identified so you do something different with a hallway. There’s a real amortization, which is things like the standing sets and then there’s an amortization where you go, “OK, we won’t gut this set completely.” “We’ll build on top of it.” The $150,000 that you spent on that set is now getting $80,000 worth of stuff built on top of it because you didn’t have to build the base. Or it gets 60,000 built on top of it and then you change this room enough, but you’ve got 50,000, so it works out. I’m just pulling movies out at random. I don’t remember what the episodes were. That was Thom Wells and Richard, really. Bridget went into a room and came out and came back over to my desk and went, “This drawing’s not going anywhere. It’s cutting off here. Build a wall here.” “OK, whatever. You asked me to go big; I did. Now it’s…” In episodic TV you have to go big. That was always Richard’s thing, go big or go home.

David Read:
If you’re not gonna do it right, why bother?

Douglas McLean:
I went big. Ultimately, I think you are better off to go, “OK, we would like 90% of 50% rather than 50% of 90%.”

David Read:
You’re gonna get more mileage out of it.

Douglas McLean:
Ask for this big thing and it’s epic and wonderful and then go, “OK, it can only be this big though.” It’s like, “well, OK.” The thinking and the detailing and the idea that went into that are still in that. I think you get more by getting that, the gist of what you wanted in the design and then go, “OK, so we make it a bit smaller. We cut down on this. We don’t go into three rooms. We make this room do twice with a redress. You guys have to leave the stage and shoot something else.”

David Read:
Go elsewhere.

Douglas McLean:
That’s a big part of it, your ADs. You always say it’s a team; it is. It’s like if anyone wants to get too primadonnaish, you’re screwed somewhere in there. It’s like, “OK, you can have this, but now pull out your wallet, now it has to be done in two days.” You wouldn’t go out for four days. If you went out for four days, you can have it for this. If you want it two days from now, we’re working round the clock and that costs you money.

David Read:
You had a couple of things going for you and I think that you can tell me how much this contributed to success. You had a rotating series of directors whom you all knew kind of their way of shooting, how they would want things. You also had them, because they were rotating, you also had them around regularly. There’s no reason for you to create a full space when you know that they’re only going to shoot in a fraction of that space. When you turn the camera this way on the space, the space looks like it’s going the other direction. Was having the directors around cost-effective?

Douglas McLean:
I think so, on many levels, I’m sure. For production, if you’re hiring someone on an episode and then they’re getting to edit and cut that episode the following week and a half, then they’ve got a short break or whatever and then they’re back, it’s like, OK, they’re around there. You’re not flying them back and forth. You just get people who get the show and who have worked on it enough to know, “I can ask for this and I can get it.” Or, “I can ask for this and I’m gonna be told not a chance in hell.”

David Read:
Go big or go home.

Douglas McLean:
Most definitely, and you just get a shorthand with people. I worked with Richard on God knows how many shows. Actually, not that many shows, probably only three or four, but they lasted. I’d look at my resume and go, “Here, I’ve been working for 15 years with four people. Right, OK.”

David Read:
Something’s working.

Douglas McLean:
It is and I always felt that was good. It also means that he can walk into my office and go, “Here’s the script, here’s kind of what I’m thinking. I looked at this picture and I liked it.” “OK, go away.”

David Read:
“Let me get to work now.”

Douglas McLean:
It’s like, “OK, I know what you said you wanted, but this is really what you want!”

David Read:
You have a shorthand with people.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly. I was never afraid with Richard on any of the shows of going, “Do you really want that?” It was like, “You’re really willing to cut this down to this? You’re sure about that?” He’s had discussions with directors and producers that I know nothing about. It was like, “You want this?” “I don’t think it’s right. When I read the script, I would not go there, but if you guys have all discussed this and you’re going there, I’ll take you there.” It’s like, “Yes.” “OK.” Then it’s like “I’m 100% behind you.” Richard has done that with the producers too. He has his very famous story of the flat, of, “You just want a flat?” “Yep, we just want a flat.” “You’re sure you don’t want this?” “No, we’re gonna put that all in post.” “You just want a flat?” “Yep.” You get there on the day and they’re phoning him up and they’re like, “It’s just a flat here.” “Yeah, that’s the flat you wanted.” “But I can’t…” “No you can’t, or you can, but that’s a visual effect shot now.”

David Read:
This is why we confirm this stuff.

Douglas McLean:
The more you work with people, the more he would go into their office and go, “You sure you just want two flats looking that way?” “OK, maybe you could give us a third one. Good idea.”

David Read:
“Let’s figure this out now so that we don’t have to say, ‘Well, you’re stuck with this later.'” No one wants to be in that situation. You wanna please people, you wanna make them happy.

Douglas McLean:
Absolutely. We want people coming to the set and going, “Great.” Even if at their initial talk about the show, they’re going, “We’re only gonna shoot this way.” It’s like, “No, you’re not.”

David Read:
Let’s be real here.

Douglas McLean:
How about if we give you this way as your heroes and we give you a little bit here so that you can sneak here? Then if you need to do a full reverse, then you’re in a visual effect shot. No one wants a visual effect shot because you’ve gone partly into profile. It’s like, “We can spend $10,000 building this, or you can spend $10,000 every time you look at that shot.” It’s like “Ooh, no, we don’t wanna do that.”

David Read:
You gotta make it work.

Douglas McLean:
We had a really good relationship with the visual effects people too.

David Read:
You would want them to be on your side to make it as seamless as possible.

Douglas McLean:
They were in-house, they were on the lot. They would come over and they would go, “Here’s the matte painting we’re doing. Here’s a set piece, “OK, let’s build an element just like that into the matte.”

David Read:
We’re talking with Kent Matheson on Friday.

Douglas McLean:
Good. He’s awesome.

David Read:
I’m really looking forward to it. Some of his stuff is so iconic SG-1. When you would be at your drafting board, you talked about go big or go home. How often were you finding yourself censoring your ideas about saying, “I would love to do this, but given this budget, it’s not gonna happen.” Or would you say, “OK, this is my vision for this, and we can cut it down from here.” How would that work itself out?

Douglas McLean:
My censoring would be, “Goddamn it, why isn’t the stage 20 feet wider?” It would be, “OK, it has to be this wide.” You’re limited to certain things. Richard would have a pretty good idea of, “No, I don’t need 200 feet of set. We’re building three things, so all three of them are gonna have to fit into this space.” After that, I have a pretty good idea of what something’s gonna cost or how difficult it’s gonna be. I would go as far as I thought I could go. Thom Wells was always around while we were building, and he would always be over my shoulder. His favorite saying to me was, “Doug, you’re killing me.” It would be like, “Oh come on Thom, it’s only this and this and this.” Gary York, who was one of his foremen, would be dropping by all the time. They would sometimes be like, “Can you do this or can you do that,” and simplify something.

David Read:
One of the things that I thought was mesmerizing, that I believed my eye was seeing for years, there’s an episode called “Window of Opportunity” and it’s a planet with ruins and these pillars with holes in them that can shoot beams through the Stargate. For the wide shot, it’s this planet with this orange and red landscape with tornadoes in the background, this highly atmospheric stuff going on. For these tighter shots, what I’m thinking was green screen, is actually this fuzzy material that they projected orange lighting onto. I forget what the material is called. Bridget told me the name of it and I’ve forgotten what it is. For these medium and tighter shots, I, as a viewer for years, was thinking it’s a visual effect of the horizon and it’s not. It’s a special material that’s hidden behind the stone pillars. Pulling this set off, it was an amazing set.

Douglas McLean:
We went on to Once Upon a Time after Battlestar. That was the first time I felt like virtual sets were starting to really work.

David Read:
They started looking real enough. By the end of that show the virtual sets look completely different than the beginning. They were approaching that level of fidelity, and the virtual sets were always used in the fantasy side of stuff too. You had this this texture to it that made sense to the world.

Douglas McLean:
I like to take some of the credit for that. I came on about halfway through Season One. Michael Joy was the production designer and they were a classic art department. They had some people doing CAD work ’cause CAD had started to finally make its way in. They would sometimes model the sets and then send that off to Zoic. Zoic would get us sort of the rough 3D model and a sketch or a map or a painting to sort of say, “This is what we’re looking at.” Michael wanted to get more control back into the art department because, on an episodic, once the train’s left the station, you got no control. It goes over there and you’ve got nothing. Stuff comes back and the next time you see a virtual set, it’s in the cut. Michael was feeling he wasn’t getting as much on the Zoic end of things. No fault to them; they’re churning it, they are pushing the envelope as they’re going. Michael wanted to get a bit more control back. I came on and we started doing essentially the same thing, sending them initial models that Paolo Venturi had done paint-overs on. As we got into Season Two and Three, I started rendering more because it became available. We’re talking about PCs and Macs and that’s all you got. We don’t have render farms. They do at Zoic, but they’re also producing eight shows. They have a dedicated person but not a dedicated complete team necessarily. We pushed further and did more finished work to send them, they had to spend less time just getting basic textures on things. They got to finesse more and it got better and better and better.

David Read:
Ah, OK. Because the amount of what they could allocate their time on shifted?

Douglas McLean:
Sure. They didn’t have to hear, “You’ve got a rough model, and they would have to rebuild and re-texture.” They didn’t have to guess. They didn’t have to think, “Oh, this is this size,” or, “This is kind of this thing.” It was, “Here’s what we’d like. Now you make it work for your pipeline.” I wasn’t working in Maya at the time. I was working Form-Z. They run all their stuff through Maya and probably V-Ray and all of that. It was a fabulous experience for me. I got to do stuff that I had been dreaming of doing since Stargate. Actually, since Kids in the Hall I’d been dreaming of doing.

David Read:
Way back.

Douglas McLean:
But Stargate was where I got a chance to dabble. Then Battlestar, a bit more. I was doing a lot purer art directing then so I didn’t get to play much. Then I got to do it for six years in a row, so I got to push myself. The industry pushed itself. Zoic pushed a little bit because we worked in green screen. They had their Zeus camera system so I would get them the initial model even with rough texturing that they could throw into the Zeus. When they were shooting the director went, “Oh, there’s a wall there. Oh, OK.” “Oh, that’s what that’s gonna look like?” “No, it’s gonna look way better than that, trust me.” By the time we’d finished there, there were starting to be LED screens, and the volume stage came a bit later. Once could’ve been spectacularly done with that kind of stuff.

David Read:
We’ve gotten to the point where you can’t tell the difference if it’s lit right.

Douglas McLean:
No.

David Read:
If it’s lit wrong, it’s like, OK, my brain is saying, “Something’s wrong.” With Unreal 5 and all this stuff now, man, oh, man, you have the right people looking at it and you can’t lose.

Douglas McLean:
Ultimately it always boils down to the people. AI is kind of rearing its head and everyone’s going, “Oh, we can just make this…” I’ve played with AI, I get it. It does some things wonderfully, it does other things terribly and ultimately, you still have to have somebody with the eye going “No. That’s terrible.”

David Read:
We’re in the phase of it where it’s like there’s some stuff over here that’s gonna be just crap. It’s like when synthesizers started coming out with music, it’s like, “Whoa. They’ve just taken it overboard in this way.” It’s finding the balance and using the tool. I don’t wanna say appropriately because what’s appropriate? But in a way that works for what it is that you’re doing.

Douglas McLean:
It’s always happening with any technology. I was alive when the Mac computer first came out. Actually, using computers, I can’t tell you the horrible resumes I got from people who just bought a Mac and decided they could play with fonts. I mean, really? Come on.

David Read:
Pick one.

Douglas McLean:
Pick one.

David Read:
And pick a good one.

Douglas McLean:
And use it well. I can do graphics in that I can, if forced to, whip up a sign or whatever. But I know what a graphic artist does and I don’t do it. AI can whip up something for you as an illustration. It’s a good starting place and I’m surprised sometimes at how good it is at some things. But a good illustrator… Of late, I keep being credited as illustrator on things. I go, “No, no. I’m not an illustrator.” Ken Rabehl was an illustrator. He could take a pen, a pencil, a brush, or whatever and do you a fabulous drawing. Brentan Harron is a fabulous illustrator. James Robbins, fabulous illustrator.

David Read:
James is fabulous.

Douglas McLean:
I came back for a couple of guest appearances on Stargate when it got into Universe, when James was directing and designing. I did a couple of cockpits with him. You get a lot of stuff from James, but he also lets you run away with it and go and have fun.

David Read:
He trusts you. You’re brought in because of your particular set of skills.

Douglas McLean:
We had a good time. That’s what I would consider an illustrator. Do you know Ray Lai? He works out of Vancouver, he is an illustrator and does a lot of prop stuff and has done a lot of big movies. His website is, I can’t remember what he calls it. Image Manufacturing. I’m going, “OK, I can do that.” I can photo bash. I can work with renderings. I can collude stuff together and give you some really interesting things to see and that people will look at and go, “Oh, that’s a great illustration.” I’m going, “No. To me, if I’d done it by hand it would be a great illustration.” I like his choice of words, of Image Manufacturing.

David Read:
You guys are creating worlds on a weekly basis. It’s extraordinary stuff.

Douglas McLean:
In fact, I think you could almost think of an art department, or even an entire movie film crew, as the human form of artificial intelligence. You take a written input, it’s quite a long prompt, it’s 60 or 70 pages of prompt. They take that and they turn it into an image. That’s what AI is trying to do and it does it very well.

David Read:
To a point.

Douglas McLean:
When you have a hundred people doing it, you get something really interesting. You need something to keep those 100 people together, so you have a production designer, you have a DOP, you have a director, you have an art director. The art director’s trying to keep those 10 people in the art department online and the production designer’s trying to keep a whole bunch of others online all the way down. I think, basically, it’s human artificial intelligence because that final product is not one person’s work. If I can take it back to something I started earlier. We were credited as art directors on “Jolinar’s Memories.” I said, “That was a huge credit to Richard, Brad and John Smith.” They had put that show up for a Gemini Award which we eventually won. When the nomination came back, it only had Richard, Bridget and the Davidsons. I went, “Well, that kinda hurts guys.” Yes, they had a lot to do with it, but so did I, so did Ivana, so did Brent. What happened was they approached the Geminis and they said, “We wanna have these people on it.” They said, “No, we will only have people on who are art directors or production designers or the key decorators.” So, Richard went, “OK. These are three art directors. There’s a supervising art director and there’s a production designer and there’s the two decorators, the two key decorators.” They were willing to go along with that and Jon and Brad went, “OK. We will.” That’s where we got credited and that’s when it started. I think it probably was a fair credit in that we were credited as assistant art directors until then. There wasn’t a set designer and illustrator at the time. We all functioned, I think you can take that, as the whole team. That set looked like it did because of these people. Really, you should go with the construction guys. It’s “OK, that fit to that.” I think what you get out of 200 people creating an image, which is what goes on the screen, is better than what you can get from looking at two billion images and synthesizing just from those. I once held a conversation with ChatGPT where I said, “I think I’m an AI.” It answered back and said, “Oh, you’re using that metaphorically.” I said, “Well, I take text prompts and turn them into images. That’s an AI, isn’t it?” It said, “OK. Well, you’re using it metaphorically or figuratively,” or whatever. Then I asked it, “What’s the difference between what an AI is doing, creating these images from text prompt, and me?” It delineated it beautifully. I keep it because it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen. “The human being brings emotional response and personal experiences.” AI is sensing some of that but it’s still only matching, “Oh, that’s a sad image.” “This is an image of a tree. This is an image of a dog. I want a sad dog underneath a tree, It can get those things together. It’s not making those kinds of leaps that we do. I think what you get with one person doing it is one thing. When you get ten people doing it, or five or whatever in an art department, that’s the next step of it. When you take that whole crew and it’s 100 and some odd people, that’s the final image that goes up there, plus editors and all of that, you get that distilled intelligence. Maybe distilled intelligence is a better way than artificial intelligence.

David Read:
Well, you’re all working toward a goal. You’re all working toward a specific vision.

Douglas McLean:
That really makes it magic when it works and it does. AI is doing the same things. When it works, you’re kinda going, “Wow. That’s done a better job with that than I could but it missed here.” When it went wrong, it’s like, “No. I shouldn’t have six fingers holding the goblet.” Although it seems to have corrected that now.

David Read:
It’s much better now. They haven’t pushed us out just yet, Douglas.

Douglas McLean:
No, they haven’t.

David Read:
They still need us.

Douglas McLean:
I don’t think they will.

David Read:
I hope that’s true.

Douglas McLean:
When you look at the interesting use of it, the Peter Jackson thing of the Beatles recently where they used AI to correct. Basically, to pull the piano out of something and then direct John’s voice and then put new piano in behind it. You go, “OK, that’s a good use of AI.” Or when you want a stunt that’s so stupidly dangerous no one should be doing it.

David Read:
I think it also comes down to the intent of the user and how fastidious they’re either willing to be or have time to be. I fear that a lot of folks are gonna be “OK, that’s good enough.” It comes down to the standard of what you’re willing to accept too.

Douglas McLean:
I don’t mind seeing the use of AI in the hands of brilliant special effects producers and coordinators. I don’t mind seeing it in the hands of good, talented art department people. It worries me when, I don’t mean to be disparaging of producers or production managers or writers, but it’s like, you have your area of expertise. It really shouldn’t be you who’s gonna decide whether the AI version of this is good enough. “I’ll just go with that and not hire a production designer.” Any good producer worth their salt is not gonna do that. It’s gonna be the bottom tier of people who will just go, “this is good enough for what I need.” If that’s all you need, that’s great, but don’t think you’re making the next Dune.

David Read:
You may make the next horror film, whatever it is, that they film it for a million dollars and it turns out $300 million. Paranormal Activity Nine or whatever. Those things will exist but I don’t think that they will. I think that they will find their place along with everything else.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly and they exist now. There are pictures that are being made by people that, “We’re not gonna work, we’re gonna work smarter.” Yeah, no, you’re not. Trust me, you’re gonna learn this huge vision that you’re having. You’re not getting it for free. You’re gonna find a way to pay. Again, good, fast, or cheap, pick one.

David Read:
That’s it. If you bypass certain steps, there are going to be repercussions.

Douglas McLean:
Every technology does it. Computers were gonna destroy us. Television was gonna destroy the radio. Streaming was gonna destroy everything. It did, it certainly disrupted it and changed it.

David Read:
Yes, that’s true. There’s a disruption with every step along the way and then we find our way.

Douglas McLean:
Oddly enough, the studios are still managing to make money. There’s still an industry. It changes. I wouldn’t wanna be starting in it right now, I wouldn’t make it. Technology disrupts. First time you saw a Steadicam, it was like, “Oh, wow.” When you saw 9,000 Steadicam shots it was strange. Really? We don’t need every shot in this movie to be Steadicam. We did a fabulous one at the beginning of Battlestar Galactica.

David Read:
Oh yeah, with walking through the ship. Make a hole.

Douglas McLean:
That went through the entire set. It was a continuous shot, took us all day to shoot it, but it’s like, OK, that was magic. Now, if you kept repeating that it’d go, “Hello, we’ve been here. Boring.” You still use Steadicam when you want it, when you need that ability. Sometimes it betrays itself and the shot is like, “OK, he came down off a crane, he walked with the actor, he got on top of a car. That’s not really furthering the narrative.”

David Read:
It’s interesting you bring up Battlestar ’cause the Steadicam was not what Battlestar was known for. Battlestar was known for the Handycam, the zooms. There was one time that you guys, in my opinion, took it too far. I think that it was a style choice. The nuke goes off at the end of Season Two, destroys the Cloud 9 and a few of the other spaceships around it and the camera gets hit as well. That was like, “OK, come on. The camera’s not there. There isn’t actually a guy in a suit out there filming it.” It’s to give that texture but in that instance it’s hard to deny that a camera isn’t out there filming the explosion because the camera gets damaged as a result of the explosion. To this day, I’ve always been bothered by that shot. Who decided to do that?

Douglas McLean:
That’s a good point. I don’t know. I don’t remember or how it came about but those decisions get made and then they’re preserved forever and people come along and go, “Hey.”

David Read:
20 years later.

Douglas McLean:
The other thing that’s amazing about any episodic TV is, we didn’t know at the beginning that we were gonna be at the end. It’s sort of like people go, “Well, why did you make this choice in Season Five?” It’s like, “Well, we made that choice in Season Five ’cause we were stuck with it from Season One.” Or, “Why didn’t you do this?” It’s like, “Because we didn’t know we were gonna do that then.”

David Read:
Yeah, because the thing was blue and we needed blue. There’s a reason for all of it that goes all the way down if people are competent to know what they’re doing. Last question for you. Are you concerned about the industry disruption that we’re having right now with so many people out of work, with the contraction of the industry? Do you think that this may be a big one? What do you think about the future?

Douglas McLean:
Mine is fairly set ’cause I’m pretty much done. We still do occasional work. I just finished doing some stuff with Bridget actually. It would be tough going into the business now. It’s especially tough because we were in an absolute gold rush a few years ago.

David Read:
Vancouver exploded.

Douglas McLean:
We got tons. I think everywhere exploded because of streaming. Streaming content, new, everyone going, “Oh, we need to be a studio or we’re gonna die once the vault runs dry. We need to start releasing things to compete with Amazon, with Apple, with this, with that.” The studios who had sold their vaults to Netflix, who had not rented them to Netflix, were reaching the end of their agreements and going, “Those guys made…”

David Read:
How much money?

Douglas McLean:
“on the 60 million they gave us. Damn. OK, that’s ending.” Now, Paramount+ and Disney+, all of the studios are getting in. Everyone was suddenly doing new stuff and tons of it. A lot of people came into the business and then COVID hit. That sort of threw everybody. We came out of COVID and production started back up, but not for you. It wasn’t just like, “let’s just go nuts,” because they knew then they were going to do negotiations and then AI was hitting. Then negotiations really became tough, there’s a lotta money at stake, it’s really not about anything but money. It’s like you wanna preserve your artistic persona because you don’t want them using it for free. It’s, “OK, I get that. I don’t want them taking all of my old things,” which they all own anyways. I have nothing, I have no ground.

David Read:
People wanna be treated fairly. They don’t wanna be taken out back and turned, having these things that they’ve created and spent their energy on turned to something else.

Douglas McLean:
Those negotiations were tough. They came out of that but there’s also been lots of readjustment in the industry, studio mergers, new heads of this, new streaming services going, “OK, well, we now have to show a profit.” “Oh, OK.” This gets trimmed down, that gets trimmed back. It’s big. Production is up here. I remember just after COVID, you’d look at the production schedule and there’d be three things shooting. Now, there’s 15 or whatever, or 16, but there’s not 35. I don’t think there will be for a while, if ever. It was a lot of back-to-back things. If it were just this adjustment due to the strike and the networks and everything coalescing and changing and the model of everything changing, it would still be a big adjustment, but it came after a year and a half of nothing. So, people are really hurting.

David Read:
I’m concerned that things are changing faster, especially with our technology, our technology alone. Faster than our ape brains can keep up, that we’re entering a spiral that’s spinning faster and faster and is becoming more and more unpredictable. You got an industry now where people can’t make a living wage. I read an article; it’s becoming a gig economy.

Douglas McLean:
Yes.

David Read:
That’s no good. It’s not gonna be boring.

Douglas McLean:
Yes, it certainly will not be. It’s gonna be a roller coaster ride. I think ultimately, talent rises to the top. People who are really good are gonna get more. I guess the A crowd will always have it, and B, I consider myself a B, a good B+ player. I’m not in the exalted realms of some of the people I’ve worked with. Those people will probably always get work. If you’re in this B-minus, C range where suddenly you could get work that was even better than the work you should be doing, now that hurts. That’s where you start cutting.

David Read:
Yeah, AI is starting to play in your territory.

Douglas McLean:
Heavily, and not just AI. In many ways, we’re our own worst enemies. We adopt technologies that let us do things better and faster so now they’re expecting better and faster. A simple example is the art department on IATSE, on its own, basically started to create a storage for ground plans of locations. People were going back to the same ones and measuring them ten times but now what you’re seeing is every show comes on and they go, “Has anyone been to this location?” and they get the plans for it. All they need them for really is the tech pack because if they’re using them to build from, they’re insane.

David Read:
Explain. Tech pack.

Douglas McLean:
The tech pack, when you go out for a tech survey, there’s a package that the art department puts together. It has all of the plans and some of the drawings, illustrations, so that when we’re standing on location and the production designer isn’t going, “Over here, over there.”

David Read:
This is stuff that’s gonna be installed in this place.

Douglas McLean:
It’s sort of, “Here’s the plan.” “We’re shooting in this direction.” “We’re gonna build here and here. It’s on your plan.” There’s an illustration of what it was gonna be. If it’s a location where you’re not doing much other than dressing, someone else’s measurements of the walls are probably fine. If you’re gonna build from it, I would go down and measure it myself or send someone. The construction coordinator, if he’s smart, would send his own guy down to measure. When we were working with Thom, I would go and measure and then I’d do a drawing and then he would give the drawing to Gary and go, “Gary, go and check these measurements.” When you build it 13 3/4 inches, it’d better be 13, 3/4.

David Read:
I’m not gonna rely on a database.

Douglas McLean:
No. God knows how outdated it is and who did it, the talent of the person who did it. What has happened as a result is fewer people are getting hired ’cause you don’t need to send someone to measure a location if you can just grab the plans. It works faster. It worked great because you’re always in a rush but in a way, you’re cutting your own throats. You can now do with a four-person art department, which maybe you should have had five, really. You’re gonna hire your senior people that you know. Someone hires me ’cause they know me. They’ve worked with me. They know what I do. They know my good points; they know my bad points. So, the devil you know. They’re fine with that. But if you just needed someone to go and measure locations, that’s when you are just coming into the union. Nobody knows you. You may be way more qualified than the guy who’s above you, but nobody knows that.

David Read:
They haven’t figured it out yet.

Douglas McLean:
You get that job. You go, “OK, fine. I’ll go measure your damn locations.” You do it fast and efficiently and you come back and the drawings are good and the people go, “Hmm, geez, yeah, he’s good. Yeah, let’s hire him on our next show.” Those are the ones that disappear and it gets harder to get in. There are now more people in the union, there’s now more people out of work. It’s tough and it’s gonna be tough for a while. I don’t think there’s any way around that. I am very thankful I’m not 45 because I feel like, “Oh my god, now I have to pay a mortgage and I have to put kids through school and feed the family.” It’s like, “OK.” We’re as retired as we’re gonna be. If people come along and Bridget phones me and goes, “I need someone for three weeks or four weeks doing this,” and I go, “Can I work at home?” “Yes.” “Can I work three days a week?” “Yes, OK, perfect.” I can’t do an hour commute and 12-hour day six days a week. It’s like, dude, forget it. That’s a young person’s game and they should do it.

David Read:
Absolutely. This is their opportunity to shine.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly.

David Read:
Now more than ever.

Douglas McLean:
If you can cope with all my demands and you’re happy, I’m happy to do it ’cause it’s good people. I like the people I work with. As you do more and more work and work with more and more people, you wanna work with fewer and fewer of them.

David Read:
You figured it out.

Douglas McLean:
If George Lucas calls, I’ll go and make the coffee and I will do the 60-hour weeks, yes. But apart from that, no.

David Read:
Well, your time on these shows, and particularly SG-1, has been well-spent, sir. I think that you guys did yourselves proud. It’s a testament to why we’re still talking about it, almost 30 years later. Something was done right.

Douglas McLean:
Yes. That goes all through the whole production because they wouldn’t be watching it just for the sets.

David Read:
No. The sets are great but you have to hang characters on those sets.

Douglas McLean:
If sets were falling down or not working well, they might be watching it because of the, “You’ve gotta believe. You can’t believe how camp this show is. It’s so bad.”

David Read:
Could you imagine if the whole thing was “Wormhole X-Treme?” Oh, that would have been funny, in a sad way.

Douglas McLean:
It is a credit to everyone, the producers, the writers, the actors, the production staff, the DOPs, the camera operators. The construction, paint, set decoration, props. If you look, those people have always done very well. You look at some of the people who’ve done those jobs on Stargate SG-1 and it’s like, “they’re still working.”

David Read:
Still doing well.

Douglas McLean:
They had good careers. Whoever put that first team together is like, “OK, all the decisions fell into place and it all worked.” That’s why people will still talk about Star Trek, even the original series. There’s some terrible things about the original series but that was made a long time ago.

David Read:
They did quite a bit with what they had.

Douglas McLean:
It got better and better. I watched the Picard series a while ago and sort of went, “Wow. They went back; they paid homage to all of the original stuff. A good friend of mine worked on it, Doug Drexler, out of Battlestar. He goes way back to Star Trek.

David Read:
Yep, he sure does. He was a fan growing up.

Douglas McLean:
It’s magic. It’s a show that renewed itself. They went through different phases. They did movies. They denied their heritage. They went totally different ways. They came back, they went this, they went that. I watched Picard, I went, “Wow, that’s it.”

David Read:
Absolutely. That third season was amazing.

Douglas McLean:
All the new technology, all the great stuff, but all the right things. The things that did work, even back in 19 whatever it was that the original was done, there’s good elements you pick out of that. I think that’s why shows last. They work. I know I personally go back and watch all the early Agatha Christie Poirot’s that were done. You go, “No, they got it right.”

David Read:
They were quality.

Douglas McLean:
They were quality. They spent money. They did the best they possibly could. Could it be done better? Yes. Could it be done better now? Yes. You could go back and remake Stargate now and go, “It’ll be a different show.” Maybe they will. Who knows? Franchises come around and they come around again.

David Read:
Like the Stargate.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly.

David Read:
It’s a matter of time, I think. Douglas McLean, thank you so much, sir. This was a treat.

Douglas McLean:
It’s been fun. It’s been fun going back and thinking about it again ’cause, as you say, it’s 20, almost 30 years since the first one. It’s 25 years since we finished Season Five and then four or five years, six years later, eight years later, I came back and caught the tail end and that was fun too, just to be there for that.

David Read:
Completely evolved, everything of what you guys started off with. Just wild stuff.

Douglas McLean:
Yep. It’s amazing to come back and look at it on your website and the interviews and the people. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.”

David Read:
You guys had a good time.

Douglas McLean:
Exactly. We did. We did always have a good time.

David Read:
I was talking with John Smith just earlier today and he’s like, “I never woke up and said, ‘I don’t wanna go into work.'” That is a blessing.

Douglas McLean:
As I say, from the top down, everywhere, it was good people and it was a good show.

David Read:
My thanks to art director Douglas McLean for joining us in this episode. I really appreciate his insight and his thoughts about Stargate and the industry and everything that’s involved in making a television show. If you enjoyed this episode and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, click that Like button, please. It makes a difference and will continue to help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend, if you’ve got friends out there who enjoy this kind of content and love the show. If you want to get more advanced notice about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. 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 both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. My tremendous thanks, as always, to my moderating team, Sommer, Tracy, Antony, Jeremy and Marcia. They make the show continue to be possible so that we can get these episodes out to you every week. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at Concepts Web, our web developer at Dial the Gate. My tremendous thanks to my digital artists, EagleSG and Brice. They make the show look good. And always my tremendous thanks to Neil Acree, our composer, also composer on Stargate, for our theme sequence. Never say that one enough. We’ve got more episodes heading your way, a whole thing of them lined up for Season Four, so we’re not done yet. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.