Editing Podcast:Collaborators

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|download link= http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/305/bsg_ep305_FULL.mp3

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|transcribed by= [[User:Steelviper|Steelviper]]

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Initially this sequence- well, there's a lot to talk about in terms of what the early story was. Let's just talk about this sequence here with [[James Lyman|Jammer]] getting tossed out the airlock. In the initial drafts, [[Tucker Clellan|Duck]] and Jammer- we had transposed the roles. This was going to be Duck. 'Cause Duck was going to be the collaborator and Jammer was going to be the suicide bomber, and then as we went through various revisions we decided that these were better roles for these particular characters. Actually at the suggestion of [[Aaron Douglas]], who pointed out that given who Jammer was, and the way we had played him, had just seemed like Jammer was a little bit- better for this kind of a role. That he was- he had- we had painted him a bit weakly in "[[Valley of Darkness]]" and then he was a guy that could get led astray and make the wrong decisions and then end up in this position. This sequence, to me, is one of the toughest we've ever done, 'cause essentially we're opening the episode with a murder. And it's not just any murder. It's a murder of one of our characters, who we've established, who we've come to know over the seasons, who we know tried to do something heroic, and he's being killed not by faceless, bad, evil vigilantes out there. Our guys are right in the thick of this. [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]], [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]], [[Samuel Anders|Anders]]. And the we have Connely and then we have [[Jean Barolay|Barolay]]. Excuse me, [[Charlie Connor|Connor]] and Barolay to round it out. But there was something about opening the show with this kind of sequence to really send the message that we're not kidding around. That this one- you're gonna go for a ride here, and it's not going to be an entirely pleasant ride. That this is gonna be about the line between vengeance and justice. It's gonna be about responsibility. It's gonna be about the truth. It's gonna be about a lot of difficult things. And that we weren't gonna really shy away from them.  

The set and the style here. We had a lot of discussion about what the interior of the Cylon baseship should look like. It felt like this was the place where we had to go into science fiction more strongly than we do in the rest of the show. In [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] proper, and on the [[The Fleet (RDM)|civilian ships]], and on [[The Twelve Colonies of Kobol#Caprica|Caprica]], they are clearly human, they are clearly close to what we see in our everyday lives. It's all very familiar, very [[naturalistic science fiction|naturalistic]], as I'm always saying. But when we went over to the Cylon baseship, I couldn't find a way to justify it being anything other than alien to our point of view. That there didn't seem to be a reason why the Cylons would construct the interior of the baseship to look anything like the interior of ''Galactica'', and yet I didn't want it to look like the starship ''Enterprise'', either, that it was all slick and whatever. So we went for the odd juxtaposition of the slick high-tech quality of it with abstract furniture piece like the bed that you- or the daybed that you just saw. And this- a lack of geography, as you'll see over there. It's hard to get a handle on exactly where you are in the Cylon baseship.

This little- this is a little mini-arc that we're starting here about Tigh and Adama and their estrangement from one another and Tigh's complete inability to fit back into the ''Galactica'' command structure. This will play itself out over several episodes, actually. But we just kept asking ourselves, again, "What would really happen?" How could Gaeta walk back into CIC? As much as he wants to, could Gaeta ever resume his post, and under what circumstances?

Now this, the meeting of the Circle, is something only developed in later episodes. In early drafts it was alluded to that they had met and they looked over evidence but you never really saw it. And I felt that it was important to see that these people took this seriously. That they weren't just crazies. They weren't running around just offing people willy-nilly. There was a system that they took to heart. That they were trying to behave like a jury. That- and the show is starting to- the show starts with this idea that, ok, there's vigilantes and they've gone crazy. And then you start peeling the onion back a little bit. And little by little you start realizing that actually it's not that simple. It's- they are meeting. They are working as a jury. And that Tigh- Tigh of all people, slams that guy's head to the table because he's not a- he doesn't see himself as a nutjob here, either. It's important to all these people in this room to believe that they are doing something that is just. That they are operating on the side of right. They are not people that are doing this because they think this is all about vengeance. They're doing it because they think this is the right thing to do. And as you then- the next layer you find on top of that is that the [[Government#Executive Branch 2|President of the Colonies]] has authorized this and that this is all done under legal circumstances.

We played around with a lot of this, in terms of editing, of where these scenes fell. The central idea was that [[Felix Gaeta|Gaeta]] was always gonna be tough. That is was- here's somebody the audience likes. Here's somebody that the audience, if they know the backstory or they watched the recap, knows was genuinely a good guy. Here's a good guy who was trying to do something in a tough position. But what would everyone else think? And what would happen because nobody knew that he was the informant. And who would believe him?  

The mood here on the [[Basestar (RDM)|Cylon baseship]] is intentionally more surreal. A little stranger. It's not as naturalistic. It's not as edgy and hand-held as we typically go. The camera still has a little bit of life in it, so it doesn't break completely with our style, but the idea was [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] is [[Wikipedia:Stranger in a Strange Land|"Stranger in a Strange Land"]] here. Not literally, but he's an odd- he's odd man out over there. And what's he gonna do? And where- what are his circumstances? And to- instead of laying out everything that was gonna happen on the Cylon baseship in the first episode, decided it was more interesting to play it as more mysterious. Play from Baltar's point of view. You don't get to see the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] talking about him. You don't get to see anything, really, outside of the confines of this room, here in the first episode. So you're really with the prisoner wondering, "What is this world I have landed in and what are my options?" And you start immediately hearing about divisions. You start hearing about arguments. That there's- his life is hanging in the balance and decisions are being taken someplace else. And it's interesting that [[Number Three|D'anna]] comes to see him before [[Caprica-Six]] does, or any of the [[Number Six|Sixes]].

The set design of this, I was talking about a litle bit earlier. There were a lot of different concepts. It was a fine line deciding at what point did we want it to be straight up scifi in its feeling, traditional science fiction with flashy lights and all kinds of gear. And at what point did we want it to pull back from that and be more austere. And we settled on this idea that the backgrounds are opaque in terms of you don't know the functions or the purpose of any of the lights you're seeing or where those doorways go or even what the rooms are foor. There's just rooms. And you'll see in subsequent episodes you'll see hallway- you'll see more of the Cylon baseship as the show goes on. But in the initial setup it's just unclear what that world is. Because I think that with the Cylon baseship, a little goes a long way and also no matter what we show you on the Cylon baseship you're inevitably going to be somewhat disappointed. And I'm sure there will be lots of comment about, "Oh... we had such high hopes for the interior of the Cylon baseship, and this is all we got." And that's one of the things that we intentionally said, "You know what? We're gonna take that hit." Because we wanna tell the storyline over there, and that requires us to build some sets. And we had to build those sets in the same area where we once had the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']], which also drove us to get rid of ''Pegasus''. 'Cause you only have so much stage space to deal with. And we knew right away that no matter what we came up with, no matter what concept we put into that Cylon baseship, inevitably it was never gonna be as cool or as interesting as what your mind's eye imagines. What you project into the baseship and what you thought was the interior of the baseship will always be far more mysterious and interesting than anything we could possibly produce. And we just decided, "Know what? We'll take that hit 'cause we wanna tell a story over there."

I like that Gaeta has yet to put his uniform on here in this scene in the rec room. He's not really one of us yet. He's back on the ship and his position is a little uncertain. And everyone's watching him and everyone watches him and [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] together. And I like the idea that Gaeta is trying to tell people, "I did a good thing," but the truth is, who would believe him, really? I mean, if you're one of the people who's living on [[New Caprica]] and you're looking at Gaeta and you think that Gaeta is [[Wikipedia:Martin Bormann|Martin Bormann]], who- Martin Bormann was one of [[Wikipedia:Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]'s inner circle, you don't have to think- you don't have to really see a picture Martin Bormann doing somethin' nasty. You just know that he was one of the in-guys with high-Nazis. That guy was a evil and should go down. And essentially the analogy here. That Gaeta is damned just by the fact that everyone knew that he was still worked for [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]. And he's telling people what he did. And he's telling people about the dog bowl. He's telling people that, "I was trying to help [[New Caprica Resistance|the restance]]." But noone believes him. And the thing is, because of the circumstances and random chance, he's not telling it to Tyrol and he has no idea that Tyrol is the one guy on this ship that he should be saying that to. But how could he possibly know? And how could he know that Tyrol's out there getting ready to vote on his death.

I should also say that [[Michael Rymer]], who directed this episode, was incredibly influential and had a key hand in developing the whole look of these Cylon sets. Not just in this episode, but in subsequents. Along with [[Richard Hudolin]], who's our production designer, obviously, and his entire art department and [[Harvey Frand|Harvey]] and the whole team. But there was a lot of conversation with Michael in terms of how we were shooting these sets and the lighting. He had a great deal of impact in how we shot these scenes subsequently. But Richard Hudolin really, and his art department team, really had to make all this happen and really make all this stand in for a gigantic basestar.

Now in a minute here, [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] comes in and- I'm seeing this insert, actually for the first time. No, I've seen this insert before, I take that back. A lot of times the insert shots like that are shot so much later that ofttimes we don't have those shots in the cut itself and as you're watching the cut when you're- the editors, directors, even the studio and network cut. Frequently we don't have any of those little insert shots and an insert shot is typically a closeup of a piece of paper, a closeup of [[Dradis|DRADIS]] screen, of a gun, whatever. It's almost always a closeup of an object with somebody's hand in it and many times that hand has- is not related to the actual actor on camera and those shots are shot weeks later because we realize we're missing a piece of coverage in the editing room and then they're just thrown in much later. Sometimes- in "[[Water]]", in the episode "Water" in [[Season 1 (2004-05)|season one]], we redid the inserts of the detonator and the bomb under [[Sharon Valerii (Galactica copy)|Sharon]]'s [[Raptor]] chair more times than I care to even like fuckin' think about. It was just like over and over again 'cause we never got it right.

This scene- I intercut this. This was not meant to be an intercut. It was not meant- this was supposed to be a completely separate piece of business. It was like Kara is with Anders out here. She leaves the Circle. She has her breakup scene with Anders and then she goes back in as scripted and as shot. She went back into the room and participated in the end of the jury scene. See, this scene right here, where [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] is talking, trying to convince [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]], [[Katee Sackhoff|Katee]] is actually still- is sitting in this set. And we had to like- because I wanted to intercut the two, I felt that by going out there and having their entire marriage breakup scene and then following Kara back into this scene and starting all over again, it felt slow and it felt too long and it didn't have any juice to it. So what we did wa- what I did was to try to intercut the two, but that meant having to carve Katee out of all this coverage. Because in several of these shots there were angles where you could see Katee's head or she was looking and we had to then carefully reconstruct that scene in the Circle so that you never saw her sitting at the table. And it also, by intercutting it, allowed me to chop up this breakup scene a little bit. Because I wro- I wrote this breakup scene a couple of times and it got a little purple for my taste. It got a little melodramatic some of the things they were saying. Part of me still feels a little dissatisfied with this sequence. I tried to cut this down even harsher. I was- there was a cut I did where this was even more barebones than this. It was just mostly looks and a couple of lines and then she was gonna say goodbye and he was gonna leave. And people freaked. They were like a- They were like, "You can't. I was crying. What are you doing?" And I don't know there's- it's an interesting thing. I notice this in myself, a lot, in my writing and onscreen. Sometimes I will write dialogue for characters, especially in emotional, romantic type scenes, and it reads beautifully on the page. Or at least, I think it does, and then sometimes I'll see it on camera and I'll make me cringe and I pull away from it and I start carving back and then I start whittling it back so far that it's too much. And it's trying to find the happy medium where it works and- I don't know. There's some- there is a differen- there's obviously difference between the written word and the spoken word and sometimes on the page you can write things that are poetic and interesting and I think that they're gonna play beautifully and then I watch them on camera and I realize that I've just overwritten it and that I'm hitting stuff a little bit too hard on the nose. And thin- and that's just a challenge for me, personally, as a writer. Writing this sort of emotional scenes without overwriting the emotional scenes.

I love that shot. The wide shot of them in the [[hangar deck]]. It's romantic. I mean, it's a romantic shot. See, now this is where I was saying Katee walked back in, and then we were gonna pick up the jury scene and she was gonna sit down and then once the jury had been reassembled they were gonna go through the whole vote again.