Robert Hewitt Wolfe:
Well, we’re shooting show [number] five right now, which is our
first show we’re actually out and about in the nicely terraformed Greater
Vancouver pine forest. It’s our first planet show, it’s looking pretty
good. And very nicely, the Vancouver Film Commission actually managed to
make the rain stop just in time for our exteriors. Hey, they are very powerful
men.
SC: On Trek
and especially DS9, you didn’t do much location shooting. Has
it proved challenging?
RHW:
Well, this particular crew had done locations. The challenges are basically
getting the stuff on to location and having daylight last and matching
weather and all that good stuff. But the good thing is that we’re shooting
in a northern latitude in summer, so we basically have unlimited daylight.
It’s not like Trek where
a lot of those people have been on the show 10 to 15 years and haven’t
done a lot of exterior work. Not that they had problems with it, but it
just wasn’t their normal mode of operation. Most shows do a lot more exteriors
than Star Trek or Babylon 5 or any of those types of genre
shows.
SC:
Are you looking at the schedule and keeping in the mind the weather for
the exteriors?
RHW:
Oh, yeah. We want to shoot basically all our exteriors before October.
The downside of being in a northern latitude is when you do want to shoot
exteriors, if you don’t want to shoot night, you better shoot before winter
otherwise the other side comes back to haunt you.
That’s why we’re scheduled
to shoot from May through December instead of shooting June through February
or July through February. We’re specifically trying to maximize our daylight
hours when we want to go outside and to avoid the worst of the rainy season.
SC: Rain
turns to snow, are you going to take advantage?
RHW:
Well, rain doesn’t really turn to snow at sea level. In British Columbia,
it turns to snow at higher altitudes, uh, it snows maybe two, three days
a year in Vancouver and usually the rule of thumb is the day you write
a script for snow, is the day it becomes unseasonably warm and snow melts.
SC:
So we’re not going to see the cast of Andromeda climbing a mountain
to get that nice visible breath and them shivering or…
RHW:
Well, I wouldn’t rule it out. We’ll see. There are things that I said I’d
never want to try to do on location that [co-executive producer] Allan
[Eastman] seems very confident that we can pull off.
SC: Such
as?
RHW:
Shooting on water, on boats. I don’t know if we’ll ever actually do it
or not but, he seems to think that we can pull it off. There are people
on the crew who have experience doing that sort of thing.
SC: Didn’t
they discover on Waterworld that one of the reasons that shooting
on water is so difficult is because on a moving boat, you can’t keep the
distance uniform and so the focal length is constantly changing?
RHW: Yeah,
it’s a hugely complicated issue and obviously cameras run on electricity
and batteries and they don’t like moisture. There’s all sorts of issues:
some actors are comfortable on boats, some aren’t. Some actors can swim,
some can’t. Some crew people can swim, some can’t.
The weather can change, it’s
difficult to match because sometimes a body of water is very placid and
waves don’t move at all. Then sometimes you wake up and there are waves.
We are talking about the possibility of doing it for a specific episode
but we’ll see. I remain open but cautious.
It’s the same with snow.
If it works it’s wonderful, because it adds a lot of production value.
We wanted to do a high-altitude, snow environment on Deep Space 9,
the actors were on Mount Whitney and had to pretend that they were cold
when it was 90 degrees outside. [Director] Allan Kroeker made it look cold
but it was 90 degrees up there, it was incredibly hot. We’ll see if we
can pull it off. There certainly are fjords, large bodies of water, rivers
and mountains and there are a lot of wonderful natural environments within
reasonable distance of where we’re shooting in Vancouver and we’d love
to do them.
SC:
Tribune’s already committed to 44 episodes or 2 years. Have they looked
at the dailies yet and what is their feedback then?
RHW:
Oh they’re happy. They’ve seen cuts of three episodes. As with all these
things, you always want to do adjustments and make things better, but everyone’s
happy with the first three episodes. They are very rough. There’s no music,
very few effects, no post sound, no ADR, none of that, but even dry they
are playing really well. Fast paced, fun, exciting, interesting with good
character stuff, so they’re happy.
SC:
You’re shooting on film, not DV [Digital Video], right?
RHW:
We’re shooting on film right now, we’re shooting in 35 millimeter. We have
looked into DV, there’s a possibility we may eventually shift over. We
had so many things to deal with starting up that trying to figure out a
new technology on top of that was a little intimidating. We didn’t want
to have to worry about how our cameras were gonna work. But they are using
it on [fellow Tribune series] Earth:
Final Conflict right now.
It seems like it’s going
quite well, so based on how they do, we’ll make that decision on when,
if and when we’ll switch over. But I think there is a strong possibility
that we’ll do that.
SC: Has
there started to become a buzz about the show, now that you’re in production,
or are you pretty much isolated from what’s happening in the outside world?
RHW: It’s
hard to tell. I mean it seems like there’s some interest building, especially
on the Internet. I’m going to a convention at the end of the month, and
we’ll see how many people show up and how interested they are in what we’re
doing.
SC: Which
convention?
RHW: Dragon*Con
in Atlanta, June 29-July 2. If you look at the Internet there seems to
be a pretty high amount of activity but that sometimes that’s very indicative
of what’s going on in the general population and sometimes it can be a
little distorted so.
SC: Are
you going to be showing anything at the convention?
RHW: It’s
possible.
SC: Cool.
Are you gonna be making a presentation at San Diego Comic-Con?
RHW: Uh,
yeah, I think so. I know I’m doing Dragon*Con and then 95 percent sure
I’m doing Comic-Con [July 20-23].
SC: Is
any of the talent doing Comic-Con?
RHW: It’s
unlikely just because we’re so far away. I’m not sure 100 percent about
that but it is tough when they are in Vancouver for them to get down to
do stuff like that.
What do you think? Send your
comments to the editor.
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