Tuesday, January 13, 2009

BSG Auction

I received the Battlestar Galactica auction catalog yesterday, which is fun and a bit of a trip down memory lane. I was always mightily impressed by the amount of effort that was put into creating material that was sometimes just a tossed off suggestion in a script. "Lee has a file folder" takes three seconds to type, but it requires someone with great talent to decide what the folder should look like, if it has a BSG logo, is it minus the edges, how MANY papers are inside, are we talking maps, diagrams, etc., etc., etc., etc. Multiply that by all the stuff that appears in every episode and you start to have an idea of the magnitude of work involved.

One of the coolest props that never made it to film was an ersatz "chess set" that was put together for a sequence in (I think) one of my episodes. It's a sign of my frail mental state that I can't remember which one now, or why the scene was cut pre-shooting. I do recall that Tyrol would have been one of the players. Anyhow, the props department put together a really cool board and pieces that had been cobbled together out of various machine parts. It sat on a shelf in the Vancouver BSG offices for awhile, and I was always tempted to say, "hey, can I have that?!" But I never did. I haven't pursued the catalog that closely, but if it's in there... well, I won't be bidding on it, but whoever does, good luck!