Caprica's characters, including the Graystone and Adama families, live in a world before the events of Battlestar Galactica occurred. All images Carole Segal/SCI FI Channel.

Despite the fact that the Battlestar Galactica series came to a close in March, the world and mythology reworked by Ron Moore and David Eick is far from over. The SCI FI Channel (soon to be SyFy) has The Plan, an original two-hour movie from the robotic Cylons' perspective, on deck for the fall and the new prequel series Caprica in prep to debut in January 2010. Of course, that's still a while away for pining fans, so Universal Home Ent. has made the bold move of releasing the unrated pilot for Caprica for purchase on DVD and digital download today.

As it turns out, Gary Hutzel, the Emmy award-winning visual effects supervisor on Galactica, and his in-house Universal visual effects team are staying with the franchise, creating the visual effects for both The Plan and Caprica. Providing VFXWorld with some tantalizing insight into what to expect from the new series in terms of visuals and the overall aesthetic, Hutzel talks to us exclusively about their work on the Caprica pilot and his expectations for the new series.

Setting the context for their recent work on the various franchise projects, Hutzel explains, "It turns out with Caprica that we did the pilot and we completed it with previs and presented it to the studio and network. But at the time they presented, they didn't feel they had the ability to pick it up so it sat there. Our scheduled delivery date was October [2008] and it sat and sat and sat. Everyone knew it was a winner but they had no scheduled date or game plan for a pick-up. When they did find out about the pick-up [in December 2008], then there was a new game plan from the DVD folks that wanted to release it in April '09. For that to happen, they needed it months in advance so that became a panic for us because it had to be done immediately. And that pushed the delivery for the Battlestar finale, so we were working seven days a week for four months to put these shows out."

Aside from the work crunch, Hutzel says Caprica also represents a big change in terms of the kinds of effects they creating for the mythology. "You'll find that Caprica has the same dramatic textures as Galactica with the seriousness and the attention to keeping it real and connected. But the texture of the show is different. It's not a gritty, documentary. In its style of shooting and its color palette, it's much more of a standard drama. They are going for a vaguely '50s look by using sepia and saturated colors. There's a muted color range done primarily by removing a lot of the blues. For us that's not a particular issue at all. Galactica had an iron-clad design element, which was the documentary style. This is much less so and more about saturated tones and beautiful photography and it doesn't impact us as far as design is concerned. The elements of the design are pretty straightforward.

"I met with Jane Espenson, who will be executive producer and showrunner by mid-season," Hutzel adds, "and we talked about what they want to accomplish with Caprica." As some background, the series takes place 58 years before the events of Battlestar Galactica and deals with the infancy of the robotic Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes, or Cylons. The 12 Colonies, which include Caprica, are peaceful but the underlying issues that will eventually lead to the annihilation of humankind begin in this series. One of those big issues is the development of artificial intelligence. The first version of the Cylons created is called the U-87, which actually looks like a more primitive Cylon from the original Battlestar 1978 series. But this robot isn't just a collection of impersonal metal and bolts. It's created through the investment of wealthy technologist Daniel Graystone (Eric Stolz), who is obsessed with the idea of reincarnating his newly-deceased 14-year old daughter Zoe (Alessandra Toressani) as a cyborg. The story reveals before her death the young girl, who was also quite brilliant, managed to download "rudimentary elements of her personality and DNA into the machine," forging this astounding hybrid that elicits all sorts of moral and ethical quandaries.

"Obviously Caprica involves the U-87 and Zoe's continued life as U-87," Hutzel continues. "So we talked about the first six or seven episodes and how virtual reality is going to be integrated into the storyline because that will involve us. I did a pilot for Ron [Moore] called Virtuality and we did hundreds of greenscreen comps where we put in heightened backgrounds. What was requested for that was a similar situation of virtual worlds where they can escape to where the environments are vivid and interactive. I took some of that work over and showed it to Jane and the other writers and they got quite excited by it. They want to integrate some of that into Caprica so the virtual environments become more of a player in the events that occur. I'm not clear how that works yet in the storytelling. It could be a separate tool to allow them to keep Zoe alive perhaps, but there is probably going to be a virtual Caprica.