Editing Podcast:Rapture

{{podcast|author=Catrope|emailAuthor2= and [[Special:Emailuser/Steelviper|Steelviper]]||suffix=s|additionalCopyright=and Terry Dresbach}}

Now this, as you can see— they're looking— this is all very specific stuff, they're looking on— they're— our guys are on a ridge, he's— [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] is laying in wire for a [[w:M18A1 Claymore Antipersonnel Mine|Claymore]] somewhere else. <!-- 16:30 --> There was a whole section in the script which I really regret us not been able to do it because of time considerations, where essentially, they had taken the [[tylium]] from— some of the fuel that was existing on the planet, and they had filled tylium in these trenches, and when the Cylons approached they were gonna light the tylium on fire, which was gonna create this really intense fire and stop the Cylons and make them easier to pick them off, and there was all these great tactics that the boys came up with that ultimately we weren't unable to do. And even here, see, here you have a <!-- 17:00 -->tough time understanding the terrain, and this is all very carefully choreographed stuff, they laid out elaborate positions, where everybody was, what the angle of approach was, where the ambush would be, where the fall-back positions were, but as you're looking at the footage it's really hard on camera to tell one position from the other. So what happened in the editing bay is we just kept working these scenes just to make them work dynamically and make them fun to watch, and all the geography got tossed out the window and all these guys are looking in the wrong directions from <!-- 17:30 -->where they actually are, none of it really lines up with— if you went out and walked the actual location, none of this would make sense, y'know the— we're cutting this in such a way and from different angles that you could not possibly line all this stuff up, this is all just— this is the difference between camera and theory. The camera changes the terrain, it changes the perspective, it just shifts everything.

Terry: You can see it's really, really <!-- 18:00 --> cold outside, that's why they're not sweaty outside, and it's hot inside because they've got fires within to keep them warm, it's too heated.

RDM: There wa— this is all a lot of stuff done— y'know [[Gary Hutzel]] and his crack of the effects guys with the Cylons, and—

RDM: —we worked a lot with what they were going to do, and— y'know the Cylons have a lot more personality, I think, in these little bits you can see them looking, being careful, they're wary, <!-- 18:30-->they're trying to get to their targets, they're not just mindless robots. Gary's team has really started to be able to give them a great deal more personality, as it were, than the [[Centurion]]s have really had previously.

Terry: Yeah, they really have changed since the last time I saw them.

RDM: Yeah. This beat of losing [[Hillard]] <!-- 19:00 --> was a little longer, a little bit more elaborate in the early cuts, there was a little more dialogue with Anders, talking about what this guy meant to him and so on, but it seemed to slow down the action, and you get the emotional (unintelligible) pretty quickly, so we opted to get out of this little sequence and move on quickly. All the— again, this whole section, all the ground fights went through a lot of editing changes, there were several different ground fights in a lot of different set-ups and payoffs for what was happening <!-- 19:30 --> that got shifted multiple times in the editing room, and this cut that's coming up, where we're about to go back to the Kara-Dualla scene, did not occur here. Because what happened was, in the original cut, was Anders and Lee kept— he says "have you heard from Kara?", Lee says "No", and that conversation kept going, where essentially they talked about— y'know Anders talked about Kara, what she meant to him, his knowledge of the person that she was, more— <!-- 20:00 --> it was more of the love aspect of the show, the romantic triangle, and it felt forced when we were watching it, it felt like you didn't need it and went without saying. This, again, here we're inside the Raptor with Kara, this is all back on the sound stage, which is why that window in the back is mysteriously opaque (laughs) it's really— that is not a promised moment, it's just this opaque window that you can't see through, and you're not quite sure why, it's supposed to (unintelligible).

This beat here with Kara pointing the gun, 'cause of her burned hands— and <!-- 20:30 -->I love the burned hands and Kara's reaction to it— that beat with Kara pointing the gun at who's gonna come out the door used to be an act-out, and then at the top of the next act Dualla came in and we relieved the tension, but it was a phony act-out, so we just made it one sequence. In early drafts, like I said, it was a different injury, between the two I think her leg was damaged, but as we got deeper into the script, we (unintelligible) in love with this idea of these deeply burned hands, <!-- 21:00 -->which I think was something that Brad came up with, as that would really— if your hands are so horribly burned—

RDM: —and so hurt, you— she's just incapacitated, she's a pilot, she can't fly the plane physically. And that was about the point where we started thinking that we'd like to play the beat of Dualla having to fly the plane out of here.

Back to the Cylon baseship. Again, this sequence moved around in the cut quite a bit, and what— we used to follow hard on the heels of the earlier <!-- 21:30 -->scene with Sharon waking up in the [[Resurrection Ship]] and then we cut directly here, and we separated that, and just— back and forth and back and forth, in the rhythms of the acts. Essentially the problem that you face with a lot of these kinds of sequences, in terms of where they fall in the acts, is that you don't want the acts to be much more— much shorter than, say, six minutes, in the current scheme of television. If you get an act that's less than six minutes, the audience starts feeling like they're just watching endless <!-- 22:00 -->commercials, like you're no sooner in the show, then boom, another commercials slaps you in the face, and there's also a theory that— you're trying very hard to make the teaser and act 1 and 2 as long as possible, because the idea is you hook the audience into watching the show, and you keep 'em in, keep 'em in, keep 'em in, then they get to a commercial break, then along-long-long-long-long, it's all to keep them from turning the channel, so you'll note in— as you're watching on air that the early acts are all <!-- 22:30 --> long, and then the latter acts are all short. But that doesn't always flow with how the story's supposed to go, and much less so, sometimes, when you're in the editing room, so you end up making a lot of difficult choices of sliding things around just to plump out the early acts and to carve down later acts, and this is an example, this was— y'know the whole Hera sequence kept moving around just to make the act links correct, which is sort of— besides, if you're listening to this commentary on DVD, you don't care about the act breaks, <!-- 23:00 -->it's— so you're sort of— on one hand, I spent a l— a great deal of time and effort in editing trying to make these act links come out correctly and to try to get the proper act-out of maximum suspense for the broadcast version of the show, but when you're watching it later on DVD, in the archival version, you don't care. It's like no one— if you're watching this on DVD, the act break doesn't matter to you, you're watching the episode through as a piece, but you'll note that the rhythms of television force these artificial climaxes at the end of all these <!-- 23:30 -->acts, and fade into black, where— in many ways, if you just play this straight through, it's a much more effective piece.

RDM: Because we were threatening the life of a child, and how much— y'know, the infamous moment when Six killed the baby <!-- 24:00 -->in the [[Miniseries]], and the f— and some of the audience freaking out because of we're about to kill the baby, and the baby-killing show and all that stuff.

Terry: It's pretty obvious that (unintelligible) more upset about— this wasn't done the rough I saw.

RDM: This wasn't— yeah, probably not. And then she's snapping her neck, and how much of that do you show on camera, and this is one of those graphic content thing that eats up a great deal of time—

OK, how does Caprica-Six get Sharon and Hera off the baseship and back to ''Galactica'' and into the Raptor, without anybody catching her? Well, you'll just have to figure that out at home, that's one of the deep dark secrets of the show that will only be revealed in Season 7. No, I don't know, and I didn't really care, I didn't think it really mattered. I think for that part you just gotta to go with the flow, and she can get her off— you just accept <!-- 25:00 -->she can get her off the ship, because the dramatic end of that commercial—

Terry: Well, because they're Cylons!

RDM: They're Cylons, and it doesn't really matter. Oh, that's great, them running down the hill, all this— this battle sequence—

Terry: It feels like the first time they've— I don't now, maybe just—

RDM: See, there's Cally running up to Tyrol with the phone, ''again''. It's almost the same shot as we used earlier in the show, and he's phone again, this is the exact same scene that we stole to manufacture that beat from earlier on.

RDM: A lot of that goes to Gary Hutzel, I have to say, I mean we script a certain number of shots and we argue about price and all that, and then you get the editing room, and Gar— it's— it doesn't come from us crazy producers, like 'We need more visual effects shots', <!-- 26:00 -->a lot of time Gary comes to us and says 'To make this sequence work, to make it really everything that it needs to be, I'm gonna put more shots in here and offer you a way to pay for it.'

RDM: He's really good, and his team, they'll— y'know, (unintelligible) shots will appear, and we don't— y'know, how they were paid for, I think Gary is secretly embezzling funds from [[w:Star Trek|Star Trek]], 'cause I think he still has access to those bank accounts, but somehow those funds are g— y'know the shots are getting paid for.

Terry: That's good. The [[w:IRS|IRS]] will be at our door next week, 'cause they listen to your podcast.

OK, now we're back, we're at the Rap— the Kara and Dualla Raptor sequence. I like this little chat that they have, this was a longer chat as scripted and shot, where Kara talked more about Lee, and her problems with Lee, and her— the emotional stuff with Dualla, and there was more give and take between the two. It was a scene that I wrote, and it wasn't that good, <!-- 27:00 -->we saw it on camera and I just felt it was a little overwrought and a little too melodramatical and too soapy, and it just— it (unintelligible) more as a cliché, and it's true. You could get away with a lot less being set in this scene then what I initially thought.

Terry: It's just like these two women, they're in this situation—

RDM: It's plenty.

RDM: You don't need them to really bear their souls and it doesn't play.  

But now— I would say that the thing that I'm not entirely satisfied in this episode is their getaway. <!-- 27:30 -->We go through this little beat that sets up an expectation, I think, that you're gonna get a whole sequence here of Kara teaching Dualla how to fly the Raptor. And we don't pay that off. And I think that's a mistake. That's a mistake I think I made in the structure of the piece, because you— the audience, at this point, watching this scene and Dualla's doing the who's-it<!-- ? --> with the what's-it<!-- ? --> and crossing the (unintelligible). I love her slapping, that's like my favorite beat, she just smacks her.

RDM: And I think you're expecting a bigger pilot-mentor relationship, and all you really get is the shaky cam and the Raptor taking off, and that's it. And that was— it's just not satisfying, it's not a good way to structure. I think it's a mistake, always, to set the audience expectation up and then not pay something off, better than just not to do it.

Terry: (unintelligible) something (unintelligible) about the riders.

RDM: Yeah I know, fucking riders.

This notion of <!-- 28:30 -->Tyrol— they set the charges in the temple and then Tyrol can't bring himself to blow it. I like it, it's there, but again it's not quite fully realized in the show, in that I wish we had a little bit— the scene that you're really missing instead of that concocted scene, the one on the telephone that we made up, we really should've had a scene that dealt more with Tyrol's growing religious awareness and—

Terry: And Baltar's suddenly realizing that he's about to get blown up

RDM: Yeah, I know, I love— <!-- 29:00 -->Baltar sees the gun, he's like "Oh, the gun— oh wait, the explosives.", it runs over. But we didn't really— we didn't quite pay enough service to the idea of Tyrol's true difficulty in blowing up this temple.

And then we get to the star going nova, which we've set up way back then. There's a lot of moving pieces in this episode, there's a lot of plot threads that had to come together. And the timing of those plot threads, like I was— I keep <!-- 29:30 --> talking about, was very difficult in the editing, in the rhythms, at what point in the cut do you see the star go nova, at what point do you cut inside here and see them discover that oh, the Eye of Jupiter is actually right over there. And we played around with a lot of different versions until we got to this version, so you went outside, and then inside, and— some of it has no (unintelligible) reason other than you sit in the editing room and you feel that that's the proper rhythm that these things need to go in, and that your initial instincts are not always right. <!-- 30:00 -->

And look, I— it was always (unintelligible) that Cavil really knew the secrets, that Cavil was keeper of the secrets in some ways.

OK, here, this little scene in CIC, you'll note that they are not in CIC proper, they're actually in the weapons room, because there was another countdown sequence here that I cut as extraneous where, as they realized that the Cy— from orbit ''Galactica'' had realized from their satellite imagery that the Cylons had penetrated the temple and were inside, <!--30:30 -->and Lee did not blow it. And Adama was starting another countdown to launch the nukes, it was going through the whole thing— y'know, weapons, (unintelligible), spin up [[FTL|the drives]] and do the whole thing, and enter your launch codes, and we'd gone through the whole thing again when the star happened, and then we cut the launch sequence short, to say "Let's get the hell out of here". And I cut it because I couldn't believe— when I saw it, it was like "we just did this", and I couldn't believe I actually just played the whole sequence in part one, in the cliffhanger, and now I was gonna do it all over again. It was just— it was stupid and it was like you didn't need to do it.

Terry: What's the thing about this?

RDM: Oh this, the Raptor take-off is saved completely by the visual effects. The look out the cockpit and the exterior of the Raptor saves it. But it doesn't have— there's no actual story there, you're still not paying off for learning how to fly the Raptor, you're just seeing a nice shot from the Raptor.

I love Cavil as the keeper of secrets and Cavil is the guy who won't let D'Anna go see the [[final five]]. I always thought that was cool, because it was a nice <!-- 31:30 -->twist on the character, who he really was, that the atheist Cylon actually knew something about the religion of the Cylons.

We talked a lot about what this moment was, in terms of how did the mes— how did they— how did she see the final five and what is the message that is left to ''Galactica'' and the Colonials about where [[Earth]] is. At first we went out of our way to avoid doing the well of lost souls, which is— y'know you're standing in the well of souls <!-- 32:00 --> and— [[w:Indiana Jones|Indiana Jones]] in the first [[w:Raiders of the Lost Ark|Raiders of the Lost Ark]] movie, and the sun comes in a certain position and the light shines in. And we tried various versions of all kinds of tech things happened with the supernova that sent messengers or sent arrows and— not literal arrows, but metaphorical light beings in a certain direction— and ultimately, in the cut, we said "No, it's the well of souls." The light comes in, and the light shines down and it takes you to a certain spot. 'Cause it works. And that's what you (unintelligible).

Terry: This is the final fix on these days? <!-- ? --> <!-- 32:30 -->

RDM: I think this is the final fix that we're looking at these guys, <!-- ? -->where D'Anna sees the faces— looks upon the faces of the final five—

RDM: —and we do not. And I— it was [[Michael Rymer|Rymer's]] idea, I believe, to go back to the [[Kobol]]lian [[Opera House]], which is a nice bit of tying in to the mythos of the show, and that the Opera House is actually a meaningful place, and those big banners that you saw tie in to the vision that Baltar and Six had back in the season— the beginning of Season 2.

RDM: (laughs) Mission accomplished.

RDM: I love this, she reaches out to touch one. And then she falls. It's a really interesting story arc for the D'Anna model that Baltar had guided her and manipulated her <!-- 33:30 -->on some level, and yet she wanted to be manipulated, and she wanted to this place, and then she finally gets to this place where she sees her— she actually succeeds. She gets what she wants, she wants to look upon the final five and she does. ''He'' doesn't get what he wants. He doesn't know if he's a Cylon, to this moment, and doesn't know who the final five are. Which is, I thought, a nice bit of irony for the story arc.

Now this is where we get into— personally, I don't think this is proper <!-- 34:00 -->structure in television terms, that we get to this point and in comes Tyrol, Tyrol whacks him with a gun, and then this is the act-out. Of the third act.