“One of the major contributions we made was to make sure that we used professionals and we cast them as you would any other actor. What a lot of people don’t realize is that if someone comes onto a film stage and walks across and says, ‘Hi, Gerry!,’ they walk quite naturally. The moment you say I want you to walk urgently or briskly or lazily, they can’t do it and they become terribly self-conscious. Very quickly, we realized we needed to hire professional motion-capture artists and we got them to develop a different and specific walk for each leading character. It worked very well. I don’t think an audience would notice how a character walks, but I do believe people would say, ‘My God that looks so realistic! They could be real people.’

The CG series swung into its second season Sept. 3 in the U.K.

“We also had some trouble at the beginning and it had to do with using certain software to build a skeleton and another software package to build the faces and bodies. Certain inaccuracies started to creep in and that caused some problems. Also, with Scarlet, when we started, scripts were arriving, but feedback came from the CGI director we had at the time, saying we can’t do things like water. There were a lot of restrictions being placed on us and so we changed our top members of our crew and brought in Ron Thornton, who had worked in the U.S. for 20 years, and he came over and helped us overcome our problems. It was a few months before we put together a CGI team that really knew what they were doing and we managed to do the most spectacular things that we were told over and over again we wouldn’t be able to do. Now we’ve finished The New Captain Scarlet and gotten rid of all our equipment, not because there was anything wrong with it, but it’s a very fast moving world when it comes to computers, so we sold it all off and we are running up to begin a new television show, called Lightspeed.

“One of the things we are doing on the new series is to use all the lessons we learned about building the characters, knowing the pitfalls we fell into last time. At the end of September, we start our pre-production and during that time we will be assessing whatever new hardware and software is around and will be buying all new equipment and setting it all up again… If we start at [the level of episode 26 on Scarlet], I think the next series will be fantastic!”

Anderson admits he’s now completely wedded to CGI. “I’ve shot live-action in my time and when I look at our pictures and I see revolutionary science fiction vehicles that would probably weigh 8 or 9 tons in real life, being shot on a mountain road 6,000 feet up on a sheer drop, I think, ‘My God, if I took a film crew up there, we’d blow the budget in one day!’ The next day we are shooting in [a virtual] frozen Siberia and then next day a desert, so the scope of entertainment that CGI provides is something I’ve come to love and I’m almost certain that I will end my days making CGI television shows and maybe feature films.”

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.