Cooper, Woeste Talk About "Ark" Challenges

The "fire scene" being filmed for "Stargate: The Ark of Truth"

In the final part of the Ark Angel – The Ark of Truth series at MGM’s official Stargate website, writer/director/producer Robert C. Cooper and director of photography Peter Woeste talk about the challenges that they faced in putting together the first direct-to-DVD movie for the Stargate franchise since the cancellation of the ten-year-old series Stargate SG-1.

Woeste reveals some of the behind-the-scenes details concerning his role as the director of photography in which he helps to make the movie come to life. “I’m loaded down with calculators and tables and celestial prediction devices and GPS’s so I can determine the right time of day to shoot something. I’ll do that for any shoot, whether it was that particular one or whether we’re planning a scene in a meadow somewhere or in a busy street. I’ll plan the time of day. It’s important that you’re aware of that. Everywhere in the world, the sun conditions are different. If I’m planning a shoot in May and that’s when the production would like to do it, well, I’ll check the script and make sure that the proper sun conditions will actually exist. If not, we’ll reschedule.”

"Fire scene" in the movie

One of the most challenging scenes for Woeste to light was the “fire scene” in which Adria and Vala have a conversation in the Hall of Fire. “I just loved how that came together, because I know the difficulties that we had shooting it and how unsure Robert was. He just wasn’t sure about doing it the way we did it, and we were all kind of antsy when we went home that night. We had worked until like three or four in the morning, and we went, ‘Ugh!’ All that effort, and we didn’t think we had a scene at all. So that was great, to see it come together the way it did.”

The biggest challenge of all was meeting the schedule that the new direct-to-video format demanded. The distritubor needed time to get their side of the production rolling, whereas there was a more direct relationship between production and the broadcaster when making a television series. “Fox, the distributor — their comfortable window for mastering, marketing and distributing a DVD is about six months. They want the finished movie in their hands six months prior to that. Back that up from March 11th… We said ‘Look, we need more time’, and they condensed it for us. But they wanted to release both movies this year and they needed time between Ark of Truth and Continuum. So they needed the movie by absolute latest end of October 2007.”

Along with the challenges of fitting in the availability of actors and getting all of the visual effects shots completed, Cooper explained that he had seen the movie over 400 times at various stages. Not only was he the writer and director, but he was also the producer. Even so, there were parts of the production process that he enjoyed.

Daniel's tears

Cooper concludes the interview, “I think the performances are great. I think the actors really stepped up, taking things to another level. I think Michael [Shanks] is brilliant in some of the scenes that he’s faced with. I actually think everyone, Chris [Judge], Amanda [Tapping], Ben [Browder] and Claudia [Black] gave great performances, and the guest stars like Tim [Guinee] and Currie [Graham] are really great. And the music. That was one of the most fun aspects of the process that I’ve ever experienced, going down and seeing the score performed by tremendously talented people in an orchestra.

“It’s the sort of thing that was a real pleasure to do. That’s the best part of it, for me anyway — the experience of getting to make it under the circumstances we did.”

To read the complete series, visit these links at the MGM website:

The next event for the movie is the screening in Australia at the Supanova convention tomorrow, April 4, in Brisbane. The following are the known dates for future international DVD releases (thanks to our readers for helping put the list together):

  • April 8, 2008: New Zealand
  • April 9, 2008: Australia
  • April 23, 2008: France
  • April 23, 2008: The Netherlands
  • April 28, 2008: UK (Note: moved from April 14)
  • April 29, 2008: Italy
  • May 2, 2008: Germany
  • June 25, 2008: Spain
  • July 28, 2008: Czech Republic

If you’ve heard of other release dates, please leave the information in our comment section below. Thanks!

2 thoughts on “Cooper, Woeste Talk About "Ark" Challenges”

Comments are closed.