I try to pretend that I keep my posts related to stuff I am working on or something which is marginally interesting but this post is going to be a 100% vanity post. So if you don’t want to see me get all mushy and doe eyed over nostalgia, you had better look away now.<\/p>\n
1993 was a long time ago. I was in sixth form and had a dream in life, I was dead set on working in the VFX business and had books, magazines, model kits, plastic bits, metal bits, all kind of random parts of rubbish which i tried to bend to my desire to make my dream come true. I was watching Star Trek:TNG when it was on (every Wednesday on bbc2 at 6pm), had been watching the original series when it was on and BBC 2 was a gold mine of old sci-fi (Buck Rogers, the invaders, Ren and Stimpy (wait what?)) and all of a sudden a new series appeared on Channel 4. Babylon 5 had not really had a lot of build up then it appeared out of nowhere with the first episode being shown before the pilot which was shown the following weekend before the second episode. B5 had everything that Star Trek didn’t, proper space fights, aliens that didn’t look like people with funny noses, people who didn’t get along… I loved it. But something wasn’t right with it, there was all this glossy CGI stuff and I didn’t understand it but kept watching. I was taping every episode religiously and until about two years ago I still had the tapes, probably breaking about a dozen copyright laws in the process but my love of this series was beyond that.<\/p>\n
I went to art college the next year and studied photography with the idea that it would help with my VFX career by understanding how lens are used to photograph models (plastic ones dear readers, not the lingerie ones… Actually they are probably more plastic that the ones i was interested in) then I was accepted onto a VFX and model making course in Ipswich and the Babylon project continued along with its third year. We sat around talking about it and how more and more companies used CGI to do their effects but we still had our skills which would be useful as around this time ‘lost in space’ hit the big screen with its mix of CGI and model work and loads of the effects crew said that traditional model skills would be useful and we took heart with this (can I say that I saw that film about four times in the cinema, loved it but still don’t have it on DVD)
\nThen the bubble burst on our careers and I went into post production and whore myself out the mighty pixel.<\/p>\n
Lets move on a few years as this part is getting boring.<\/p>\n
I got the B5 boxed set for Christmas this year and its a big box. There are a lot of discs in there and I’ve taken a few weeks to get round to looking at it as I’ve been watching other DVD’s, but i’ve cracked open the box and plunged in. I have to say my first choice was poor. I went for the legend of the rangers which came after the main B5 series and looks like a nasty spin off with an attempt to create a new series. It burned me to watch as it looked low budget and had piss poor characters. I couldn’t believe how tacky it all looked with some effects work which just looked nasty and some bizarre gimmicks (punching and kicking to fire the ships weapons in a VR simulation which made the controller look like she is flying in space? WTF?). It was painful to watch.<\/p>\n
After a short break I finally plucked up some nerve to watch the pilot, it sat unhappily with me as it tried too hard to fit too much in to its short space of time but thats the sin most pilots have, but last night i finally got round to episode 1 ‘midnight on the firing line’ and its all there as I remember it, but more. Its widescreen which was something the pilot wasn’t, i remember an article about how they filmed it widescreen knowing it was coming but then it was cropped 4:3 to make it fit the norm at the time, there are references to some events later in the series like Londo’s dream about him and G’kar strangling each other in 20 years time, the rather bizarre 2nd favourite thing in the universe routine, the intro which i could mouth along to word for word and the music. The work of Christopher Franke would lead me to an impulse but of three Tangerine Dream albums in the local Andy records in Rochdale which then led onto a lifetime love of TD and related prog.<\/p>\n
So I’m writing this on a lazy Sunday morning just before watching another episode because its stirred up so many memories and this is my way of exorcising them. I know how the series is going to end but thats not the point. The point is that as the opening music played, goosebumps ran down my arms and the hairs stood up, I could remember chunks of dialogue, I knew the food (time for some fresh Spoo) and I spotted plot points which will come up in two or three series time. That level of emotion for a TV series doesn’t happen for me anymore but this series represents some very important milestones in my life and they all flooded back as I watched Garibaldi with hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I try to pretend that I keep my posts related to stuff I am working…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[332],"class_list":["post-1050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-life","tag-babylon-5"],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n