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| B5: Lost Tales Boasts Updated F/X J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the upcoming DVD movie Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, told SCI FI Wire that he benefited from advances in visual-effects technology since 1998, the year that saw the end of the Babylon 5 TV show on which the movie is based. In The Lost Tales, Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner), president of the Interstelar Alliance, heads to an all-important meeting aboard Babylon 5, led by Cmdr. Lochley (Tracy Scoggins). In the new film, computer animators rendered the visual effects at a higher resolution than was possible even for the final effects on the TV series, Straczynski said in an interview. "One of the effects we could never do with B5 was get too close to either the ships or to B5, because a polygon simply couldn't handle the load," he said. "But on this DVD, we really had some pane-scrapers [shots that got close to ships]. We get right in there. And the degree of resolution of detail is terrific." When Babylon 5 finished production in 1998, all of the show's assets—wardrobe, props, computer-generated models, texture mattes, etc.—were turned over to Warner Brothers, and the disks containing the computer-graphic information were lost. That forced the new F/X team to start from scratch. And they turned to fans for help. "The guys in the effects department said, 'My God, how can we get this thing done in time when we have to build everything from the scratch?'" Straczynski said. "I pointed out that a lot of fans out there over the years built their own models of our ships and the station and everything else. So they went out to all these different sites to find high-resolution models and wireframes and texture mattes and so on that they could then take and start building from. So it kind of closed the loop in the sense that Babylon 5 created these images and gave them to the fans, and now the fans have given them back to us. It's a nice bit of symmetry." Babylon 5: The Lost Tales arrives in stores on July 31 |