Mark Nicholson, one of the people responsible for assembling Stargate’s props into physical reality, sits down with Dial the Gate to talk about some of the iconic pieces from each of the series!

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Timecodes
0:00:00 Splash Screen
0:00:45 Opening Credits
0:01:12 Welcome and Episode Outline
0:02:22 Building Props!
0:04:18 Bringing the Imagination to Life
0:05:21 3D Animation
0:07:49 Replicator Stunner from “The Return”
0:10:17 Joseph Mallozzi’s Blog Led to Connections Online
0:11:20 Virtual Boy Chip in “The Ark of Truth”
0:14:31 Mark’s Focus at the Prop Shop
0:16:14 Asgard Core Crystal
0:17:43 Ancient Crystals
0:19:05 Ori Chair LEDs
0:20:52 3D Printing
0:22:33 Physical Materials
0:24:01 Mark’s Workspace
0:24:59 Baal’s Continuum Costume
0:27:14 Alien Grenade from “The Daedalus Variations”
0:34:25 Bent Staff Weapons
0:36:47 Double-Ended Staff Weapon
0:38:07 Modified Furling from “200”
0:41:45 Repairing Props
0:44:05 Last-Minute Prop Needs
0:45:31 Disappearing Zero Point Modules
0:47:33 Evil Asgard / Ancient Space Suits
0:49:38 Miniature Asgard Suit
0:50:46 1/3 Atlantis Stargate
0:55:06 Anticipating is Part of the Job
0:56:53 Iron Man Inspiration in “The Lost Tribe”
0:58:16 Bringing the Suit to Life
0:59:36 Glowsticks
1:01:37 IMDb Profile
1:03:28 Spare Crystals
1:05:22 Achilles Details in Continuum
1:09:05 Helmets for Stargate Universe
1:10:23 No Airflow
1:12:13 Ancient Neural Interface
1:14:26 Suspending Disbelief is Ruined
1:18:14 The Ark of Lies
1:20:40 Not Enough Time
1:24:04 Improving Props Later
1:27:00 More 3D Sculpting
1:28:11 CNC Machinery
1:31:10 Ancient Stunner Part 2
1:34:55 Final Thoughts
1:39:33 Mechs!
1:40:37 Wrap-Up
1:42:56 End Credits

***

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

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Welcome to Dial the Gate: the Stargate Oral History Project. I am David Read, and I appreciate you joining me. Mark Nicholson, prop builder for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, The Ark of Truth, and Continuum, is joining me for this episode. This is a livestream, so if you have questions for Mark, go ahead and submit them to the YouTube live chat, where we are live on YouTube, so you can chat with our moderators. And then meanwhile, I’m gonna catch up with this man. Mark Nicholson, prop builder, how are you, sir?

Mark Nicholson:
I’m well. Thank you for having me.

David Read:
Thank you for joining me here. It is a pleasure to have you. I have many of your toys in my possession. I saw a comment that you made on one of my videos saying that you watched them, so you probably have an idea of some of the things that I’m gonna present to you today that’s some of the more portable stuff. And it’s a pleasure to talk with one of the builders of these things. How many of you were there? What was your place among this group? Let’s back up first. What was your function on Stargate? What did you do day-to-day?

Mark Nicholson:
OK, day-to-day, we were building props. We were in a warehouse, place with no windows. Things leave and go to set. I maybe got down to the Bridge Studios five times in five years. What I do is I get a drawing and I turn it into a real thing, and it leaves the door, and I never see it again.

David Read:
Were you guys at NORCO?

Mark Nicholson:
That was across the street.

David Read:
So, there was a different facility?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah.

David Read:
Wow, I didn’t know that. That makes sense that you guys wouldn’t have a production space on site at Bridge Studios because that was mostly for filming and administrative.

Mark Nicholson:
There was the NORCO building across the street, which the first year I was there, Season 10/3, was still Stargate sets. So, I think there was a Goa’uld shuttle and then the Ori ship sets in there. And then our building across the street from it, we had the model shop where I worked, and then there was a set decoration shop in the next section over, and then there was the construction area, which was much larger, for building sets. They were building walls and large structures and moving them, and they’d truck them all down to the Bridge, which is about 15 minutes away.

David Read:
So, Bridge Studios was a 15-minute drive. That makes sense.

Mark Nicholson:
And then the NORCO building, I think later, the TV show Sanctuary, which was made by a lot of ex-Stargate people, they took that over. It was a lot of friends across the street, and they’d come and talk and we’d make stuff for them occasionally too.

David Read:
Makes a lot of sense. You guys are a resource that they know what you’ve got and what you’re capable of, and if they want something, they can get it. The amazing thing, Martin Gero once told me this. And I’m sure James Robbins never got over it either, but Martin never got over the fact that he could write something and within a matter of days or weeks, he could hold it in his hand. You would never get over that. It’s like anything that comes out of here, within reason, it’s either gonna be a visual effect or I can will it into reality like God. You just need a production cycle.

Mark Nicholson:
There’s a lotta people involved in making that happen and a lotta talent. Back to your other question though, there was about 10 or 15 of us, depending on the year or the time it changed, ’cause I was there for five years. And it was a lotta fun. It wasn’t what I planned to do. This was a job I lucked into.

David Read:
Tell me about that.

Mark Nicholson:
I, as a young kid even, really got into 3D animation. That was a thing I saw and was like, “I wanna go do this. This is cool.” I got my hands on software for it at a very young age, did a bunch of it, and went, “Yeah, this is really what I wanna do.” Went to school for that, got a job at a game studio, was making a game. Two months later, they canceled the project and let a bunch of people go.

David Read:
Boy, have I been there. I’ve been there with Stargate Worlds, yup.

Mark Nicholson:
Did that, and then I’m looking for work again, and my school contacts me, and they’re like, “Hey, we’re looking. Someone contact us. They’re looking for someone 3D modeling.” And I’m like, “OK, whatever. I’ll go find out what it is.” And the model shop had been– They’d gotten a tool for 3D scanning people, and they were trying to build out some capability to do that.

David Read:
Humans?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah. People, but also other things. ‘Cause they were doing a lot of really cool technology stuff. And I’ll continue to talk more about that in a moment. But they were like, “Hey, we need someone who can 3D model. Also, wait, you’ve done woodworking in shops before and worked in welding shops and know how to fabricate things a little bit? Cool. We’re also super busy. We could even use someone to sweep floors.” This was gonna be a part-time thing, but you know what? Forget it. Come in next week.

David Read:
So, this is the beginning of Atlantis Season 3/SG-1 Season 10?

Mark Nicholson:
I started working, and they were really busy that season, so there was tons of work. And it went really well. They were getting me to do a few things to figure out what I could do, and also there was so much that needed doing. And then about a month or two months later, they had ordered in months ago and finally got in a laser engraver, and they were not even sure what they were gonna do with it. So, they’re like, “Hey, go figure this thing out.” So, I did, and what we figured out was we could do so much with it and it was so powerful for doing exactly what Martin Gero said, turning an idea into a thing you could hold in your hand in very short amounts of time. You see that rubber on the back of the handle?

David Read:
Yes, sir.

Mark Nicholson:
That’d take about 30 seconds to cut out. And I could make as many of them as I wanted.

David Read:
Did you cut this with it, or was this with another milling machine?

Mark Nicholson:
That was done with a milling machine, but the little acrylic shiny sections on there and that back handle thing? I did those with a laser cutter. That was that season.

David Read:
And I haven’t changed the batteries, Mark. Can you believe that?

Mark Nicholson:
I honestly don’t know what the batteries are in that, so I don’t know.

David Read:
It’s a very unusual type. I could look it up and share it with everybody, but it would bore 90% of them. But, the magnets. This thing has so much heft. It’s mind-blowing. For a long time I thought that– It’s aluminum. I thought it was etched with water, but I think I was mistaken. I think it was made by some other means. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Use the Replicator stunner as a case study?

Mark Nicholson:
I don’t recall what it was painted with. Again, one of the things is we also had a pretty good division of capabilities, so we had a full-time painter the whole time. So, his job is just to paint. It changed at one point from one painter to another.

David Read:
There’s definitely no paint, but the milling, how they produced it. The machine that probably kicked this out would had to have been some kind of industrial size, ’cause the–

Mark Nicholson:
It’s a big milling machine. It was a Haas CNC machine, four-axis. It had a 40-by-20-inch plate, so it could do really big stuff. It’s the size of a large car.

David Read:
I bet not anymore. I bet, depending on what you need from it, probably.

Mark Nicholson:
I’m pretty sure I know exactly where that same machine is right now, because some of the people who worked on that are still going. I talked to one of them late last year, early this year. Joe Mallozzi did his blog talking to people who worked on the show. I did a Q&A with him. But I also left contact information, which means now prop collectors start sending me messages.

David Read:
Really?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah. So, I’ve formed a friendship with one of them. I’ve met him a couple times whenever he’s come into town. A handful of them, over the years, people keep contacting me with stuff, ’cause I’m the only person anyone can reach who knows something about these things. So, they’re like, “Hey, I got this prop finally, because it took years to finally get it over here. What can you tell me about it? How do I access this? What were the lights?” And I’m like, sometimes I don’t know any answers. Sometimes someone will ask me a crazy question. I don’t know every answer, except maybe the one they want.

David Read:
You were part of a team over years and years. And you were part of the last iteration of that team.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes.

David Read:
It’s nuts.

Mark Nicholson:
I got one comment from an email that continues to delight me every time I read it. It was from a Virtual Boy forum, like the old Nintendo console. And they were like, “Is that chip that Merrick holds up in the Ark of Truth,” and puts it right up to the camera, “is that a graphics chip from the side of a Virtual Boy? That looks like the same thing.” And they’re like, “Hey, what is this?” And I’m like, “Huh. Yeah, I made that. Here’s everything I could remember. Go ahead and post it back on the forum. Have fun, guys.”

David Read:
Let me pull this thing up here while I’m thinking about it. I’ve got it.

Mark Nicholson:
You found it?

David Read:
Of course. You sent it to me, thankfully. But my internet is suddenly having issues. Maybe I do need that AT&T guy we were talking about.

Mark Nicholson:
There it is.

David Read:
I always assumed that it was the innards of an SD card. Because it’s about the dimensions and that would make sense. You had a Wraith device that was a claw on one end and a human USB on the other.

Mark Nicholson:
I made a bunch of USB-to-something connectors. I think there are about four or five of them, and it became a joke by the end. Internally we’re like, “USB to what now? OK, sure.” No, that chip’s actually a little larger than an SD card. And what it was was… because you always build one of something, I needed two of a chip.

David Read:
Because one is none.

Mark Nicholson:
Because if something happens to anything on set, you don’t wanna stop filming to make a thing. You always have a second one ready. I literally pulled up a parts bin full of chips and was like, “Where can I find two of it?” Found two, cool. Let’s go build it with that. That was it. That was my whole process for picking that chip, and it was about the right size.

David Read:
Then how did you know it was a Virtual Boy piece if it came from a bin full of chips?

Mark Nicholson:
They found that out. They’re like, “Here’s the picture.” I looked at it and I’m like, “Probably,” ’cause my guess is someone took a Virtual Boy because they wanted the shell for some other thing. Tossed all the innards into a bin, and this is years later, and I have no idea what happened other than that. Could be anything.

David Read:
It was probably a Virtual Boy used in production somewhere for some goggles or something.

Mark Nicholson:
But it might not have even been this show. That bin might have come from anywhere ’cause the Virtual Boy was ten years old at that point. Who knows where it came from?

David Read:
Really old. Early ’90s. So, I owned one and I saw that and it didn’t even occur to me. So, that’s pretty awesome.

Mark Nicholson:
I looked at it and I’m like, “How would you know unless you really cared about Virtual Boys?” This was super cool. It made my day. It still makes my day reading it. It’s so much fun to be able to connect these weird dots in these things that we all care about.

David Read:
Was there any specialty that you had that the others didn’t so that they came to you for X, Y or Z? Or was there, within the group of you, a smaller group of which you were a part? ‘Cause you mentioned you were a 3D artist, so you’re making CAD files.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes. A little less ’cause I was mostly doing game-ready 3D, polygon modeling as opposed to parametric surface modeling. They’re a little different. So I’d done a bit of both, but one of them is just dots and lines. And the other is math.

David Read:
I see.

Mark Nicholson:
So, parametric surface modeling is, “Hi, I’ve created a shape and it’s all math driven, so I can actually undo this math, cutting a circle through it, it’s this dimension, and I can change it on the fly.”

David Read:
That sounds like that’s your thing.

Mark Nicholson:
No, that’s the other one. I love it, but most of what I do now is games. So it’s all the other kind. Tools are getting better for mixing both. I did that, but also that laser engraver turned into my full-time job real quick. ‘Cause we were like, “The chip that that thing came out of? Yeah, I cut that too.” And it was like, “We just need someone who can draw this stuff all the time and make these shapes and do this stuff and figure out how this machine works ’cause it’s a bit finicky.” And you get to a point where it’s like, I can pick up a piece of black ABS plastic and I can be like, “I can tell how much rubber is in the mix for this and whether it’s gonna cut well or not just by looking at it.”

David Read:
I think this is another piece of the Asgard core right here. I’m pretty positive. Because they all had a uniform kind of design for every individual thing.

Mark Nicholson:
And the other thing is there’s the stuff that’s pre-laser cut. They would etch in with a router table. And then they would bandsaw the edges and then flame polish them and it took them hours and hours and hours.

David Read:
Like all of the Earth spaceship stuff from Prometheus to–we didn’t see Sun Tzu, but Hammond–you have these huge pieces of plexi. And there are, I’m assuming, CNC etchings on them, and then they light the edges which make the etchings glow. That’s where you’re getting that effect. Was it halogen bulbs? It was ceiling bulbs that they would put in on the sides and then shoot them at the thin layer and it would light up all the way through. So, that’s what’s happening here. That’s why these become beautiful when you put a light underneath them. So, look at this one.

Mark Nicholson:
I definitely remember making that one.

David Read:
So, as long as there’s a uniform light, and these cameras are not the best for this. I can’t even remember what this one plugged into, but if you look carefully through the show, you can see all of them. One of the classic ones is this one right here.

Mark Nicholson:
Whereas that looks like that was done with a router table and then has a graphic printed and applied to it. Which was pre my time.

David Read:
Yep, do you know where this came from? Do you know where this prop was?

Mark Nicholson:
No.

David Read:
These were from the Puddle Jumper. So, this would’ve been 2000 …

Mark Nicholson:
’04?

David Read:
… 2004.

Mark Nicholson:
I know who made that. I know exactly who made that, how it was done, what was going on. We tended to transition to what I was doing because it was faster and cheaper.

David Read:
I see. And there were no stickers involved, like these. So, this has also got a holographic sticker on it.

Mark Nicholson:
I did some with stickers. The episode in Season 10 where they go through the Gate and they find out that the DHD on the other end is actually a museum replica, and they’re in a museum–

David Read:
“Bad Guys.”

Mark Nicholson:
“Bad Guys,” one of my favorite episodes. The little passkeys in that are ones where I actually did a vinyl cut. It was a metallic vinyl in gold and silver, and then I cut those out for those ones. But I have a picture that I sent you of the Ori chair.

David Read:
Yes, we’re gonna cover it.

Mark Nicholson:
That is a great example of the LED side lighting that was one of the first ones where we laser cut it. We saw that and we were like, “Oh, no, this is super cool. We gotta do more of this.” So, those are all side lit with LEDs inside the chair, and then some of those pieces are all heat bent and that thing looked amazing when you lit it up. It was so cool, and this picture doesn’t quite do it justice.

David Read:
That’s the thing. There’s only so much information that you can get, unless you’re pointing a high-resolution camera at it. Amazing stuff.

Mark Nicholson:
It was super cool. But that was really the first thing we made, ’cause it was early that season that we saw this and we were like, “This looks rad.” And everyone all the way up was like, “This looks cool. We should do this more.”

David Read:
I’ve got a whole bag of these things, all kinds of different configurations and anything that you could imagine. Most of them are the same depth. But some of them are even thinner. I can never stand this one up. But crystal technology is such an integral component of Ancient tech and all of their cousins. You go back further along, earlier into SG-1, these clear pieces are our technology. These are the ones that somehow we’ve managed to fabricate and manufacture. But you go further back and the colored ones, the Goa’uld, have been using them for a really long time.

Mark Nicholson:
The funny thing is, part of that is the actual advances in literal technology that allowed us to build different props. 3D printing was another thing we were on the forefront of. We were doing that in 2007. That was an expensive printer, and we started trying to figure out what we could do with it. And again, that was where a lot of my modeling skills would come in, and I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, we can just go build this and that.” Make stuff. But the laser engraver ended up being a large part of what I did all the time. So, making chips, making crystals, making masks for painting, all sorts of stuff. We prototyped a thing for etching circuit boards, where the electronics designer would give me a file so I could cut out the pieces. He’d put the Mylar on the thing, put the solder paste on top, pull it off, drop all the chips, and just put it in the light oven, solder everything, done. Which is a technology that’s absolutely common now.

David Read:
That’s nuts.

Mark Nicholson:
But we could do that, and he could hand it to me, and I’d have it back to him in– It’d take two minutes to cut and another 10 minutes to clean all the bits and pieces out. It was so fast and so easy. Someone would come and be like, “I need a disk out of plastic, and I need it to be three inches on the outside and one inch on the inside,” and I’d be like, “OK, cool. Here you go.” I’d do it while he was standing there.

David Read:
What materials did you guys have to work with? Aluminum, plexiglass?

Mark Nicholson:
Acrylic–

David Read:
What did you keep in stock? Or acrylic?

Mark Nicholson:
Acrylic, ’cause the names are actually really important, ’cause we could cut acrylic, half-inch and lower. Half-inch acrylic was a little hard on the laser cutter, but we could do it. A lot of the wood stuff was a high-quality birch that they always kept in stock because it was free of knots and really, really easy to work with. So the birch was the wood we were using all the time. ABS, which is a specific kind of plastic. Most people will know it from the Lego brick stuff, or what we 3D print things with. So we always had that in stock. We had a few other things. But the problem is some materials don’t laser cut well ’cause you’re burning it, so neoprene, we discovered, cuts beautifully, also releases highly acidic, toxic gas that you should never be anywhere n–

David Read:
It’s not good to breathe.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s not good for metallic things either. So, it was like, “Let’s try it. Oh, wait, no, we just found out. This is really bad. We should never do this again.” It cut beautifully though, and it was like, someone could probably figure out a way to do it, but not without a lot of scary safety stuff.

David Read:
Was there anything that you had to cut with special masks?

Mark Nicholson:
You have a picture of my workspace there. If you load it up, you can see that there’s a cage on the left there with the blue machine down there. That’s the laser cutter.

David Read:
Blue machine, do you hear it? In here? This thing.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s in its own room so that the air isn’t getting out, ’cause even with its own ventilation, it was enough, and there was a little fume hood up at the top as well. It was never a good room to be in. I laser cut leather, which smells like burnt flesh or hair, so that’s fun. Doing that for three days straight… That was interesting.

David Read:
I’ll bet it was, Mark.

Mark Nicholson:
Baal’s costume from Continuum, where he’s got the black with all the little holes all through it?

David Read:
The pieces all the way down.

Mark Nicholson:
It looked great, so it was worth it, I guess. Laser cutting rubber was really problematic, but we could do it. It would be a lot of work. It would smell awful, and it’d be a lot of extra work afterwards to try and clean it up. And obviously, anything like wood, you get charred edges, so you gotta clean it before you wanna handle it, ’cause it’s ash. It’s not good for you. The stuff’s not nice to work with. It was one of the reasons why I don’t really wanna continue prop building. It’s a really toxic environment.

David Read:
Literally. How often would you be working with Valerie Halverson? The costume designer, for people not in the know.

Mark Nicholson:
I worked with Val on that specific Baal costume, and I think I saw her a handful of other times.

David Read:
And that was it? OK.

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah. James Robbins, the art director? We’d see him once a year. Our lead would go down to the Bridge for meetings every day or two all the time.

David Read:
So, evil Kenny.

Mark Nicholson:
Kenny and Gord would always be going down to the meeting.

David Read:
Gord Bellamy. OK.

Mark Nicholson:
Gord Bellamy would be going down for meetings. Kenny would come and see us all the time. Seeing Kenny, he’d be there at least every week. But James coming over to the shop? No, almost never happened. We’d see him once a year. Val coming to the shop was rare. And then figured out a little while later that her brother-in-law was my old math teacher in high school.

David Read:
Vancouver was a small town then.

Mark Nicholson:
No. It really wasn’t, ’cause that was in a suburb of Abbotsford, way out where I grew up. And her and her sister, nothing alike. It’s very funny.

David Read:
Keep on bumping into people. It’s so amazing.

Mark Nicholson:
I bump into people all the time. I don’t even think about it anymore.

David Read:
Is a memory coming up?

Mark Nicholson:
Not very strongly, which is why it’s weird, ’cause I’m like, “I think I’ve seen this before,” but wow, I definitely haven’t seen this in what is now 20 years?

David Read:
See if anyone in the chat gets it. I’m curious.

Mark Nicholson:
This is actually the biggest problem with talking about it all now is I’ve forgotten more than I remember.

David Read:
The thing about this is you’ve got this piece on the top, it’s got layers in it. So, as the light hits it differently, different pieces of the orange glow through. And you’ve got the text on the side here, and then you’ve got a different material on the bottom, which has actually not aged well. It’s become really sticky. There’s an adhesive on the outside of this for some reason; there was never anything there, but it’s deteriorated. Maintaining so much of this stuff, because oxygen deteriorates. I don’t have a nitrogen cabinet to keep some of this stuff. But there’s so much that’s involved there. Genii grenade? No, Antony, the Genii grenade is here. No, it’s not a Genii grenade. It’s a Wraith grenade. Never mind. So, this is a Wraith grenade, and that was made in 2004. So, it is–

Mark Nicholson:
Show me the bottom of that thing? Some memories are coming back. I think that bit that goes across was a laser-cut plastic piece that we glued on, or something.

David Read:
Really?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah.

David Read:
This whole thing, the milling behind this is absolutely nuts. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s got it. This was the unnamed alien race’s grenade from “Daedalus Variations.” He rolls it onto the floor and then it goes boom. The big white creatures with the red light in their face, and, “Rawr, ratith, rah.”

Mark Nicholson:
Those guys.

David Read:
Exactly.

Mark Nicholson:
I remember this now.

David Read:
They made a comics about ’em.

Mark Nicholson:
So, that, or something like that, is a great example of how much time I spend with things like this. Someone would go, “Hey, we’ve got this thing. We’re halfway through. Can you make this one bit for us?” And I’m like, “OK, cool.” I make it that day. We put it on maybe the next day. The third day, it’s gone. And I’m working on six other things at the same time, so it’s like, “How do I remember these things?”

David Read:
You mean it’s in storage?

Mark Nicholson:
No. It would go to set, and then it would go in storage, and I’d never see it again. There were some props where you’d see it for a few minutes and then it’d be gone forever.

David Read:
That makes a lot of sense.

Mark Nicholson:
That was actually one of the reasons why I started being intentional about taking photos of things, because no one had a record of everything we were building, and I was like, “Why? You’re gonna need this.”

David Read:
That’s right. The production department, especially the drafts people who were building all the sets, they had reference material for everything they created before they struck it, because you couldn’t store it. There were no Tupperware containers for that, and you guys were Tupperware City when Propworx moved in with my team to take everything away. A lot of the larger stuff, we just couldn’t move it. I was like, “That’s Thor’s bio pod from ‘Nemesis.'” And my boss was like, “It won’t sell.” And he was right. And we took a couple of larger pieces, and they went for nothing, because crating them was hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to ship to the customer. It wasn’t worth it.

Mark Nicholson:
Also building a crate for them. Great example of that, the staff weapon. Everyone knows what it is. There was only ever one that actually did the mechanical opening and closing. And for the entire run of the show, that was only ever a front half. There was never a full staff weapon that did that. But then, after SG-1 wrapped, we were still working on the other stuff, but they were like– MGM calls up and they’re like, “We want the working staff weapon that opens and closes, the whole thing.” And that doesn’t exist, and they’re like, “Build it.” So we put it together with a back.

David Read:
Was this before the movies or after them?

Mark Nicholson:
Probably around the same time.

David Read:
Because I’ve seen that one. It was sold to a private customer. The head, it would mee myu. That was never screen-used?

Mark Nicholson:
No. MGM wanted one to put in their office. I’m surprised–

David Read:
Maybe it’s a different one, then. We sold one that was full length, not the Sodan ones that I have here, where the end mechanically opened and closed, and we stored the battery in the bottom where the liquid naquadah cell was supposed to be, that purple thing. You would pop it off, and the batteries were in that.

Mark Nicholson:
No, there was only ever one of those.

David Read:
Then we sold it. MGM didn’t take it, and it was in a custom box.

Mark Nicholson:
Weird. Yes, it was in a custom box. I remember how long it took to build the custom box for it.

David Read:
You and I have a lot of text messages to exchange in the future, sir, so there’s a lot there.

Mark Nicholson:
We will do that. And this is why I’ve talked to a bunch of prop builders or prop collectors, and they’re always like, “I got this,” or, “It’s in this way.”

David Read:
It was never screen-used. And I know who has it. I can talk to them. Interesting.

Mark Nicholson:
But no, that thing was together for– We got it working and the amount of time between getting it done and putting it in the crate was half an hour. And then we put it in the crate, never to see it again.

David Read:
What, you assembled that staff weapon in half an hour?

Mark Nicholson:
No, no, no. I’m saying the time between finishing assembly and crating it to never see it again was only half an hour.

David Read:
I understand.

Mark Nicholson:
We finished putting it together, then we shipped it off forever. But the cool part was I had some family come in to visit. They were out of town, and they came in to have a tour of the shop right in that half hour, so they could see it working.

David Read:
Aw, that’s cool. Were they fans of the show?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah.

David Read:
So, it meant something to them?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah. They knew what it was, and I’m like, “This didn’t exist half an hour ago and it will never be in town again.” My understanding was it was gonna get shipped down to LA.

David Read:
It was not. Sorry, everyone. I don’t know why, but my hot keys are doing that, but I’m trying to pull up– I wanna see if you and I can dispel a couple of myths together.

Mark Nicholson:
Rad.

David Read:
A huge majority of the Stargate prop images online are images that my team took. All of these on the white, my team took all of these. This was one of the staffs here, Ma’Tok. That comes from the movie. That term has never been used in any dialogue here. This was one of the ones. We got a huge stack of them from Bridge where this was leaning up against the wall in this direction. You can tell the core inside of it melted. The heat made it bend this way. You’ve got a diagonal swoosh now.

Mark Nicholson:
I remember seeing some of those. I remember seeing the bent ones.

David Read:
So, my understanding was, because you weren’t here, you may not be able to tell, but for a long time, in most of the seasons early on, when the staff weapon opened, it was actually a visual effects shot. So, it wasn’t done mechanically in any way.

Mark Nicholson:
The people who designed the opening and closing on it started on Season Four or Five.

David Read:
OK. So, anything before that for a staff weapon– Because the big cannon that’s been used since Season One actually did the open and close–the cannon that you could position and move. We sold that one as well, and that had a lever that we twisted, and the four ends of it would open and shut. But I guess this was so small. Here, this is the butt end of it, so that’s where the liquid naquadah was stored.

Mark Nicholson:
So, I might be wrong and someone made a working one before that, but I know the people who designed that opening and closing mechanism only started on Season Four or Five.

David Read:
I’ll ask Kenny.

Mark Nicholson:
So, Kenny might know. The person who designed it was someone I was talking to earlier this year. I don’t wanna name them because they’ve never expressed an interest in it, so I’m being polite.

David Read:
You and I can gossip offline.

Mark Nicholson:
Hey, everyone: By the way, all the people who don’t do interviews and talk about this, they don’t wanna do interviews and talk about this. Don’t worry about it. If you really wanna know, I’m OK to be an intermediary for it. I’ve done it before. If you have questions, you can find me and ask me. I don’t mind.

David Read:
We’re gonna share his information. So, his website is confracto.com. We’re gonna get into some of your other work here at some point in the discussion. But there was another staff weapon, I think it was just designed for concept, and production took a look at it and went, “No.” It was just two ends of the front, of the top here and then this middle piece here, and then on the other side, and it was only four and a half, five feet long. And they’re like, “No, that’s not what we want.” So, we sold that at Propworx. It’s actually in our catalog as a concept. Like I mentioned, we’ve never seen this on screen, not in any work that I could find. But we sold it because it was cool. And we found it hanging above the shop on fishing wire.

Mark Nicholson:
Sometimes the other aspect of that is we plan things and then they don’t turn into a real thing. We build stuff and then they’re like, “Oh, no, we’re not doing that.” And then the frustrating and sad aspect is sometimes you spend two weeks building a cool thing and then they’re like, “Nope, ax it.” And then it’s a busy shop, you don’t have time to clean it up. So, it’s sitting there reminding you that you don’t get to build this cool thing for weeks before you’ll get even time to clean that space.

David Read:
And then that’s it. Then it’s all over with.

Mark Nicholson:
Which is sometimes sad and crushing and it’s like, “Ah, I cared about that thing. That was a lot of fun.”

David Read:
That’s it. Do you remember this guy?

Mark Nicholson:
Yes, I do.

David Read:
So, who turned him into a Jaffa? Whose idea was this? This confounded us forever, Mark. This is actually from a video. Someone has screen capped my video and gone out of their way to make a leaf symbol for it. That’s what was really tripping us up because we’re like, “OK, why would someone go to this much trouble unless they were, A, making it for a production meeting that was never used, or B, just effing around?” Was that you?

Mark Nicholson:
It was just effing around.

David Read:
Did you do that?

Mark Nicholson:
I was not the instigator of that. But I remember it happening. I don’t remember whether I made that leaf or whether someone else made the leaf, but I remember that–

David Read:
‘Cause someone had to design it.

Mark Nicholson:
It was just something someone whipped up in a couple of minutes. This was all very effortless, and it was like, “We wanna display things.” ‘Cause we had a room at the front where there’s some display stuff. I have a picture of a few of the things.

David Read:
Including the tentacled Ancient drone weapons.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes. That thing was wonky.

David Read:
It was on some kind of a pedestal underneath.

Mark Nicholson:
It was on a hanger so it could hang because it was all floppy and wobbly, not something you could put down on the ground without it getting damaged in some way.

David Read:
That’s the thing.

Mark Nicholson:
But no, that was done as a lark.

David Read:
OK. That makes me feel so much better here. I’m trying to pull them up.

Mark Nicholson:
Do you see the smile on my face? That’s the smile everyone had when we were putting this together.

David Read:
There he is.

Mark Nicholson:
This is so goofy and fun.

David Read:
So, this belt is a Wraith belt from “Defiant One.” That’s that material. And then it’s got Jaffa gauntlets and a Jaffa knife. We kept him together as best we could. We weren’t gonna pull him apart because they’d obviously made some kind of a mannequin or a PVC-pipe-reinforced thing underneath for him and we have some other Furling stuff that we’ll show in a little bit that you sent me. And that was basically it.

Mark Nicholson:
There’s a foam mannequin under there. We actually scanned these people so we could build the rest of the suit around them. I remember this now. Again, this is almost 20 years ago.

David Read:
Man, that’s nuts.

Mark Nicholson:
So, they were like, “Oh, yeah. No, we’re gonna put him on the thing.” And then I think I know who started it, but it was done for fun. I’m surprised. I’m actually a little shocked that years later it was still together.

David Read:
We were careful. We only sold it in 2011.

Mark Nicholson:
But that’s what I mean. It went five years with no one pulling that apart.

David Read:
That’s true.

Mark Nicholson:
That’s what surprises me, at no point during the rest of the show were all those Jaffa pieces needed for anything, where they would have been like, “Oh, yeah, pull it apart. Let’s go.”

David Read:
So much of the Jaffa stuff for Continuum was brand new. I sold generations of Jaffa armor going back to “Children of the Gods.” I had pieces with the actors’ names on the inside, of the stunt people, and it was from 1997. And we combined suit after suit after suit, and we had a leftover thing of pieces at the end. None of these things are like the other, ’cause everything was reiterated as they went forward and they made new stuff as far as Continuum went, but it was pretty extraordinary, the collection of items that you guys accumulated over 17 television seasons. Just madness.

Mark Nicholson:
Some of it degrades. And again, over 10 years, the number of things I repaired because they were made with materials that don’t last.

David Read:
Like baby monitors?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah.

David Read:
Your worst nightmare, a terrible example of a prop.

Mark Nicholson:
God, that thing. Everyone working on it is like, “This thing’s so dumb. This thing’s so dumb.”

David Read:
So, the top was a Genii– This here was built– I’m pretty sure this was made or taken from something else that was made for “Underground” in Season One, but the back is a baby monitor. And I assume in Genii parlance, it’s a battery pack and a range extender because they were talking through the Stargate to their planet. But it’s a painted baby monitor. That’s it.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes. And no, none of us who are building these things like it when we have to do stuff like that, but it happens. The communicator in Phantom Menace is just like a ladies’ razor with a few bits and bobs on it. On screen at a distance, it looks fine.

David Read:
That’s it.

Mark Nicholson:
Sometimes you build things because it works, and that’s the budget and time you get.

David Read:
Absolutely. I wanna start getting to some fan questions right now and then move into the slideshow piece in a little bit here.

Mark Nicholson:
You’ve gone robot voice.

David Read:
Testing, one, two. Can you hear me OK now?

Mark Nicholson:
Is it better? I still see warning signs on your little icon in the corner. Cool.

David Read:
Really? I apologize. I don’t think my guy here is testing my internet connection yet. But can you hear me OK now?

Mark Nicholson:
No, you’re still a little bad.

David Read:
Really? You’re coming through OK.

Mark Nicholson:
The feed I’m getting of the video from you is also– OK, it’s getting better now. My internet connection’s unstable.

David Read:
Is it?

Mark Nicholson:
Let me try turning off my VPN to see if that helps.

David Read:
VPN, OK. You may wink out.

Mark Nicholson:
Testing. Still here?

David Read:
You’re still here.

Mark Nicholson:
Great. Never mind.

David Read:
You said earlier something along the lines of, we try not to or we don’t want to have to make something in the middle of production. Was there ever a point where production was going and they said, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, Mark, we need this now?”

Mark Nicholson:
All the time.

David Read:
What do you remember?

Mark Nicholson:
Constantly. Hold up any of those chips you had. Pick one. No, any of the ones that don’t have the printed stuff, that’s right there.

David Read:
Mark!

Mark Nicholson:
Come on. Gotta get the right ones. It’s OK. That stuff. I’m pretty sure with both of those ones, this is an actual example of something that happened, because what happens with small props like that on set with a whole bunch of people is they are smaller than someone’s pocket.

David Read:
And pockets have holes. And stuff walks. Stuff disappears.

Mark Nicholson:
I can see that ZPM on your shelf there that I think they only ever made three of?

David Read:
The full ones?

Mark Nicholson:
Not on the top.

David Read:
The battery-powered ones by the end? ‘Cause those were replaced by air piston ones earlier.

Mark Nicholson:
No, the big orange crystal thing on the other side of you.

David Read:
The Zero Point Modules?

Mark Nicholson:
Yes.

David Read:
Yeah, for sure.

Mark Nicholson:
I think they made three.

David Read:
Yes.

Mark Nicholson:
And by the end we only had one.

David Read:
Which is why we only sold one. We only had one of the fully contained ones, and we had one or two that had the cable run through it so you could dial the intensity as it was dying. And then we had a couple of breakable ones with the candy glass, at least one. The others walked and we don’t know what happened to them, but we knew they were there.

Mark Nicholson:
We don’t know what happened to them. They were gone before I got there. Really important props that went missing early on.

David Read:
The only one that I do have was the one that Rodney receives at the beginning of “Siege Part 3.” “Your ZPM, sir.” And with the crate, you open it up, ZPM unit, and you pull it out. That whole self-contained piece we sold. Man, I wanted to hang onto it and buy it for myself, but I couldn’t. I wanted a fan to get it. That was the frustrating part about my job, was that so much of this stuff came through and I’m kinda like the drug dealer and addict at the same time. I did set aside things for myself here that we had eight of them. And I’m like, “OK, I’m gonna set one aside for myself.” And then we would watch what it went for, and then I would pay that.

Mark Nicholson:
I remember on the last season also, looking at some of the Propworx auctions and seeing what things went for and being shocked at how far off the prices were from what it actually costs to create them, or how much work went into them. Because how much work goes into it is actually the cost, you’re paying people’s hours.

David Read:
That’s correct. Let’s actually get to one of those as a case study, because I’ve got an example that we can overlap and talk about here. And where did it go? It’s a Universe question. OK. Antony: “Were you involved in the ideas and designs for the Ancient spacesuits that were used first in Atlantis as the Vanir, the evil Asgard, in Season Five?”

Mark Nicholson:
Yes. I was.

David Read:
What can you remember about it? Because according to Joseph Mallozzi, he said it was $100,000 per suit for R&D, and John Lenic confirmed, “Yes, and we had three of them, so it was $300,000 to develop those things.” 30 different pieces that all came together, one of which I still have. It’s not technically the suit, but it was part of the suit because it had attachments here for it.

Mark Nicholson:
Do you still have a good glow stick in there?

David Read:
I have a bad glow stick. But you guys designed it to fit glow sticks, which was brilliant.

Mark Nicholson:
‘Cause that was the hacky thing that came up at the time.

David Read:
That’s it, you make it work. Tell us about that.

Mark Nicholson:
At that point, that was the biggest thing we’d ever made. It was a lot of extra work. I remember working a 14-hour day on my anniversary and my wife not being happy with me. But I also remember how much that really solidified our team. Everyone came together and we really made an incredible thing in a short amount of time. I remember doing a lot of bits and pieces for it and detail work. I remember we also, after that, did a whole bunch of conversion of our digital files that we’d CNC molds out of, and turned that into the beginnings of a file we could hand to the visual effects team and be like, “Here you go. We’ve already made it.”

David Read:
Yes, because we see them fall out of their ship and go through the roof of Atlantis, of one of the towers. And you could just take the same asset and give it to them.

Mark Nicholson:
And then we’d also 3D-scanned the painted version and we could get the paint material and transfer it onto the model and you’d get all the aging and the paint done on there. One of the photos I sent you was a really tiny guy next to a penny.

David Read:
I didn’t know this existed. This holds up completely at how small it is.

Mark Nicholson:
He was four or five inches tall. But this is a really good example of stuff that’s never meant for screen, never meant for anything.

David Read:
Was it a study model? Is that what he is?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah, but it’s also the shop showing what we can do. It’s advertising. So, you can go, “Hey, we can do this.” And because we worked on other shows occasionally, we actually did something like that for Night at the Museum 2 ’cause it was filming up the road, where they– I never actually watched the film, so I don’t know how it played out. But the Owen Wilson cowboy guy, they made a little three-inch scan of him.

David Read:
Extraordinary. There’s some amazing stuff that you guys put out. Let me circle back around here and have a look. Lockwatcher: “Can you tell us any story behind the one-third Atlantis Gate built for “The Shrine” and how the scenes were shot?” So they took a third of the Atlantis Gate, or maybe a little bit more, because there was no location Gate. They never built one. It was why we rarely saw it because it was always CG. But at some point during production, either Season Three, Four, or Five of Atlantis–

Mark Nicholson:
Four, I think.

David Read:
Was it Four? So it was reused for “The Shrine.”

Mark Nicholson:
‘Cause we built it for that. The episode where they’re on it in the flood.

David Read:
That’s “The Shrine.” That’s in Season Five.

Mark Nicholson:
Was it? OK. That was what we built it for. So it was built for, “Hey, we actually need them all on top of it, and it’s gonna be in the water, so we only need to build the third.” And then we built it for that, ’cause there was no location Gate for that show. It was all CG or never shot. And then afterwards, we did actually design it with the intent of, and so it had a stand that you could put it on its side.

David Read:
So you could use it, not in forced perspective, but in actual shots.

Mark Nicholson:
They would use that half of it in actual shots and be like, “Here’s a little bit of the Gate as we all walk out.” So, in episodes filmed after that, I don’t know what the chronology of airing is.

David Read:
You definitely see it in the series finale, I can think of it right now, because there’s a Gate aboard the Hive Ship. But that was a great piece, and it’s one of those instances where that Atlantis Gate room, or the Gatrium as the production liked to call it, was used for– The one thing that I can think of is the lunchroom. But I guess they couldn’t or didn’t want to damage the Stargate that was used in that, ’cause they could’ve easily put a rig up and shot on top of it. But instead someone was like, “No, let’s go ahead and build a separate one that will withstand the hold of these actors.”

Mark Nicholson:
No, but to take the Gate out of the Gate room, it’s connected to the room.

David Read:
That’s what I’m saying. You could film on top of it, and just fill in the space.

Mark Nicholson:
You couldn’t flip that room.

David Read:
Fill in the space around it.

Mark Nicholson:
Water.

David Read:
Wasn’t it a fish tank? Didn’t they use forced perspective on that?

Mark Nicholson:
To get up to that level, the ground floor that that Gate’s on is already six, eight feet in the air. So, to build a tank into your set and destroy your whole set to do it, it’s preposterous. No. Could you? What’s the actual cost to do it? How long would it take? How would it affect the rest of our filming? Because we’ve only got one of that set. We can’t stop filming in there all the time. We need a tank, and we can’t build a tank in our set. These things are heavy.

David Read:
I didn’t realize that the Gate was actually submerged. I thought they used forced perspective with a fish tank in front of the camera. I know for some shots they did where it was under the water.

Mark Nicholson:
That one where they’re all on it, they’re in the water. That was why we built that third of a Gate, because we actually needed to put it in water.

David Read:
I didn’t know that.

Mark Nicholson:
That’s what it was for.

David Read:
I know that they used a fish tank for some pieces, ’cause there’s behind-the-scenes footage of it in the DVD. The techniques that they use for all these different shots, probably to get the camera underneath because there’s debris and muck, maybe that’s what that shot was for. It’s amazing stuff.

Mark Nicholson:
The other thing is, I don’t know how they’re gonna shoot it. I’m not at a pay grade that’s gonna ever find anything out. We just get told what we’re building and it’s like, “OK, cool.” Learned really early on that you’re building this to facilitate a director’s whim.

David Read:
That’s it.

Mark Nicholson:
Which means if they use it, that was their call on the day. They might get on set, in the scene, do it once and go, “No, this isn’t right. We don’t need it this way.” And it’s their call and it’s correct for them to be able to do that. As long as we’re getting paid, that’s all cool, because we made the work they asked us to, we should get paid. And that was happening. But also, they’d be like, “Oh, we need the front of this thing,” and I’m like, “Cool, let’s build the back anyway, ’cause they’ll need the back,” and they always did.

David Read:
Anticipating is part of your job.

Mark Nicholson:
Anticipating was a big part of the job, anticipating what kit to take with the prop for repairing it on set. Do we have spare parts? Do we have the right kind of glue and tape and materials to hold this thing together that’s held with glue and tape and materials? Spares.

David Read:
Would you guys rotate in terms of who was dispatched to be there on set this the props? In your time, was that always Kenny, or always someone specific?

Mark Nicholson:
Kenny’s the prop master, so he’s usually on set. There are prop people who are separate from us who are the handlers for all the other props and also our props, who are always on set. But yes, sometimes there would be builders going with specific props that needed it because two of the guys were reasonable puppeteers and actors on their own and have done other things. And another person had transitioned from on-set props to building, so he was also familiar with it. So those three guys were the most common to go with props.

David Read:
It made sense then.

Mark Nicholson:
So, occasionally other people would go if something called for it, but it was usually one of those three guys going with it.

David Read:
The amount of stuff. Your staff must have been bigger than I realized then in order to pull all of that off, especially for when the two shows were running simultaneously. The Asgard suits that you guys built for “First Contact” and “The Lost Tribe.” When you guys finally built the full-sized ones, and you saw them lit, and you saw BamBam and his guys inside of them, what did you think?

Mark Nicholson:
That photo of BamBam that I have in there was the first picture I saw of it from set all together with someone in it. That was incredible. That was a feeling. And it was also very strange, ’cause right then was when the MCU’s Iron Man just came out. So, I was doing this, and then I went to the theater and saw Iron Man. And I’m like, “I think we did pretty good.”

David Read:
And in “The Lost Tribe,” they use a lot of Iron Man-style imagery with Michael Shanks’ and David Hewlett’s faces up close and the CG renderings of the inside of that thing …

Mark Nicholson:
The HUD.

David Read:
… over the top, because Iron Man had just come out …

Mark Nicholson:
It literally had.

David Read:
… six months before. Mind-blowing.

Mark Nicholson:
‘Cause we were building that, again, in May was when we were assembling it, and then they shot it in June.

David Read:
Middle of the season.

Mark Nicholson:
I don’t know when Iron Man came out. Let’s go find out.

David Read:
I am surprised. You see these black strips here?

Mark Nicholson:
Yep.

David Read:
Those are zip ties. I always thought that those were there for repair. I didn’t realize that they were there from the very beginning. Interesting.

Mark Nicholson:
Iron Man came out May 2nd, so it would’ve been right before we built this. So, I would’ve been building this and gone and seen Iron Man and been like, “We’re doing all right.” But then seeing this, that photo was the first time I’d seen someone in the suit moving around and it was like, “Oh, yeah.” I know some of our guys had gone over to manage those pieces and come back with those photos.

David Read:
I would be so wanting to make sure– Part of me would be like, “OK, one of us has to get into this thing to make sure that we’re right, that nothing is missing.” But the wear–

Mark Nicholson:
I’m trying to remember if any person from the shop got in. I think we did a couple bits of parts. But not whole people.

David Read:
But the distress that you’ve put into it. I thought that most of the distress was made for the versions that were used on Destiny, but looking back on this, a lot of it was created for the first episode. I mean, they’re old-looking.

Mark Nicholson:
They’re very old and worn-looking.

David Read:
Man, oh, man. And you had the glow sticks in …

Mark Nicholson:
Glow sticks.

David Read:
… the arms as well?

Mark Nicholson:
Yep. Trying to get power down there, a wire while someone’s moving around where you gotta have a whole battery pack in there.

David Read:
There’s one here and then there’s one here.

Mark Nicholson:
My favorite thing about these suits was James Robbins’ original concept art for them. Someone printed it up at one-to-one scale, so a big, six-foot-tall version of it, and we put it at the end of the hallway where the stairwell is. When the whole shop’s dark and there’s just light at the end of the stairwell, there’s this big, black silhouette of this guy at the end of it. The number of people that literally spooked… It was so much fun… And that stayed there.

David Read:
Had that stayed there until the end?

Mark Nicholson:
No, it was a printed thing on the wall. But no, that stayed there the whole time. That was a lot of fun. There was the Wraith victims, the desiccated corpses. Those guys were hanging on the wall in a different spot. They were …

David Read:
Yeah, “Aurora.”

Mark Nicholson:
… there the whole time. They were old friends.

David Read:
And we sold your old friends. The Aurora stasis pods with many Ancients in them. Or are you talking about the Wraith victims with the skeletal…

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK. Ah, you got those too.

Mark Nicholson:
The really desiccated-looking people where they’re just sucked dry. Those are old friends. There was an actual medical skeleton. You have that picture of my workspace and right next to where the camera is, there was a skeleton hanging there the whole time.

David Read:
Let’s see.

Mark Nicholson:
He was an old friend.

David Read:
Let’s see if I can find that real quick here.

Mark Nicholson:
I don’t think he’s in any of the shots but–

David Read:
You’re saying he’s basically there?

Mark Nicholson:
From where that picture was taken, you could reach out and touch him.

David Read:
Man. Bernd Backhaus: “Mark, why don’t you have an IMDb profile and should we add it for you?” I certainly can, Mark. Why weren’t you credited by that means?

Mark Nicholson:
What actually happened is the only real credit any of us got was for the Ark of Truth and Continuum films. Because of what we were starting to build when, I started two weeks late, and there was another guy who was only there for the first three weeks. For the Ark of Truth, when they gathered everyone’s names, I wasn’t there yet. He was there, his name’s in the credits where it should be. Then for Continuum, they gathered a whole new list with my name on it, but used the other one.

David Read:
I can’t do anything about the end credits in the released content, but we can get you an IMDb profile so you can add yourself as uncredited.

Mark Nicholson:
I tried twice and no one would do it.

David Read:
We’re gonna fix it. We’re gonna fix it in this one …

Mark Nicholson:
Great. About time.

David Read:
… because after you finish with this episode and I upload it to IMDb, it generates a profile for you. So, you’re welcome.

Mark Nicholson:
Perfect.

David Read:
There we go. Then you can go in and get an IMDb Pro account free for 30 days and fill it out to your heart’s content ’cause you can claim it. We will do that.

Mark Nicholson:
I’ll figure that out. We’ll work on that ’cause I gotta connect it with a bunch of my other work now too.

David Read:
That’s correct, exactly. You can use it for anything. IMDb Pro saves my butt doing this show. I couldn’t do the show without it.

Mark Nicholson:
I’m actually curious if some of my other credits even show up on here.

David Read:
‘Cause I’m not seeing a profile for you on IMDb. So, we should be able to make you a new one and just do it. But Raj wanted to know, do you have an easier, hardest prop story in terms of assembly, and is there anything that you have now with the modern technology or rather the knowledge that you have now than you had then that you would’ve done differently?

Mark Nicholson:
Easiest thing, those chips that we talked about going missing.

David Read:
Just hammer them out.

Mark Nicholson:
You know what you figure out really early? “We’re gonna build how many? Let me run a few more.” And I’ll put them in a cup on the shelf. Again, you can see a picture of my shelves right next to my workspace. Those are cups full of spares. All those cups at the top? That’s all spares. So, literally what would happen is someone would show up and they’d be like, “Hey, I ran out of this.” Some of them had gone missing or they got damaged or whatever, and I’m like, “Can you make some more?” And I’m like, “Here you go.” That happened about five or six times, but it was the best ’cause they’re expecting it to take days or be a lot of effort and I’m like, “No, I got some.” Just hand ’em. That was the most satisfying thing in the world. When you store that cable away for the future or that piece of wood and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll use it later.” When you get to use it later, it’s the best.

David Read:
Is it because you’ve had the presence of mind to think ahead and actually …

Mark Nicholson:
Yes.

David Read:
… do what you need?

Mark Nicholson:
A lot of that was learned experience from going, “Hey, we ran out of this. Can you make more?” And I would make more and they’d be like, “Ah, they’ve already asked for this one twice. I’ll do a bit of an extra run and we’ll make that one work.”

David Read:
For sure. Let me see here. TG wants to know, was there a task that you received where you thought, “I don’t know how we’re gonna make this,” or something that you made where you thought, “This turned out so much better than I anticipated,” or, “I knew it was gonna be good, but this is great?”

Mark Nicholson:
I would actually say that I can’t think of an example, but the biggest thing I learned working on that show, building film props at that speed and scale, was, wow, we’re actually really capable of doing something really good really quickly from having no idea how to do it because we had to. And when you practice that time and time again, years of experience, it’s like, “I’ve never done this before. I’ve only got one shot. It’s gotta be done tomorrow. Hey, that turned out great.” On Continuum, the freighter ship from the …

David Read:
The Achilles.

Mark Nicholson:
… when it’s crossing over the Atlantic. There were some bits and pieces of that, handles and little welded bits that I put together. That was an example of what I remember of something I made myself that was like, “Oh, yeah, how do I do these really big welds?” And I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just get some putty and try and do it this way,” and took some plastic rod to make the handles, and I made a molding, like a jig for bending them. It all worked really cool. I spent way longer on the jig than making the handles, but they were part of the process to make the handles. And once I had the jig working, I could just pump them out in minutes. It’s hours and hours and hours designing this jig, and then build a handle in two minutes. OK. 20 minutes later, I’ve got all the handles done. That was one of the things that we were doing with the laser cutter a lot, was building tooling, jigs, bits and pieces that allowed us to make the other things we were doing. It was really powerful for that kinda stuff, ’cause it was like, “I need a really complicated custom 2D shape that’s a rigid structure, and I can make anything.”

David Read:
My buddy, Martin McLean, who designed the Puddle Jumper here, and a number… I mean, that’s a legitimate toy. And the naquadah reactor here, and a few of the other pieces, the Touchstone up here, he makes them in CAD files. And so much of what he does, especially for the Jumper, in terms of making the wings open and close, what he finds himself doing very often, because this is just who he is, he’s a designer by trade, and makes manuals as well as the instructions for how to assemble stuff, he finds himself so often over-designing things after he comes to a simpler solution. He doesn’t realize he’s over-designed it, because that’s often his first idea. And Occam’s razor seems to hold true. For him, at least, the simplest solution, generally speaking, turns out to be the correct one. And he’s like, “I spent so much time R&Ding this. I’ve wasted so much.” It’s like, “No, no, no, Martin, you had to go there for your mind in order to get there. That’s what was needed, so the simple solution you managed to execute only because you tried the complicated first and it didn’t work as easy. There were too many moving parts, so to speak.”

Mark Nicholson:
Keeping it simple, that simple solution was often the only solution. Sometimes we never had time to R&D stuff. Sometimes things would be like, “No, we gotta build the thing.” Those suits are a really good example, because the Universe version has a different helmet.

David Read:
Correct. They needed to see their faces.

Mark Nicholson:
There was a whole concept and a whole design for an actual helmet, and then they cut the time and budget, and were like, “We need you to shove something together real, real quick.” So, they’re motorcycle helmets.

David Read:
Yes, they are.

Mark Nicholson:
I don’t even know if the concept ever got out. I don’t have a copy of it, but they looked a little more like the Lost in Space ones, but they would actually ratchet over and had a big glass front and everything, but they looked cool. We were gonna build them, and then a lot of time got wasted. I didn’t actually understand what was going on, so I can’t speak to it, but from my perspective, a lot of time got wasted and the budget shrank radically, and then we had two, three weeks to get six helmets together, and– On Mallozzi’s blog, he even talks about it. They got to set, and the actors couldn’t breathe. Yeah, that’s it.

David Read:
And they have computer fans in them. The one that I have has at least one in the back, so there was some kinda circulation. I imagine that that was made last minute?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah, they went to set, and they shot late that night. And there’s even– I’ve got a photo of that bit from “Water” where there’s two of our prop guys there with them, minding the suits. But the actors couldn’t breathe in them ’cause we hadn’t even had time to put anyone in them for a period of time to know that, because it had been such a rush job. And then the next day, they come back, and we’re literally just drilling holes into them to get some air in, and someone ran to the computer store to grab fans.

David Read:
Maybe that’s why Louis is giving everyone the finger. ‘Cause they’re sweating their nuts off. Excuse my language, folks, but it’s probably true.

Mark Nicholson:
Those are two of my old friends with them. But they couldn’t breathe in that.

David Read:
It’s a motorcycle helmet.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s a motorcycle helmet.

David Read:
Just nuts. And it probably woulda been one of the better solutions to begin with, or do you think that kit bashing a motorcycle helmet was, at the end of the day, probably more uncomfortable for them instead of designing something from whole cloth?

Mark Nicholson:
It was definitely more comfortable than designing something. Anything we design is generally uncomfortable.

David Read:
It’s generally uncomfortable. Let’s face facts.

Mark Nicholson:
No. Things like chairs? Do you know how much work goes into padding a chair and doing upholstery and figuring out what the correct dimensions are for that? People who build chairs know. I don’t. Some of the chairs we built, they’re not very comfortable. You don’t wanna sit in them for eight hours a day. They’re OK for an hour or two, but it’s not great.

David Read:
When you’re really having to get into them, for instance, I don’t know if this is the bridge chair, or if this is the room with the– Look at that.

Mark Nicholson:
If you scroll up, you’ll see the– It’s got the neural interface in the top.

David Read:
It’s the neural interface. There you go. See? You know what you’re talking about. You were there.

Mark Nicholson:
That was some big parts, and then a bunch of little 3D-printed stuff on it.

David Read:
Man, and you’re designing this for looks. Creature comfort is not, I would think, the first thought.

Mark Nicholson:
No. Part of it is, we get a concept, and it’s like, “Build that.” There’s another of my old coworkers in one of his chairs, enjoying it. That chair was not actually that comfortable to sit in.

David Read:
Heavy is the head that holds the crown.

Mark Nicholson:
Actually, if you scroll up, at the top, you can see the corner of the big CNC machine on the left. That there’s one of them.

David Read:
Wild stuff. I’m having a great time with this. Thank you so much for sharing all of this.

Mark Nicholson:
You’re welcome. It’s fun.

David Read:
I really wanna save the slideshow for a future episode with you and go into some of the more detail. I’m good for another 20 minutes or so, if you can, because I do wanna finish off the list of questions here that people have submitted and cover a couple of other things. This is all fascinating and the fact that you have it all still, it’s all elastic in your brain still, rather than just gone and turned to dust is fantastic. So please give me more, Mark.

Mark Nicholson:
I’m trying ’cause trying to keep everything I remember about this IP is getting harder.

David Read:
Sure, this is why we do these.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s a bit frustrating.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Mark Nicholson:
‘Cause I’ve worked on a couple of other IPs where I’m trying to learn everything about what’s going on as well because that’s part of the job. And I’m finding, “Oh, man. I’ve forgotten more than I remember now.”

David Read:
For sure.

Mark Nicholson:
‘Cause it’s so old.

David Read:
Happens to the best of us. How old are you?

Mark Nicholson:
I am about to turn 43.

David Read:
You’re not that much older than I am, so I’ll be 42 this summer. Matt T: “As a prop builder, when you watch a TV episode or a movie, can you watch it like the average Joe or are you seeing props and thinking, ‘I wonder how they made that?’ Or, ‘Oh, I know exactly how they made that.’ Or, ‘I would have made that differently.'” Or can you get swept away in the narrative?

Mark Nicholson:
I have a complicated answer to that ’cause yes, that’s a really important question. Pretty quickly on, that ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy the show, that disappeared for me real quick and I was constantly asking those questions, trying to figure those things out. It came back for movies after a couple of years, but watching scripted live-action North American television, I can’t do it still.

David Read:
You go into production mode.

Mark Nicholson:
I go into production mode way too easy. The last TV show I watched was The Crown, which I really enjoyed. It was beautiful, but I was enjoying it and I still couldn’t stay in it. Animated stuff’s way easier, or things that are completely fantastic, or–

David Read:
To you. The stuff you’ve got right in front. This is fantastic to me.

Mark Nicholson:
But the stuff that’s farther away from what I worked on.

David Read:
I see.

Mark Nicholson:
So, I never actually watched Game of Thrones, but that would have been easier for me to do a bit of. A little bit easier. So yes, I still struggle with that. I don’t watch a lot of TV because of that. And that’s one of those things. Why do the people who create this stuff not go and enjoy it the same way? It’s because their ability to enjoy it is diminished by making it.

David Read:
For some people. I made a Choose Your Own Adventure DVD for college. I wrote and directed it, edited it, the whole thing, and when I go and watch it, I can watch it knowing everything that’s going on, but I can also turn that part of my brain off and get largely swept away. And I think maybe that’s just me, or maybe I just did my job enough that I can– ‘Cause it’s never a case where I can’t get into this. George Lucas claims that he can never get into Star Wars, at least the stuff that he’s made. It’s not been a problem for me. It’s probably just a person to person thing.

Mark Nicholson:
I think it is, and I think also it depends how much work and time you’ve invested in building it and how much you care about it. ‘Cause if you are still attached to, like, “Oh, I never quite got that right.”

David Read:
‘Cause you’re on a time crunch.

Mark Nicholson:
That feeling …

David Read:
So severe.

Mark Nicholson:
… and you see your thing again, you’re gonna feel that every time. When you build a big thing and you care about it, sometimes you’re gonna get attached to it in a way that’s– I understand how actors can’t watch themselves. Seeing themselves on a screen, for some of them that’s just awful, the worst thing in the world. They could never– They can’t enjoy it. How often do you like looking at your own face and going, “Oh, yeah. That person’s cool.?” No. It’s awful.

David Read:
It’s the career you chose.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes, but–

David Read:
To be part of the process, I guess. Not to enjoy it afterwards.

Mark Nicholson:
To be part of the process and to make something good, not necessarily be part of the intended audience.

David Read:
That makes a lot of sense.

Mark Nicholson:
There’s things like that where sometimes you can’t have the same attachment to your work the way that the intended viewer– You don’t get to be part of that group anymore. It costs you something to make it.

David Read:
Raj wanted to know, “What’s the prop that you hated the most?”

Mark Nicholson:
The Ark of Lies.

David Read:
Really? Tell me more. Why?

Mark Nicholson:
That was a lot of building in a very short amount of time from some sket… Again, that was what we were calling it. I don’t know if you noticed how fast I came up with that answer.

David Read:
You didn’t take any time at all.

Mark Nicholson:
That was a ridiculously complex build in a short amount of time. Not only because we had to build it, but we had to build it so it would fall over and open up repeatably when the bit happens at the end. I remember all of that. The little detailing on there is all sandblast mask that we laser cut, which again, is one of those materials that would degrade over time, so anything that was made with it a long time ago I’d always have to repair and rebuild and repaint.

David Read:
If there were radio controllers for this, I didn’t get them when we sold them. But we put batteries in, and I couldn’t get them to work.

Mark Nicholson:
That probably was a radio controller.

David Read:
You could press them. I felt it responding to my touch. And then at the bottom of this was a separate circuit board that we had. We could– Whoops.

Mark Nicholson:
What? At the bottom of that was a big panel filled with little eight-sided crystals.

David Read:
That’s what I mean. Exactly. Little octagons.

Mark Nicholson:
I made that.

David Read:
Exactly.

Mark Nicholson:
That was the biggest contribution was they were like, “What’s inside it?” and I’m like, “Let me do this.”

David Read:
But when it’s hitting the Doci in the face, I’m assuming it’s just a light thing. You’re not using–

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah, no, they just pulled that out and put a big light in there.

David Read:
Exactly right. It’s a whole series– What I meant by circuit board was Ancient circuit board. That’s what I was saying. Not like a human circuit board. See, what you’ve created is already in my brain as Ancient lingo.

Mark Nicholson:
Yes, but that was, “Hey Mark, can you think up something to go in this? ‘Cause no one’s designed anything and we need it today.” I literally–

David Read:
And it needs to be simple.

Mark Nicholson:
I made that up on the fly. It’s this thing where you’re like, “Oh, it’s this Ancient crystal circuit thing.” And I’m like, “No one had time to think about that.” And it’s what’s inside the Ark, which always boggled me. This is a really important thing, isn’t it?

David Read:
So, you call it the Ark of Lies. Did the R and D of it drive you nuts in terms of the stuff that you guys had to come up with or what left you having such resentment for it?

Mark Nicholson:
I’m trying to remember. The amount of time we didn’t have. ‘Cause again, I think that thing got built in two weeks.

David Read:
It’s Cooper’s show, let’s be honest. So, he’s the boss and he’s saying, “Yeah, let’s do it. That’s what I want. We’re not gonna cut corners.”

Mark Nicholson:
I’ve never met Robert Cooper.

David Read:
Really?

Mark Nicholson:
No. We never met most of them. I met Joe only afterwards. We would never, ever– Occasionally at wrap parties we’d be in the same room as them, but no. They had no idea who we were. But Robert Cooper episodes were, because he was writing, producing, and directing–

David Read:
It’s his show.

Mark Nicholson:
That “and directing” thing was, like, usually the directors were separate people. I noticed a trend pretty quickly that his episodes are always excellent. They’re great television. He does excellent work. But they were always the hardest to work on because he was controlling that extra aspect of it, which he got to do, which is cool.

David Read:
He’s a co-creator.

Mark Nicholson:
But every time we were doing stuff it’s like, “Oh, we’re doing a Robert Cooper episode? Oh no, we’re gonna be building all sorts of ridiculous extra things at short times and he’s gonna be changing his mind and things.” It made great TV, but those were the challenging episodes.

David Read:
Was your budget allocation larger for those or was it typically a standard budget allocation for every episode?

Mark Nicholson:
I never saw a budget. I’m so happy I never saw a budget. Someone would tell me, “Hey, build this. Here’s the due date.”

David Read:
OK. So, you think in terms of not in dollars, but in terms of hours. Were the number of days that you had to create something malleable for when you had an upcoming episode for him? Or was that all, “OK, people, this is what’s coming, this is the amount of time that we have?” Was it a little bit elastic or was it all blocks of equidistant amounts of time for every single episode?

Mark Nicholson:
I need to stress this, I was part of a team. I was the young new guy on this team. I was surrounded by experts who were all incredible people. I learned a lot from them, I got good at a couple things. But the people managing that, I would not be part of those meetings and I shouldn’t have been part of those meetings. So would due dates change based on, “Oh, what is this thing and we need it? Maybe we can rework the schedule.” And again, those meetings are happening down at the Bridge, Gord and Kenny are involved in that. But no, I’m never dealing with that. Sometimes due dates would change on me and that’s okay. I’m getting paid to do the work. It’s fine. Let go.

David Read:
Let go. I love it.

Mark Nicholson:
Because sticking on it would never lead anywhere good. If something big was taking too long, like with the suits, those took a long time. I think they might have worked the schedule around that, but I can’t even remember. I don’t know. So, I was never involved in a discussion like that, unless they were asking me for an estimate of what was actually going on.

David Read:
Let’s see how OCD you got. Mazlem wanted to know, did you ever go back and rebuild or improve in some way a prop even though it may not be used again just in case, or to fix something that was bugging you? Now, we know when you had a little bit of time to kill you may have modified a Furling here and there, but I’m curious outside of that and if anything ever was, “This is gnawing at me. I know I can make this a little bit better just for my own edification.”

Mark Nicholson:
Always wanted to. Whenever a prop would come back to us, for me to even have access to it, it’s because someone intentionally was sending it to the shop for repair or someone had already made that decision. I could never get it into my hands again willingly. I never had a key to the cage in our big room there, the half of it was caged that was just storage. I could never get in there. Why would I need to go in there? That’s just for storage. So, no, I never had the agency to make that decision unless the decision to do something with it was already there for me. Would I repair old things? Would I make them better when I could? The key there is actually consistency. It has to look like the old version. So, to make it different would actually be bad. Do I wanna try and figure out how to make something better or more resilient or out of a material that’s not gonna degrade or something like that? Always. We’re always trying to do that. But there’s a trade-off with a ridiculous old process that is the way we figured it out once, and we’re doing that every time. The zat gun, the actual mechanical one that opened and closed? Every time that was used, the little flexible material that covers the joints, every time they’d pull it out ’cause they hadn’t shot with it in two months, we’d strip it off and put a new one on because it would wear very quickly.

David Read:
It was the consistency of electrical tape. It only had so many movements in it. That was it after a little bit, it was not possible.

Mark Nicholson:
It was a medical latex-like material. The material was the right color, but no, it doesn’t last. So you could shoot with it for a day or two, and then you’d have to go do it again.

David Read:
Because these things aren’t real in many cases. They’re as real as they need to be for as long as the shot needs to take. And then they go into oblivion.

Mark Nicholson:
If something’s made of straw and mud and wax, and it holds together for your shot, that’s enough.

David Read:
There’s a Tok’ra tunnel for ya.

Mark Nicholson:
If it works, it works. And you move on, and you make the rest of your show.

David Read:
That’s it. Lockwatcher wants to know, “Now that 3D printing is mainstream and so much cheaper, how do you think this is evolving prop building?”

Mark Nicholson:
Lot more 3D sculpting going on. A lot more 3D modeling, a lot more concept in 3D translating straight into building and then doing the complex finishing, because 3D printing still doesn’t really make a nice finish.

David Read:
Even still I think that …

Mark Nicholson:
It’s getting better.

David Read:
… there’s a lot of work that has to be done afterwards.

Mark Nicholson:
I saw it when it was at the start. It was like, “Oh, no, we’re gonna be–” ‘Cause we were already doing a lot of 3D modeling for CNC and the laser cutting, and the 3D printing was just a natural extension of that where we were like, “Yeah, it’s going this way. We’re doing this. Everyone’s gonna be doing this soon.” It felt inevitable. These tools, once you got them and once you started using them, you’re like, “Ah, no, we’re gonna be doing this all the time. This is great. This is the way we should be doing stuff. Let’s go make more of it.”

David Read:
Martin Wood would tell us of stories where he would go to trade shows, I don’t know who with, but he would see things like the CNC machine and be like, “All right, let’s order one,” and then you guys would have it. And it’s like, “OK, see what you can do with it.” You have to start somewhere, and a lot of times I’m sure you’re gonna be busting your humps with the learning curve.

Mark Nicholson:
Again, my experience with the laser cutter was that same thing, where, “No, let’s–” We had no idea what we were gonna do with this. Someone just ordered one ’cause they thought it might be neat. And it was like $40,000 just on a whim, on a tool that was probably gonna pay for itself and absolutely paid for itself orders of magnitude over in how much work we got out of it. There was a thing on the Atlantis set where there’s these walls, and they’ve got these little slits of light coming through, and there’s these little chevron-shaped acrylic pieces about this big. And it would take three carpenters days to produce 200 of them. Three people working hard full time, band-sawing and polishing and everything. I could hit a button …

David Read:
Let me see here.

Mark Nicholson:
… and keep the machine going for three days and make thousands. It was so easy.

David Read:
Let’s see here. Whoops, I’m not shopping for wall sconces. Thank you, everyone. There they are.

Mark Nicholson:
Those things.

David Read:
Acrylic chiclets. We called them chiclets. I don’t know if production came up with that term.

Mark Nicholson:
Maybe.

David Read:
These are the ones on the left here we had for Season Five for Janus’s lab, and then the ones on the right here were made for Season One. Can I go closer? I can. Thank you, Pinterest. These come off on the front, and everything wired through the back of them are extension cords, regular home extension cords plugged into a regular office power strip at the bottom. And that was it. They were portable. They could take them off and replace them easily rather than just cut the cord and have to rebuild another one. There’s stuff that they did not have.

Mark Nicholson:
But it was one of those things where it was like, “No, we can make this way faster with this machine,” and it paid for itself so quickly with that stuff.

David Read:
Bridget McGuire, I quote, “We could have made stuff for NASA.”

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah. No, we were making really cool stuff. It’s prototype, so it’s all still– There are aspects of testing that aren’t involved into whether our stuff’s any good. But no, we were building cool stuff real fast. And the quality was quite high.

David Read:
Immensely high. I’m still amazed by this. We had a whole series, and you had stunt versions of these, which were rubber. I was gonna say- plastic, but this is so heavy. But the piece here on a couple of them started coming undone. I don’t know what glue was used to install these here, but this one’s held on really good. But one or two of them just started fraying a little bit.

Mark Nicholson:
I’m not sure whether those were glue or whether it was double-sided tape actually applied onto the foam and laser cut with the tape on it. And it stuck right on.

David Read:
OK. In this case, it could hold long term. I’m keeping an eye on some stuff. My Wraith mask for my drone downstairs in my living room, as time passes, the mask is shriveling and dying.

Mark Nicholson:
Latex doesn’t last.

David Read:
Latex does not last. The Asgard puppets. I told whoever bought this thing, “You must preserve this thing.” He’s like, “I’ve got a nitrogen case.” I’m like, “You must preserve him.” I got a photo of him a couple of years ago. He’s completely destroyed. He’s turned into a raisin.

Mark Nicholson:
I was the one to actually glue the little bits on it for that last episode.

David Read:
For the Vanir piece? Here, and here. Yep. And we sold him as is.

Mark Nicholson:
That decision was made at a pretty high level of, “No, this puppet’s degrading. This is the last time we’re gonna shoot him.” And I’m like, “If I do this, it’s permanent. We all sure?” I was double and triple checking it, because it was like, “No, we’re using Super Glue on this.” When we pull it off, we’re gonna rip out the chunk of skin with it.

David Read:
They never pulled it out.

Mark Nicholson:
They couldn’t. But it was like, “Are we certain we’re doing this?” I applied those.

David Read:
This actually came off pretty easily. This was some kind of gentle adhesive. But this did not come off.

Mark Nicholson:
It was like, “When we put this on, it’s not coming off. It’s never coming off.” But they already knew he was degrading. Which is why they were like, “No, we’re certain this is the last time we’re shooting with him.”

David Read:
And the species is dead.

Mark Nicholson:
But it was one of those things where it was like, “No, we know the puppet’s actually degrading,” the physical object.

David Read:
I see, with this puppet. Yes, got it.

David Read:
Case in point, this was the old one that we sold in the second live auction and, ugh, that resolution is so low, but his face is gone. And this was the one that was built for Season Three, for an episode called “Fair Game,” and he still has the webbed feet. He may have actually been in “The Fifth Race.” I know he wasn’t used in “Thor’s Chariot,” because that was just a half puppet that started here. But even his neck and everything, it’s silicone. Oxygen wears it away. It’s corrosive.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s the nature of some of these materials, where they just– They’re not designed to last. They’re not stone.

David Read:
All of it will eventually turn back into stardust one day or another, I guess, when our sun wipes us all out one day.

Mark Nicholson:
We’re all made of star stuff.

David Read:
So, it’s here for a little while. We take the pictures with us, and the memories that we got, and there are some good ones, because you made an amazing amount of stuff over the years, Mark.

Mark Nicholson:
We did.

David Read:
I really thank you for spending the time with me and doing this.

Mark Nicholson:
You’re welcome.

David Read:
We have a slideshow that we couldn’t get to, so we’re gonna have you back later this season.

Mark Nicholson:
Cool.

David Read:
Any thoughts before we wrap up?

Mark Nicholson:
It’s weird reliving some of these thoughts. Some of the things you’re showing me, I’m like, “I haven’t even thought about this in sometimes almost 20 years.”

David Read:
A lot of it’s still in there.

Mark Nicholson:
It’s still clacking around in there. It’s still so much fun. This was not a job I expected to be doing, but as soon as I was there, I’m like, “No, this is amazing. This is so much fun. Let’s ride this out for as long as I can.” It was awesome. I had a great time.

David Read:
Were you a Stargate fan before this?

Mark Nicholson:
Yes. I had watched the show off and on, bits and pieces here and there. I started the job in late winter, spring. The summer before, a close friend of mine had lent me the first four seasons, and as I was looking for work, I had time, so I started watch–

David Read:
Atlantis.

Mark Nicholson:
No, the first four seasons of SG-1.

David Read:
SG-1.

Mark Nicholson:
I actually watched them in order the year before this happened, and was like–

David Read:
You knew your stuff.

Mark Nicholson:
I knew a lot of stuff. I didn’t know all my stuff. But very quickly, working with the team, everyone figured out that I knew way more than everyone about what the actual show was ’cause I’d seen enough of it, and I like this kind of stuff, where I like learning about a thing and knowing a lot more about it. So, I quickly became the resource for, “Hey, we need a continuity check on something, or what this old thing looked like.” So, going to GateWorld and finding old screen grabs of episodes and hunting stuff down. Thank you.

David Read:
You’re welcome.

Mark Nicholson:
That work is really important and invaluable. ‘Cause I’ve done this with BattleTech, I’ve done this with Fallout, where these wikis and all this information, when it’s trustworthy, can become a reliable resource for even the people making it, who still also have to make sure that it’s a reliable resource. So, that reliability is really important. I watched– I think Atlantis Season Two is the only season I never watched. ‘Cause I read a summary of what happened, I looked through pictures of what happened, I’m like, “I should really get around to watching ‘Grace Under Pressure,’ but the rest of it looks skippable.” I didn’t-

David Read:
So you’ve still not seen it?

Mark Nicholson:
No. I found Atlantis to be less my thing.

David Read:
It’s more action-oriented. It’s less Indiana Jones adventure in that way. It’s very, “Rodney do this. Rodney do that. Rodney complains. Rodney solves the problem. They go home.”

Mark Nicholson:
By the end, I was calling it the Rodney McKay show, ’cause he was doing all the work.

David Read:
I have all the transcripts saved into a document for each show, and I’m sure I could throw the Atlantis document into ChatGPT and the percentage of Rodney dialogue would probably exceed 50% or be near enough to it, in terms of total words.

Mark Nicholson:
But he was literally the hero of the show, making everything happen, and everyone else is escorting him. Functionally, all of the action …

David Read:
It’s a fair argument.

Mark Nicholson:
… is just to get Rodney where he needs to be. In the same way that Samantha Carter was doing that kind of work, but more concentrated.

David Read:
It’s a fair argument.

Mark Nicholson:
That was the part of the show I was like, “No, this guy’s doing all the work.”

David Read:
I think Hewlett would agree with you in terms of the dialogue. He’s very proud of that, and not every actor could pull that off.

Mark Nicholson:
He was doing all the work. It’s hard.

David Read:
Not every actor could do that day in and day out. We saw him when they were filming an episode of Season Two called “Trinity,” we saw him on set, and he had no voice. And I go back and watch that episode and he has a voice and it’s like, “How is he pulling this off?” He didn’t have one when we were there talking to him. I guess he just made it happen.

Mark Nicholson:
Sometimes, some part of acting is really hard work. In a very short amount of time. And then there’s huge gaps of doing nothing.

David Read:
That’s it. They tell you to, “Run, run, run, run, run. OK, we’re here. OK, now wait for five hours.” “Yeah, but we just ran all this way.” “Yeah, well things change. Hurry up and wait.”

Mark Nicholson:
“Hurry up and wait.” That’s what being on set is like all the time, because it’s like baseball. There’s one or two people doing a whole bunch of work that’s really important, and everyone else is standing around being ready.

David Read:
Last question for you. Kathiescall: “Did you complete any games or have any published? My son just got his associates in programming and is working independently on his own game.”

Mark Nicholson:
I’ve been working in games for the last 10 years. I spent a bunch of time working on MechWarrior Online and MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, and that’s a bunch of my work from those games. More recently, I’m working on Fallout 76.

David Read:
Fallout 76. Awesome. Are you liking what you’re seeing?

Mark Nicholson:
This is me looking at my old work, so that’s complicated.

David Read:
That’s a fair point.

Mark Nicholson:
I’m making power armor in another sci-fi IP that I loved as a teenager. ‘Cause apparently I’ve done this three times now, and I have a type.

David Read:
Like mechs?

Mark Nicholson:
Yeah, I like giant robots. They’re a good time.

David Read:
I have an ED-209 two rooms over. He’s this tall. He’s a toy. But he looks accurate. Cool stuff, man. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk and I’m looking forward to having you back.

Mark Nicholson:
You’re welcome. This has been fun. Thank you so much.

David Read:
Absolutely. I’m gonna wrap up the show on this side. Thank you, Mark. Mark Nicholson, everyone. Prop builder for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, The Ark of Truth, and Continuum. He has graciously assembled– you saw a little bit of it, a complete archive slideshow, and once we started talking a little bit beforehand, I was like, “I think we’ve got another show in us here,” much like I did recently with Peter Bodnarus. We had to end up splitting it into two pieces because there was so much information. You don’t know how much information has survived in the person after a period of time, and a lot of it is because they only cared about it so much in terms of while they needed it, and you can tell the people who are really invested in it because it’s still with them in a lot of cases. And you can tell the people who were invested in it and who have bad memories and it doesn’t stick with them anymore, and they’re so apologetic about that. But huge thanks to Mark for making this possible and providing so much detail and answering so many of my questions that I’ve had over a number of years of seeing some of this stuff, especially at Propworx and assembling it, and it’s like, “OK, why was that done that way?” And I’m actually gonna go through my catalogs here and pull some more stuff out from those seasons where I knew he was there and ask him, “Mark, why?” So, that’s what I’ve got for you. I’m David Read for Dial the Gate. If you enjoy the show and you wanna see more content like this, click the Like button. It does make a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend, and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe, and clips from this livestream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. DialtheGate.com has the complete information for all of the upcoming episodes. I’ve got a couple of great guests that are rattling around right now that we’re trying to get confirmed and then their names will appear. Very excited about a couple of them. Thanks to my producers, Antony, Kevin, and Linda; my moderators, Antony, Jeremy, Kevin, Lockwatcher, Marcia, Raj, and Jakub; and Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb keeping DialtheGate.com up and running. My tremendous thanks to all of you. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you on the other side. All right. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. Let me– My AT&T guy is here, so I normally would sit around afterwards and talk, but I’m gonna have to go…