In this week’s Dispatch from Andromeda, SPACE.com’s Don Lipper speaks with Jim Finn, the show’s visual effects supervisor, about the series' graphics, special effects and cinematic language.

SPACE.com: With this show you’re telling a lot of the story in the graphics?

Jim Finn: Yeah, I couldn't imagine how many shots we've already done. We have a lot of monitors and displays on the ship that show the status of the ship -- of areas on the ship, the weapons status, navigational status, the power systems or the slipstream drive -- but none of it is in English. We can't stick up on the screen, "Danger!! Enemy ships approaching!!" We have to illustrate that with graphics.

We probably create 30 to 40 unique graphic animations for every episode so that we're not constantly having to go outside to show space. The actors can interact with the animation that's shown on the screens.

There's nothing worse than having to put text on the screen that you can read, because on television you have to make that text very big. And it just looks a little unrealistic. So that's been a huge challenge. Our graphics are looking great and we're quite proud of them.

SPACE.com: Is it a 2-D flat panel, or is it 3-D where they're walking around these displays?

JF: For the most part they're two-dimensional panels, they have a lot of three-dimensional graphics within them. We have three-dimensional models of the Andromeda and all the other ships, so most of the elements we create in CG, we also use graphically on the playback [monitors on the set].

We can't afford to do a feature every episode, so one of the ways to illustrate what's going on in space is to show it graphically so that we can spend our money doing the shots we need to do outside the ship.

And we also generate a lot of the exteriors -- space shots that we see from the bridge -- ourselves and display those on the screens. We don't have physical windows, we have displays that show them what's happening in space.

SPACE.com: How does this job differ from the stuff you've done in the past? You've done Poltergeist and Sliders.

JF: I've done a lot of physical (effects) shows, spies and ghosts and goblins, and the experiences you get with that is the compositing and the effects have to be much more realistic and believable.

What you do in space is more imaginative. But [we're] basically having to create the better part of a lot of scenes, instead of doing a single shot or a couple of shots within a scene, we're creating anywhere from two to 12 minutes of computer generated images per episode.

So we're really having to tell a good part of the story and work very closely with the editors and the animators to make sure that everything cuts, instead of having a cut and taking a shot and making someone appear or disappear or die in some unimaginably horrible way.

SPACE.com: That seems to be more effects than your average space show.

JF: Again, we're just starting the show so I imagine that we'll get to a point where we can do a lot more actor-intensive episodes and try and cut back a little bit on the CG, but right now we're trying to set the stage for what the ship can do, what environment it's living in, all the other cultures it interacts with. But we’ve been creating a lot of shots in the last couple of months.

SPACE.com: What’s it like being so integral in designing the visual language of the show?

JF: Usually on an episodic basis we'll go in and we'll attend the production meeting and we'll have an effects meeting and then we have a concept meeting and we'll shoot the show.

On this show we have advance production meetings with just visual effects so we can talk about the script and see if we're going massively overboard or if I think we can do more, and then it will go back to the writers and then it'll come back to us and we'll try to design and choreograph what we're gonna see in space with the writers and producers. Once we have a good idea of what we can afford to do and what we can write into the script, then we'll start having our normal set of meetings when the director comes on board.

So it's a much longer process, we're much more involved in the choreography of the show from start to finish, which makes it more interesting for us, ‘cause we're not just pasting stuff on top of a shot. We're creating, in some cases, entire scenes in the show, so we have a little bit more latitude with the writing and the producing of the show.

SPACE.com: Do you get to the point where you can say, "we don't need this block of dialogue, we can do this"?

JF: What we try and do is work with the dialogue, because the dialogue is telling the story, but in a lot of cases we'll say we either don't need to be standing on the bridge talking about this, we can get outside and we can look back at the ship and we can do this and you get a lot more freedom to try and help the director and the writers get outside the spaceship.

And in a lot of cases, when we have a very heavy episode that's starting to get over the top financially, then we can say, "listen, we don't necessarily need to go outside to see all of this action, we can do it with our graphics displays." We can intercut the graphics, we can have the actors interacting with the graphics, and then we can go outside to see what happens.

That creativity has come just since we've started developing the ability to tell the story with the graphics, and that's helped a lot because now we can afford to spend the money on the key shots, blowing up galaxies and space battles with hundreds of ships, which is difficult to do in a television show.

We're not creating armageddon. Well, actually we sort of are creating an armageddon every week.

JF: Oh yeah, and we've done it several times already. We're trying not to run a body count up too high, but we certainly get the ability to let the animators go when it comes to interaction between weapons and the ships and blowing things up.

Some of the scenes that start out in the script as being 10 or 15 seconds long end up being two minutes because we've got an idea for destroying a fleet of enemy ships and they let us run with it. We've done that quite a few times already.

And as we build up stock, we try and design a lot of the shots so that they can be re-used in some way. We don't necessarily re-use them the way they were originally designed, but we have the flexibility to change them a little bit.

SPACE.com: When you're doing those shots, because it’s all CG, you can have the same battle, show it at a different angle and you don't have to do anything else aside from shift the camera?

JF: The way we design and layer it is that we may have a battle happening with a specific civilization. Four or five episodes down the road we may replace all the enemy ships with a different ship, move the camera a little bit and re-render all the pieces, put them together over a slightly different galactic background and we've saved ourselves a ton of time animating and compositing and a lot of money in the meantime.

We try not to re-use shots exactly the way they were originally shot, but with the flexibility of creating the whole scene, all you have to do is use the camera. It really becomes a virtual set.

JF: We spend so much time talking about the show before we actually start shooting, that we're pretty much on the same page as far as how we're going to shoot it and how we're going to interact with the effects.

There's always a bit of a learning curve once you start creating the effects for the show, but, because we decided we were going to tell the story visually -- and not verbally or with English language on the screen -- we already knew what the task was going to be.

And we learned because we started creating stuff early. Some of it's not going to work, it's not telling the story, it really feels like we have to put something in there to say what's going on so we take a totally different approach, and hopefully what we've come up with works well.

JF: Yeah, Andromeda herself. The ship itself has the beauty and the grace. We have to illustrate that with the actress, we have to illustrate that with the different ways that she interacts with the actors in the ship. She keeps showing up in different forms all over the place.

SPACE.com: And how does she display the condition of the ship? If she gets hit, does she get a black eye?

JF: No. If conditions get bad enough, she may disappear but then she can reappear on a screen. As she gets damaged, the complexity of her appearance may change.

But as long as the ship's alive, she's there to help the crew, either verbally or by at least getting graphics up on the screen to illustrate the problems they're having.

SPACE.com: Did you look at any NASA footage or anything like that to give the visual effects sort of a documentary real feel?

JF: We worked fairly closely with the Hubbell people and the NASA people as far as getting the actual look of space. But since we can go anywhere we want, we . . . don't use actual images from the telescope. We use them as a guide to create our own just so we have a somewhat more accurate rendition.

JF: We're trying to create more of a P.O.V. than a handheld look. The camera is more alive and if you're standing beside the spaceship and it gets hit, then you get hit. If an explosion goes off close to you, then you feel the concussion. Or if you're just cruising through space then it's more of a relaxing ride.

We've tried to make the camera more of a P.O.V. than an actual view from the spaceship. We're not always looking out through the camera on the spaceship, we move away from the Andromeda, we try and keep it close and personal.

SPACE.com: When Andromeda airs, is there anything where you’ll say, "Hey, that's mine, that's the real money shot"?

JF: It just changes every day right now because we're delivering a lot of episodes right away -- I'm really delivering an episode a week right now -- so every week I'm more excited about the next show. We think we've topped ourselves, and the next week we do something bigger and better.

Right now until we get the first season under our belts, it's gonna be hard to sit down and just look at it and decide what's the best work we've done. About every episode we've done so far has been pretty exciting.

The most exciting part was sitting down and mixing the first episode and seeing the effects in the show, hearing them with sound and being able to watch the show and not keep watching for missing shots, for mistakes, for flaws. Trying to sit back and enjoy it. The first three or four shows are looking pretty exciting.