Last year’s Sci Fi Channel hit Battlestar Galactica begins season two this month. Behind the scenes, it’s barely controlled chaos. All images © 2005 NBC Universal Inc. All rights reserved.

A lot has happened since Battlestar Galactica premiered as a series on the Sci Fi Channel last year. It’s become a ratings hit and helped solidify Friday night as the genre’s appointment TV night, along with winning placement on a host of TV critics’ lists as one of the best shows of 2005. Meanwhile, the winter premiere of season two began airing this month, with the climactic “Resurrection Ship, Part 2,” bowing on Friday.

Behind the scenes, it’s been business as usual, which means barely controlled chaos for one of the most unusually crafted television series in production today. Visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel and his team of vfx artists and collaborators from Vancouver’s Atmosphere and L.A.’s Zoic Studios are still creating the impossible in record time, helping to achieve exec producers Ron Moore and David Eick’s exacting mandate for a science fiction show that surpasses the boundaries and quality of other TV shows. What does that mean? “No prisoners taken on this show,” Hutzel laughs. “We joke in the office that the producers are like kids and we are all in this wooden, rickety cart being pushed down a hill at high speed and we are just dying for one of the wheels to fly off and it never quite does. They make it to bottom and push us back up again, but at some time we all know the wheels are coming off, but it’s a thrill ride until then.”

With the producers having established a very organic and some might say, dizzyingly unstructured production cycle during the first year, Hutzel says the second season is following the same model with even more challenges. “Season one was a short season of 13 episodes. Going into season two, we are going to do 20 episodes in very nearly the same amount of time with an extra month or two thrown in. It’s really 50% more shows in nearly the same amount of time.” The specific visual effect hurdles come from the way Battlestar is post-produced. “We started out season one by approaching it in a traditional fashion, having the usual visual effects and finals meetings. What we found was that after the first few episodes, we discarded that because of the sophistication of the show. In order to address all the ideas being expressed with the visual effects, the meetings would go on for three or four hours! Even that was fine, except the shows had a tendency to not lock. There are no traditional vfx locks on any of our shows, so the elements of post-production, which you are used to, the lock dates, the meeting dates, none of those things apply. There is literally no schedule. We just know when they air!

Vfx supervisor Gary Hutzel and his team of vfx artists and collaborators from Vancouver’s Atmosphere and L.A.’s Zoic Studios create the impossible in record time.

“It starts with the fact that David Eick has always insisted the directors get a cut of the show. On any TV show, the director has a cut, but it’s really just a cursory nod because the directors on a one-hour show have four days to cut and they often don’t have time to get through it. On a sophisticated show like ours, it’s absolutely inadequate. But what David said early on was that the directors get their cut and we may not like a lot of what they do, but it’s worth going through it all for just one fresh idea. It means, quite often, the directors don’t have their cuts for weeks, so that immediately blows the schedule out of the water. Normally, if the director isn’t available when he is scheduled, then he forgoes his cut. Not on our show. If he’s unavailable, we wait for him to come back to do the cut. He does his cut and at that point the producers tag team the show. They go through and take up to two or three weeks to completely change the show to their liking. Then at that time, they pass it to the next producer and he has his pass on the show. Then they get together and argue about what they liked and didn’t like and generally do a third or fourth producers pass and only then do we get a show in a form we can work on… It’s a show that is done spontaneously and [that’s] what gives the show its form.”

In theory, it’s a refreshingly open and creative way of producing a series outside of the standard, cookie-cutter production cycle. In practice, especially for the visual effects team, it can be hell. “It defies all of the ideals of how you get a TV show done,” Hutzel agrees. “It’s very much more like a feature where people get a say because it’s politically their option to have a say, and they take as much time that they need to get it done. On a feature, if the screening date shifts three months, it’s pretty standard procedure. On our show, there is no shifting. It was easier last season because the delay in airdates was so incredible. In this new season, the task has become as demanding as we can possibly get. We are delivering the whole second half of the season on a one-week per schedule. It would have been different if they hadn’t gone into episode 11 [“Resurrection Ship”] and decided to turn it into a two-parter, but, the truth is, that isn’t unusual for our show...”