L5: First City in Space

From: Xenophile [mailto:xenophile2002@...]

> It's a torus, fer cryin' out loud! It's already been
> done, in _2001_!

Yeah, and I'll bet one thing they hated about that scene was that there
was nothing they could do about the fact that Heywood and his companion
were rather obviously walking downslope at one end of that set, and
upslope at the other end.

> Hmmnnn...... I wonder if there is
> something just innately expensive about such things.
> Have to look into that. There's still no reason it
> couldn't be done with animation.

Somebody (possibly someone on this list) was on an on-line chat with J.
Michael Straczynski (B-5), and asked him why it was that we hardly ever
go to see the interior of that big, green cylindrical section. He said
that it was an expensive special effect, so they tended to avoid it.
The asker found this answer unsatisfying because he didn't see any
reason why computer animations of the cylinder interior would be any
more expensive than animations of space battles, and there were
certainly those in aplenty. But I bet JMS was referring to the
complications of green-screening people into the foregrounds. But
towards the end of the show's run they were using green-screen quite
extensively, and since then we've had movies like "Sky Captain" which
was almost entirely done green-screen. So I'm sure it's not as
expensive now as it was.

> Xenophile (which brings me to the animated superhero adventure: _L-
> Force: Defenders of the High Frontier_)

This reminds me of a fantasy I had that maybe Gerry Anderson could be
persuaded to get back to his roots and do another "international rescue
team" show, only this one set in an early High Frontier orbital mining
and construction setting. You could get into habitat manufacture
further along in the run of the show.

Regards,

Mike Combs