Join digital effects creators Brice “IBREC” Ors and Matt “EAGLESG” Wilson as they interview David about his Stargate career and uncover a Baal or two from the past…

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome everyone to Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project, Episode 416. I’m David Read, I appreciate you being here with me. Brice Ors, IBREC, is a French Stargate fan and a visual effects creator and a producer over here at Dial the Gate. He invited me last week on his, usually French, YouTube channel, and I think Twitch, to discuss my career in Stargate. People are regularly asking me, “Tell your story.” I’ve told this story on this channel, but I’ve been digging through a lot of archive material recently and I had a few things to share that folks might find interesting, like the preview that we posted yesterday of the Goa’uld mothership attack on Earth’s surface from someone who was actually there on the ground. It was supplemental material that I created while I was hired with 20th Century Fox to create some viral marketing. That was just one piece. This is a long conversation, but if you’re interested in my story and you don’t mind having the French audience have things translated to them in French throughout, then go ahead and tune in for this one. Actually, we’ve put some crude subtitles in place for when they’re talking in French so we can see exactly what it was that they were saying, or close enough to it. If this is something you’re interested in, stick around. I appreciate you tuning in and I’ll see you when I see you.

Brice Ors:
Hello everyone. For English-speaking people, don’t hesitate to speak in the chat. The stream will be French and English at the same time. Hello, everyone. Hello to English people in the chat. A little bit stressed, but everything is gonna be fine. I have some notes. There is YouTube and Twitch in the chat over here, because before it was not allowed by Twitch. We are in multistream between Twitch and YouTube. My English is not very good, but I have some notes, so be gentle with me. OK, I have my notes, everything is OK. First of all, for English people in the chat, don’t worry, it will be French and English. I will speak in French first, then in English. Tonight, I’m joined by EagleSG, Matt, who we had on live at the end of last year. He will be here to help me in English. In case you don’t know him, he makes some 3D renders of Stargate spaceships and he did some intros for David’s YouTube channel. Tonight, I’m happy to welcome, for those who don’t know, David Read. He has been a Stargate fan for nearly thirty years. He worked on various Stargate projects, official projects, fan projects. Thank you for the sub. I’m gonna turn off the alert sounds. I hope it doesn’t cut us off. We’ll always see them, but there won’t be the sound anymore. He has kept the franchise alive, like many fans, with his YouTube channel Dial the Gate and you probably saw him in the Prime Video announcement. Please welcome David Read from Dial the Gate and EagleSG. Hello, guys. How are you? You can hear me?

David Read:
Very good. How are you?

Brice Ors:
I’m good, thanks. Welcome to my channel.

David Read:
Thank you for inviting us. Very good to be here.

Brice Ors:
Is everything OK for technical issues, audio, video? Everything OK?

David Read:
No, but we’ll make do.

Brice Ors:
OK, nice. I’m gonna lower the music a little bit. You don’t speak French at all, David?

David Read:
Not in public, no. I’ve heard that the French can be very critical if you don’t get it right. So no, I don’t.

Brice Ors:
Yes, it’s true. That’s why I’m a bit afraid to speak in English in public as well.

David Read:
Not the same in English. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Brice Ors:
But I know English people…

David Read:
Just trying puts a smile on our faces.

Brice Ors:
It’s true. I know English people are quite kind with French trying to speak in English.

David Read:
There you go.

Brice Ors:
OK, I have some notes so I do not forget anything. As I said, I’m gonna speak French first and then I’m gonna translate it into English. Matt, I count on you, of course, to help me. How are you, Matt?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I’m fine. I’m ready to be the English backup, if needed.

Brice Ors:
Have you been to France, David?

David Read:
Yes, in 2016. Thank you, Frizull. I appreciate the comment on my English being very good.

Brice Ors:
And it was Paris?

David Read:
I’ve been to Paris. I’ve been to Switzerland, so there were a lot of French-speaking there. But yeah, it’s been a while. This summer, I’ll definitely be back over there in that part of the world, for sure, and probably later as well. I am looking forward to going back to Europe.

Brice Ors:
OK. To translate in French, Matt, don’t hesitate to translate as well, just after David. He said he had already been to Paris to see friends who speak French. After that, he plans to return to Europe as soon as possible. That’s what I understood. That’s it. Maybe for the replays, there will be, of course, subtitles on YouTube, automatic subtitles. It’s going to be much more easier, I guess, maybe, for French people who don’t speak English, maybe. OK, so where are you in the US? East Coast, West Coast?

David Read:
I’m in Nashville. If you cut the country down the middle, I am slightly to the east. I am in the south, technically speaking. Tennessee is considered south, but I would consider myself Midwest, but apparently, I am wrong. I’m four hours from home, but this is home number eight for me.

Brice Ors:
OK. How long have we known each other? I was thinking during the day when I was preparing some questions and stuff like that, what was the first time we talked? Do you remember?

David Read:
You and I? I can’t remember exactly when. Were you part of GateWorld forum back in, probably, 2004, 2005?

Brice Ors:
Not that early.

David Read:
OK. Were you involved with Stargate Worlds at all?

Brice Ors:
Yeah, in the forum, but my nickname wasn’t IBREC, it was Voisir.

David Read:
I’m not saying I would have remembered who you were, but yeah, we probably crossed paths here and there.

Brice Ors:
It was maybe near 2010, not earlier.

David Read:
It’s been a while, man.

Brice Ors:
Really, decades. The first time I sent you an email was for Stargate Network, maybe in 2014 or something like that.

David Read:
That sounds right.

Brice Ors:
Maybe.

David Read:
How long has The Experience been around? How long has it existed?

Brice Ors:
Since 2007. The 3D version was in 2010, so I think it’s probably around that. Maybe.

David Read:
So, it’s been a while now. Pretty cool.

Brice Ors:
We met at Gatecon in 2018.

David Read:
That’s right. Yep, that was a good year.

Brice Ors:
That was actually my first time outside France.

David Read:
Really?

Brice Ors:
Yeah. Only once.

David Read:
To Canada.

Brice Ors:
The first time and only once since then.

David Read:
You’ve never left France before or since?

Brice Ors:
Just in London in 2016 for Star Wars Celebration. I’ve been to Switzerland and Germany, but it’s Europe, so it’s not like leaving, crossing the sea.

David Read:
It’s like going to another state over here. It’s just that they speak a different language and they wear slightly different clothes. Slightly.

Brice Ors:
Before we talk about Dial the Gate, I would like to make some sort of timeline of your Stargate journey. When did Stargate start for you? When did you first become a fan? Do you remember?

David Read:
I found the show when it was entering its second season on Showtime. The night that it entered syndication is the first time I watched it. That would have been… I found it… September 14th of ’98. I had just turned 15.

Brice Ors:
OK.

David Read:
I’ve been hooked ever since. I’m 43 this year, so it’s almost 30 years. Isn’t that wild? I’ve been contributing to it as a reporter or as a writer since Season Six of SG-1. That’s how far I go back.

Brice Ors:
When it was in syndication, because syndication is a very US thing, it’s like starting Season One? One year after the real start?

David Read:
It was about 15 months later, that was normally how it would run.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Let me ask you in English first. David, syndication, it’s because the USA is a country with several time zones, so each channel locally could show Stargate at special times because it’s something that French people don’t know: what syndication is. That doesn’t exist in France.

David Read:
So, in terms of what syndication is? We have a lot of programming over here and after it’s run for the first time on whatever channel has ordered its creation, after a certain period of time, the contract will allow it to be broadcast in additional markets. We had access to the first run on Showtime, but I saw it late on Saturday nights on our local ABC, American Broadcasting Company, affiliate to fill in airtime before the network went off the air at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. In those days it was over-the-air programming, things would go off the air. From 9:00 PM to midnight or 1:00 in the morning, my local over-the-air network would broadcast reruns of MGM programming. It was Outer Limits, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Stargate, Earth Final Conflict, and these would rotate around. There was two, and then Earth Final Conflict.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
We have that in France actually.

David Read:
It’s a rerun.

Brice Ors:
It’s funny because in France, it’s a one-year gap with the US. When the US is at Season Two, we are at Season One. There is always a one-year gap to translate everything so it’s pretty much like syndication.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It was one year for SG-1.

David Read:
They have to make it for that region and that costs money and time.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
But Atlantis was a few months, not even a year.

David Read:
They got better at it. The nice thing about Amazon is everyone is gonna get it the world over at the same time, which means that we’re all gonna have to wait a little while, slightly longer. I forget the term for it, it’s not regioning. It may be regioning, where they make it ready for every market to have it all at once. As far as I’m concerned, do it. Take your time so that we can all enjoy it globally at the same time.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
In French, it’s doublage; when you write the French version and you have the actors voicing the…

David Read:
Exactly.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That’s actually a good thing.

David Read:
It’s a great thing.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
We can all talk about it together.

David Read:
If you have friends outside of your market, it’s a great thing. If you have no friends, you don’t care. “Give me my Stargate.” But that’s not anyone in this group.

Brice Ors:
Let’s continue. I’m thinking it’s pretty much the same time you met Darren and you started to work on GateWorld, or maybe later?

David Read:
I met Darren, we corresponded when Season Four, Season Five were airing. GateWorld wasn’t even GateWorld yet. It was called Star Guide at that point. Hey, hello. That’s cute. Look at that. He’s so happy and he’s floating away.

Brice Ors:
That’s when the chat puts emojis, it’s displayed on the…

David Read:
Really? Really?

Brice Ors:
Yeah.

David Read:
Wow.

Brice Ors:
I can do that though.

David Read:
It’s very cool. Hey, looky there. As you have no one with ADHD is on your channel. Man, we’ve got earth symbols everywhere. Hey, the artifact. We started working together on Season Six, so 2002. It was the first time that I did something for Stargate, and the first thing that I did was write Jack O’Neill. What the heck?

Brice Ors:
It’s my head.

David Read:
It’s you.

Brice Ors:
I have emoji with my head.

David Read:
All right, very good.

Brice Ors:
Welcome to Twitch. It’s only a feature on Twitch.

David Read:
Mario 3. Gosh, that threw me for a loop.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Your first article, it was 2002, Season Six.

David Read:
Yeah, I wrote Jack O’Neill’s biography for the Stargate Omnipedia and that was the very first thing that I did. From there, as the Australians would say, “Bob’s your uncle.” Everything has happened since. It’s been a wonderful journey in and out of Stargate over the years. What the heck is that?

Brice Ors:
Don’t worry, it’s only emojis on Twitch.

David Read:
OK, I’ll start ignoring them.

Brice Ors:
I can disable it if you want.

David Read:
I’ll get used to it. You might wanna tell me these things in advance before we start the stream, before things start flying around the page. OK, that’s… Squirrel!

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
What was the name of GateWorld before? Star Guide.

David Read:
Star Guide. I don’t know how you would say that in French.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Star Guide. That’s the pun, with Stargate, Starguide, in English, obviously.

David Read:
So “there you have it.”

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
So, “tout va comme sur des roulettes,” would be the French expression.

Brice Ors:
I saw you actually had the chance to visit the set as well.

David Read:
Four or five times.

Brice Ors:
Can you tell us more?

David Read:
Here I am, on the staircase there. That’s back in the day. Look at that kid with his fan-made press badge. That’s 2005, probably. No, that’s 2007. That’s James C.D. Robbins; he is doing the studio tour. Universe was in pre-production, was filming Season One. That was 2008, I’m guessing. This is 2008. You can see that the SGC has been turned into Icarus Base and then a little afterwards it will be turned into that Egyptian outpost for the Lucian Alliance two-parter.
Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The end of Season One.

David Read:
“Incursion.”

Brice Ors:
It was your first time on set?

David Read:
No. My first time on set was Atlantis Season Two, SG-1 Season Nine. Two, three, four, five, one. Five years in a row, I went.

Brice Ors:
What did you feel the first time you walked onto set? It breaks the magic, maybe?

David Read:
I felt a lot of the magic leave. It was replaced with cold reality. The cold reality was extraordinary in other ways because it was… Darren described this the first year he went. He went during Season Eight and Season One of the shows. He put his hand on the wall of Stargate Command. You’re expecting your hand to find cold concrete and it’s just the wall that’s in your house, or less.

Brice Ors:
It’s like wood.

David Read:
It’s not real. It’s barely wood. We call it sheetrock here. Slightly above that, like 12, 13, 14 feet up, it’s fabric that’s been painted to look like concrete.

Brice Ors:
In France, the sets, we say, sheet of paper. Plaque de plâtre.

David Read:
I don’t know why we call it sheetrock. It’s nothing solid like rock but that’s what we have over here for walls. You basically sit them in and that’s what they had there. The point of it is that the fourth wall, as we say in English, was broken. It no longer felt as real as it would after that because once you knew where the exits were and each of the doors were to get off the set, you place yourself in that space once you’re there and your perception of those spaces that you grew up with and that you’ve loved are forever changed. I’ve met a few people who came away not liking the fact that they would never see it the same again. I looked up the more common term, it’s called drywall, and apparently in French, it’s cloison sèche.

Brice Ors:
Drywall. Cloison sèche.

David Read:
It said it to me and then I pushed it again and then it went, “Cloison sèche.” “Listen to it again, you idiot. I will go slower now.”

Brice Ors:
Cloison sèche. Yes. I know what you mean by this feeling.

David Read:
I know. I was curious myself because I was like, there’s another term for it. I have a friend who puts it up for a living and I don’t even know.

Brice Ors:
I saw something, when you were working with Darren on GateWorld, you also worked on this?

David Read:
Yes, I did work on that.

Brice Ors:
The official Stargate magazine?

David Read:
Yes. I have bylines in there.

Brice Ors:
You have all the collection. I see it was 2004 to 2010?

David Read:
It was seven or eight issues. It’s one of the things that Stargate Wiki actually gets right about my entry. Stargate Wiki actually has an entry for me in there. They’re all listed there.

Brice Ors:
I saw your name on it, so that’s why.

David Read:
Yes, I took over for Darren doing the news byline for several issues because he just didn’t have the bandwidth. That was one of the first times, maybe the only time that I come to think of it, that I took over for something for him because he just couldn’t keep up with it anymore. The magazine was taking GateWorld’s news stories and repurposing them a few months later because obviously the magazine took some time to print and create and the layouts and everything, so they were always a little bit behind us. They were still like, “Well, let’s just go ahead with the source that is on top of things,” and that was definitely GateWorld. Darren always was the powerhouse when it came to creating written Stargate content. He is in his element. His space is the GateWorld news article space, it always has been, I think it always will be. I’ll sit there and I can type up an article but I’m just, “Oh my God, just finish, write already!” I’m much better verbally and conversationally, so that’s where I get my stories. Other people can transcribe. Now we’re letting computers on the back end of Dial the Gate do 95% of that work. Thank God for my transcript team, I love you all. Thank you, Jakub.

Brice Ors:
In some sort, it’s the first time fans worked for official products in a way?

David Read:
Say again?

Brice Ors:
Is it, in a way, the first time the fan base is working on official products for official things from MGM? It’s the official magazine, it’s not fan made, it’s made for MGM.

David Read:
That’s right. That was the first time that I was doing it. Darren had been doing that for years with, was it Skybox? Whoever had the… Was it? No, that would’ve been… Wait, that would’ve been Kate Ritter.

Brice Ors:
Time Zone Magazine.

David Read:
That would have been Kate Ritter for the trading card collection. That was the first time that I was working officially for MGM, if that’s what you are asking. Yes, it is. Whichever issue I started, I started working on Stargate Worlds in February of 2007. That wasn’t MGM, it was an MGM licensee – Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment – and so was this. The first time that I was actually working for MGM would have been 2015 to 2016.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It’s been a while.

Brice Ors:
When did you work on Stargate Worlds, the MMORPG video game?

David Read:
I didn’t work on the MMO. That was February of ’07 to June of ’08. I went up to Arizona and got hired for that position in January of ’07 and then they let me go June of ’08. I worked on that project 16/17 months as a lead community manager. There’s water.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I translated bit by bit before. It’s too much. How many months did you say, David? 18?

David Read:
17. That first planet was Agnos. It’s actually canon, it appears in Stargate Universe. This planet would have been called Anima Vitris.

Brice Ors:
How did it end? It was rough, I guess.

David Read:
Getting fired is rough. I was given my marching papers on the 6th or 7th of June. I found out later, a lot of it was downsizing; it wasn’t just me. I was certainly a big part of it. The person who replaced me was gone in two months. By fall of 2008, obviously, the recession hit. They say “when America gets the sniffles, the rest of the world gets a cold.” It just did a spiral. The investment dried up. By 2009, most of the people that I worked with were gone and Stargate Resistance had taken over. It was a real shame.

Brice Ors:
Was it a good experience?

David Read:
A wonderful experience. Just today I aired the…

Brice Ors:
I saw the first part.

David Read:
…second episode with Dan Elggren, who is the…how do you put it? The studio lead of Stargate Worlds. We recorded that on Monday, Katie and I, and then we posted that today. That was over two hours long. Hey, that’s a Straegis. That’s what happens when you make Furlings evil. The game was an extraordinary experience and for the rest of the year, I’m gonna be having the developers on at regular intervals to share their experiences from that title. It’s gonna be a lot of information. There’s at least eight or nine episodes to come and there’s gonna be a lot of catharsis for the team. What is that in French?

Brice Ors:
Catharsis. We’re going to talk about Dial the Gate in a few minutes. That was your first official job for Stargate?

David Read:
That was my first 9:00-to-5:00 Stargate job. That’s correct.

Brice Ors:
It’s cool when you are fun, I guess.

David Read:
You have no idea how hard it is to break into the video game industry and I just waltzed in. It was very strange seeing how hard all these people competed to be in that office. I didn’t even really have to try all that much. I wasn’t working on the title itself, I was working with the marketing team, so there is that. Just going upstairs and watching them and being a fly on the wall in all those meetings and taking it in. I talk about it a lot in both of the episodes we have published on Stargate Worlds and I will continue to talk about. There’s mini-games. That’s Tollana.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
For David, I was telling the chat, it’s definitely my mic doing the sound you hear and it’s dying.

David Read:
It’s not the end of the world, man. “It’s definitely my mic and it’s definitely fine. You’ll all get over it.”

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
A fly on the wall, in French, that’s being a mouse.

Brice Ors:
A little mouse.

David Read:
OK. Very good.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
A little mouse, that’s the equivalent.

Brice Ors:
Then after that, you worked for Propworx.

David Read:
After that, I was unemployed for 18 months.

Brice Ors:
You stayed in the Stargate field, of course, for the life?

David Read:
I was with GateWorld. After that, I was picked up as a freelancer, whatever the French equivalent is for that, for 20th Century Fox. As soon as I left Stargate Worlds, I was picked up and became part of the marketing for Stargate: Continuum. MGM didn’t have a distribution arm so 20th Century Fox picked up that catalog, the Stargate catalog, and carried it. That kept me with a roof over my head almost completely for the next 16, 17 months. Stargate really did carry me. In the meantime, I watched and fell in love with Lost.

Brice Ors:
Me too.

David Read:
You too? There we go.

Brice Ors:
I’m a Losty.

David Read:
Man, I am so Lost. Can I share my screen?

Brice Ors:
Not really.

David Read:
Can you share something if I send it to you?

Brice Ors:
No. If you have any files or link, I can switch it on my screen.

David Read:
Can I send you a file?

Brice Ors:
Yeah.

David Read:
I’d like to show you something.

Brice Ors:
Yeah, sure.

David Read:
I’d like to show you what I worked on, if I can get to it here. Where do you want me to send it to you? Just a drop box.

Brice Ors:
On the Discord.

David Read:
It’s too big. It’s a video file.

Brice Ors:
A link on the messenger?

David Read:
OK, I’ll upload it first and I’ll get it to you. Give me a few minutes. When I was with 20th Century Fox, the thing that got me hired…I’ve never shown this. You’re getting a world-exclusive here. No, it’s been ages, it has existed. I pitched to Jenny Stiven and to Brad Wright… “What happens in Stargate: Continuum, guys?”

Brice Ors:
About Ba’al?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Time travel?

David Read:
What happens?

Brice Ors:
Time travel?

David Read:
What does he do?

Brice Ors:
He changes the timeline.

David Read:
That’s correct. He changes the timeline. I had a buddy named Sam Dieter and he also worked on the video game. Jenny and I pitched to Brad… Let me back up. At the time, there was this thing called blogs. Blogs were already a thing. It was called viral marketing. I pitched this idea of a video blogger that existed in the altered reality of Ba’al’s timeline and was putting things together. At the end of the blog series, Earth would be attacked from orbit by the Goa’uld. There were 10 episodes, and what I just sent you was Episode 9. He stole a Zat and he thinks that he’s causing this attack from orbit. He saw a video of Julia Donovan on the screen. We incorporated some elements from Continuum for that. If you wanna back it up, if you can play the audio. Can you pause that real quick?

Brice Ors:
Nope.

David Read:
Can you pause that? Back that up and crank it.

Brice Ors:
You won’t hear but the chat can.

David Read:
I understand. As long as they can.

Character 1 [clip]:
Whoa. This is the point in the movie where the protagonist tells the ugly starch bureaucrats, “I told you so.” Well, this ain’t no movie and I ain’t no hero. All I know is there’s some major exploding crap raining down from the sky and something tells me they don’t come in peace. All I know is my apartment lies in shambles. Apartment two doors down from me was blown up. I survived by jumping out of my balcony and I’ve been running around ever since then. I don’t know why they’re here. Could it be possible that it has something to do with that device I found? I’d gladly give it back to them if somebody hadn’t stolen it.

Character 2 [clip]:
Get off my property.

Character 1 [clip]:
All right, man, cool. Just don’t point that thing at me, dude, whatever you do.

Brice Ors:
It’s quite in the vibes of Cloverfield. It wasn’t the same year?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I was thinking about that.

Brice Ors:
I think maybe.

David Read:
This one came out before Continuum was released.

Brice Ors:
The first Cloverfield movie.

David Read:
Quite possibly. It’s very Cloverfield vibes. I think, actually, we may have released this one the week that Continuum was released. I wrote and directed all those segments and Sam executed them with his camera. That was actually shot in my apartment complex. We brought a bunch of people over and we pretended that the world was going to hell. The resolution is awful, but it’s still cool. Brad approved all of those scripts and it’s one of the highlights of my earlier time working on Stargate because he edited me. He sent me notes and it was like, “OK. I like this. I don’t like that.” We had another guy who was in the part, we switched him out. It was funny, it was fun to get into Brad’s rhythm of how he would edit someone. It was kinda cool for a few months there being a part of that.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Why wasn’t it published?

David Read:
It was published. It was published on Blogspot.com.

Brice Ors:
Really?

David Read:
It was viral marketing. We had two or three different websites. One was the informantblog.blogspot.com, or whatever it was. That was the thing at the time, viral marketing. Jenny ran one where Sam had taken up oboe instruction. No, she had learned how to play the oboe again and she had made something for that. I think that there was a third one. These were all linking back to, and dovetailing toward, the launch of Continuum. I was paid, I think, 10,000 US for that project. It floated me for a little while back in 2000. It’d float you for a couple of months now, but it took care of me for a little bit back in 2008, for sure. It was one of those, “I have an idea,” and it was like, “Good, here’s some money.” It’s like, “Wow, how cool is that?” That was pretty awesome.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
In France, David, there was Skyblog and Blogspot, so there were the two battles. Brice had the Skyblog and I had a Blogspot at the time. So, you see? Good example.

David Read:
My dad still has his. We will be releasing the whole series this year.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
This?

David Read:
Yeah, on Dial the Gate.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Nice.

Brice Ors:
In the next couple of months, weeks days?

David Read:
Hopefully the next couple of months here. We wanted to release it for the 15th anniversary of Continuum, I think. I’ve sent you a couple of screenshots of this, Brice, so you can display those as well. These are from some of the other clips that we did. We played a little bit of time-travel hijinks. There’s one before that. That’s one of the last ones. I actually got production to send me this so that’s why I have this. [Daniel Jackson’s book]

Brice Ors:
That’s a real one?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Have you read it?

David Read:
Inside the original is a third or second or fourth edition of The Coming of the Third Reich. So, whatever.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Really?

David Read:
Yes. So, this one I went to a second-hand bookstore and put this in it.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Legends.

David Read:
Yes. This is a collection by Robert Silverberg. In it, because we don’t see the book in the movie and he’s going through it, I wanted to talk about what Daniel had written. I had no ink in my printer at the time; all I had was blue ink and the pages are blue. I wrote this thing; I wrote a whole logic for it. These are the things that alternate Daniel found and that was the thing that we made from that.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That’s very cool.

Brice Ors:
What about the second one? This one

David Read:
This one here, we took footage from “Covenant” and then took the footage from Continuum on the screen, which in itself was footage taken from “Insiders” because you have the Al’kesh followed by an Air Force fighter and they just added the Washington monument over DC. I just made these news chyrons here for that, ’cause that was her station, IWN, or the news network, and put this thing at the bottom about the president and everything else. I adjusted history a little bit when Ba’al talks with Vala or Qetesh. He says that he was on Earth in another time in another life and I assumed that he was lying to her. I assumed that he made dips in and out of Earth from time to time, having read Earth history in the future, and wanted to peek in here and there. There’s the third one after the Kennedy assassination, the swearing in on Air Force One. I sent you that image. I don’t know if you have that one.

Brice Ors:
Yep.

David Read:
This is Lyndon Johnson. My image is frozen. Hang on a second here. That’s Lyndon Johnson being sworn in after Kennedy was assassinated. There we go. As you can see, there’s a certain South African present as well. I don’t know why that’s suddenly slower. It was this whole alternate reality thing that we set up and it was ten episodes of fun. Obviously, my Photoshop skills at that point were extremely poor. You have to understand, if not appreciate, that that is 2008.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out.

Brice Ors:
There is Ba’al over here.

David Read:
What Sam has done is that he’s gone in across history. Here’s another one. He’s involved himself in the US administration. That’s H.W., George H.W. Bush, in the late ’80s, early ’90s. We wanted an excuse for why he would have the number to the White House so he could make the phone call and do it. He was planting seeds inside of the White House communication pipeline for a really long time to be able to make that phone call in the future. That’s where that comes from. What Sam has picked up on is that this guy doesn’t age; the same guy again and again. I have no idea how he figured that out. This was all the story inside of the altered timeline. What you find out, there was the tenth episode, which we never aired. It appears that he gets hit pretty directly with that giant ball of plasma. The tenth episode we didn’t air, he’s bleeding out and his feed is automatically going onto the internet. He’s not gonna have to edit it later ’cause he’s dying. These later episodes are with a better camera and he’s actually live streaming. We livestream him vanishing and the timeline resetting because SG-1 has succeeded. Katie Postma, I was talking with her a couple of days ago, she was like, “Why don’t you do an updated one, what he’s doing now?” It’s like, “No, no, no. That timeline was averted. That didn’t happen anymore.”

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That’s really interesting. Live streaming in 2008?

David Read:
It’s sci-fi.

Brice Ors:
It’s a nice idea.

David Read:
I couldn’t figure out why Ba’al had access to one of the numbers that would take you directly to the president. Henry Hayes, he’s like, “It’s coming from the spaceship.” In this alternate reality, he recreates the time device. He doesn’t need to recreate it again; it’s recreated so that our heroes can use it to fix time. It suggests that he recreated it because he was planning to continue to tweak things to his liking. If he did that, he probably made clones of himself again because he wouldn’t trust anyone but him to go to Earth and start to lay the pipeline for his eventual reign.

Brice Ors:
That was your last official work for MGM? Something about Stargate?

David Read:
Stargate Command was. Stargate Command was the last time.

Brice Ors:
At this specific time, just before Propworx?

David Read:
Yes. Then I went on to Propworx in December of 2008.

Brice Ors:
The series Stargate Universe ended in the same year? One year later, maybe?

David Read:
Stargate Universe was in production on Season Two when I started production at Propworx. I’m trying to think and search at the same time. Oh boy, there he is. I went up to Bridge Studios to start pulling pieces for sale. Oh, there you go. The SGC was gone and the only thing that was left was the spiral staircase that was a part of that whole structure. That was a big eye-opener for me that things were moving forward, because the bridge and the shuttle bay were going to be going in there and a lot of Destiny itself. That was this, what I just sent you, Brice. If you could pull this up and put it on mute for me. Don’t play the audio, just have that muted for me. Is that sharing audio?

Brice Ors:
Yep.

David Read:
No, don’t share that audio.

Brice Ors:
No audio.

David Read:
We pulled all the panels off of the gates and sold it later. The production team obviously had to go in and take everything apart piece by piece, so that’s what they’re doing. They’re taking the shells off of it. Here you can actually see the gear that made the whole mechanism work there. That was a shame to tear that all up. Those gears were made, that gear was made so that it could turn diagonally and get through the doors to the studio. That particular stage, stage four and five, or five and six, I forget their numbers.

Brice Ors:
Six and five.

David Read:
Were specifically designed to get that in there. The next 18 months of my life were spent selling all these pieces. We sold about 5,000 or 6,000 pieces over the course of 18 months and I’m going, right now, through all of my video and photography and working on creating a piece for that that’s going to come out later this year. Ut’s not going to be an ongoing series, it’s going to be a specific documentary. There will be two versions of it. There will be one that’s 90 minutes, really, really tight. The other one is going to be about three, three and a half, four hours long that just has everything in it from Propworx with all of our stories. That’s the intent of what I’m working on right now.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I would have loved to have those consoles.

David Read:
A lot of people did. I know a lot of people who went into debt buying them.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Wasn’t it a little bit sad to see all of these props dispatched all around the world and the series gone?

David Read:
It was heart-wrenching.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Wasn’t it a sad time?

David Read:
Absolutely. Definitely. I was thankful to be the one to do it. There were a lot of listings for Universe that were wrong. They were not sold by someone who knew the show as well as one of us did. I would pick things up, I would buy things from Universe, and I would find little hidden switches and things would light up that they didn’t realize worked. It’s like, “guys, you could have made so much more.” The pieces that attach over Rush and Young’s heads in space, they sold those and they had no idea that there were batteries in them. They had no idea that they lit up because there’s no switch on them. The switch is actually built into the thing itself. You can cut that there. We go on to another one after that, a different documentary. It’s all an extraordinary journey that I’ve had and I’m so thankful. I’ve been so blessed to have this experience. One thing after another, every few years.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
You’re not sure of the stage numbers, right, David?

Brice Ors:
SGC was stage 6, Atlantis was stage 5.

David Read:
I can’t remember the two stages that were next to each other that held the production offices for Stargate. I think it was 5 and 6.

Brice Ors:
Les enfants de MacGyver.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
They said thanks for the parts.

David Read:
You’re very welcome, guys. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. Thank you for buying them from me.

Brice Ors:
OK, so after that, you worked on Stargate Command, right?

David Read:
That was Stargate Command. I took a break. That was 2016 to 2019.

Brice Ors:
After the end of the show, there had been a big void with nothing about Stargate.

David Read:
That’s right. Regime change is a routine thing at MGM. I’ve gone through so many at this point. People come in, they’re like, “yes, it will be this way, it’ll be this way.” I’m like, “OK, yep, yep, I gotcha. I’ll see your successor in a few years and we’ll have another conversation.” It’s really wild that MGM is now in a place that I think is gonna be far more stable and this show is gonna be led by someone who loves the show arguably more than I do and Darren does and some of us do. I’m very excited that Martin is the one that’s been selected to convey this thing to the next generation of fans. This thing’s been around for 30 years now, the series, 29 years. I’m not necessarily gonna be watching it in 30 years, but the people who are gonna watch this one are.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
After Stargate Command, that’s when you created Dial the Gate.

David Read:
Yes.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
You made Dialing Home for Stargate Command.

David Read:
Yes.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It’s sometimes the same thing?

David Read:
I blew right through that, didn’t I? Yes. Christopher Judge and I, Jenny and I. Jenny Stiven of Clio Consulting, she was brought in to assist with bringing up Stargate Command for MGM. We got together at MGM. Hey, look there. We got to create a wish list with Chris Ottinger and with five or six other folks at the top who were responding. Chris really loved Stargate; he was great for Stargate. We got to create a wish list of everything that we would like to do. One of the things was we sat down with sticky notes. I’ve got the photos somewhere; we kept them on purpose. We created a plot board of 50 or 60 threads that could be pulled into the future and used again and that were not finished. Also, one of the things that I always loved was it’s called the… Let me see if I can pull this up. They’ve changed their name, but originally, they were called the Archive of American Television. Let me send it to you, Brice. Now they are called Foundation Interviews. This thing is a free resource of archived stories for the future and the pioneers of American television. I always wanted to create something like that for Stargate. It was gonna be them telling stories. It was gonna be much less of me engaging the guest so much, but I tend to ramble, and that’s what it became. We found a balance, I think, of an interview show, but also a show that gave the Stargate folks and fans a chance to tell some deep cathartic stories about the franchise. That’s what I adopted. Christopher and I started that with Dialing Home, and then its spiritual successor is Dial the Gate. They gave me the opportunity to carry forward with that idea. They gave us a budget for Season One and Season Two. Season Two never aired and I’m slowly, very slowly unfolding the unaired Season Two episodes over the course of a few years because I didn’t get paid for that season. Fair is fair. Don’t tell the French, they’ll spill the beans. This is actually the link that I prefer to use because this is a master archive. I haven’t looked at this since I started Season Six. I love to go through and look at all the pretty pictures. This is kind of how I look back on the franchise and say “Hey. I know that dialing device.” I am so thankful that it’s caught fire at this stage. I was doing something to keep myself preoccupied during COVID and I could finally do it because actors were forced to learn how to use a piece of technology called Zoom and it changed everything. I no longer had to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on flights and camera equipment and lighting rigs and a space to share these stories. Sometimes the reception over Zoom is crummy, but the more important thing is that we get the stories transcribed and that’s what we are doing right now. We’re about 65% of the way through the back catalog when a couple of months ago, we were 55% percent. We are cooking with gas and it’s been an extraordinary experience. I’m finding material all the time from my catalog of hard drives that I forgot that I had. I’ve been getting ready to do a celebration of Joel Goldsmith’s career and I just came across an interview that I did with him in 2008 that talks about the first few episodes of Stargate Universe. We only released as a text file, but I found the audio and I’m gonna go through it, I’m gonna clean it up and we’re gonna release that for the first time. People will be able to hear Joel’s voice in 2008 talking about Universe and that’s gonna be coming out later this year. I’m working on a documentary about Joel that’s gonna be going out first that’s about an hour and a half or an hour and forty-five minutes long that’s covering his music. It’s “The Music of Stargate: Joel Goldsmith,” and that’s what I’m really deep in right now in terms of investing my time. My hope was to launch 20 episodes of Season Six in 20 days. Today is day number 21 and today I aired the 21st episode. I aired 20 episodes in 18 days, so I met my goal. Now we’re gonna throttle back a little bit and see how things go and hopefully settle down a little bit because I think all of my transcribers are like, “we’re gonna kill you. We’re gonna kill you if you keep going at this pace.”

Brice Ors:
I am putting a link for everyone. Here we go. On Twitch. OK. If I can on YouTube.

David Read:
I so like it. Hop.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
One hour and a half, right, David, the [Joel Goldmsith] documentary?

David Read:
Yeah, it’s gonna be closer to two hours. It’s a lot of music. It’s just music and Brad and Rob have been interviewed and a couple of Stargate fans who have become composers because of Joel were also interviewed.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
All Stargate series, all the music from all the shows, David, that would be in the document?

David Read:
Yes, that is the intent.

Brice Ors:
It’s quite a shame there has never been any public release of Joel’s music. Only for Season One of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis for the pilot but not all the music. For example, each season to have all music.

David Read:
Apparently, it didn’t succeed financially enough to do it. There’s the original broadcast release of “Children of the Gods” in the United States, it’s on CD. Then Season One, they released a series of his suites, S-U-I-T-E-S, for all of his episodes from Season One. A few years ago, Brad got the original “Children of the Gods” score that Joel had composed out and available because Jonathan Glassner wanted… They paid for the music from the movie, so they wanted to add the two together because they paid for that theme. Brad released that original. Then, you’re right, the Atlantis pilot as well and then nothing from Universe, which is a crying shame because the stuff that Joel did with the Dilruba and the electric guitar in that show, it’s, in my opinion, the best music that he did, especially the ending. We actually recreated the ending recently.

Brice Ors:
Yeah, I watched the episode.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I spent so much time as a teenager to try to extract Stargate Universe music because I loved it so much.

David Read:
Preach.

Brice Ors:
Me too.

David Read:
Preach to the choir.

Brice Ors:
So about Dial the Gate, what’s next? What are you hoping for? What guests?

David Read:
There’s only one thing that’s left that I’m working on. If you want to pull up the preview earlier that… OK, so tomorrow.

Brice Ors:
This one?

David Read:
I’m having Kerry McDowell on. She is the post-production supervisor for SG-1, SGA and SGU right up until the end. She’s now a post-production producer, which is more to the financial side of things these days. She is still in the industry up there and she’s doing a bang-up job. I’m gonna have her on tomorrow. I’ve always wanted to talk with her or someone in that specific arena who pulls all of the pieces together to make the show, the show that’s gonna be going on streaming or broadcast in those days. They had to have different cuts for the music because there were commercial breaks. There are all different kinds of things going on; going off to Sharpe Sound up there in Vancouver to do the Foley and all of that together. She is a huge key to getting some great stories because she’s gonna have a few of them, I think, in terms of what it is that the show does in order to get to us. We’re having her tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Pacific and she’s gonna be live so that fans can ask questions.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Which time you said, David?

David Read:
10 a.m. Pacific.

Brice Ors:
In France, it’s…

David Read:
Later. What time is it there now?

Brice Ors:
It’s 2200. Vingt-deux heures.

David Read:
20 to 9? Or 20 to ten?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Four PM, here.

Brice Ors:
Four PM for us.

David Read:
There we go. I was gonna do the math for you.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I was checking on the internet to be sure, because there’s summer time and winter time.

David Read:
I know. I talk a lot at that time zone so I know exactly how far ahead you guys are once I unspool the math. Do you get in trouble for sharing some music? Let’s try it, we won’t do that. Will it warn you first?

Brice Ors:
I don’t know, it depends on the music. If it’s copyrighted music?

David Read:
It’s… yes, some music.

Brice Ors:
I don’t know.

David Read:
OK, let not do that. Let’s not touch that.

Brice Ors:
I don’t know.

David Read:
All right, very good. Then do this. Mute it and share the video. This is the last thing that I am working on. I think I set it to the exact time code. It should be set to the exact time code if I did my job right. There you go. Just mute that. I love how it automatically translates it into French. So, that’s muted?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Yep. It’s hidden.

David Read:
OK, this is Gildart Jackson. He obviously played Janus, as it said. He’s helping me create, as are a number of other Stargate cast, “The Stargate Timeline,” which is now more important than ever in leading up to this show, because there’s a lot of details. This will straighten out the timeline for people who haven’t had a chance to watch everything. One of the last things that I did at GateWorld, in the Omnipedia, was to create a timeline of all the events in the history of the franchise and put them together. I have taken that raw material and I have adapted it into a video presentation. Gildart is the first person who I have hired to share the stories of the history of that universe. I’m specifically getting people who, more likely than not, would have those stories in their possession themselves to be able to tell them in the voice of those characters. He is not playing Janus again, but he is. He sat down in a booth and he did that for me. He goes through the ancient history, non-uppercase-A ancient, of what happened pre-history, as we call it. Then we will move through it. My hope is to get folks like Corin Nemec and others involved to tell the pieces of those stories. That’s really expensive and I’m taking my time with it because I’m not made of money and hiring all those actors is gonna cost me a lot. I don’t take money from fans, so this is something that I hope to have done before the end of the year and we’re doing it in pieces. I need someone who has an ElevenLabs account, truthfully, to take my voice and do the whole thing so that I can plot it at least on a timeline for something that we can go in and pull all the screenshots down and start filling those details in. There are 450 entries. It’s gonna be X number of minutes long. I’ve actually already gone in and done the math in a Google Sheet where I’ve taken all of the lines of dialogue that were from the timeline and I’ve told the Google Sheet, “OK, if there’s this many lines, if there’s this many words in each of these, how many screenshots does that translate into that we need to fetch?” I know exactly the number of screenshots that I need to get. I just need someone to take my voice to lay down railroad track so that we can put this up on a board so that my voice will be in there as a placeholder so that we can build this thing out. Then I’ll get folks like Torri Higginson, she’s already agreed. Rachel Luttrell has already agreed. Rainbow Sun Francks and even one or two folks who will have one line. I wanted to stick this person in here because they were important to this episode and we still have communication. You’ll be going along and all of a sudden, “oh my god, that’s so-and-so’s voice.” It’ll be in the likeness of that character. That’s what I’m working on right now, but I need someone with an ElevenLabs subscription to let me provide my voice to do that because I don’t want anyone else’s voice in there as a temp track. That’s all it is. It’s a temporary track. I don’t need the subscription anymore; I already have one. Thank you. It’s just been sent to me. That’s the internet.

Brice Ors:
Just right now?

David Read:
Just right now.

Brice Ors:
All right, thanks to my life.

David Read:
It’s done, problem’s done. It cost a million dollars.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
So, the magic of the internet.

David Read:
That’s funny. That’s really funny.

Brice Ors:
To finish with Dial the Gate, is there any guest you would love to have but you can’t or you could not?

David Read:
I would love to get Anna-Louise Plowman.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That’s your ongoing goal?

David Read:
That is my ongoing goal and I may have an approach. It is unflattering to say, but she is my white whale, she is a slippery fish. I’ve invited her seven or eight times now. She’s very busy and she appreciates that we’ve wanted to have her on. It’s been one of those frustrations of mine; I’ve offered good money to bring her on. The further away that we move from that period, it wouldn’t make it any easier. So, RDA please. Yes, RDA. Rick is very private. Rick is very accustomed, no one tells Rick what to do. It has to be his choice. He’s been invited on repeatedly. Michael Greenburg has invited him on for me. Kate Ritter has invited him on for me.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
He’s been a bit more at conventions lately?

David Read:
Yeah, they pay him a lot of money to do that. I have paid thousands to have guests on, don’t get me wrong.

Brice Ors:
But sometimes it’s not for him.

David Read:
To secure him for a couple of hours would require a lot of money if I go the direct way, which it may come down to one day. Raj Luthra, “what if RDA was joined with someone else?” Michael Greenburg and RDA have a standing invitation together. It’s one of the things that I’ve talked about because for sure, Rick would be more comfortable with someone that he knows absolutely. I’ve dealt with this in every direction, but supine. I can only hope that he would have some kind of involvement with the new show. They’d be foolish not to. Dial the Gate being in the position that I’m so thankful to be in now, in terms of the level of exposure that the channel has had, I think that there’s a chance of it, but I’m not… It’s not that I’m gonna say that I’m not gonna hold my breath, but I am Emmett Bregman in “Heroes” chasing Jack around the SGC. Part of me hears Jack saying, “I hope shots of my ass serve you well.” The funny thing is, I’ve interviewed Rick on the USS Midway and the last words that he had were, “Do I have to move on? I wanna keep talking to this guy.” It’s a place waiting for a time. Or maybe it’s just not gonna happen. My point is that I’ve resigned myself to that not being the case. I think that we would have a good time. I think that he would really have a good time. Rick has to get to know someone a little bit first before he’s willing to go all in on that. I’ve met him two or three times, but he’s been insanely busy in those times, and as press, you stand back and let them breathe.

Brice Ors:
It’s been two hours, David. I don’t know if you are OK, if you have anything more to do?

David Read:
Non.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Do you wanna say anything more about Dial the Gate? I would like a little bit to talk about that if you may.

David Read:
I can’t see myself quitting for… Hello. I know those guys.

Brice Ors:
About the new series, about this announcement, or how it had been made.

David Read:
I was contacted by Joseph Mallozzi about a week before you saw this, maybe a little bit more, actually. He asked what my availability was and what Darren’s availability was. I’ve known Joe since before I could drink. He was finally asking me for my phone number. I was like, “OK, that’s weird. Something’s different.” We’ve always corresponded over chat and email. That was my first tip-off. I reached out to Darren and I said, “What do you think?” He said, “It’s gonna be a comic book series. They’re doing Season Six of Atlantis in comic book form.” I said, “I don’t think so. I think this is big. I think this is the one.” I had no expectations of being right, but I felt it. Brad came up on the screen and it was really great to see Brad in the Zoom. This thing is loading for me and Joe comes up, it’s great to see Joe, and then Martin Gero is sitting there. I’m like, “ha… Here we go.” Around a week after that, this went live to the world and my life has never been the same. It was extraordinary to be a part of that. This one video has just cracked a million views, not too long ago. That’s not to say anything about all the other versions that are floating around out there on YouTube and on other channels. It’s been tremendous. It’s taken me a little while to get used to the exposure. There have been some downsides of it, but I’m glad it happened now, because we have time to get ready for this thing to come out whenever it’s gonna come out. It was such a tremendous honor to be invited, to be included to do this. I can’t thank Martin and Brad and Joe enough for that. What a cool idea. They could have brought in anyone, they could have made the announcement from the Space Station, for crying out loud. That’s what they could have done and they went with these two 40-year-old guys who have loved the show since they were teenagers.

Brice Ors:
The idea was to thank the fans for keeping the lights on, I think it’s a great idea.

David Read:
It was a thank you to him and me for keeping the lights on.

Brice Ors:
It’s perfect to have you and Darren; it’s the best idea they could have.

David Read:
That’s been tremendous. We’ll see what happens. I’m hopefully gonna be involved in reporting it, I don’t see how I wouldn’t be involved in reporting it. I need to actually get my passport updated ’cause I’m nearing the six-month mark and I got an email saying, “Some countries won’t let you in if you’re less than six months.” I was like, “OK, I’ll go get that fixed.” It’s been a game changer for sure. I can’t wait. I’m just like everyone else, just dying to see what it is that he’s coming up with.

Brice Ors:
Do you have any expectations?

David Read:
I did not say that much. You were having a conversation over my head. I did not say that much information.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I’m trying to carry your emotions also.

David Read:
“He feels lustly about the project,” yes.

Brice Ors:
Yes.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
In French, you need more emotions. That’s why it takes longer.

David Read:
I know.

Brice Ors:
More words.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I have to…

Brice Ors:
More words. More words. Too much words.

David Read:
Like in Japanese, when they do the English translation, it takes more time.

Brice Ors:
The lip sync.

David Read:
Yep, exactly.

Brice Ors:
What’s your expectation for the new series? Do you have any expectation? Any hope?

David Read:
It’s gonna burn straight to hell. No, I’m kidding. I have a lot of expectations for it.

Brice Ors:
Yeah?

David Read:
I think Peter DeLuise said it the best a few days ago. ” And there was another H, something like heart or something. It has to have those three qualities and I think he really hit the nail on the head.

Brice Ors:
Hope?

David Read:
I’ve been meaning to turn it into a clip. Hope. It was not hope, but hope is there for sure. I really hope that it does return us to that kind of “Fifth Race” mindset when Jack came back down the ramp and said, “You know all that stuff that Daniel was talking about, that meaning of life stuff, I think we’re gonna be okay. I think we’re gonna be all right.” However, that’s translated in French.

Brice Ors:
It was the same in French.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The French version of Stargate was really good in terms of carrying the emotion and translation actually.

Brice Ors:
Except the jokes.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The what?

Brice Ors:
Except the jokes.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
But they found French equivalent of jokes because sometimes you cannot translate, so it was very good.

Brice Ors:
The Jack jokes are not the same in English and French.

David Read:
Some of them don’t work. Some of them are “Spank me, Rosie.” I found out you guys don’t have a word for Rosie.

Brice Ors:
In French it was very light in terms of… I don’t know the word in English.

David Read:
Of course.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Truly.

David Read:
I don’t know. OK. I trust. The point is that I have a high bar for it. If I have a high bar for any part of it, it is conveying that sense of wonder and exploration and awe about the cosmos that they were getting to in SGU, but they ran out of runway to do for SGU. I didn’t mind the dark so much on SGU because Atlantis felt, in some respects, like a Saturday morning cartoon meets 24. “Rodney, fix it. Rodney complains, Rodney fixes it.” That had gotten tiresome for me. As much as I love Hewlett, sooner or later, I got it. He’s gonna fix it. That’s one of the reasons I loved Universe so much was because it was such a dramatic turn in the other direction. I didn’t love it right away. It took me a little while once I realized what they were doing. I am hopeful that I will fall in love with this one all the same and I don’t expect to right out of the gate, pardon the pun. I expect to sit with it and spend time with it and let it consume my expectation of it into whatever it is that it is designed to be rather than what I want it to be. Man, that was so poignant.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Wow. And you made a joke that we cannot translate into French. “Right out of the gate.” It’s not the same equivalent in French.

David Read:
Right out of the gate, exactly.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
There’s no pun.

David Read:
That was a pun. That was not a joke. Do you have puns in French, technically?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Yes, a lot of them.

David Read:
They don’t really exist in the Asiatic languages, actually.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
French, the most common example. The French word for vert, there’s three ways:

David Read:
The what?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Vert.

David Read:
French word for what?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Vert.

Brice Ors:
Green?

David Read:
Which is? Over there?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
There’s three different ways to write it, but it can mean green, it can mean glass, or it can mean a worm, like an earthworm.

David Read:
OK. Got it.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Depending on how you write. You can imagine how many puns we can make with that. A lot of French words are like that, actually. French is really a pun-intended language.

David Read:
Absolutely. We have the same with ass. We have eight or nine different uses of ass. There is a Finnish comedian who pulls it all apart. “Get off my ass. Look at that piece of ass. Oh, my ass.” They all mean something completely different.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
I have to share a quick side story related to that, because I live in Alsace, in France, and a famous American restaurant, we can say brands here?

Brice Ors:
Yeah.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
McDonald’s, they made a new burger recently called the Big Arch, but in Alsatian, arch means ass. It made the news around here and everybody is laughing and McDonald’s France had to make an apology tweet saying, “Yeah, we forgot about that. We are sorry, but let’s laugh together.”

David Read:
You have a marketing team. They make more money than most people would know what to do with over there and they make that level of mistake! It’s kinda wild, man. In the US we had a vehicle called the Chevy Nova. In Spanish, nova means no go. So, you can imagine how well the…

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Ah, no go.

David Read:
Exactly right. Oh, my video feed is going down. It’s overheating. I probably need to wrap this up because you’re suddenly gonna just be hearing from me.

Brice Ors:
I just want to say Stargate_POV is in the chat. She has made a video with the comparison between French and English. It’s very on point. I will link to you later.

David Read:
I know there’s a specific one. We talk about it in the French episode on Dial the Gate, where they’re walking back to the Stargate at the end of “Emancipation,” which is the mongol episode, and they’re talking about the life-saving, potential life-saving properties of whatever plant they discovered on the Shavadai world. They remind O’Neill that he’s not gonna be able to share this with the world. He says, “Ah, there goes my Oprah interview.” Teal’c says, “What is an Oprah?” In the French version, I found out that they actually say, “Well, there goes my shot at a Nobel Prize.” I’m assuming Teal’c says, “What is a Nobel?” or something. I’m sure he probably said something like that. The whole point in terms of regioning these things is to convey the same emotional reaction. There’s a famous one from Inside Out, the Disney film, where you see the emotions inside the girl’s head. Depending on the region where the film released, the food on her plate changed to make all the kids in those particular regions go, “ugh.”

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That’s the magic of 3D, actually. You cannot do that with a live shooting show.

David Read:
You can, but you’d need different takes. You’ll never imagine my delight when I pulled up the Harry Potter European cut. “We know about the Philosopher’s Stone.” The Philosopher’s Stone? What the hell does that mean? It’s like they just recut the whole thing because the first book has two different names.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The latest one I saw, it was translation on a prop that they did CGI on just to correct. That was in the latest Matrix movie.

David Read:
Really?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It’s a small thing. I don’t know if you saw it, but when Neo is in his office as Thomas Anderson and there’s an award and the plate on the cinema was in French. I was like, “they did CG just for translation and it’s not very, very relevant to the plot.”

David Read:
They wanted to make it fit.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That changed.

David Read:
I can appreciate that.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Yes, but the thing is, I got the Blu-ray, it’s in English.

David Read:
I really do appreciate that. There you go. I wonder if it’s possible to get that. It’s one of the things that I really appreciate about films like Passion of the Christ, where the entire film was shot in Aramaic. It’s beautiful to listen to those words come out of their mouths. Sometimes in situations like this where you can have region-specific things, it’s one of the cool things that I’m looking forward to about Stargate 4. One of the first things that I’m gonna do is get everyone from all the different languages and we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna compare notes. It’s like, “OK, this is specific to my country. There is no way that they could have said that there. How did they phrase it over there?” Probably at the end of the season, I wanna sit down with people from every different speaking language and say, “OK, how does yours sound?” I know that the end result will be the same gut reaction.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
You’ll have to do a Stargate regional party episode.

David Read:
That’s exactly right. My hope at some point is to get enough people from enough of the different languages to go through a whole list of Jack-isms. Give this group of people twenty different scenes of dialogue from Jack, like the “What is an Oprah? What is a Nobel Prize?” example, and say, “OK, how did your region handle this? and did you feel that it worked? Did you feel that it did not work?” I don’t know if it’s Germany… I think it may be Germany. I know that the Czech-speaking people…I think when David Nykl speaks Czech, they just let him talk. The guy who does his dubbing just stops talking. That would drive me nuts. It pulls you out of the entertainment. “Guys, do better!”

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
They do that in France sometimes. Sometimes they keep the voice change directly. You can feel that, or for the sound, in French we’d say the onomatopée. I think it happened a lot with Teal’c, from some moments when he’s in combat, you can actually hear in French version the real voice of Christopher Judge.

David Read:
A lot of that is done in the sound studio with Walla and Foley.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
That would be complicated to do the dubbing of the battle sounds, because it’s you in a booth with a mic and you’re not on stage outside battling.

David Read:
This is why action movies do so well overseas; they don’t have to mess with a lot of that.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The thing they do in French a lot of times when people are actually speaking French in the original version, I don’t remember which movie or TV show, but they were speaking Spanish. They changed the language, just telling the character was speaking Spanish. I discovered that when I decided to look at the original version and they were speaking French. I was like, “OK. That’s clever.”

David Read:
It depends on how much money they’re willing to put into it and the caliber of people who are working on the projects and how much they’re willing to try. We might wanna explain to the French-speaking people exactly what we’re all talking about.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
In English, it’s suspension of disbelief.

David Read:
That’s right.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
The fact that they have to translate – I’m struggling to find the French word.

David Read:
My father says, “you have to buy it.” If you’re gonna sit down and take the journey, you have to be willing to take that journey. We all do this. I love it when sci-fi fans pull stories apart, especially the Trekkies. I’m a consummate Star Trek fan, first and foremost. Star Trek is in here [my heart]. For crying out loud, you’re wearing a comm badge. That’s exactly right. I know exactly what era that’s from and everything. You are the one who stops you from buying what you are being shown. I have a hard time getting my dad into Star Trek stuff now because ever since they introduced time travel, with going around the sun in the original series, it’s like, well, “if that person died, they can just go around the sun and get them back.” It’s like, “yes, they can, but they don’t do that.” He just loves pulling it apart, which is funny because he’s the guy who got me into it.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Thostick asked, in French, were my reactions in the video captured live or was I warned in advance before the Zoom conversation was recorded for the app? I knew about it a week in advance. My reaction was also fairly genuine, just hearing Martin say it again, ’cause it was the second time that it sunk in.

Brice Ors:
I think it’s the end. What do you think the next update will be? Title? Storyline?

David Read:
Regarding Stargate?

Brice Ors:
Yeah, the new show. When and what?

David Read:
I think the next thing that we will hear is probably who the lead’s going to be.

Brice Ors:
Lead role or lead directing?

David Read:
No, the actor.

Brice Ors:
The actor? OK.

David Read:
I suspect the actor will come next. Soon after that, we’ll probably have an estimated release date, but maybe not. I don’t know.

Brice Ors:
Maybe not.

David Read:
In a lot of cases, we don’t find out until long after shows are done when they’re gonna be released. It’s one of the things that I’m interested in talking with Kerry McDowell about tomorrow, is, “OK, let’s put aside all the bullshit. Why does this take so long?” It can’t be this complicated now, and the fact of the matter is it is.

Brice Ors:
There is so much to unpack.

David Read:
They have to put this whole thing together. Guys, this has been awesome. Any final thoughts?

Brice Ors:
Yeah, it’s been so cool. Thank you for being here tonight, really appreciate it.

David Read:
Thank you for inviting me. This was great. This was really great.

Brice Ors:
Welcome.

David Read:
I’m gonna ask to steal it after it’s been up for a little while. I’m assuming you’re saving a local copy for yourself.

Brice Ors:
Sure. It will be on my YouTube channel.

David Read:
The lower-resolution version will be. I’d like your permission to repost it after a certain number of days and drive the traffic back to your channel.

Brice Ors:
Sure.

David Read:
I’m just getting that out there in front of everybody!

Brice Ors:
No problem. Please be my guest.

David Read:
Matt, it is always good to see you.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Same

Brice Ors:
Thank you.

David Read:
You are such a key to everything that I do on my side. You make it really look spectacular. Brice, so do you.

Brice Ors:
Thanks.

David Read:
The two of you combined, with your visual effects, are just extraordinary. I couldn’t dream of doing any of that. The fact that you dress up my work and make it look far better than it should; far, far better than it should. I’m so tremendously thankful.

Brice Ors:
You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Me, I have to thank you both. David, to let me play with those little models like a kid.

David Read:
They’re just fan-made models. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
But I’m playing with them.

David Read:
They’re very, very, very, very accurate.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Yes. That’s thanks to Brice, actually, that I’m doing that because he was the one suggesting to me when you were thinking about having Starship in the intros and the Stargates.

David Read:
Brice, I think you may have recognized that you were doing yourself a disservice by that. I don’t know if that will translate or not, but I would have been like, “I have this friend over here who does extraordinary work. I do extraordinary work, but he does other extraordinary work.” I would have been very hesitant about pointing you in his direction because it would have been like, “he’ll never come back to me again for anything once he sees this guy. This guy can make ships fly again.” The fact of the matter is that you both have your own areas of expertise. I’m very thankful to have you both.

Brice Ors:
Together, we are stronger.

David Read:
That’s it. The dream team.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
He went back.

Brice Ors:
The dream team.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
When you asked me for Atlantis with water, I was super glad. The Atlantis intro was actually made for the Janus episode. When you told me, “I’m gonna have you invited, can you do something?” I was like, “I have to render Atlantis.” That was a lot of work.

David Read:
So, it’s done?

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It was worth it. No, the one in space. But then, when you asked with water, I immediately said “this is having a nice version on Unreal Engine.” I never did proper water on Lightwave because that’s the software I use. It’s always back and forth and that’s what I like.

Brice Ors:
Unreal Engine is faster, but it’s made for real time.

David Read:
It’s a gaming engine.

Brice Ors:
You can do renderings now, but at first it was for video games. Sometimes it works very fast.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
It’s faster for complex scenes actually. I have to say I’m using the software that was used for the actual shows, the Star Trek shows, and that’s the same software. I’m using my humble computer which is not designed for it. Lightwave 3D was designed to do on render farms and I don’t have a warehouse full of PCs unfortunately. I wish. That’s why it takes more time and that’s why sometimes Unreal Engine and the new softwares are better actually.

David Read:
One last thing to share. It’s not just you guys, this young man, he goes by Venture Pictures, his name is James Young. He is now doing some credits for me and we rolled this out today. This should be timed to the correct time code, make sure it’s on mute. He did something absolutely cool with the Biliskner; absolutely killed it.

Brice Ors:
His work is amazing. I saw all the renders he made.

David Read:
He does it comparatively in no time. That right there is… I forget the name of the tool that he’s using. Blender. He’s using Blender and it’s a free tool. It’s stellar, pardon the pun.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
He really has a nice workflow to setting up the scenes and I would love to know his computer configuration for Blender.

David Read:
I’m sure he will tell it to you.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Out of curiosity.

David Read:
If you ask for it, I’d be happy to set you up.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Yes, please. I saw the videos and I’m really blasted actually. That’s really awesome work.

David Read:
The thing that I love is that… Sure, I imagine there’s a little bit of jealousy, but at the same time, encourages you to be better. That’s what an artist should be doing with another artist, so that’s what’s really cool about it. Guys, thank you. Thank you for everything.

Brice Ors:
Thanks to you. Maybe we translate the end for French people and then I will wrap up the live.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
There’s no jealousy, actually, I have to say.

David Read:
I really glad to hear that.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Teamwork, right, David?

David Read:
That’s it.

Brice Ors:
Thank you to Matt for helping me tonight with my very strong French accent.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
You did very well actually.

Brice Ors:
Thank you, David. Anything you need, anytime. Thanks again.

David Read:
I appreciate that.

Brice Ors:
I am going to wrap up so you can disconnect when I am full screen.

David Read:
Guys, thank you. As I say on my channel, “Je te verrai de l’autre côté.”

Brice Ors:
I’ll see you on the other side.

Matt “EagleSG” Wilson:
Take care.

David Read:
Bye.

Brice Ors:
Bye. Thank you everyone. I hope the stream was good for you, the fact that it was English and French at the same time. Thanks again to Matt for helping me. When the conversation is long, it is hard to remember everything so it is great to have him. Feel free to follow me on Twitch and YouTube and social media as well. All the links are here in the description. I am doing The Pegasus Project in the Unreal Engine. It is a 3D project. We talk a lot about Stargate in each livestream and we have a live chat. You are welcome to join us and we speak English in the chat. I try to answer your questions when I can. I hope my English is understandable, with my French accent it is sometimes quite strange. Thanks a lot everyone.