No one has heard so much as a peep from Syfy on the shot pilot for the “Battlestar Galactica” spinoff series “Blood & Chrome,” but a decision on when fans will get a chance to see the episode is coming soon.
But even if Syfy does pick the show up for series, don’t expect a premiere until at least 2013.
“What I love about ['Blood & Chrome'] is we’re applying this idea of virtual sets on a whole new level,” Syfy original programming president Mark Stern recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We took photos and digitized all of the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ sets before we struck them. So when you see two actors walking down a hallway, they’re [really] walking down a green hallway. And then we put photo-real shots of hallways and CIC and all the sets we had behind them.”
Although the process seems similar to the pioneering efforts of another Syfy show, “Sanctuary,” it seems “Blood & Chrome” is requiring much more work in post-production. For instance, even though the pilot for B&C was filmed months ago, Syfy executives only got to see a first cut of the pilot in November, Stern said.
“We’re trying to figure out the economics right now,” he said. “I love it, but we’re trying to put various things together to see how we’re going to get it made. My hope is we get it figured out.”
“Blood & Chrome” takes place before the “Battlestar Galactica” series but after the BSG prequel series “Caprica,” which lasted just a single season. “Caprica” did utilize a lot more CGI background work, but not until late in the series.
The new show, which features a young William Adama on a sleek new Battlestar Galactica, was a tricky prospect because the sets for BSG are long gone (that show ended in 2009). But knowing there could be potential franchise built around the first reimagined series, production crews took extensive photos of the sets so that they could be used in backgrounds in future projects.
B&C was originally produced as a Web-based miniseries, but last year was graduated to full-fledged pilot just before “Caprica” was cancelled by Syfy. Although the Battlestar telemovie “Razor” featured flashbacks of a young Adama first aboard the Galactica at the end of the first Cylon War, this series will take place well before that. It stars Luke Pasqualino as Adama, replacing Nico Cortez who portrayed Adama from that time period in “Razor.”
Because of how quiet Syfy has been about B&C, many believed the project to be dead. In fact, reports surfaced late last year that the Battlestar spinoff would actually return to being a Web series again. And that is still possible — according to Stern, no decision has been made on the fate of the pilot, let alone a series.
“Now that we’re back from the holidays, I’m just waiting to get some foreign [financial] numbers in because we’re both the studio and network on this,” Stern said. “I’m hoping to make a decision [on a series order] in the next month or so.”
The “Blood & Chrome” pilot was written by Michael Taylor and directed by Jonas Pate. Taylor — a prolific writer of “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Dead Zone” and both “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” — has worked on a series with heavy virtual sets before. He was an executive producer and teleplay writer for the Fox broken pilot “Virtuality” in 2009, allowing him to work with BSG’s Ronald D. Moore once again.
Moore does not appear to be a part of “Blood & Chrome,” but his producing partner David Eick is.
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