Dragon*Con 2007 Thursday/Friday: The line starts here
I'm still unable to get online unless directly hooked into my mother's modem. Argh. Anyway, here's part 1 of the con report, with more coming soon. I'm rather disappointed with how my pictures came out; perhaps next time I'll try practicing with the new camera before taking pictures I really want to have.
asta77 and I arrived on Thursday this year, partly so that we'd be able to do stuff on Friday (me in particular; the timing of flights from the West Coast means leaving really early to arrive mid-afternoon, too late for most panels anyway, or leaving at a decent hour and getting in in the evening, and I opted for the latter this year) and partly so that we'd be able to hopefully score two double beds instead of a king for the four occupants of our room. Victory was ours.
asta77's flight was delayed by thunderstorms, so we got to the hotel at almost the same time, and after settling in and grabbing some dinner, we headed down to registration, where we got our first glimpse of just what the weekend was going to be like: a line. Yes, we lined up at 9pm to pick up our pre-registered badges and were finished by 10:45 or so. Not a good sign, though in hindsight, we did considerably better than people who tried to register later in the weekend. (Overheard in the registration line, randomly, someone telling a friend, "She met her current husband playing World of Warcraft," and a plaintive cell phone call, "Well, my ride got incarcerated, so I need a new ride." Ah, Dragon*Con.)
And that was it for Thursday. For all our talk about a Stargate marathon, for which we both brought DVDs, did we watch a single moment of Stargate the entire weekend? No. I blame Dante's Cove.
* * * * *
1:00 -- Star Trek vs. BSG
[Panelists: Gates McFaddon, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Aaron Douglas, Richard Hatch, Jamie Bamber, Mark Sheppard, Kevin Grazer (BSG science advisor), a guy whose intro I didn't hear but who I think is a writer or actor on one of the biggest ST fan-made series, and a guy whose intro I only partly heard and who I think works for Zoic and has done effects for Star Trek (either fan-made series or both fan-made series and actual Paramount property), Firefly, and BSG.]
We went back to the hotel right after this panel, so I actually wrote down my notes immediately; alas, that did not happen again over the course of the weekend. I'm doing all of these from memory.
I like the idea of the Star Trek vs. X Show panels, because I think there's a lot of value to comparing shows and looking at the history and development of genre television, but feel like the Trek Trak people often try to set the shows in opposition to each other, which tends to draw lots of long, uncomfortable silences from the panelists, who didn't really come to the con to diss on other shows, especially in front of their cast members. This particular panel also suffered from plain old bad questions from the audience; many of them were unanswerable, or just didn't give the panelists anything to hang a response or a tangent on, and a couple were just plain old pontificating at the actors. So there were lots of awkward pauses throughout, but there were a few good moments.
Gates McFadden (who BTW looked absolutely fabulous; I ended up washing my hands in the sink next to her in the ladies room outside the Centennial Ballrooms after the panel and she looked every bit as good up close) started the panel off on a very funny note, asking the ur-question of all cons, something along the lines of, "Can you talk about the show, the ideas behind the show, your experience working on the show, and how you thought your character developed. One at a time, please."
Brent Spiner was also extremely funny, though in a way that made it clear he didn't suffer fools very gladly. He kept calling BSG "Battleship Galactica," not in an obnoxious way, but in a way that mocked the whole oppositional structure of the panel, as if he was too old-school to get what the kids are watching these days.
Sheppard and Douglas both professed to being huge ST: TNG fans, and it was quite clear from the banter Sheppard had with Spiner and Frakes that he had indeed watched the show attentively and admired it. (In general, over the course of the weekend, Sheppard displayed a level of knowledge of and admiration for several genre shows that marked him as a true fanboy, and it was endearing.) Sheppard actually asked the effects guy if he'd been responsible for the Firefly-class ship you can see flying by Roslin's doctor's window when she's getting her diagnosis in the BSG miniseries; I didn't quite understand the answer, but the effects guy seemed to be denying that it was actually a Firefly, which COME ON.
Above: The effects guy lies through his teeth.
Aaron Douglas passed gregarious about two exits back and was firmly in obnoxious territory for me; this was the case pretty much the entire weekend. I like the Chief, but have some issues with Aaron Douglas, so I'm afraid my reports on panels are going to reflect that. On the other hand, to give credit where credit is due, so many of the questions for this panel were bad that he did end up stepping in to fill some awkward pauses and didn't end up interfering with actual interesting commentary in this case.
All of the panelists did sort of poke around the issue of how Trek is a fundamentally optimistic view of the universe while BSG is much darker. Richard Hatch made the most overt criticism of "the other" show of any of the panelists, saying that shows get comfortable and stop taking risks and that he thought that happened with Star Trek, though it was unclear to me if he was talking specifically about TNG or the franchise as a whole.
Someone (Gates McFadden? Or possibly a question from the audience?) brought up the fact that in Star Trek, there couldn't be interpersonal conflict between the characters, so all of the conflict was external, and that produced a very different atmosphere from the one on BSG.
Someone asked a question about how both shows could be viewed as re-inventions of old classics, but the panel didn't seem to think they were that similar in that regard: ST:TNG, while set in the same universe, was an entirely new set of characters, while BSG was actually re-working the old show and old characters.
There was some discussion of the new fan-made Trek series; the Zoic effects guy teaches at a school in Orlando and his students had done the effects for one of them (I think New Generations?). He joked about how a typical BSG episode might have 40 effects-all expensive, all part of production costs-but the Trek episode had 700 because they were free. (The con channel in the hotel ran several episodes of one of the new fan-made Trek series over the course of the weekend and I've got to say that although some of the acting was a leeetle painful, it's obvious that a tremendous amount of effort has gone into the writing, costumes, sets, and effects, and it's a pretty impressive production for a bunch of amateurs.) He also mentioned that digital effects make it easier for the show's creative people to be picky; when faced with the cost of rebuilding a model and re-shooting an explosion, most showrunners in the past would suck it up and go with a less than perfect shot, but now that it's just a matter of re-doing things on a computer, they demand a far greater number of small changes. Richard Hatch joked about how expensive the effects on the original BSG had been, and how they had run the same effects shots over and over again because of it.
Jamie Bamber mostly looked bored (which, while not very diplomatic, was fairly well justified; the questions really did suck and didn't give the panelists much to work with), but he did get quite animated when talking about ST:TOS (and TNG? I wasn't quite sure if he was talking about both) being made in a more optimistic era, and BSG reflecting more complicated and dark aspects of our current world, and liking that about the show. His shirt did not make my eyes bleed.
Above: Proof that Jamie Bamber's shirt choices do not have to physically hurt us.
A guy who was dressed in a Badger costume (that's Badger from Firefly, not a badger; I feel the need to make that distinction) asked Brent Spiner a question about Data; the gist was that a lot of fans, who are geeks and nerds, could relate strongly to Data and the way he had to figure out the intricacies of human relationships, and was Spiner aware of that when performing? Spiner started off quite seriously giving all credit to the writers, but when the crowd protested, he switched gears and joked that he took credit for everything. Sheppard complimented the questioner on his very fine hat. I was a little sad that Spiner didn't have more of an opportunity to get into why he thought so many fans could relate to Data, and why Data was so popular, but the conversation moved in a different direction at that point.
Someone asked about the new JJ Abrams Trek movie that's in development, in the context of prequels maybe not being one of the franchise's strengths; it was a pretty obvious slam on Enterprise, but the Trek actors either didn't pick that up or ignored it, and all of them expressed unequivocal support for the project and excitement that there will be another movie in the universe. Either Frakes (who otherwise didn't say much) or Spiner mentioned that they thought "that Quinto kid" was a good casting choice and a sign that JJ Abrams is a good choice to helm the movie. I stuffed a fist in my mouth to prevent an outburst of Alias-related bitterness.
Kevin Grazer, BSG's science advisor, who was also at the con last year, was asked about the differences in advising a show like Trek versus a show like BSG. He knows the guy who advised Trek and said that he did a lot more speculation, while Kevin mostly sticks to concrete sciences. He said that in some cases, the technology in the BSG-verse is actually a little behind our contemporary technology, which makes for even less speculation. He also mentioned Tyrol and Cally's brief decompression in Season 3, when they'd suffered from the bends but hadn't exploded or anything, and said that people thought he'd gotten it wrong because they'd been conditioned by 50 years of erroneous depictions of decompression in sci fi.
This panel ended up, unfortunately, being the only one I saw with the Trek actors, since I ended up standing in line for other panels during the other Trek panels. But that was all ahead of me, since at this point I had no idea how bad things were going to get.
4:00 -- Farscape
[Panelists: David Franklin, Gigi Edgley, and Lani Tupu]
This was the only Farscape panel that didn't conflict with other stuff I wanted to see (the Farscape panels on Saturday and Sunday were running against Claudia Black and Stargate respectively), and I'm glad I did get a chance to see the Farscape actors at least once. I don't remember a ton of specifics; the entire hour was a long, easily-flowing conversation between the actors, who seem to have the con routine down. And I don't mean that in a perjorative way; they were attentive to audience questions, had some fun stories to share, and their affection toward the show and its fans was readily apparent, but they'd obviously done this a lot and knew exactly how to go about it. So I doubt if much of this is new material, but I did enjoy the panel a lot.
Someone asked a very business/industry-type question about what had happened between the announcement that there would be a Season 5 and the show's cancellation; this is not exactly something you expect the actors to know the details of, but Lani Tupu made a fair attempt at fielding it and said that the show had gotten caught up in the collapse of a German parent company of part of the production, among other things. I was sitting behind pellucid and I believe we both had our faces in our palms at that point.
Lani also spoke of some current projects he's working on-mostly theater in Sydney, including a play about a Cuban cigar-making concern in 1920s Florida that Jimmy Smits had done on Broadway (I think) a few years ago. He mentioned enjoying the cigars.
Gigi talked about doing The Starter Wife (I think it's called), the Debra Messing show, and how much she enjoyed her part and working with the other actors on the project.
David Franklin, when asked about a memorable moment on the show, talked about his scenes channeling the Skreeth and how he'd had no idea how he was going to do that before getting on the set. That seemed to be a common experience; they all spoke of the incredibly fast pace of production. Lani Tupu told a story about showing up to film a three-minute scene with a female actress whose name I didn't recognize on the Talyn set; something about the way he talked about it made me think he must have been referring to Crais's conversation with his former PK girlfriend aboard Talyn during "Into the Lion's Den." Apparently, after filming, they found out that David Kemper was rewriting the scene-in LA-and they ended up re-filming it later in the afternoon, with the camera cutting between actors because they were literally working on the dialogue after having had it in their hands for an hour and couldn't do the whole thing seamlessly. They all seemed to shrug off the last-minute changes, though, expressing utmost trust in the writers.
David and Gigi both talked about different aspects of the show's use of makeup and how that affected their working environment. David said that he and Rebecca Riggs had a really great rapport, but that since he was used to working with her while she was in makeup, it was a little difficult for him to relate the person he saw off the set to the person he worked with. Gigi talked about how after a year or so she'd discovered that using oil was the fastest way of getting the makeup off, and was generally tired and ready to leave and just got it off as quickly as she could, and sometimes would be curling up with her boyfriend when he'd point out that she'd brought a little of Chiana home with her-behind her ear, for example. Gigi also talked about seeing Anthony Simcoe and taking a moment to place him without the D'Argo makeup. David Franklin joked that Wayne Pygram looked much the same in and out of makeup, except more dead (I think in the Scorpius gear; the opposite would be rather terrifying.)
Gigi talked about working with the show's first female director, and how excited she'd been to be working with another woman, and how the director had hated Chiana's mannerisms and tried to direct her out of it (something along the lines of, "Why are you doing that with your head? Stop it!") and they'd ended up having quite a bit of struggle over it. I think this was one of the "Self-Inflicted Wounds" episodes, since Gigi mentioned that it was one of the first Jool episodes, and there was all kinds of quirky behavior all over the place, and there had been a giant snake. The second time the female director worked on the show, Gigi approached her to try to pave a smooth relationship at the beginning, and it worked much better.
Lani's answer to the question about memorable moments on the show was that when he filmed his last scene, it was literally Crais's last scene-the one where he tells Talyn to starburst in the hanger of the command carrier-and that he hadn't really thought too much of it until he saw it on the show and realized what a great ending it was for the character.
Gigi and Lani talked about finding out the show had been canceled. Lani was in Las Vegas and some random stranger came up to him and asked him how he felt about the show being over, and he had no idea what the person was talking about, so that's how he found out the news. Gigi was in Chiana makeup, trying not to melt in the heat at the studio, but ended up having lunch with the rest of the cast and crew rather than staying in her trailer and keeping cool; somebody (Brian Henson, I think?) came to talk to her in her trailer afterward and made a move to hug her but it was awkward because he couldn't touch her makeup everywhere. She said everybody was in shock, and mentioned that Claudia was on the phone with her agent trying to figure out what was going on.
They all spoke very highly of the quality of writing on the show, and the ability to act out such complicated characters, and were appreciative of the fans. They all seemed like nice, approachable people. I saw all three of them in the Marriott lobby at various times over the course of the weekend; Gigi Edgley getting into an elevator with a bag of food, David Franklin people-watching in the line at the Starbucks, Lani Tupu walking through the lobby while the costume display was in full swing with a wide grin on his face.
sdwolfpup and brynnmck didn't arrive until later in the afternoon on Friday, so asta77 and I met up with molly_may, then loafed through most of the morning before hitting panels. Over the course of the day, I got to meet pellucid, kernezelda, scrubschick, jarrow272, and sugargroupie, and after all the flailing and the planning and the wondering if it was going to be possible to catch up to everyone I wanted to meet over the course of such a big event, it ended up being surprisingly easy. It's always funny to meet people you've "known" online in person, and they were every bit as funny and smart as they seem. sdwolfpup and brynnmck arrived at around 5, just when the Marriott lobby was starting to get into full swing, so brynnmck, who hadn't been to Dragon*Con before, got the full frontal costume experience from the start.
Friday was sdwolfpup's birthday, so we had a celebratory dinner, and then spent way too much time in the faintly dodgy nearby liquor store trying to figure out what percentage of the larcenous markups was attributable to Georgia's insane liquor taxes and what percentage was due to the "we're the only liquor store near a group of giant convention hotels" factor, and then there was an attempt to go to the Buffy Horror Picture Show-we were thwarted, as we were with so many things during the weekend, by the sheer volume of people and the fact that we hadn't gotten in line way ahead of time-so instead we finally managed to hooked up with bheerfan and watched vids back in our room.
Up next: Saturday, Claudia Black, Stargate, Dante's Cove. I don't know how I feel about putting Dante's Cove in with those other two things, which are actually good. Hm.
asta77 and I arrived on Thursday this year, partly so that we'd be able to do stuff on Friday (me in particular; the timing of flights from the West Coast means leaving really early to arrive mid-afternoon, too late for most panels anyway, or leaving at a decent hour and getting in in the evening, and I opted for the latter this year) and partly so that we'd be able to hopefully score two double beds instead of a king for the four occupants of our room. Victory was ours.
asta77's flight was delayed by thunderstorms, so we got to the hotel at almost the same time, and after settling in and grabbing some dinner, we headed down to registration, where we got our first glimpse of just what the weekend was going to be like: a line. Yes, we lined up at 9pm to pick up our pre-registered badges and were finished by 10:45 or so. Not a good sign, though in hindsight, we did considerably better than people who tried to register later in the weekend. (Overheard in the registration line, randomly, someone telling a friend, "She met her current husband playing World of Warcraft," and a plaintive cell phone call, "Well, my ride got incarcerated, so I need a new ride." Ah, Dragon*Con.)
And that was it for Thursday. For all our talk about a Stargate marathon, for which we both brought DVDs, did we watch a single moment of Stargate the entire weekend? No. I blame Dante's Cove.
* * * * *
1:00 -- Star Trek vs. BSG
[Panelists: Gates McFaddon, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Aaron Douglas, Richard Hatch, Jamie Bamber, Mark Sheppard, Kevin Grazer (BSG science advisor), a guy whose intro I didn't hear but who I think is a writer or actor on one of the biggest ST fan-made series, and a guy whose intro I only partly heard and who I think works for Zoic and has done effects for Star Trek (either fan-made series or both fan-made series and actual Paramount property), Firefly, and BSG.]
We went back to the hotel right after this panel, so I actually wrote down my notes immediately; alas, that did not happen again over the course of the weekend. I'm doing all of these from memory.
I like the idea of the Star Trek vs. X Show panels, because I think there's a lot of value to comparing shows and looking at the history and development of genre television, but feel like the Trek Trak people often try to set the shows in opposition to each other, which tends to draw lots of long, uncomfortable silences from the panelists, who didn't really come to the con to diss on other shows, especially in front of their cast members. This particular panel also suffered from plain old bad questions from the audience; many of them were unanswerable, or just didn't give the panelists anything to hang a response or a tangent on, and a couple were just plain old pontificating at the actors. So there were lots of awkward pauses throughout, but there were a few good moments.
Gates McFadden (who BTW looked absolutely fabulous; I ended up washing my hands in the sink next to her in the ladies room outside the Centennial Ballrooms after the panel and she looked every bit as good up close) started the panel off on a very funny note, asking the ur-question of all cons, something along the lines of, "Can you talk about the show, the ideas behind the show, your experience working on the show, and how you thought your character developed. One at a time, please."
Brent Spiner was also extremely funny, though in a way that made it clear he didn't suffer fools very gladly. He kept calling BSG "Battleship Galactica," not in an obnoxious way, but in a way that mocked the whole oppositional structure of the panel, as if he was too old-school to get what the kids are watching these days.
Sheppard and Douglas both professed to being huge ST: TNG fans, and it was quite clear from the banter Sheppard had with Spiner and Frakes that he had indeed watched the show attentively and admired it. (In general, over the course of the weekend, Sheppard displayed a level of knowledge of and admiration for several genre shows that marked him as a true fanboy, and it was endearing.) Sheppard actually asked the effects guy if he'd been responsible for the Firefly-class ship you can see flying by Roslin's doctor's window when she's getting her diagnosis in the BSG miniseries; I didn't quite understand the answer, but the effects guy seemed to be denying that it was actually a Firefly, which COME ON.
Above: The effects guy lies through his teeth.
Aaron Douglas passed gregarious about two exits back and was firmly in obnoxious territory for me; this was the case pretty much the entire weekend. I like the Chief, but have some issues with Aaron Douglas, so I'm afraid my reports on panels are going to reflect that. On the other hand, to give credit where credit is due, so many of the questions for this panel were bad that he did end up stepping in to fill some awkward pauses and didn't end up interfering with actual interesting commentary in this case.
All of the panelists did sort of poke around the issue of how Trek is a fundamentally optimistic view of the universe while BSG is much darker. Richard Hatch made the most overt criticism of "the other" show of any of the panelists, saying that shows get comfortable and stop taking risks and that he thought that happened with Star Trek, though it was unclear to me if he was talking specifically about TNG or the franchise as a whole.
Someone (Gates McFadden? Or possibly a question from the audience?) brought up the fact that in Star Trek, there couldn't be interpersonal conflict between the characters, so all of the conflict was external, and that produced a very different atmosphere from the one on BSG.
Someone asked a question about how both shows could be viewed as re-inventions of old classics, but the panel didn't seem to think they were that similar in that regard: ST:TNG, while set in the same universe, was an entirely new set of characters, while BSG was actually re-working the old show and old characters.
There was some discussion of the new fan-made Trek series; the Zoic effects guy teaches at a school in Orlando and his students had done the effects for one of them (I think New Generations?). He joked about how a typical BSG episode might have 40 effects-all expensive, all part of production costs-but the Trek episode had 700 because they were free. (The con channel in the hotel ran several episodes of one of the new fan-made Trek series over the course of the weekend and I've got to say that although some of the acting was a leeetle painful, it's obvious that a tremendous amount of effort has gone into the writing, costumes, sets, and effects, and it's a pretty impressive production for a bunch of amateurs.) He also mentioned that digital effects make it easier for the show's creative people to be picky; when faced with the cost of rebuilding a model and re-shooting an explosion, most showrunners in the past would suck it up and go with a less than perfect shot, but now that it's just a matter of re-doing things on a computer, they demand a far greater number of small changes. Richard Hatch joked about how expensive the effects on the original BSG had been, and how they had run the same effects shots over and over again because of it.
Jamie Bamber mostly looked bored (which, while not very diplomatic, was fairly well justified; the questions really did suck and didn't give the panelists much to work with), but he did get quite animated when talking about ST:TOS (and TNG? I wasn't quite sure if he was talking about both) being made in a more optimistic era, and BSG reflecting more complicated and dark aspects of our current world, and liking that about the show. His shirt did not make my eyes bleed.
Above: Proof that Jamie Bamber's shirt choices do not have to physically hurt us.
A guy who was dressed in a Badger costume (that's Badger from Firefly, not a badger; I feel the need to make that distinction) asked Brent Spiner a question about Data; the gist was that a lot of fans, who are geeks and nerds, could relate strongly to Data and the way he had to figure out the intricacies of human relationships, and was Spiner aware of that when performing? Spiner started off quite seriously giving all credit to the writers, but when the crowd protested, he switched gears and joked that he took credit for everything. Sheppard complimented the questioner on his very fine hat. I was a little sad that Spiner didn't have more of an opportunity to get into why he thought so many fans could relate to Data, and why Data was so popular, but the conversation moved in a different direction at that point.
Someone asked about the new JJ Abrams Trek movie that's in development, in the context of prequels maybe not being one of the franchise's strengths; it was a pretty obvious slam on Enterprise, but the Trek actors either didn't pick that up or ignored it, and all of them expressed unequivocal support for the project and excitement that there will be another movie in the universe. Either Frakes (who otherwise didn't say much) or Spiner mentioned that they thought "that Quinto kid" was a good casting choice and a sign that JJ Abrams is a good choice to helm the movie. I stuffed a fist in my mouth to prevent an outburst of Alias-related bitterness.
Kevin Grazer, BSG's science advisor, who was also at the con last year, was asked about the differences in advising a show like Trek versus a show like BSG. He knows the guy who advised Trek and said that he did a lot more speculation, while Kevin mostly sticks to concrete sciences. He said that in some cases, the technology in the BSG-verse is actually a little behind our contemporary technology, which makes for even less speculation. He also mentioned Tyrol and Cally's brief decompression in Season 3, when they'd suffered from the bends but hadn't exploded or anything, and said that people thought he'd gotten it wrong because they'd been conditioned by 50 years of erroneous depictions of decompression in sci fi.
This panel ended up, unfortunately, being the only one I saw with the Trek actors, since I ended up standing in line for other panels during the other Trek panels. But that was all ahead of me, since at this point I had no idea how bad things were going to get.
4:00 -- Farscape
[Panelists: David Franklin, Gigi Edgley, and Lani Tupu]
This was the only Farscape panel that didn't conflict with other stuff I wanted to see (the Farscape panels on Saturday and Sunday were running against Claudia Black and Stargate respectively), and I'm glad I did get a chance to see the Farscape actors at least once. I don't remember a ton of specifics; the entire hour was a long, easily-flowing conversation between the actors, who seem to have the con routine down. And I don't mean that in a perjorative way; they were attentive to audience questions, had some fun stories to share, and their affection toward the show and its fans was readily apparent, but they'd obviously done this a lot and knew exactly how to go about it. So I doubt if much of this is new material, but I did enjoy the panel a lot.
Someone asked a very business/industry-type question about what had happened between the announcement that there would be a Season 5 and the show's cancellation; this is not exactly something you expect the actors to know the details of, but Lani Tupu made a fair attempt at fielding it and said that the show had gotten caught up in the collapse of a German parent company of part of the production, among other things. I was sitting behind pellucid and I believe we both had our faces in our palms at that point.
Lani also spoke of some current projects he's working on-mostly theater in Sydney, including a play about a Cuban cigar-making concern in 1920s Florida that Jimmy Smits had done on Broadway (I think) a few years ago. He mentioned enjoying the cigars.
Gigi talked about doing The Starter Wife (I think it's called), the Debra Messing show, and how much she enjoyed her part and working with the other actors on the project.
David Franklin, when asked about a memorable moment on the show, talked about his scenes channeling the Skreeth and how he'd had no idea how he was going to do that before getting on the set. That seemed to be a common experience; they all spoke of the incredibly fast pace of production. Lani Tupu told a story about showing up to film a three-minute scene with a female actress whose name I didn't recognize on the Talyn set; something about the way he talked about it made me think he must have been referring to Crais's conversation with his former PK girlfriend aboard Talyn during "Into the Lion's Den." Apparently, after filming, they found out that David Kemper was rewriting the scene-in LA-and they ended up re-filming it later in the afternoon, with the camera cutting between actors because they were literally working on the dialogue after having had it in their hands for an hour and couldn't do the whole thing seamlessly. They all seemed to shrug off the last-minute changes, though, expressing utmost trust in the writers.
David and Gigi both talked about different aspects of the show's use of makeup and how that affected their working environment. David said that he and Rebecca Riggs had a really great rapport, but that since he was used to working with her while she was in makeup, it was a little difficult for him to relate the person he saw off the set to the person he worked with. Gigi talked about how after a year or so she'd discovered that using oil was the fastest way of getting the makeup off, and was generally tired and ready to leave and just got it off as quickly as she could, and sometimes would be curling up with her boyfriend when he'd point out that she'd brought a little of Chiana home with her-behind her ear, for example. Gigi also talked about seeing Anthony Simcoe and taking a moment to place him without the D'Argo makeup. David Franklin joked that Wayne Pygram looked much the same in and out of makeup, except more dead (I think in the Scorpius gear; the opposite would be rather terrifying.)
Gigi talked about working with the show's first female director, and how excited she'd been to be working with another woman, and how the director had hated Chiana's mannerisms and tried to direct her out of it (something along the lines of, "Why are you doing that with your head? Stop it!") and they'd ended up having quite a bit of struggle over it. I think this was one of the "Self-Inflicted Wounds" episodes, since Gigi mentioned that it was one of the first Jool episodes, and there was all kinds of quirky behavior all over the place, and there had been a giant snake. The second time the female director worked on the show, Gigi approached her to try to pave a smooth relationship at the beginning, and it worked much better.
Lani's answer to the question about memorable moments on the show was that when he filmed his last scene, it was literally Crais's last scene-the one where he tells Talyn to starburst in the hanger of the command carrier-and that he hadn't really thought too much of it until he saw it on the show and realized what a great ending it was for the character.
Gigi and Lani talked about finding out the show had been canceled. Lani was in Las Vegas and some random stranger came up to him and asked him how he felt about the show being over, and he had no idea what the person was talking about, so that's how he found out the news. Gigi was in Chiana makeup, trying not to melt in the heat at the studio, but ended up having lunch with the rest of the cast and crew rather than staying in her trailer and keeping cool; somebody (Brian Henson, I think?) came to talk to her in her trailer afterward and made a move to hug her but it was awkward because he couldn't touch her makeup everywhere. She said everybody was in shock, and mentioned that Claudia was on the phone with her agent trying to figure out what was going on.
They all spoke very highly of the quality of writing on the show, and the ability to act out such complicated characters, and were appreciative of the fans. They all seemed like nice, approachable people. I saw all three of them in the Marriott lobby at various times over the course of the weekend; Gigi Edgley getting into an elevator with a bag of food, David Franklin people-watching in the line at the Starbucks, Lani Tupu walking through the lobby while the costume display was in full swing with a wide grin on his face.
sdwolfpup and brynnmck didn't arrive until later in the afternoon on Friday, so asta77 and I met up with molly_may, then loafed through most of the morning before hitting panels. Over the course of the day, I got to meet pellucid, kernezelda, scrubschick, jarrow272, and sugargroupie, and after all the flailing and the planning and the wondering if it was going to be possible to catch up to everyone I wanted to meet over the course of such a big event, it ended up being surprisingly easy. It's always funny to meet people you've "known" online in person, and they were every bit as funny and smart as they seem. sdwolfpup and brynnmck arrived at around 5, just when the Marriott lobby was starting to get into full swing, so brynnmck, who hadn't been to Dragon*Con before, got the full frontal costume experience from the start.
Friday was sdwolfpup's birthday, so we had a celebratory dinner, and then spent way too much time in the faintly dodgy nearby liquor store trying to figure out what percentage of the larcenous markups was attributable to Georgia's insane liquor taxes and what percentage was due to the "we're the only liquor store near a group of giant convention hotels" factor, and then there was an attempt to go to the Buffy Horror Picture Show-we were thwarted, as we were with so many things during the weekend, by the sheer volume of people and the fact that we hadn't gotten in line way ahead of time-so instead we finally managed to hooked up with bheerfan and watched vids back in our room.
Up next: Saturday, Claudia Black, Stargate, Dante's Cove. I don't know how I feel about putting Dante's Cove in with those other two things, which are actually good. Hm.