July 25th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Set Nerd Phasers to Discombobulate.
So we just finished watching season three of Battlestar Galactica. It’s a pretty great show (and Julie likes it too, which reduces the geekiness factor as far as I’m concerned). The performances are above average for science-fiction TV, and the direction is very strong.
I’ve been most impressed, however, by the strength of the writing. As Cory Doctorow likes to say, all science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s about the present. I’ve really admired how the BG writers have taken on a schwack of contemporary topics–torture, military justice, terrorism, racism and so forth. For example, several episodes function as cutting criticism of American foreign policy.
I have a few outstanding questions about the show, but the one that’s most frustrated me is this: how big, exactly, is the Cylon fleet?
Do they have 1000 of those big base ships, or eight? I think the most we’ve seen is four or five, but I’ve got no idea if that’s the same four or five, or entirely difference groups (they don’t have license plates, so they’re hard to distinguish). Unless I missed it, the humans haven’t exactly exhausted much brainpower in counting the opposition.
Did I miss something?
On a related note, I wanted to discuss a particular aspect of the final episode of season three. I’ve included it after the break, so that if you’re still catching up, there won’t be any spoilage. If you’re such a person, read the comments at your own risk.
Read more…
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July 5th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Via Kate, I read about how the Sci-Fi Channel invited a bunch of bloggers and digital journalists to Vancouver for a week of set tours and panels with casts and crews for the five shows that are shot locally.
“You expect to see cameras at these things, but to see all these people with their laptops open, blogging live from the events — it was a completely different use of media than I’ve ever seen,” said Dave Howe, Sci-fi Channel exec VP-general manager.
The only show I know anything about is Battlestar Galactica. We’re currently working our way through season three, so keep your fracking spoilers to yourselves, please.
In any case, I did some quick searches and turned up a bunch of reports from TV Squad, including a set tour report and a video of the cast and crew panel (Jamie Bamber may be a looker, but he’s got one poncy accent. That said, his accent work is excellent.).
The press tour was organized by New Media Strategies. One thing they could have done better was to create a little microsite that aggregates all of the blogger’s content–photos, audio, video, blog posts–in one place. That way readers of any one attending blogger could easily access the content created by the other attendees. If they did create one, they needed to make it more findable.
It’s been my experience that when marketing people put on events for bloggers, they think exclusively of the event itself, not about the (more important, because they last much longer) digital artifacts that live on afterward.
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