Babylon 5 Mini-Movies Start Production

Babylon 5 fanboys can rejoice! It seems work has started on a new set of mini-movies:

Sheridan, Lochley, Galen, And More!! BABYLON 5: THE LOST TALES Begins Production!!

“The initial goal was to try and do three big stories in one DVD. So I wrote three scripts, featuring Sheridan, Lochley, Galen and Garibaldi. (I wanted to focus on the human characters initially so we’d have more time for prosthetics R&D for the next one.) The stories, as noted previously, were huge…all over the map, from Minbar, to Earth, Mars, the future, the distant past, as well as B5 itself obviously. We’re also going to be trying some new production technologies, again trying to stay ahead of the tech curve, the way B5 has always stayed ahead on these things.

And over the last few days, as we began to bring on crew and lay out the production, looking at just how complicated these mini-movies were going to be, the idea of making three of these monsters began to become a bit much for us to pull off on out first time out the gate, especially since I’m still kind of new as a director. So we decided to postpone one of the three to the next DVD, and lengthen the other two to make up the difference. GIven that the Garibaldi story was the most complicated visually and technically, also the most difficult from a CGi perspective, that’s the one that got pushed until, potentially, next time.”

It also looks like they might make more mini-movies down the line:

“And if the sales are anywhere near what WB expects, and I think they will be, there’s no question that there will be more of these down the road. So we’re gong to focus in on those two stories and knock them out of the park.

Part of what we’re doing is to re-think the look of B5 to some degree. The show was created using 1993 technology, video toasters and amigas, and was to some extent limited by the paradigms and production methods we used in that. But it’s now 13 years later, and while I will keep the feel of the show the same, and the silhouettes and designs, there’s no reason to limit the look of the feel to what we could do six years ago (from when we stopped). So we’re going to invest a lot of time, effort and money into really re-imagining some of the visuals at the present level — looking at shows like Battlestar and the like — and bringing those tools into B5 while still maintaining the feel of the show.”

…ah yes the good old days of the Video Toaster and the Amiga!