I'm curious. How much did you build to make this happen?
SHANKAR: Everything. There are no visual effects in the show. None whatsoever. We went to space. The spaceships are real. They are very, very large.
[Everyone laughs.]
Everything is a total of about 80,000 square feet. There's a big stage that's 40,000 square feet and then two 18,000 square foot stages. It's in Pinewood Toronto, but it's massive. The sets were really big. I mean you don't usually build on this scale for science fiction. Obviously as big as they were, we enhanced them massively with visual effects. There's a good amount of blue screen work, but the physical environment of the series a ton of it is practical. The spaceships, the interiors. We built The Knight, which is the shuttle they go off in the pilot. It's 30 feet high. Three stories, actually almost closer to four. And the vertical space, we pulled people up on a wire so you could actually do zero-G floats on them in a convincing fashion. Again, it's rare when you build that kind of vertical space. The airlock set that we built is 30 feet up and goes 25 feet down. It's not common to build like this.
I'm really rooting for the show and hope people can give it a chance. The SyFy name and even people comparing it to something with the name Battlestar Galactica will immediately turn people off. Shallow as it may be, they should avoid the Battlestar Galactica (which sounds extremely nerdy) comparisons if they want to pull in the mainstream.
