Blood & Chrome VFX - Ten Years Later

Do you realize it's been ten years since we made Battlestar Galactica Blood & Chrome? Well it has. To celebrate the decade that has passed, here is an extra put together by the studio about making it. It was a fully green screen show, all the sets were virtual, and at a time that this was unheard of on television.



Gary Hutzel and I first met on TNG when I was a makeup artist, working for Mikey Westmore... and I knew I liked him right away. Aside from being talented, he was funny, and if you know me, there is nothing better than that.



When I jumped from makeup to the art department at the start of DS9, thanks to my brother, Mike Okuda, I got to know Gary a whole lot better. The Star Trek Art Department in those days worked hand in glove with visual effects. We made it our business to be a resource. Gary knew that if his budget didn’t cover a model of Star Fleet Command in San Francisco, we'd make him one for him out of bird feeders and CD racks, and yes, we did.



Gary and I always enjoyed one another, and we always, always, had a lot of fun on Star Trek. You know that... In fact, while on DS9, Gary and I both made our first tentative steps into computer graphics. He saw me dabbling in the art department with it, and a light went off over his head. I built a couple of models for him before DS9 ended. I remember telling him how much fun I had, and hoped we’d get a chance to do it again. I'll never forget it. He looked at me and said... "Be careful what you wish for". Be careful what you wish for. Holy cow, I had no idea.



Gary Hutzel often said that you could not defeat a good idea...and the miracle was, that with Gary you could have one. I know it sounds crazy, but he was the exception... not the rule. With Gary, everyone was a filmmaker first, and a visual effects artist second. We'd create scenarios, then tailor sequences, and then sit with Gary in editorial... and cut our shots into the show... unheard of! And if they didn't work, wed hammer out new shots, and all on the same day. We'd solve a problem in the time it would take an outside facility to get back to us with their bill for how much it would cost for them to think about it.



Mike Gibson, my dear friend, and our incredible VFX producer, who I love dearly... had this to say about Gary at the Memorial service. I cannot say it any better, I've tried. Let Mike speak -



For the last 13 years I have had the most distinct pleasure to be Gary Hutzel’s Visual Effects Producer. And what that really means is that I have been at ground zero to witness Gary’s artistic and creative genius at work…and I don’t use that word "genius" lightly. And what an amazing 13 years it has been. I could stand here and talk to you about all the Emmy wins and nominations, about the 5 back-to-back Visual effects Society Awards for Gary’s work on Battlestar Galactica, about the countless accolades from his collaborators and peers over the years, but I’m not going to because Gary didn’t really care about that kind of stuff too much, to tell you the truth he was. sometimes a bit embarrassed about it. He would say, "That’s just a product of us doing our job and doing our job well." And Gary did his job so well.



Enjoy the video.



Additional - I have to call out that a big part of getting it done was the fact that we never received a single note from the producers or director on the design work. Not a single one. Let me amend that, the only note was Jonas Pate calling for lens flares, as JJ's Trek had just come out. What a mistake! We warned him.