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Here’s a thing most B5 fans should find a little interesting at least.
I’ve updated the site that I put together a while ago.
It now contains a fair bit more writing on it from a number of contributors. It’s clearly not finished, and the format of the site is creaking a little under the weight of the various new content, but as I need to take a break from it for a while (to deal with some real life stuff) I decided to post it up now.
I’m still in the middle of talking to a few people (as well as the current contributors) including a couple of those behind the Legend of the Rangers and the new Lost Tales, as well as a few more connected to B5 & Crusade in various ways. So there is quite a lot of things still to add to it.
As before Mac users have no chance of viewing it (Opera & Safari). IE and Firefox should run it as should Netscape (with the IE emulator turned on for the window your running it under).
[url]http://ftp.themadgoner.com/B5/B5Scrolls/B5Scrolls.htm[/url]
Anyway, any thoughts? Anyone in particular that you think should be on it that’s not already there, anything that you want an answer to?
Hell, is it interesting?
It now contains a fair bit more writing on it from a number of contributors. It’s clearly not finished, and the format of the site is creaking a little under the weight of the various new content, but as I need to take a break from it for a while (to deal with some real life stuff) I decided to post it up now.
I’m still in the middle of talking to a few people (as well as the current contributors) including a couple of those behind the Legend of the Rangers and the new Lost Tales, as well as a few more connected to B5 & Crusade in various ways. So there is quite a lot of things still to add to it.
As before Mac users have no chance of viewing it (Opera & Safari). IE and Firefox should run it as should Netscape (with the IE emulator turned on for the window your running it under).
[url]http://ftp.themadgoner.com/B5/B5Scrolls/B5Scrolls.htm[/url]
Anyway, any thoughts? Anyone in particular that you think should be on it that’s not already there, anything that you want an answer to?
Hell, is it interesting?
Comments
no, really...
If you ever near a machine running the others you might want to take a peek though. there's a fair to middling chance you might change that reply ;)
no, really...[/QUOTE]
Don't worry, I use Firefox and I can't see it properly either. Evidently, it doesn't get along with flash click-to-play. :)
[edit]
Is this one of those wonderfully helpful firefox configuration thingies.
Now that I’ve had a very quick think about it. If you’ve disabled the automatic running of flash files then you won’t be able to click and play as there’s a layer running over the flash file so you can’t get access to it in order to click it. It’s up to you whether you want to temporary allow flash files to run automatically. The rest of the site should be still viewable though.
I was amused by the specifications.
Also, I'd never seen fan models of a lot of those ships. That's pretty impressive that you got so much.
Design wise, Im a little disappointed the Omega has got no mojo in its rotating section. Its a major part of its design, even though most people heading to your site have probably already seen it, it should be there.. :)
Same for Drakh rosebud.
Oh, and I love the: "6. Don't Blame Me, I Only Write What They Tell Me To Write." Outer hull description on the Maintenance pod. ;)
The hand destroyer crew description also cracked me up.. :)
Psi Core pod blinking: Thumbs up, same for Xill rotating part.
Finally got a look at a view from the gallery ships, thanks! :)
You should add the "New" canon ships in TLT.
Its also an idea to add the episodes the ships are in, some fans are pretty rabid, and will doubt your canon'ness if you dont..
Lastly, I love the M.I.A. gallery. Keep it up!
BTW, I didn't realize Sid Mead was a designer for 2010. (Looking at IMDB, another interesting note was that SAL was voiced by Candice Bergen)
One small critique, you may want to make the BACK arrow on the Response pages stand out a bit more, it took me a bit to locate button, since it looks almost like a flurish, not a button.
Jake
Funny about that Drakh Docking port concept. We never saw that design concept at Sierra. Musta been around the time they pulled the plug.
:(
The site layout is a mess, didn’t have the time to change it. I’m viewing releasing what’s been done as a test run in a way because the danger of spending so much time on something like this is that you loose perspective on how it looks to others. So I’m taking on board what’s being said.
There’s more to go on. Including stuff from a couple of those behind LOTR and the Lost Tales as well as a few others.
You should be speaking to Alec McClymont and Renee Dunlop then I suppose, as well as JMS.
;)
I do recall him saying there were some writer jobs that weren't covered by the strike.
Looks good, as much as I've read, B-Moon354.
All of these smilies and no 'moon'?
And while I do love the content on the site, I can't stand the fact that it is flash based. The subtle lag between page loads, the generally graphic-heavy nature of it all puts me off.
The content is superb and the details are interesting, but I cannot find any love for the interface.
As Biggles did mention, we do have a wiki that is in dire need of content... *cough* :p
To say jms created the show (or it is the vision of one man) is pretty misleading and dismissive of the guys who did create it. He had the story, of course, but the creation of the show (the complete package) was more or less down to a team. In the early years (in particular) they had regular meetings for each episode where jms but more John Copeland would tell the department heads what was needed. They then went off and did it with little further input from the producers – what there was mostly coming from John Copeland.
In the site I put together, it touches on (the final version will go into more detail) at just how much of the visual appearance was guided by people other than jms. Shadows where originally going to be humanoid and called Shadow men. In Soul hunters jms originally wanted to give the station [U]tractor beams[/U] to drag the ship in. jms’s original idea for launching Starfuries (which he had no part in the design of) was pretty lame swinging doors. Newtonian physics, colourful universe, the use of CGI, to name a few from a long list where the ideas of Ron Thornton and Paul Bryant for example, which they had to push through early on.
The array of aliens was more or less down to Everett Burrell and the guys at optic nerve, John Iacovelli, Kevin Kutchaver, Mitch Suskin and frankly too many to list here are the ones who made the show with either little or no creative input from jms. He basically let them get on with it. With ridiculously low budgets as well.
That’s why they were able to produce so much in the tight time scales i.e. little or no producer involvement other than to OK what was done. Lol. I shit you not. jms basically provided one element (an important one of course) the other important elements where created by others, which is VERY largely overlooked.
So to be honest, you can quote from the site, I have no problems with that (as long as you reference the quotes of course). But if you want to come up with something unique and accurate your going to have to go against the populist grain. Can you do that? Do you want to do that?
If you can and do, then I could (maybe) provide more information from the guys that were there and also ask them to directly answer any questions you may have (there's more contributors who I have not yet published). If not good luck with the site and make it a good one.
Won’t be for a while though, as I have to sod of for around six months (it’s also the reason why the site looks like crap – no time to change it from the original format).
Oh... so that's what that concept art is in issue 19 of Babylon 5 Magazine...
Issue 19 of the B5 magazine!! Bugger, I came into the fan community Waaayyyyyy to late to see things like that. Don’t suppose you have a scanner handy :)
"This mega spaceship was supposed to be a derelict ship," says designer Luc Mayrand of his work for Appearances and Other Deceits. "In doing a lot of these ships, you always have to try to come up with something different, and sometimes it's kind of hard. But here I thought I could do something a little bit more random looking, that would have its own unscripted aesthetic, and that's why there are structures out there that just project out for no particular reason.
"They're just like the braces of a cathedral," Mayrand adds. "Maybe their understanding of physics works a little bit differently from ours. Maybe they interpret something and maybe there's a religious reason why they would want to project some structures out, or maybe it's more impressive to them. And that offered an opportunity to make something with a more classical, a Sixties-Seventies, Roger Dean-Chris Fossian look.
"It was supposed to look like you would get lost in there if you aren't careful, and they don't get lost in it because they are not necessarily insectiod, but they are okay with that kind of chaos. I was thinking that the engine section in the back should look really complex, almost made complex more because they like it that way than because they couldn't have made it simpler. And also, if there were windows in there, put them on a different pattern than the usual horizontal stratum. So maybe the gravity is pointing in different directions in each segment."
"Then I drew another one. For this one, I thought it would be interesting to play off the idea that maybe they have a different gravitic drive where some kind of torus actually articulates everything around it, and that's what generates it, and there's almost a haphazard way that the engines connect to it because it's as if an alien medieval race would have found a way to get to the stars. I was really fascinated with the idea of things that looked bulbous and really large and heavy with really tiny, little structures holding everything together."
"The interior was more of a conundrum, because what do you put inside a ship that's shaped like that? If there was a forest of criss-crossing members, it might be interesting cinematically but I couldn't have drawn it!
"That's one of the challenges that I face every time," adds Mayrand. "How much of it can you really draw, because I can't spend days and days on these things. And ultimately sometimes it makes it harder to understand. Drawings are a means of communicating design, and if the drawing is indecipherable, nobody will want to build it.
"So I tried to pick some sense of pretty soaring members that would still have some tiny, little things hanging off of them, and this chamber where they have the battle was conceivably the most open chamber in the whole ship. It would be the one with either the gravity drive or engine section, so you have these pseudo tanks that may be some kind of fuel or some kind of generating thing. And when this is on, the power would actually be created by some kind of articulation between the pod in the centre and the hanging crystal. That was the notion: maybe there would be some other kind of glowing things here, but the ship is not powered. You don't see those things running while you're there. Of course, it's round, circular, because it's inside one of those big, old round things."
And there's two peices of concept art for this as well. One of the ship's outsite, and one of the inside. Issue 15 if you want to know. It's also the issue with the Moradi ship concept art, which also has two other versions of the big ships. I forgot just how much concept art they put into this magazine.
Your MUST be joking, I’m still a bit at the stage of being sick of the sight of it, though it is wearing off a bit. To be honest I wouldn’t know how to approach editing something like the Wiki entries, by that I mean things like tone.
I didn’t mean to sound overly critical about “The Great Machine”. At the end of the day it’s hardly surprising that it’s going to contain similar types of information to other things. For the very simple reason that there is not a lot of information to base things on and there’s only so many ways you can go over it. The other thing, probably more by accident than design (I hope-I’m being diplomatic there), almost everything “official” being created for B5 comes from jms alone.
To me, this resulted in two things happening. The first was that a lot of the (remaining – don’t know about early fan) stuff on the net was incredibly jms-centric. The second was, people where so desperate for additional information that fan based conjecture developed into facts over time, just look at B5Tech and the what’s came out of it. But the reasons for the way it seems to have developed is totally understandable.
There was a couple of reasons why I decided to continue with the site beyond the original version. One was I read a (recent) thread where the visuals where almost being dismissed as being a pretty distraction to the “genius” of the story. It smacked a bit of intellectual snobbery, which is a bit ironic going by what I understand jms’s problems with that American writers thing was all about.
Even I was surprised at how much others input to the story. For example: The Shadows. A pretty big bit of the story surrounding them (which is repeatedly revisited) is to do with the organic tech. Ron Thornton introduced that idea, though I need to check who it was who came up with the host acting as the CPU because if that was him or someone else like John Teska then that’s one hell of a story element which didn’t originate from jms.
The bottom line, as I saw it anyway, was that without the wide ranging and innovative work carried out by a whole load of people then the show would have undoubtedly been received very differently, would almost certainly have never ran for the full five years and in fact would have never have been made in the first place. So to largely overlook them (in a fair proportion of the on-line fan community) and essentially simplifying things down to jms had a creative (and guiding) hand in every aspect of the show and Tim Earls was “the man” as far as the VFX go was something that should be corrected by coaxing the guys actually involved to do some talking.
And saying all that probably makes me sound like I’ve got my head firmly stuck up my arse – Which is half true at the week-ends ;).
@ DarthCaligula
I hate you for having those mags, I hope you know that. Seriously though, don’t worry about trying to upload the concept art, though the articles sound interesting. Luc’s already provided a few nice images for the site, and I’ve still to talk to him about a few of the ships. I was rushing everyone a few weeks back as I knew I was going to be tied up with work for the next 6 months, give or take, so I wasn’t going to have time to add any new content. Though I’m still asking some questions to keep the input ticking over.
As an aside, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this. John Copeland got wind of the site from Everett Burrell and he’s making a few “interesting” contributions now as well.