On July 20, Canada’s The Weather Network visited Stargate Atlantis showrunners Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie at Bridge Studios to talk about how the film and television industry is financially affected by the weather. The resulting interview was featured on the channel today.
In the feature, the two producers talked about how they made the best of the weather, especially in SG-1‘s Season Nine episode “Camelot” in which one can see a very drenched Daniel Jackson talking to the village’s historian about Merlin’s library. Mallozzi commented that it turned out that the mud created from the downpour was a blessing in disguise because it made the sword fight between Mitchell and the Black Knight “grittier.” The brief feature includes clips from the episode.
Mallozzi provided some behind-the-scenes information about the interview in his blog on July 22:
Fellow Student Bodies alumni Ross Hull and I have been looking for a project to do together for quite a while and, last week, we finally found one: a two minute Weather Network report on how inclement weather effects television production. Ross, a weather anchor for the network, dropped by the studio on Friday and conducted the hard-hitting interview in which Paul and I revealed numerous shocking facts on the topic: how it’s not really not that big of a deal despite Vancouver’s notorious rainy season, how we’ll simply tarp a scene if the downpour gets too bad, how the only time it truly effects production is when the coverages don’t match (In which case Post performs magic with color correction, but even this isn’t always a solution. For a great example, look no further than the last few scenes of Nightwalkers).
We also explained how, sometimes, the nasty weather turns out to work in our favor. Take Camelot for instance. We were shooting on location when the rain hit. Note poor Daniel’s walk and talk early in Act I. He is soaking wet. Bad for Michael but great for our director who got some wonderfully sloppy visuals of a muddy Mitchell during the swordfight sequence.
Threshold is another great example. We weren’t expecting snow but we soldiered on and were pleasantly surprised by the ensuing dailies. Gorgeous. In this case, despite – or one could argue because of the bad weather, everyone won – with the possible [exception] of Chris Judge who had to spend hours lying in the cold, cold snow.
And in a rather ironic twist of fate, apparently the Stargate Atlantis crew had to film in the rain on location for the Season Four episode “Harmony” on the same day that this Weather Network feature debuted. Mallozzi visited the location shoot as it began last week and included several pictures and short videos on the behind-the-scenes operations in his blog entries. He wasn’t able to make the shoot today, but said, “Well, even though I was back at the office today in body, in spirit I was with Will Waring and co. over at Green Timbers where they were shooting day #4 of Harmony. I hope my spirit brought an umbrella because it was downright miserable this morning.”
To see The Weather Network video, visit YouTube. (Thanks to PG15 for the upload!)