New Battlestar Galactica Series Starts Today — And It Looks Awesome

There’s a new Battlestar Galactica series starting today. Called Blood & Chrome, it’s the first part of SyFy movie that will premiere in 2013. It looks like an action packed war and adventures movie. Aesthetically, it’s truly spectacular. Take a look at the trailers.

The new series and movie follows the adventures of the young Admiral Adama, back when he was Husher, a Viper pilot fighting in the Cylon Wars. Most of it is filmed like the Star Wars prequels, using green screen techniques, according to Doug Drexler, CG supervisor on Blood & Chrome:

Because the show was all greenscreen, we had an opportunity to expand the ship and give it greater scope.

They also used some of the same software used in Star Wars, both in the prequels and the release of the latest restored copies, which included new battle scenes entirely rendered using LightWave. LightWave is a classic animation program and a favourite of John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic for those scenes. If he sounds familiar to you, maybe it is because he’s the co-inventor of Photoshop with his brother, Thomas.

If the pilot is successful, I guess there will be a long series after. I hope!

The best part: it will be available online, for free, starting with the first episode out of 10 today. The worst part: they are only seven to 10 minutes long.

But I don’t care. By coincidence — I wasn’t aware of the development of these series at all — I finished watching all the seasons of Battlestar Galactica yesterday. It’s been my second time and I can’t wait for this new dose of intergalactic space opera.