Stargate’s believability is often defined by its visual effects. One of the key people responsible for 15 seasons of the franchise is Craig VandenBiggelaar. Join us as we talk creating Replicators, fully-CG Asgard and more!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome
0:32 – Episode Outline
1:20 – Guest Introduction
2:22 – Getting Into the Industry
4:08 – Stargate: A Positive Working Experience
5:19 – A Transformative Era for Visual Effects
9:36 – Visual Slight of Hand
10:56 – $5000 for Each Puddle Pass
12:34 – Staff Blasts
14:29 – Puddle Ripples
15:50 – Daniel’s Moment with the Stargate in the Movie
17:35 – The True Enemy: Money or Time?
18:28 – No Shot Is Finished… It’s Abandoned
19:17 – Burst Appendix in “Space Race”
20:51 – Replicators in “Nemesis”
22:18 – 225 Replicator Blocks Per Replicator
24:30 – The Asgard’s Unseen Enemy
27:06 – Heimdall in “Revelations”
28:05 – Motion Capture with Teryl Rothery
29:36 – Heimdall Shakes O’Neill’s Hand
32:07 – Making Us Feel Something
34:20 – Blowing the Pyramid in “Full Circle”
37:02 – “Reckoning” Parts 1 and 2
38:10 – Replicator Space Ship from “New Order”
38:55 – Replicators in “The Ark of Truth”
40:42 – James Merrick’s Replicator Form
42:50 – Render Issues
46:08 – “Be All My Sins Remember’d”
46:54 – Spreading the VFX Work to Multiple Studios
49:52 – Evolving Ship Designs
50:21 – Pegasus Stargates: 8 Chevrons
51:05 – Darkroom Digital Effects: Craig Needs a Web Site!
51:33 – Slow Since the Strikes
53:16 – Unreal 5, Volumes and the Future
55:36 – Working Alongside AI
56:21 – We’re Not Slowing Down
57:09 – We’ve Barely Scratched the Surface
57:34 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:00:12 – 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, and welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate – The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. Thank you so much for joining me. Craig VandenBiggelaar, visual effects supervisor for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe is joining me for this episode. He was responsible for a great deal of what it is that you see on screen that you love from the show. And we’re going to go through and have a discussion about a number of different things, from Replicators to puddles to the evolution of motion capture from the original Asgard puppets to Heimdall to what we saw in Season Five, and what would later move forward. So I’m really interested in having this discussion with him. And I think you’re really going to… if visual effects are your thing, this is one you’re not going to want to miss. So let’s bring him in. Craig Van Den Biggelaar. Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe – Visual Effects Supervisor through Image Engine, I am just now discovering. Sir, I am thrilled to have you on. The Image Engine… you guys… your work was so key to the show. And what you’ve gone on and done since then is just so impressive. But I mean, it is tremendous to have you here. So I really appreciate you being here.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So I need to clarify, actually; I left Image Engine in 2006.

David Read:
Oh, OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And I started my own company, Darkroom Digital Effects, and continued to work on the series after I left Image Engine.

David Read:
OK. So Darkroom Digital Effects. All right. So we’re going to look up that. Oh, wow. OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And there’s not a lot of information on Darkroom Digital Effects. I’ve actually not had a website or a demo reel since I left Image Engine, just based on my contacts and reputation and work quality. I’ve just been busy since.

David Read:
OK. Well, good for you.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You’re not going to see a lot.

David Read:
Craig, how did you fall in love with visual effects and with working into this industry? How did this all happen? Can you take me back?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, absolutely. So after high school, you don’t know what you want to do. I loved physics. I loved art. How am I going to marry the two together? I tried architecture for a while and went to school for architecture and [it] happened to be fate. There were no jobs at the time. And soI thought, “OK, well, maybe I’ll be a film director or something.” I’ve always liked films. So I came to Vancouver to look at the film director course and ended up seeing their visual effects computer animation course and I fell in love. That was it. So I signed up for that and the rest is history. I went back home in Alberta – Edmonton, Alberta, Canada – and was waiting for word from a lot of the places I applied and, at the end of the day, Image Engine hired me. That was, you know, that was that. I started at Image Engine.

David Read:
What year was that?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
1996.

David Read:
1996. So right when SG-1 was in pre-production.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Right when it was in pre-production. And I remember, you know, the first year at Image Engine, the partner saying, “We got to get on the show. This show looks really cool.” So, you know, “we got to… whatever it takes.” So we did some spec pieces and some stuff on the fly. And we, you know, at Image Engine had been working on it ever since.

David Read:
Wow.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I guess we did something right.

David Read:
Something’s working. You know, when you got a tiger by the tail, it can be a double edged sword. So you got to be careful. What do you remember most fondly about working on this massive franchise?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Oh, man, I mean, there are so many things. First of all, it was just a great production to work with. I mean, the people were amazing and the creativity was amazing. And the way that the show fell into its groove allowed for creativity and expression through all fields. It wasn’t just visual effects. You could see in the acting how the characters evolved and got along, and the writing got evolved over time. But for me personally, it was just being able to push boundaries, doing things like spaceships and Stargate puddles and aliens and symbiotes and all sorts of fun, wild things that really wasn’t on the table for other series at the time. So it was just this broad array of stuff to hone your teeth on and to have fun with.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You got to play.

David Read:
For sure.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Is how I thought of it.

David Read:
Looking back on that era, it’s a real… I mean, it’s kind of redundant because all eras are transformative, but it’s a real transformative era that the show sat on from going from an era where you went through really practical models for a lot of things. I mean, that’s… John Gedecki was shot, you know, the… Season One and Season Two were practical models for… especially the Season Two…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
For a lot of it.

David Read:
Right… to adopting the software that was able to carry a lot of that by the end of even SG-1, you know? It’s a really transformative time. Is there any technology that you used during SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe that you were really impressed with by the time that it came to you? It’s like, “wow, we could never have done this just a few years ago.” Was there anything that really wowed you? Or were you just always just being blown away by, “hey, check it out! Look at what we’re doing now, and it doesn’t cost 10 million dollars!”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So, exactly. It’s kind of a double edged sword that question, because everything was a struggle. It was new, right? Visual effects were new and you had ILM doing Jurassic Park three years before and, you know, they had the resources and the money and the people to just, you know, pound that out and everyone’s jaw was on the floor and they saw that. We were in an era where we were trying to replicate that, but we were a small studio. We had like… initially it was just three of us, the owners and myself. And then we hired on a couple more guys. And for the longest time, it was like four or five people working on Stargate, you know, putting out great work. But, you know, the software was evolving. We started out on software called Alias PowerAnimator, which required, like a long time. Alias Wavefront. This was before Maya was even existing.

David Read:
Oh, prior to Maya? OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Prior Maya. Maya bought Alias Wavefront. Wavefront was their particle simulator. Alias PowerAnimator was their animation suite. And Alias had bought Wavefront, hence they called it Alias Wavefront. And it was just this… you had to buy… I remember buying SGI octane machines that were $80,000 a piece just to run a seat of the software. And we had three of them. So that was a big deal. And like limitations, you couldn’t do anything over two gigabytes of memory. And if you approach that, it was just a nightmare. And you had to trim things and you had to really cut your teeth on how to be efficient. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter. I mean, everything is so fast. You just… what do I want to do creatively? And you can come up with it and the software’s huge nowadays, but back then you really had to wrestle the software and the lighting. There was no such thing as built-in global illumination or, you know, the ray tracing was super slow. So we would do what’s called ray casting and you would fake light bounces and reflections and all of that.

David Read:
Just baking stuff into the shot, right?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Just bake stuff into the shot and, you know, like… it was just such a different world back then.

David Read:
We take it for granted… go ahead.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
We totally take it for granted. And I look back now and you wonder, “how did I get anything done?” Especially under an episodic timeline. But then again, you had 22 episodes over an entire year with a summer break. So that afforded a lot of latitude. And nowadays, everything is streaming and they want it now and they get their footage into the editing suite. And within a week or two, you’ve got stuff output for a lot of the smaller stuff. The scale of a lot of the shows nowadays is so much bigger as far as environments and everything. I remember doing matte paintings – that was fun too – where you have stuff on cards and you create these layers, almost like Walt Disney did to create depth in their 2D animation. And you would just subtly move the camera to fool the audience that this was a 3D world, but it really was just stuff pasted on cards in depth.

David Read:
It’s amazing what our brains will allow us to overlook as…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s it.

David Read:
Well, it’s a… you’re you’re looking at a trick, but our brain will accept it as the narrative very easily and incorporate it into… incorporate the trick into what we’re being presented in order to get along with the story. And we don’t even know it.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. It took us a lot of, you know, testing to figure out like, “OK, will they buy into this or are we going to have to improve it and do something else?” And again, it was kind of a renaissance. Like, ‘how do we make this work’ mindset. And, you know, there was no, at least for us in Vancouver, you know, in such a small studio, there was no blueprint. It was: we know the tools, this is what our client is asking for. We want to make it look great. And, you know, we’ll do whatever we can to get there. And there was a lot of innovation and a lot of, you know, sideways thinking and parallel thinking. And yeah, that was probably one of the best parts of starting on the series in that realm is; you were forced to want to do something realistic, but you were limited by the tools you had. So you had to think creatively.

David Read:
Brad Wright has said that each puddle pass took $5,000.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s about right. Yeah.

David Read:
And by the end of Universe… I don’t know if he had the conversation with Bruce Woloshyn over at Rainmaker or who, but by the end of Universe…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I like Bruce.

David Read:
Bruce is a good guy… each puddle pass by the end of Universe cost $5,000. And he asked somebody, “why?” And it was still, you know, you have to have someone go in there and paint each frame. That’s how it was done for this show. You guys weren’t putting lasers into the Stargate because there was – and I had the conversation with Bruce once – there was… it was about… you know, you have to understand that they’re wearing clothing and the clothing is somehow interacting with the puddle in a ways that, well, if you would feel it you would get it, so just putting a laser in there and guiding the animator would not… because apparently tests were done and it wasn’t convincing. So hand painting these things frame by frame. Man, oh man. There is a genuine artist at work in each of these shots.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s it. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I mean, and you have a show where you have multiple puddle pass-throughs. So this is kind of the bread and butter. OK, so whatever else is happening, there’s puddle pass-throughs that are going to come through. So it was… and laser blasts too. Ridiculously expensive at the time because, you know, again, software just wasn’t as easy. So we literally would… well, I mean, we did it different than other houses. You know, I know Rainmaker would have just used more of a compositing effect, but we would do a 3D teardrop.

David Read:
Explain.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So a teardrop, just basically an elongated shape of a teardrop. So you take a sphere and you create a tail on it. So you’ve got this fat head with this tail on it, and we would render that a solid color. And the reason we did that is because we wanted to get, again, the depth. It’s only on screen for about two frames, but you see it up close and far away. So you want to get that correct sense of depth. Otherwise it feels like…

David Read:
This is not right. This doesn’t feel right.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
It’s not feeling it. So that was our approach. And so it was relatively easy to do, but it meant another step to go through. And then we would take that to the compositor that would color correct it and add some glow. And we called them the A and B, so where it was shot from to where it got hit, and whatever effects needed to happen there. But we wanted to add that extra layer for laser blasts, but it still cost more money than it did at the end of the day, too, because… nowadays you can do it, I don’t know, maybe $100 instead of $1,200. There’s an evolution there. But again, at the time, that was our approach. Same with the puddles. The puddles needed a hand, like you say, a reveal of the person as they go through the water coming out or in. And a lot of times the ripples themselves needed a touch, a human touch, because it was either, as they went through, the ripples felt too fast or too thick or viscous. And so you had to speed them up or slow them down. And it wasn’t always a one solution to all of the puddle passes.

David Read:
Wow. So someone had created an algorithm to…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
No, by hand.

David Read:
For the ripples?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
For the ripples…. In our software, we had a ripple generator, but we have to say what’s the wavelength, the amplitude, the speed, and where’s the origin of these ripples. And then you would have multiple sources of that. So for example, my face went through, right? That’s one ripple source. Shoulders were typically another,> torso was another. And when you put them all together they have, you know, interference patterns and just like real ripples in real life. I mean, clever software. But, at the end of the day, you know, let’s say Jack O’Neill is jumping through really fast. Well, you need an intense ripple effect.

David Read:
It has to respond accordingly, not just… yeah, it’ll respond differently than someone just stepping through.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Exactly. Or if you have a character who just has their hand in the puddle, you know, you’re like, “well, should it be rippling?” But you need some sort of interaction. So you add a ripple. So, again, there’s the creativity. There’s the the human behind the keyboard making these decisions.

David Read:
The Stargate’s a character.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
The Stargate is a character, yes.

David Read:
When you have people interacting with it, you expect it to respond in some way. It’s not just inert.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Exactly.

David Read:
Yeah. I remember Dean Devlin doing the interview for the Stargate feature film, and he added a shot – I’m pretty sure at the last minute – of James Spader putting his hands in the water and playing with it. And the ripples, ripples, ripples, ripples were going out. And when they were developing the shot, the visual effects guys were saying, “Dean, no. We can’t do that because the ripples are…” The ripples in the movie were much looser. Much, much more like a pond or a puddle, but also very excited at the same time compared to Stargate. They’re fairly neutral by comparison. And he was like, “We’re on this shot for like 15, 20 seconds. The ripples are colliding with other ripples and it’s continuing to get more and more complicated. We can’t pull that off.”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You’re just watching the meter run on the cost of the shot.

David Read:
Money printer go, “brrr!” But they made it work. They pulled it off. And it’s one of the coolest scenes, in my opinion, in cinema.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Everybody looks at that scene, and you’re like, “I’m looking at a vertical pond. What’s going on? This is wild.” And the reflection of James Spader in the water, and they did such a good job on that. I don’t know, because we weren’t on the first season, if it was a conscious decision not to have a reflection. But I mean, I’m sure it was a cost, you know, decision to say, “OK, we can’t have reflections. That’s going to be 15 grand a puddle instead of five,” right?

David Read:
Yeah, there’s only so much you can do with the time and money that you have. Was money or time more of an enemy?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good question. It depends on the scenario. So if we’re coming right into an episode and we’re reading the script and we’re setting up a quote for the script and we just… I would either say, you know, “guys, this is way too much. We can’t do this. We have to pair it back.” So, you know, initially the money was the issue. Sorry, not initially, but at the beginning of the process, the money was the issue. And then by the end of the process, it’s, you know, changes and creative decisions, and then, “OK, we’re running out of time,” and we’re up all night, and we’re trying to deliver the best product we can. And then our computer fails and we run out of memory and, you know, time… always, there’s that crunch at the end. It doesn’t matter. And there’s a quote that I love in my industry. I mean, I love it and hate it, but it defines pretty much everything we do. And the quote is from, not obviously my industry, but it’s often used. And that is, “no shot is finished, it’s abandoned.” You have to come up to that time. So you quote as accurately as you can, the money is there. But being a boutique house at Image Engine when we were working on it, and then later on when I was doing Darkroom Digital Effects, it was… you put everything you can into it. It was a passion project. Everyone really loved what they were doing, you know, and you’re only as good as you’re last.

David Read:
Every shot has your soul.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, we would pull all nighters because we wanted to make it just right. You know, I remember I had my appendix burst during “Space Race,” but it was…

David Read:
That’s one the biggest visual effects episodes of the show!

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And it was, thankfully, right towards the end. And the whole crew stepped in while I’m in the hospital, but everything worked because we had put in the time, you know, so that we can make sure it would come together and make sure that all the pieces were looking good and that the production would get what they wanted, right? And it just kind of… that was the mindset around a lot of the visual effects people, at least the ones that I worked with was, you know, “let’s make something great.” And it lasted for a long time, a lot of seasons in that way. So, you know, for TV series, there was a lot less burnout, I think, than a lot of other TV series.

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely. I have to wonder if your appendix had anything… I’m sorry, but… had anything to do with the stress from the show. Or if it was just, well, it’s time is up. Did you not wonder that?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I mean, you wonder a lot of things when you’re in the thick of it. No, I think it’s time is just up. I mean, it’s a funny way to look at it, but no, it was just it’s time was up.

David Read:
That was the life that was happening to you at the time of one of the biggest visual effects demands of the entire freaking show. Gosh. Outside of the puddle, which is really what the show was known for, some of the more major creatures that were developed for the show that really stood the test of time were Replicators. I’m referring to the spider form. I’m not referring to the humans that came later. Were you involved at Image Engine in late Season Three When these guys [points to models on shelf]…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
“Nemesis.”

David Read:
Made their debut in “Nemesis”?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yes.

David Read:
Was it, “oh crap, what are we gonna do?”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
It was 100% “oh shit, what’s going on?” They approached us and said, “we want you to be the lead house on doing the Replicators for this upcoming episode and it’s gonna be big. And we’re going to split it between three other visual effects… you and two other visual effects houses. But we want you guys to take the lead.“ And when they gave us the design, we’re looking at the concept of being like, “wait, those are all individual pieces?” “Yes.” “You want them to fall apart?” “Yes.” “And you want it to move like a spider?” “Yes.” And we were just like, again, there goes the quote level. But at the end of the day, It was a really fun show to work on. I mean, we made it work. And I remember sitting there assembling 225 Replicator blocks per Replicator. That’s the exact number. And, you know, building the animation rig for it, you know, and it’s all hand done. When you see groups of those Replicators, every single one of them at that time was done by hand, animated by hand. And every single time that they explode from gunfire was hand animated as far as an explosion. We would create four different explosion simulations, and we would run a dynamic simulation on it and then tweak them because the software and the computing power, again, couldn’t handle everything. So we had to, you know, hand keyframe where they’re going to land. And there were certain scenarios where it worked on the ground, but not, you know, around and coming on the ceiling of the walls and everything.

David Read:
If they’re on the ceiling, they’re going to fall up based on their perspective.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. And, and honestly, there was a couple… and everyone’s going to look at this now that I say this, but there was a couple where they just disappear, and we just literally switched them out with a bunch of, you know, pieces just exploding just to make it easier and faster, right? But there were some… you had your hero bugs and then you had the swarm where you didn’t pay attention to them. So usually the first two rows in the big swarm of Replicators, or anytime there was an individual, the first two rows were hand animated. The rows behind that, where they were all overlapping, they were pretty much on a cycle, just doing their thing. And if you just saw them on their own, they would be sliding all over the place. But you don’t notice it because it’s just this crowd of, you know, feet and bodies and everything wiggling [makes noises] doing their thing. And… believe me, I know the sound.

David Read:
Oh, Joel.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
Miss him.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And at the end of the day, you don’t notice it. And that goes right back to the, you know, what can we get away with? What is the audience going to see versus what our software and hardware can produce in this timeframe? And I think we pulled it off. I mean, we got an Emmy nomination for that one, which was fun. And quite a few other Replicator episodes after that, we got Emmy nominations for. So they obviously were a favourite.

David Read:
For sure. I watched the episode as it aired originally and was just blown away because, at this point, there was a mythology built into the show that the Asgard are kept busy for some reason by some real big problem. And so when that’s revealed, it had better be good. And then I remember thinking to myself, like, “Star Trek replicators? No, these things [are] completely different.” It took a while for the brain to be like, “OK, that’s not what that is anymore. That is these things now.”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
No, we’re not making Earl Gray hot on this show.

David Read:
Exactly right. But the last shots of Nemesis, where you have, or it had to have been 200 of them, maybe more in the wide shot as they’re marching into that main hall there, is one of the most amazing shots of the show. And not only that, but… not only do you have to have the – and this is something specific to the Replicators in particular because of how fast they move their bodies. But the computer also has to add a blur.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yes.

David Read:
Can you tell us a little bit about that? Is that… that’s extra computation?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Oh, yeah.

David Read:
It can’t be a clear shot when you freeze the frame. They’re in motion and our eyes are used to out focus when something is in motion.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. So we would render groups of them and then composite them together. So, you know, the computer can handle, you know, maybe 10 to 20 depending on how close they are in frame, and then we would organize front to back and left to right and then have those rendered elements composited together in the 2D software over the plate. So that’s how we got around that solution. Later in “Ark of Truth,” when I was working on that, I had a guy program a walk cycle so it would detect the walls and various… because we’re on the space ship, and the walls.

David Read:
The Odyssey.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. And the walls are obviously not smooth like on “Nemesis.” So, you know, I had a program right like, “oh, OK, we’re going to detect where the walls are and automate it. And all we had to do is drag the torso around and the legs just kind of did their thing, which was fun, but it’s a huge contrast from “Nemesis,” right? And that’s kind of the evolution of the whole series is everything started out like, “we can’t do this, but we’re going to try” and then we did. And we thought a lot of it was groundbreaking.

David Read:
Well, you thought correct.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, yeah. And there’s a couple of times that we were quite proud. There was, if I may…

David Read:
Please.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Tangent a little bit. “Revelations” with Heimdall.

David Read:
Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Right? Was it Heimdall? I think it was Heimdall.

David Read:
Heimdall was the first fully… well, technically, Freyr came through the Stargate. But “Revelations” was the first episode that we had fully CG Asgard. Wow!

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And I think it was the first, correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t know, but from what I know is it was the first kind of guest star CG character.

David Read:
So in…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Fully CG.

David Read:
Fully CG. Yeah. And I must correct myself. Asgard had been seen in specific shots earlier in the show, like Thor gets out of his chair. He walks over. He’s very rudimentary. Heimdall, I’m pretty positive, was the first fully CG character introduced in the show. I’m racking my brain to make sure that’s right. I’m pretty positive. And Teryl [Rothery], Teryl played him.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Teryl did. And I remember doing motion capture with Teryl. It was really fun. She has a dancing background. So she does make… there’s a lot of flourish in the character. We had to kind of ask, “OK, maybe not. We might want to tone that down a little bit.” No, but what I’m referring to is, you know, there was a CG Thor before that. And we had CG Asgard. But to have such a major role throughout the episode, there was a lot of shots. And it was the first one that we had done motion capture with, which was really fun. And it was the first one we had actually used high dynamic range lighting with. So this is a part of the evolution of the tool set. So we actually took the illumination from the set, and use that to illuminate the character instead of faking it with our computer lights and spotlights and point lights.

David Read:
The ball comes into play there.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You use the spherical ball and you wrap that in your 3D environment. And if you do your HDR image correctly, you’ll be able to source the intensity of the lights and the color temperature. And you could use it for reflections, obviously, which makes a huge difference. And so that was our first use of high dynamic range lighting, which became standard in the industry afterwards. I mean, we had been reading white papers and this is what those guys are doing. Let’s try it. And it was pretty groundbreaking for a TV series. Yeah.

David Read:
It’s a pretty extraordinary character. I remember watching it and just buying it – buying that he’s there. There were a couple of things that I was thinking in this was: “wow, they’ve finally gone there. Are they going to continue to do this?” And also, “they probably had a fair, realistically, a fair amount of money left over from previous episodes. So they were like, ‘Go for it.’” He couldn’t have been cheap to create, because you’re talking dozens of shots of him standing alongside Carter and interacting with the character. My favorite scene from this is; O’Neill reaches out his hand – and it’s all done off camera – for Heimdall to shake it, and Heimdall is like shaking him vigorously and you don’t see it on camera, but the implication is that he’s just shaking… just wagging his hand. It was a fun character, man. And Teryl must have been a blast.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And Richard Dean Anderson, he played that up a lot, which was really good. And I remember, I think it was Brad Wright said – please don’t misquote. I think it was – said, “we want him to shake his hand.” And we’re just like, “too much money. We can’t interact with anybody.” “OK, we’ll do it off screen. We’re still going to shake his hand.” And that’s where that came out of. But it was a great character. The mocap people that James Tichenor, it was again breaking ground for them, because we had the set built and there was that giant ramp Teryl had to walk down. And they had to figure out how to capture that mocap coming down this big set remotely. This wasn’t on their stage with their set up. They had to come to our stage and set it up there and make it all work. And it worked beautifully. It was really good. We had to do a lot of animation fixes and tweaks to help blend things together. But at the end of the day, it was just really fun to do mocap and watch this character come to life. There’s one shot in particular where Heimdall is looking at the pod – the human Asgard hybrid in cryostasis. And it’s a shot on the glass and the hand comes up and just goes down. And that’s all you see. But there was so much feeling behind that, you know, and they really ran with it, which we were happy with. It was a really fun thing to do.

David Read:
When you look at a character like Gollum.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yes. Jaw droppingly good.

David Read:
Jaw droppingly good, because you’re making this human…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
Now an artificial thing. It’s not a human being that you’re seeing. The artistry of the human is coming through into this artificial thing and making us feel something back.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s it.

David Read:
My gosh. That’s a leap.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of that is technology leaps, time, budget. I mean, Gollum, you have to get it right. This is Lord of the Rings. And, you know, if you don’t get it right, no one’s going to… like, nobody is going to want to watch it. But I remember watching that, and actually Heimdall was on my mind because I was like, “I wish we had the budget for Heimdall to do that.” Well, because it was so good watching Gollum, all of the subtlety.

David Read:
But what you did, in my opinion, is the greatest test of that character. Thor Is on his back on some kind of… he’s always occupied with something to hold him down. And you have Heimdall walk beside him, while O’Neill is with him, and the shot works. I, as an artist, would have been scared about that the most. It’s like, “OK, here’s the physical puppet with the lighting in the room, and we’ve got a digital creature right next to him who is his brother, for all intents and purposes. They’re exactly the same. They don’t even have different characteristics. You have to be able to, as an audience member, buy one as much as buying the other because they are sharing the same space and the same lighting conditions. And it worked.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And it was fun and it worked. And that was one of our, you know, “oh, dear God, I hope this work works” moments and we thought it did. So, you know, thank you for that. Passing that back, because it was great. It was, and again, one of those episodes where there was a lot of like, “OK, We’re going to do this. Let’s do it right.” So we… I mean, there’s a lot of sleepless nights, but it was well worth it.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
What shots from the show do you remember took the most time? A, and B; cost the most money? And I’ve got a couple in my head that are some of my favorites in the show that I’d be interested to know if you were involved in. And while your brain is noodling that, I will start: the scene in full circle where the pyramid explodes is one of the most extraordinary moments in the show. Because emotionally, we have to connect back to Abydos, and the people who are on there in the movie. And you also have a physical miniature that is detonating, but you have to sweeten it. You can’t just have… because it’s only… I mean, it’s still like, I think it was still a 10 by 10 pyramid. It was huge. Were you there on set for that?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I wasn’t on set for it, but we did end up doing the work of the subsequent shockwave going through the sand in the desert. So yes, we worked on that shot, and composited it together.

David Read:
Was there a sense of, “we really need to get this one right”?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
It was, again, speaking of the legacy, we were well aware of the connection with the film, and the history of Abydos, and the whole like this is something big. And, yeah, we really felt like, yeah we have to try to get this right. Dynamic effects like the sand blowing and the individual grains of sand you look at nowadays is so much better than the technology we have back then. So in some ways I cringe looking at it, but I also know it’s like well we just had our limitations and we did the best we can.

David Read:
Yeah, the concussion wave of all the different elements, because it doesn’t just end at the pyramid – it goes on to destroy the village.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, it just obliterates…

David Read:
The whole surrounding area. Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. No, that was fun. And we wanted a lot of impact on that for sure.

David Read:
Was that an expensive shot? I would think so.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Relatively, not too bad. Not too bad. Every time, you know, you do… I mean, it all comes down to how many hands have to be on it or how long you need to research it. So, you know, we kind of knew what we were doing with dynamics and getting these effects happening. So it wasn’t too bad. But wanting to nail it, you always pad in a little bit of budget for playing with the shot, not just running it through a process and saying, “here you go,” right? We always have padded in a little bit of budget for creativity and nailing it best we can.

David Read:
OK. What others do you remember?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I mean, we’re talking like “Reckoning” part one and two were huge.

David Read:
Yes!

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You had Replicators, you had fleets… every time there was a fleet of Ha’tak starships coming in, you’re just like, “oh God,” because again, they were heavy to render. And let me just tell you, every Season we would upgrade the models. We would add a little more detail or refine the textures or up-res something. You know, so they were ever evolving. We never kind of just sat back and said, “oh, well, let’s just use a Season One model.” No, we kept upgrading them. And by the time we got to “Reckoning” one and two, we had enough horsepower and enough people to say, “OK, we can do multiple replicators. We can build this Dakara landscape map painting and make it live more and put avatars walking around and all that stuff.” And you can have… yeah, just battles and explosions. And that’s the other thing, exploding Ha’tak ships – that’s expensive. You have three or four or five or six or seven or ten, you know, it gets really expensive.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
The Replicator spaceship was fun because it was just such a different design.

David Read:
The long one?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
It was so cool, man! And when it disintegrates when the wave hits it, i mean… the particle count was high.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the creative “how do we do this?” You know, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it.” They just kept upping the ante from one Replicator bug to now we’re going to do a whole spaceship. And, you know, multiple, it just kept getting… almost every time they would come up with a Replicator show, we’d be like, “oh, no, what are we in for?” And at the end of the day, you know, it was always fun to work on, but they were challenges and they kept upping the ante. And I think, you know, we met the ante.

David Read:
When you get to “Ark of Truth,” and you get to the script, or maybe they were just told you in advance, “yeah, we’re going to bring the Replicators back,” was part of you like, “oh God”?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Part of me was definitely, “oh God.” And then you had the Ori ship, you know, and then you had… and again, talking about software and hardware. So, basically, I did all the Replicators for “Ark of Truth” myself. And I did most of the Ori battle scenes myself. That’s when I did Darkroom Digital Effects. You know, you’re like, “OK, yeah, I can take this on.” And Robert Cooper was great because he had a lot of trust in me because I’d worked with him for years. And I kept thinking, you know, “Robert, you’re crazy. Don’t bring this all to me.” And he’s like, “yeah, no, you got it.” Well, that’s all I need to hear, you know? Because I’m going to want to rise to the challenge. Robert knew exactly how to bring people… how to up their game. He was really good at that.

David Read:
You like to do it right for him.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But “Ark of Truth,” so the Replicators, you know, at first you’re like, “OK. We have the replicated Replicator,” the one that was built with the Asgard technology. And it’s just a few shots here and there. But then you get to the end when they’re, you know, shooting these things in the hallway and you’re just like, “OK, how are we going to do that?” So, you know, I went through and said, “I’m just going to lay it all out.” And I showed Robert and he’s like, “whoa! that’s too many!” But it was the same approach. You did layers and then composite them together to get them in and work for the audience. And like I said previously, we automated the animation… the guy I hired to automate the footfalls and stuff.

David Read:
Man. But then Currie Graham played James Merrick who gets eaten by one of these things. They change their behavior because, you know, if we’re going to bring them back, we’re going to do something different with them. And you had this thing that looked so good. The comparisons, you cannot help but go to the model 101… the Cyberdyne Systems 101 Terminator. I mean, I as an artist would have been like, “I can’t make it look like this.” We have the concept art for it, [what] it has to look like, but this has to move differently. It has to feel like a Replicator.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. But a broken Replicator that got blown up and came out of a human husk.

David Read:
It’s kind of like Skeletor.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Exactly. You know, and there’s a lot of like… I mean, every shot you do, you want to reference something, whether it’s real life or something that’s been done before. Visual effects always borrows off of what we’ve seen. And there’s trends, if you notice in the sci-fi. Industry. It’s like, “oh, well, this is the flavor,” you know, Abyss came out and then Stargate came out with water effects, you know, and it’s like… there’s always… the liquid metal of the T-1000, you know, and OK, there’s that trend. And for a time, everything was morphing. And for another time, everything… now everything is fine particles and disintegrating and, you know, “Infinity War” and stuff. So looking at that character was very much a, “what do we reference? I don’t know what a blown up human Replicator looks like.” So there was some reference to the original Terminator, you know, walking and kind of beaten up, you know. So there was a little element of like, “OK, we could do that.” But at the same time, what are the mechanics of the character that we have, and how would they move in that situation?

David Read:
You’re taking something that’s a quadruped and it’s now a biped. The logistics behind that are pretty self-evident.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. So, I mean…

David Read:
Made it work.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Made it work.

David Read:
Absolutely. And looking at episodes like “Space Race” where you had these visual effects heavy sequences really… I can’t imagine, you know, dealing with situations where, “oh, please”… even when you have like an $80,000 piece of software, doesn’t mean it’s not going to crash and you have to start all over rendering again.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Exactly. Exactly. As you evolve your work, you put in safeguards, so you get to a point, you save it, and when you’re rendering things… you get a feeling for when stuff is going to crash. You get a feeling for, “OK, so we have all of these ice asteroids we have to fly through.” None of the spaceships were rendered within the ice asteroid belt. They were all rendered separately with stand-in holdbacks so that we can, again, layer them in the compositing software. Nowadays you could just throw it all together and say “go” and you’d have the proper lighting, but you still composite, you still do your layers, you still have that creative control because it’s faster at the end of the day, but back then we had to be very judicial about how are we going to break this down so we can handle it.

David Read:
OK. So you could use… you could composite all of them into a.. well, not composite, that’s the wrong word, you could render all of the original elements into a single shot if you wanted too, but it would just slow everything down and bring everything to a grinding halt?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Of course. Yeah.

David Read:
So, do layers and layers, and then assemble them? I do the same thing in video editing.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s exactly it.

David Read:
Do this over here, let the computer crunch this. And now that’s done, and put this in, and just make sure that the piece that come in after are fluid with what they’re flying by.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Exactly. So it’s either that or it’s a matter of we need to break up the control because these ice blocks that we’re flying through will need more attention than these other spaceships, or the stars in the background, or whatever. So there’s a lot of creative decisions made as far as what layers do we break up for what purpose. And other times it’s a matter of like, “OK, so we’re pushing the limits of our hardware. And if I put in one more spaceship in this race of spaceships flying through this asteroid belt, the whole thing is going to catch fire and we’re going to have to evacuate the building because we’re pushing things so hard.”

David Read:
You’re overclocking just a little bit there.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Literally the straw that breaks the camel’s back most of the time, we would push things right to the limit.

David Read:
You can feel where it’s going. You can see that… I’m sure you’re watching the status screens on how cool your devices are and where it’s peaking everything else. You can feel it coming.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
All the time.

David Read:
Push it to the limit.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
We hit abort a few times. We’re like, “abort before this gets worse!” Because sometimes you can… once it starts crashing, you can’t stop it. So it gets into this like, “all right, we’re hard disk swapping,” and stuff is just going to grind to a halt, and we’re just like, “OK, no.”

David Read:
This is absolutely wild. I want to get into… are you good for a few more minutes?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
I want to get into… I’d love to have you back because we’ve mostly talked about SG-1. Did you have anything to do with “Be All My Sins Remembered”? The battle over Asuras with the Replicator planet? Was that you at all with that massive fleet of Wraith and human and Traveler going after these Replicators, the blob on the surface? Was that any of you at all? Or was that more in-house?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
In Atlantis? Yeah, no, unfortunately, I didn’t do that one.

David Read:
OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So, you know, I mean, it’s a great episode.

David Read:
Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And, you know, there was a lot of stuff that just… yeah, no, I didn’t, I didn’t do that one.

David Read:
OK. I’m curious as a layman, when someone comes to you, says, “OK, you’re going to take the lead on this, but we’re also giving this to two or three other houses.” Why isn’t it all you? Is it, “we know how many men… how much manpower you have. We need it within this time frame” or, “we’ve got a lot of money for this. We want to spread it around to a few different houses and give them a piece.” Is it just time? Is it; they know the resources that you have and anticipate how much it’s going to take?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Production is all about time. And the delivery date is the delivery date. And, you know, they know like, OK, You know, Image Engine has, you know, now 20 people and, you know, Rainmaker has however many people. And, you know, we have to divvy that up so that we can get it all delivered on time. And every time we did that, it was a nail biter because you have different techniques for lighting, and different techniques for compositing. And if you notice the Al’kesh… I had done the first episode of “Deadman Switch” with the Al’kesh. And so basically we built it.

David Read:
That’s the cargo ship, the cargo ship. Yeah. The Al’kesh came in the end of Season Four.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Oh, not… sorry. Sorry. You’re right. Sorry. The cargo ship.

David Read:
Close though. Good for you. Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Memories!

David Read:
I think it’s a Tel’tak. So, but yeah, you still got it.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Is that the Goa’uld name, Tel’tak?

David Read:
Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And they wanted the door going in and out. But basically my point is so, you know, I had built that. And and we had to pass it off to Rainmaker for another episode because you have to overlap because… and it would be often Image Engine would do one and Rainmaker would do another, and Lost Boys or Atmosphere or Gideki or someone would do another episode, because you got to keep the machine going. We can’t wait for one house to do it all. We’re not ILM. This was Vancouver back in the late 1990s, early 2000s and we just weren’t that big to have one house handle it. So Rainmaker would do their take on the cargo ship, and it looked different. It looks slightly different. But, you know, it’s OK.

David Read:
Did they tweak the model?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Oh, yeah. Their approach was a little different. Their textures didn’t show up quite the same. And it was, you know… but I look at it as we have a Corolla versus a Camry. I mean, I don’t think anyone really paid attention to it. But those are some differences that you notice when you’re in the show, you know? Like, “wait, that doesn’t look,” and we would always try to make them look the same. So that was one of the downfalls working with other houses, but it was also a godsend because you had time to really finesse what you were working on and not always feel like you were just being a factory churning out effects.

David Read:
Oh man.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And that’s what I liked about sharing the work.

David Read:
Absolutely. You’re as a team. And I get, you know, the cargo ship. You got 20 different Goa’uld flying around with these things. They’re not all coming out of, necessarily, the same factory at the same time. Like our models, things would have evolved. So, you know, that makes a lot of sense.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You can get away with it. I mean, at the end of the day, you don’t need the exact same thing, but the audience needs to believe that they are, you know, the same…

David Read:
Right. Technology.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Technology.

David Read:
Where it breaks down for me, where it is my soapbox, is… and I’m curious if you notice this as well, the Pegasus Stargates with eight chevrons on them.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
I mean, it’s like, “guys, we’re missing one.”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of like… I mean, that’s all the writers and, you know, they’re going to steer the ship, and we just kind of the visual effects kind of show their vision – what’s in the script. So, I mean, I don’t have a lot of comment on the different chevron’s and Pegasus Galaxy. This is the Milky Way. It is what it is.

David Read:
No, absolutely. The amount of work that you guys did over those years to churn all this stuff out. So you took over from Darkroom Digital Effects in 2006.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yes.

David Read:
And how long were you under that banner?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I still am.

David Read:
You still are.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK, there’s just not a lot… OK, you need to get a website. I’d like to see some of this work presented.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, I’m working on it. After the strikes… I need a website now because the industry’s just kind of slowed down in Vancouver.

David Read:
What are you working on?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Currently, nothing.

David Read:
OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Nothing. So it’s… like I said, It’s been really slow since the strikes. But before that, it was “Charmed” and, you know, other various small movies and whatnot. So, yeah.

David Read:
People are really feeling the pinch the pinch right now. I was talking with Joseph Mallozzi about it. In Canada, they’re feeling just as badly, if not more than we are in, Hollywood. I hope for the best, but I hope that everyone can plan for the worst because, you know? I fear that what they’re saying is true, that the salad days of streaming is over. And so there’s going to be a real contraction in terms of the amount of content that’s coming out, and there’s going to be, you know, families that just aren’t going to get fed unless they go in and look into some other career. So, you got to make it work, man.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m going to stay in visual effects. I’m pretty sure I’ll find my niche again and figure out, you know… it’s just what I love, you know? I love this job, I hate this job. I want to sleep, but I love what I’m doing. I can’t go to sleep. You know? it’s all good.

David Read:
Those nights where it’s like, you know, “I really need to be sleeping right now, but I’m concentrating on the problem that I’m going to have tomorrow because I’m so excited about cracking it.”

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
That’s right. That’s right.

David Read:
There’s something to be said for that.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
You’re a problem solver.

David Read:
That’s it.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And you’re trying to replicate or recreate the world around you so the audience believes it, and hopefully you can help them escape their world while you’re doing so.

David Read:
What do you feel about Unreal 5…

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Oh, amazing.

David Read:
And the lighting and the volume technology that we’re using now to put up these giant monitors behind the scenes where you don’t have to deal with blue and green screen anymore. The lighting, the collisions – they’re all in the shot right there.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. I mean, it’s expensive and that’s going to have a trickle down effect and it’s going to become more and more common, hopefully. I see a lot of the tools that are… you can look at it one of two ways: it can either replace your job, or it can make your job easier.

David Read:
Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So how are you going to adapt to that?

David Read:
Yeah.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
And that that could go through with AI that could go through with these, you know, video monitors on Unreal 5. You know, I remember when motion capture was coming out and it was just like, “holy smokes! We don’t need animators anymore.” Well, yeah, you certainly do because it’s not flawless. And, you know, we’ve seen some motion capture where it’s very dead, and very wooden. And, you know, you’re always going to need, I think, a human touch. I don’t think anything will ever replace that.

David Read:
And modern technologies also pull back on other things as well. I remember having a conversation with Bruce Woloshyn about the advantage of doing explosions in film. You can tune the color.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
And make things really look good. Whereas in digital, when you get an explosion, what you see is what you get. And if you look at some of the shots in Atlantis, it’s yellow, you know, it is what it is. It’s been captured. You can’t really tweak it unless you, you know, add effects on top of it. It’s just there. So there’s always going to be an exchange.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that’s, I think, worth it. There’s a place for practical effects. There’s a place for visual effects. There’s a place for Unreal Engine replacing a lot of human hands that’s, quite honestly, is tedious work. Let’s add in a reflection on a shiny helmet. No one wants to sit there and do that all day long. They want to get into some other things. There’s a lot of benefits to new technology coming out.

David Read:
Are you looking forward to handing off some of the more tedious stuff to AI while you work on more interesting stuff?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah. 100%.

David Read:
Because it’s coming.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
No, it’s here. I mean, it is absolutely here. And, you know, my biggest thing is copyright and, you know, where are they sourcing all this stuff? And everybody is concerned about it. You know, if my work is training AI, I’m going to feel pretty upset about it. And because other people then can use that for their benefit for free. There’s a big trickle down effect there that I think is a whole other interview.

David Read:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. But are you optimistic?

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
I am optimistic, on that sense, for me to help me in the future. Yes.

David Read:
OK.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Yeah.

David Read:
This has been really cool. I appreciate you taking the time and exploring these facets with me. There is… so much work was done in these shows. I’d love to have you back later this year to talk just a little bit more if you’d be interested.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
Sure.

David Read:
Because I do want to get into more of these facets of, OK, what is it that you guys used and what is coming to replace it? Because we’re not slowing down. And when I look at the transformation of our society from all these tools over the last several years, it does feel like we’re in fact speeding up. And we’re all just fighting to keep up and continue to find ways to stay relevant in our particular fields. So not going to be boring.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
No, no. And I’d be happy to talk to you again. I mean, we’ve barely scratched the surface of shows and episodes, and I’m sure your audience would want to know some more about some other shows and characters.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
So, by all means. If you have the time, we can set something up for later.

David Read:
Sir, I will always have the time for you. I appreciate you coming to join us.

Craig VandenBiggelaar:
All right. Thank you, David.

David Read:
Thank you. That was Craig VandenBiggelaar, Visual Effects Supervisor; SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe – of Darkroom Digital Effects Incorporated. I’ve generally had communication with people and gotten to know them a little bit before sitting down and doing an interview. Craig, I’ve never even seen his face. And soI was like, “Well, you know what, let’s see what kind of a conversation I’m going to have with this guy.” And I think I’ve made a new friend because he’s really cool and is very informative and knowledgeable about what it is that the Stargate brand is. And I cannot wait to have him back because he really gets it. And he remembers the specific moments of the show that really stand out to me as well. So it seems like a Stargate fan behind the scenes as well. There were a lot of those people who worked on the show who were… it was just not a job to them, it was also something that they were very passionate about in their own right. And I think that’s the recipe that made Stargate last for 17 seasons on television – you can’t do that if you don’t have people who are genuinely passionate about the product and willing to put in that extra mile. Before we go, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click that like button. It really 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, and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click subscribe. And 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. And clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. My tremendous thanks to my moderating team: Tracy, Anthony, Jeremy, Marcia, Sommer – you guys make the show possible episode after episode. Couldn’t keep it going without you. My producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey., thank you so much. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb. He’s our web developer on Dial the Gate who keeps things up and running. Matt Wilson, EagleSG, Brice Ors, my visual guys, they make the show look as good as it does. We’ve got a number of different episodes heading your way for Season Four. Keep it on DialtheGate.com to see the complete updated schedule. As soon as I get someone booked, I put it there and I use that page to reference dates and times, and make sure that I have everything straight. So if you want to know what’s coming up next, DialtheGate.com is the place to be. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate – The Stargate Oral History Project, and I will see you on the other side.
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