u/Mojo_LA

True fans of the original series will see it...

Only last weekend did I figure out Grok can be very suggestive (I missed out on spicy season) and yeah you have to be creative. I find being vague helps best. I did so much experimenting I didn't properly keep track of all the prompts but here is stuff that worked:

- She licks and sucks a banana suggestively, making pleased and suggestive sounds

- she closes her eyes and holds the banana in her mouth, exactly where it is. She takes a deep breath accentuating her chest. She slowly pulls the banana out of her mouth and frothy saliva drips onto herself. She continues to sensuously lick and suck the banana and saliva continues to drip.

And the one that took the longest to come up with (no pun intended lol): "The banana liquifies inside her mouth and she swallows the cream"

Oh yeah and just prompting for her to get up, turn around and show her ass at the end.

For the start image just told Grok to have her holding a banana. You don't even need that, use a reasonable closeup, as long as one hand is out of frame just say "she sucks the banana" and she will magically bring one into frame. Just use a start image where it looks like it could naturally happen.

Many of the ships of the fleet had special properties the writers weren't aware of, so I started making a guide. As usual I got distracted and this was as far as I got, but here are the ones I did.

I actually developed an episode around the Agro ship, but that's another story!

TRUE STORY: During season two, I decided I wanted to bring back the Agro ship. It had been blown up in the mini series, but it's such a cool and unique ship I wanted to dress it up, relight it and see if I could convince Ron Moore to bring it back.

One day I was working on the new lighting scheme when everyone else was at lunch and Ron Moore decided to visit the VFX department for the first time! I was taken by surprise so I offered to take him on a tour. He saw the Agro ship on my screen and asked, "didn't we blow that ship up in the mini series?" I was caught off guard and didn't know what to say. For a second I thought I might get in trouble for messing with a ship that was no longer on the show.

"Ummmm, yeah, it did get destroyed. But, errrr, it's a really cool, iconic design and I was working on some new lighting and thought maybe we could bring it back, but like you said, if it got blown up in the mini series..."

He stopped me and said, "ok, THAT one got blown up in the mini series."

And that was that.

We loved using the Agro ship; it was an original series ship, it was detailed and it was the only ship that had any color in it (the pods a variety of unique environments) so we would often stage it near the camera in fleet shots.

Anyway, enjoy the renders!

For what it's worth, I've been a visual effects artist for 30 years and a fan of The Guide since 1980.

Being unable to do Zaphod (for obvious reasons) has plagued every visual production of HHG since the first stage play. God bless the BBC for even trying; their head actually looked pretty good, under the right circumstances (which were rare). But they tried (unlike the 100 million dollar movie, which didn't even bother).

To be fair, Adams didn't write much for the other head, so even if you did HHG now with a fully CG Zaphod, 95% of the time the other head would have nothing to do, unless you assume they have the same vocal chords and you split dialog, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

In any case, I started working with Ai 2 years ago and 6 months ago I had the wild idea - could Ai do Zaphod? Despite what you may think, Ai isn't easy, and sometimes concepts you think are simple it just won't do, so I wasn't sure if it would "get" 2 heads and 3 arms.

At first it didn't, it saw 2 heads and wanted 4 (or more) arms, so I had to be very, very specific. I had to number the image and refer to that arm number in the prompt.

But it worked! I also added Mark's voice. The vocal performance is bad, but this was just to see if Ai could do the mechanics of the character and clearly it can. I feel blessed that I lived long enough to see this happen!

I did test shot last night. The head was very much always shifted right so first I used Ai to reshape Mark so his proportions more naturally looked like a person with 2 heads/3 arms. That helped a lot. If even one person wants to see that process I'll post the shot.

But as usual with Ai, feeding it good info to start helped a LOT. If a production was doing this for real, I would recommend suiting up an actor in a costume and doing their best to make practical FX look decent, then use Ai to do the rest. You just wouldn't need the second head to be radio controlled or complex, just a reasonable likeness of the actor who plays him.

The actors would be scanned, like they are today for CGI. That would provide reference so Ai can get their likeness right. They might go on set and provide key frames for Ai; actors would definitely do the voices.

The process would be a lot like animation, but instead of keyframes getting sent to armies to animators in Korea, key frames made here (in Hollywood) would be animated by small teams of people also working in Hollywood on the final episodes.

Anyway, I know most of you have strong reservations about Ai, I understand and agree with just about all of them. But I wanted to share an artist's take.

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Here is the prompt, it took about 90 minutes to craft and strategize over I'd say 3 versions:

This is a scene of a man with two heads (one has an eye patch) and three arms with one arm around his girlfriend. They are on an alien planet and there is a light wind. We hear a subtle but unmistakable hum in the distance.

The photo has each of the man's arm/hands notated as 1, 2 and 3. I will give specific instructions to animate each of those arms and those arms only. Do not invent any additional arms or hands.

The head with the eyepatch pulls in the arm with the stretched out hand (arm 1), makes his hand flat (like a salute) and puts it over his forehead to shade his good eye from the sun while he slowly scans the horizon for something in the distance.

We hold for a second, then the other head says in his british, lazy, hippy accent, "cool, you look for bad guys while I take care of things over here." He turns his gaze to the girl while he removes the hand tucked inside his jacket (arm 2) and places it under her chin. He looks into her eyes and says playfully, "yup, everything checks out!" and he kisses the girl. While he kisses her, he takes the hand from her chin and puts it around her waist, pulling her closer as they kiss. While he pulls her closer, he unballs the fisted hand around her shoulder (arm 3) and tenderly wraps the now opened hand around her shoulder.

After two seconds of kissing, the eye patch head gets slightly annoyed, unable to focus on what he's doing. He looks at the other two and says in a Californian accent, "hey, ummm, I can't really, you know, focus while this is going on." He goes back to looking at the horizon.

Camera is handheld.

An image I made a few years back.

This was always one of my favorite scenes in the books and I thought the radio drama nailed it perfectly. I spent the last few nights putting this together. It seems like this would be the only way to faithfully reproduce the series!

This is definitely my favorite FX shot that got cut at the editorial stage, so it was never rendered as a final. It's at the end of "Exodus Pt. 2," Colonial One is the last ship to leave New Caprica and rejoin the fleet, a sort of "the family is back together" moment.

But the shows always ran long so there just wasn't time for another epic FX shot in an episode full of epic FX shots.

Still, I always loved how big the Galactica looks in this shot!

UPDATE: This is previsualization, not a final shot. It has low polygon models, temp lighting, etc

The first post cut off the number of images, here are the rest!

NOTE: THIS IS PART ONE - Reddit cut off the number of images so these are only the first part of the battle

About a year (maybe more) before "Razor" was announced, I was having lunch with the writers (we all worked on the Universal lot). One day I said, "hey, you know what? If you ever did a flashback to Young Adama during the first cylon war, all the ships would be from the original series!

"Ummm, they would?" he said.

"Yes, remember the museum scene in the miniseries? We established them in there" I explained.

He thought for a moment and said, "hey, I guess you're right!"

A year later, he (David Weddle) walked up to me on the lot and said, "Mojo, you're about to get your wish." That was pretty exciting! Until I got the script.

When I first read it, the ENTIRE flashback space battle was only FOUR shots. A quick skirmish between 2 Vipers and Raiders. THAT'S IT.

"No way" I said. "We are not finally getting the chance to do an original series space battle and only doing 4 shots!" The writers were used to writing for Berman-era Star Trek and it was ingrained in them to keep VFX shots to a minimum. Models motion control is very expensive.

But CGI was different. Also, having an in-house VFX department gets paid weekly (not per shot) is also a huge advantage. If we can do it in the time we have for the episode, we can do as many shots as we want. And we're willing to work weekends!

"Well," said Gary Hutzel (VFX supervisor)," what do you have in mind?"

I spent a few days coming up with this.

Here is my previsualization (aka previz, a rough draft) for a shot in "Razor" that was never used. It's easily one of my favorite shots, I'm not sure why it didn't make the cut. I think maybe the scene it was introducing was cut. Or maybe it was in the show? I'm sure someone out there can tell me if this shot is in the episode. If it DID make it, well here is the original previz lol.

In any case, it's a flashback shot to the first Cylon war, Baseships launching Raiders over Tauron.

I was basically in charge of all the original series flashback shots, so getting to do a shot like this was just me being a kid in a candy store. I grew up playing with those toys and models and here I was doing it for real on the new series. And getting paid! Trust me, I know how lucky I am. Everyone who worked on that show knows how lucky they are. So say we all.

This shot was a real pleasure to do. The script just said a shot of Baseships launching Raiders over the planet, so it could be anything. I usually start a shot by loading the model, looking through the camera and hunting around for an interesting angle. It was a launch shot so I got the camera as close to the launch bays as I thought the model could withstand and decided this angle was pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure the first version had a locked off camera that just panned with the fighters as they launched but I wanted it to be more dynamic, so I tried moving the camera back with the squadron and that really opened up the shot and gave the Baseship a lot of scale and dimension.

Of course I knew as soon as I started I was going to re-create a famous shot of three baseships from the original series so when we pan off that's where the camera lands.

Anyway, enjoy. Make it full screen. I can still watch this shot over and over, I really like this one.

I should pull out the files and finish it as a proper shot just because it will look cool with really hi-res 3D models in 4K.

Just a few random images I had in my files. I'm going through everything, figuring out what to post. I have a lot of cool stuff for you guys!

FUN FACT: did you know the look of the planet in this episode (see the last image for reference) was all done in-camera? The color, contrast, grain, all of that was done live. 99% of productions would do that in post so they could spend time coming up with a look they could keep tweaking until the day before the show airs.

But BSG said frak that, we're doing it live! A decision like that takes balls. It was actually controversial amongst the crew - you can't undo it later if you don't like it and it means there is no "normal" version of the footage. But Ron Moore liked the look and we just went with it.

And it was the right choice. No one needs to spend weeks endlessly dwelling on "looks" for the planet. Just pick something cool and go with it - no one will know what the alternatives were.

BSG was very much seat of the pants!

The last cover image I did for "BSG v BSG." Also posted the temp version I used to block it out.

it's subtle, but I was definitely channeling the great Alex Ross when designing this one. It's all CGI with some Photoshop work, but shot, lit and styled to "feel" like an illustration.

I also included and alternate temp cover and some of the individual renders/elements used to make the final cover.

Was going for a "ship of lights" vibe.

A friend knew the late great Peter David, so I asked if he could recommend me to do some alternate covers for the "BSG vs BSG" series he was writing. Gladly, they accepted my offer and here was my fist one (for issue 3). I used CGI to create the base image, but didn't want the final image to look CGI.

For inspiration I turned to a favorite, Frank Miller's Sin City - high contrast black and white with one color. I lit the ships with a similar style in 3D to do most of the heavy lifting and only used Photoshop to add the nebula and some tweaks.

The additional images show the Sin City inspiration and the temp covers I turned in for Dynamite to choose from.

I'm really proud of this one. I love how it turned out it was emotionally satisfying - comic books were my entry point into fandom, and the chance to create the art for an actual comic book (and of BSG no less) is definitely a career highlight.

I did three more! The next one is Alex Ross :-)

I asked a friend who can do Cylon voices to make this for me a decade ago.

Wallpaper for ultra-wide monitors.