Defiance television show and video game images are ©2013 NBC Universal. All rights reserved.

SyFy channel’s new show Defiance is breaking the mold in every way. An unusual combination of fantasy blockbuster, small town mystery and sci-fi action drama, Defiance takes place on a decimated, post-apocalyptic Earth set several decades into the future. After an alien invasion and war, hmans try to co-exist with a group of aliens that are both friend and foe in a small town literally defying the odds. ScriptPhD.com was extremely fortunate to have access to one of the head writers of the show, as well as its official science advisor. In our interviews, we delve deeper into the backbone of this sci-fi hit, which is a terrific, engaging story, paired with colorful characters and the clever incorporation of science to support the plot. More after the “continue reading” cut.

Defiance is set amidst a backdrop of the ruins of a major American city, formerly St. Louis, now called Defiance, where a group of humans and aliens must survive under extreme political and existential circumstances. Jeb Nolan, a former military hero who fought the last battle of the human-Votan war, aptly named the Battle of Defiance, is now a wanderer looking for his place in the world. His adopted daughter Irisa, from a Votan alien tribe called the Castathans, is also battling a difficult past as she migrates between the world of her own people as friends and foes. In the middle of episodic mysteries, such as who is behind an attack on Defiance, or the murder mystery of the town mining magnate’s son, is a larger storyline about the integration of human and alien races in a unique post-apocalyptic melting pot.

For the SyFy channel, Defiance looks like the first bona fide hit since Battlestar Galactica, whose prequel follow-up Caprica never managed to latch on with a consistent audience. It’s premiere had the highest ratings since Eureka and follow up episodes are holding a steady audience.

And if its intricate plot isn’t enough to keep viewers hooked, Defiance is defying traditional media by merging the show with a concomitant multiplayer online video game concept, where action takes place simultaneously in San Francisco. The events that take place in the video game, which has already recorded one million registered users, will impact the storyline of the show to varying degrees, and vice versa. It is without a doubt the most interactive and ambitious storytelling format ever attempted for the genre from a technical standpoint.

ScriptPhD.com was very honored to have the opportunity to sit down with both series writer and co-creator and executive producer Michael Taylor, as well as the show’s scientific advisor Kevin Grazier, to get a better idea of the characters, storyline and what we can expect going forward.

A couple of the Votan races represented on Defiance: the Indigenes (the town doctor on the left) and Castathans (Irisa, one of the principal characters).

Taylor, also a series writer and producer on breakout SyFy hit series Battlestar Galactica, was involved in the early development of the series, which took over one and a half years to re-conceptualize and bring to the small screen from its initial concept. “Keep in mind, the original draft [of the pilot] was very different,” Taylor says. “The Chief Lawkeeper role was prototyped as this older, wry Brian Dennehy-type of character, for example. Irathient warrior Irisa was more of a wide-eyed, naïve girl than she is in the current version. We even had about two to three episodes of the series done. But as we went along, we were finding it hard to keep thinking up episodes from week to week.” Which is when the series went back to the drawing boards.

And reimagine the series they did! Unlike the vast majority of sci-fi shows, which explore the process of warring factions integrating and co-existing, in Defiance, this has already occurred, something that Taylor calls a “cool experiment.” “The 30-year-war has already been fought, all that stuff is long in the past,” Taylor reminds us. “And now we are at the point where the 8 races are trying to co-exist together. Remember, in the opening episode, the mayor [Amanda Rosewater] tells the multi-ethnic crowd that Defiance is a pretty nice place to live.” Which is in stark contrast to the vast majority of the now-destroyed Earth, which remains a very dangerous, primitive environment, as is seen in the opening minutes of the pilot. But the relatively peaceful, self-contained environment of Defiance is not the only way it differs. “This idea of the 8 races living together is still pretty rare [throughout Earth],” Taylor remarks. “In fact, in Rio de Janeiro you have the opposite with the Votan-led Earth Republic, which has pretty much the

opposite goal than what’s happening in Defiance.”

People should also be careful about inferring too many sociological or current events extrapolations from the themes explored in the show. For Taylor, the writers and creators are mainly exploring a fun concept with strong storytelling and even stronger characters. And what characters they are!

Lawkeeper Jeb Nolan and his adopted daughter Irisa are both dark, complex characters with extremely difficult pasts. “In many ways, they complement each other and need each other,” Taylor says. “They are the only two people who can complete one another because of that bond.” But they aren’t the only characters with a past. New young mayor Amanda herself has some dark secrets that fuel her motivations, many of which will be explored in future episodes, according to Taylor. At the mere suggestion that mysterious ex-mayor Nicky, who figures into the Votan plot against the humans, might not be that evil, Taylor retorts: “Nope, she’s evil. She just rationalizes her actions as the end justifying the means.”

As for integrating the video game concept, it predated the show by five years, which allowed writers to establish stories and character development that will happen separately from, albeit concurrently with, the action in Defiance onscreen. It also affords the writers on the show some freedom with the knowledge that the events in the video game don’t necessarily impact the flow of the storyline right away. “With the production schedule of television, there’s no way that we would be able to incorporate plots from the video game into the show that quickly,” says Taylor. “But remember, there is a summer hiatus between seasons, so you never know. Maybe that would be a time the writers would be able to look at some of the events that gamers chose and fold them into the story with more leisure.”

So rest assured, those of you enjoying Defiance, whether on your televisions or XBoxes. Plenty of sci-fi action is yet to come.

A scene from the Defiance interactive video game.

In case viewers are worried that Defiance’s deep focus on character development and storyline layout (in two media formats no less!) is going to come at the expense of accurate and interesting science, fear not. The production staff at the sci-fi hit has employed the services of notable scientific advisor Kevin Grazier, who also advised on Eureka and Battlestar Galactica, along with a slew of feature films.

“We’ve seen time and time again small plot points that have become little tidbits, or plot points or even major points driving an episode when you get the science right,” Grazier notes. “Caring about the science [in a series plot] can be as much of a strength as it is a constraint.”

And while it’s true that the science of Defiance does seem a bit less obvious or upfront than in shows like BSG or Eureka, it’s no less important nor is it any less incorporated. “We have a really rich, really well thought-out backstory, and that is very much informed by the science,” Grazier says. “We know that the V-7 [Votan] races came from the Votan System. What happened to their system? Well, we have that [mapped out], we know that.” He also pointed to subtle implications such as in the first few minutes of the pilot. When Irisa looks up at the sleeper pods, she says, “All those hundreds of years in space just to die in your sleep.” Grazier notes: “The subtle implication is that the V-7 aliens don’t go FTL [faster than light]. So we have figured out where they’re from and how far away they’re from and which direction of the sky they’re from and how long it took to get here.”

In addition to its elemental role in the backstory, science has also also had fun ‘little’ moments in the show, like the importance of the terrasphere in defending the Volge attack in the pilot or the hell bugs (a genetic amalgam of several earth critters) in episode 3. Some of these small scientific details were even able to result in cool visual effects. For example, when the table of writers was discussing the ark falls, Grazier, an astrophysicist by training, noted that the conservation of angular momentum meant that these things would not land vertically, but rather horizontally, using the screaming overhead comets in Deep Impact as a touchstone. Sure enough, in the first few minutes, you see Nolan and Irisa tracking what’s about to be an ark fall and you see them screaming overhead. “That will, by the way, come into play in a later episode,” Grazier teases. “We know where the ark belt is. Where the ships were when they blew up, how far away they are.”

For Grazier, the experience has not only been a rewarding one, but different from the other shows he’s worked on. “Just to give you an example of how great the Defiance writing team is with regards to the science, in an upcoming episode, the writers had written a script and there was a big incident in there that I said “You can’t do this scientifically.”" Grazier kept shooting down suggestion after suggestion, with series producer Kevin Murphy, who was a huge Basttlestar Galactica fan, staying patient and open to ideas despite being frustrated by the process. In the end, the series producers allowed Grazier to provide input to the plot that both worked scientifically and resulted in decent storytelling and visual effects. “There was a situation that the scientific content was a sticking point, and a fairly major element of the plot, and they let the science guy come up with the solution,” he remarked. “As satisfying as some of the other series that I’ve worked on have been, that’s never happened to me before.”

“Obviously in any sci-fi show, there are going to be a few [unrealistic] gimmes, a few conceits for the sake of the plot or entertainment,” Grazier reminds us. “But if you buy in that these terrashperes came down and transformed the Earth and take this journey with us, then the science will take you the rest of the way.”

Based on the first three episodes, it’s a journey I know is worth the ride.

Watch a feature-length trailer for the show here:

Watch a special video about the making of the Defiance

Defiance airs on Monday nights on SyFy Channel at 9 ET/PT.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Prometheus poster and stills ©2012 20th Century Fox, all rights reserved.

It has been three decades since Ridley Scott’s acclaimed sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner practically reinvented the genre, and he has not made another sci-fi film since. “The reason I haven’t made another sci-fi film in so may years,” he says “is because I haven’t come across anything worthwhile for me to do with enough truth, originality and strength. Prometheus has all three.” With such heightened expectations, one would expect a bold, daring, all-encompassing storyline from Scott. Loosely based on elements from Alien, and originally intended as a prequel to that film, Prometheus meets many of those expectations, especially in visual and action content, while falling short on others. Full ScriptPhD review, under the “continue reading” cut.

Set 80 years in the future, a team of archaeologists discovers a series of cave etchings with a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth—a far-away planet in the darkest corners of the Universe. Commissioned by the corporate conglomerate Weyland Corporation, the $1 trillion scientific exploratory journey is originally intended to meet our makers in their native land. But when the team makes the shocking discovery that their makers’ paradise is a way station for a dangerous experiment in bioengineering, they begin the fight of their life to save humanity.

In a scene from Prometheus, the android David, aboard the human predecessors' alien vessel, makes a shocking discovery about what is actually happening on the planet.

Interspersed within this non-stop intergalactic thrill ride are a series of conflicts between the crew members that challenge some of our most cherished scientific and philosophical ideas, conflicts we may ourselves be forced to address in the near future. The sterile, corporate (and somewhat surprisingly selfish) interests of the journey, funded by enigmatic Peter Weyland and carried out by Weyland Industries executive Meredith Vickers are in stark contrast to the spirit of scientific exploration for the sake of discovery and learning. The mission’s lead scientists are archetypes for the conflict of faith versus science. Elizabeth Shaw is deeply religious, and views the mission as a chance to meet the Gods, to affirm her faith and everything she believes in. Her partner, both in the lab and personally, Charlie Holloway is a classic adventurous scientist who is on the journey to push the envelope in the quest for answers. Finally, rounding out the crew of 17 scientists is David, a human-replica android servant of superior intelligence created by the Weyland Corporation. David is an amalgamation of virtually every artificial intelligence character sci-fi has ever created, from Hal to C-3PO to the Terminator. Originally manufactured to tend to the ship during the two-year journey and to gather intelligence, David is nevertheless acutely aware of his superiority over his human charges. He even has the will to help them figure out the nefarious scheme of the alien predecessors and fight a battle for their survival. Responding to Holloway’s flippant response that humans made David simply because they could, he retorts: “Imagine how disappointed you’d be if your makers gave you the same response?”

Crew members navigating aboard the Prometheus scientific exploratory vessel.

Scott’s commitment to the grand scope of

Prometheus rewards the audience with a technological and engineering masterpiece of science fiction, starting with the visually arresting sets and action sequences. So extraordinary are the special effects of the scientific exploration of the alien planet and consequent battles, one would falsely assume they are CGI. But Scott built enormous sets and shot the majority of the film live in three dimensions. One production crew member called it the “greatest alien playground in the world.” The state-of-the-art spacecraft, modeled after current NASA and European Space Agency designs, was constructed with every piece of technology that would be necessary to probe the outer corners of the galaxy. Techno-geeks will salivate over sleek gadgetry like the self-operating medical pod, research labs capable of immediately isolating and sequencing single strands of DNA, travelling “mind pop” mapping devices that can isolate life, not to mention sleep-state pods where the scientists are suspended for their two-year journey. Prometheus gives a credible peek into what our science and technology capabilities will be like a hundred years from now.

Ultimately, for all of its ambition and far-reaching scope, Prometheus eventually buckles under its own weight of self-importance. The existential questions it is asking are sci-fi staples. Who are we? Where do we come from? How do we reconcile science and religion in our quest to define our identities? And finally, embodied by the advanced-technology android David, what are the parameters of responsibility in the creation of life? And what is the reason for the frailty about when and why it begins and ends? Unfortunately, the film only dabbles enough with each to titillate without ever providing fulfilling answers. The audience may finish the Prometheus quest philosophically unsatisfied, but the journey there is still an action-packed, viscerally stunning sci-fi ride.

Prometheus goes into theaters nationwide on June 11, 2012.

View the trailer:

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope poster and all film stills ©2012 Wreckin Hill Entertainment, all rights reserved.

Every July, hundreds of thousands of fans descend upon the city of San Diego for a four-day celebration of comics, sci-fi, popular arts fandom and (growingly) previews of mainstream television and film blockbusters. What is this spectacular nexus of nerds? Comic-Con International, of course! From ScriptPhD’s comprehensive past coverage, one can easily glean the diversity of events, guests and panels, with enormous throngs patiently queueing to see their favorites. But who are these fans? Where do they come from? What kinds of passions drive their journeys to Comic-Con from all over the world? And what microcosms are categorized under the general umbrella of fandom? Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempts to answer these questions by crafting the sweet, intimate, honest documentary-as-ethnography Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. Through the archetypes of five 2009 Comic-Con attendees, Spurlock guides us through the history of the Con, its growth (and the subsequent conflicts that this has engendered), and most importantly, the conclusion that underneath all of those Spider-Man and Klingon costumes, geeks really do come in all shapes, colors and sizes. For full ScriptPhD review, click “continue reading.”

In 1970, comics fan Shel Dorf organized a three-day gathering in San Diego at the US Grant hotel as a fringe gathering for the most enthusiastic amateur comics fans, aspiring artists and writers to interact with comics pros. It drew 300 fans. This was the backdrop against which young Morgan Spurlock grew up in West Virginia, passionately consuming comics and horror films, transported to a different world where everyone was a little bit askew and “weird.” “I wasn’t just a fan,” Spurlock remarks. “I was addicted.” It wasn’t until 2009 that he was able to make his first amateur journey to Comic-Con International San Diego, by now a cultural juggernaut regularly drawing over 150,000 fans, amid a vastly changed (and comics-cultural) landscape. Nevertheless, Spurlock was thrilled. He ran into boyhood idol Marvel animator Stan Lee, and thanked him for all the confidence and creativity he helped to inspire. Stan’s response? “Let’s make a documentary about Comic-Con!” And so, gathering forces with Lee, sci-fi cult icon Joss Whedon, among others, Spurlock embarked on a two-year journey that captured the 2010 Con (the 40th Anniversary edition) in all its glory—including panels, parades, photos, costumes and interviews with notable celebrities that have turned passions into professions. Most of all, however, Spurlock captured the fans.

Costume designer Holly Conrad with her team on the convention floor exhibits at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con.

To winnow down the most compelling stories for the documentary, Spurlock held a casting call online that drew thousands of submissions. Among them was Holly Conrad, a talented, award-winning costume designer from a small town hoping to win the grand prize at the annual Comic-Con costume show. Knowing her slim odds, especially because of where she comes from, and the importance of making a splash for her career to take off, Holly called Comic-Con a “suicide mission for her future.” Also in a pressure cooker was Chuck Rozanski, proprietor of Mile High Comics, Americas largest inventory and dealer of comic books. Chuck uses the hectic, chaotic, crowded Comic-Con exhibit area to sell rare and collectible comics, comprising a substantial portion of his company’s income for the year, but faces a more fractured Con, with a smaller focus on comics every year. If he doesn’t make a killing at this year’s Com, Chuck knows the future of his whole business might be at risk. Sharing the convention floor with Chuck are comics-obsessed bartender Skip Harvey and US Airforce pilot and family man Eric Henson, two amateur graphic artists also putting their destiny on the line in San Diego. Armed with only a portfolio and a dream, Eric and Skip are hoping to get noticed at the portfolio critique sessions and land a professional design contract with one of the comics representatives. One succeeds (to the preview audience’s delight) and one learns he is a very big fish in a very small bowl, and must cultivate his talent for the greater stage. Intermingled for comic relief is the adorable story of James Darling and Se Young Kang, a couple who met and started dating at the previous year’s Con. James is planning to ask Se Young to marry him at this year’s Con, but must overcome a slew of hilarious obstacles to pull of his nerdy romantic feat.

Chuck Rozanski hangs rare collectibles that he is hoping to sell on the convention floor in a scene from Comic-Con Episode IV.

Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope is a terrific purview into the conflicts and dissent of the modern Con. Hidden beneath the popularity of the yearly event is a schism between older fans who have been coming for years (and feel somewhat lost in the shuffle) and the new fans, such as lovebirds James and Se Young, who may not even necessarily be there for comics events. Longtime attendees such as Kevin Smith admitted that the event has become a “beancounter” with tremendous power to preview movies and television, something Hollywood has noticed and latched onto. One can legitimately forget the presence of comics and the graphic arts at Comic-Con altogether without trying very hard. This presents a huge problem for the poignant storyline of Chuck Rozanski, with whom we empathize as he struggles to sell comics through 4-day event. When ScriptPhD.com asked Spurlock at a recent Los Angeles junket about what surprised him the most, he pointed to the sheer volume of what goes on at Comic-Con, especially the job-hunting aspect of the Comic-Con exhibition floor. His favorite moment in the movie is the comparison of Comic-Con to a Russian nesting doll, with events hidden beneath other events. “I showed the movie to people and they responded that they didn’t even know that went on at Comic-Con! There is something for everyone, no matter what your passion.” Spurlock remarked.

The documentary is at its strongest and most successful when the focus turns to what the essence of what Comic-Con is defined by—the fans. “We all weighed in with what we thought were the most important pieces of the story,” Spurlock says. “But in the end it all came back to the fans.” It is the fans whose enthusiasm drives the growth of events like Comic-Con, however much nostalgia for the past may feel threatened. It is the fans whose passion continues to motivate and drive geniuses like Stan Lee to this very day. That very same passion also launches new careers, as Holly Conrad found. Since the filming of this documentary, she has moved to Hollywood and found successful work as a costume designer on several productions. Lastly, and most importantly, it is the fans who create that magical atmosphere where no matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, how “out there” you behave, you find total acceptance and camaraderie amongst a group of treasured friends just as passionate and devoted as you are. To Spurlock, the Con “reminds us all of the importance of dreams and of wonder. It’s not just an event… it’s a state of mind.”

Trailer for Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope:

“Making of” featurette:

Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope was released in select cities on April 5, and theaters and video on demand on April 6th.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.

                          

As Comic-Con winds down on the shortened Day 4, we conclude our coverage with two panels that exemplify what Comic-Con is all about. As promised, we dissect the “Comics Design” panel of the world’s top logo designers deconstructing their work, coupled with images of their work. We also bring you an interesting panel of ethnographers, consisting of undergraduate and graduate student, studying the culture and the varying forces that shape Comic-Con. Seriously, they’re studying nerds! Finally, we are delighted to shine our ScriptPhD.com spotlight on new sci-fi author Charles Yu, who presented his new novel at his first (of what we are sure are many) Comic-Con appearance. We sat down and chatted with Charles, and are pleased to publish the interview. And of course, our Day 4 Costume of the Day. Comic-Con 2010 (through the eyes of ScriptPhD.com) ends under the “continue reading” cut!

Comics Design

The visionaries of graphics design for comics (from left to right): Mark Siegel, Chip Kidd, Adam Grano, Mark Chiarello, Keith Wood, and Fawn Lau.

We are not ashamed to admit that here at ScriptPhD.com, we are secret design nerds. We love it, particularly since good design so often elevates the content of films, television, and books, but is a relatively mysterious process. One of THE most fascinating panels that we attended at Comic-Con 2010 was on the design secrets behind some of your favorite comics and book covers. A panel of the world’s leading designers revealed their methodologies (and sometimes failures) in the design process behind their hit pieces, lifting the shroud of secrecy that designers often envelop themselves in. An unparalleled purview into the mind of the designer, and the visual appeal that so often subliminally contributes to the success of a graphic novel, comic, or even regular book. We do, as it turns out, judge books by their covers.

As promised, we revisit this illuminating panel, and thank Christopher Butcher, co-founder of The Toronto Comic Arts Festival and co-owner of The Beguiling, Canada’s finest comics bookstore. Chris was kind enough to provide us with high-quality images of the Comics Design panel’s work, for which we at ScriptPhD.com are grateful. Chris had each of the graphic artists discuss their work with an example of design that worked, and design that didn’t (if available or so inclined). The artist was asked to deconstruct the logo or design and talk about the thought process behind it.

Mark Ciarello – (art + design director at DC Comics)

SOLO, a new release from DC Comics.

Mark chose to design the cover of this book with an overall emphasis on the individual artist. Hence the white space on the book, and a focus on the logo above the “solo” artist.

Adam Grano – (designer at Fantagraphics)

The book cover of A Drunken Dream by Moto Hagio

Adam took the title of this book quite literally, and let loose with his design to truly emphasize the title. He called it “method design.” He wanted the cover to look like a drunken dream.

The Humbug collection.

For the Humbug collection, Grano tried hard not to impress too much of himself (and his tastes) in the design of the cover. He wanted to inject simplicity in a project that would stand the test of time, because it was a collector’s series.

Book cover for The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell.

Grano considered this design project his “failure.” It contrasts greatly with the simplicity and elegance of Humbug. He mentioned that everyone on the page is scripted and gridded, something that designers try to avoid in comics.

Chip Kidd – (designer at Random House)

The first Peanuts collection release after Charles M. Schultz's death.

Chip Kidd had the honor of working on the first posthumous Peanuts release after Charles M. Schultz’s death, and took to the project quite seriously. In the cover, he wanted to deconstruct a Peanuts strip. All of the human element is taken out of the strip, with the characters on the cover up to their necks in suburban anxiety.

Grant Morrison's Superman.

Kidd likes this cover because he considers it an updated spin on Superman. It’s not a classic Superman panel, so he designed a logo that deviated from the classic “Superman” logo to match.

Final Crisis, volume 1, by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones.

Kidd chose this as his design “failure”, but not the design itself. The cover represents one of seven volumes, in which the logo pictured disintegrates by the seventh issue, to match the crisis in the title. Kidd’s only regret here is that he was too subtle. He wishes he’d chosen to start the logo disintegration progression sooner, as there’s very little difference between the first few volumes.

Fawn Lau – (designer at VIZ)

GenKaku Picasso by Usamaru Furuya

Fawn was commissioned to redesign this book cover for an American audience. Keeping this in mind, and wanting the Japanese animation to be more legible for the American audience, she didn’t want too heavy-handed of a logo. In an utterly genius stroke of creativity, Lau went to an art store, bought $70 worth of art supplies, and played around with them until she constructed the “Picasso” logo. Clever, clever girl!

Mark Siegel – (First Second Books)

The new biography "Feynman" by Ottaviani Myrick.

Mark Siegel was hired to create the cover of the new biography Feynman, an eponymous title about one of the most famous physicists of all time. Feynman was an amazing man who lived an amazing life, including a Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. His biographer, Ottaviani Myrick, a nuclear physicist and speed skating champion, is an equally accomplished individual. The design of the cover was therefore chosen to reflect their dynamic personalities. The colors were chosen to represent the atomic bomb and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Feynman assisted in the development of The Manhattan Project. Incidentally, the quote on the cover – “If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us!” – is from Feynman’s own mother.

Keith Wood – (Oni Press)

The Queen and Country collection.

Wood remarked that this was the first time he was able to do design on a large scale, which really worked for this project. He chose a very basic color scheme, again to emphasize a collection standing the test of time, and designed all the covers simultaneously, including color schemes and graphics. He felt this gave the project a sense of connectedness.

Local by Bryan Wood and Ryan Kelly.

Wood chose a pantone silver as the base of this design with a stenciled typeface meant to look very modern. The back of the cover and the front of the cover were initially going to be reversed when the artists first brought him the renderings. However, Wood felt that since the book’s content is about the idea of a girl’s traveling across the United States, it would be more compelling and evocative to use feet/baggage as the front of the book. He was also the only graphic artist to show a progression of 10-12 renderings, playing with colors, panels and typeface, that led to the final design. He believes in a very traditional approach to design, which includes hand sketches and multiple renderings.

The Culture of Popular Things: Ethnographic Examinations of Comic-Con 2010

Undergraduate and graduate students present their sociology and economics analyses of Comic-Con 2010.

Each year, for the past four years, Comic-Con ends on an academic note. Matthew J. Smith, a professor at Wittenberg University in Ohio, takes along a cadre of students, graduate and undergraduate, to study Comic-Con; the nerds, the geeks, the entertainment component, the comics component, to ultimately understand the culture of what goes on in this fascinating microcosm of consumerism and fandom. By culture, the students embrace the accepted definition by famous anthropologist Raymond J. DeMallie: “what is understood by members of a group.” The students ultimately wanted to ask why people come to Comic-Con in general. They are united by the general forces of being fans; this is what is understood in their group. After milling around the various locales that constituted the Con, the students deduced that two ultimate forces were simultaneously at play. The fan culture drives and energizes the Con as a whole, while strong marketing forces were on display in the exhibit halls and panels.

Maxwell Wassmann, a political economy student at Wayne State University, pointed out that “secretly, what we’re talking about is the culture of buying things.” He compared Comic-Con as a giant shopping mall, a microcosm of our economic system in one place. “If you’ve spent at least 10 minutes at Comic-Con,” he pointed out, “you probably bought something or had something tried to be sold to you. Everything is about marketing.” As a whole, Comic-Con is subliminally designed to reinforce the idea that this piece of pop culture, which ultimately advertises an even greater subset of pop culture, is worth your money. Wassmann pointed out an advertising meme present throughout the weekend that we took notice of as well—garment-challenged ladies advertising the new Green Hornet movie. The movie itself is not terribly sexy, but by using garment-challenged ladies to espouse the very picture of the movie, when you leave Comic-Con and see a poster for Green Hornet, you will subconsciously link it to the sexy images you were exposed to in San Diego, greatly increasing your chances of wanting to see the film. By contrast, Wassmann also pointed out that there is a concomitant old-town economy happening; small comics. In the fringes of the exhibition center and the artists’ space, a totally different microcosm of consumerism and content exchange.

Kane Anderson dressed up in a costume as he immerses himself in the culture of comics fans in San Diego.

Kane Anderson, a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara getting his doctorate in “Superheroology” (seriously, why didn’t I think of that back in graduate school??), came to San Diego to observe how costumes relate to the superhero experience. To fully absorb himself in the experience, and to gain the trust of Con attendees that he’d be interviewing, Anderson came in full costume (see above picture). Overall, he deduced that the costume-goers, who we will openly admit to enjoying and photographing during our stay in San Diego, act as goodwill ambassadors for the characters and superheroes they represent. They also add to the fantasy and adventure of Comic-Con goers, creating the “experience.” The negative side to this is that it evokes a certain “looky-loo” effect, where people are actively seeking out, and singling out, costume-wearers, even though they only constitute 5% of all attendees.

Tanya Zuk, a media masters student from the University of Arizona, and Jacob Sigafoos, an undergraduate communications major at Wittenberg University, both took on the mighty Hollywood forces invading the Con, primarily the distribution of independent content, an enormous portion of the programming at Comic-Con (and a growing presence on the web). Zuk spoke about original video content, more distinctive of new media, is distributed primarily online. It allows for more exchange between creators and their audience than traditional content (such as film and cable television), and builds a community fanbase through organic interaction. Sigafoos expanded on this by talking about how to properly market such material to gain viral popularity—none at all! Lack of marketing, at least traditional forms, is the most successful way to promote a product. Producing a high-quality product, handing it off to friends, and promoting through social media is still the best way to grow a devoted following.

And speaking of Hollywood, their presence at Comic-Con is undeniable. Emily Saidel, a Master’s student at NYU, and Sam Kinney, a business/marketing student at Wittenberg University, both took on the behemoth forces of major studios hawking their products in what originally started out as a quite independent gathering. Saidel tackled Hollywood’s presence at Comic-Con, people’s acceptance/rejection thereof, and how comics are accepted by traditional academic disciplines as didactic tools in and of themselves. The common thread is a clash between the culture and the community. Being a member of a group is a relatively simple idea, but because Comic-Con is so large, it incorporates multiple communities, leading to tensions between those feeling on the outside (i.e. fringe comics or anime fans) versus those feeling on the inside (i.e. the more common mainstream fans). Comics fans would like to be part of that mainstream group and do show interest in those adaptations and changes (we’re all movie buffs, after all), noted Kinney, but feel that Comic-Con is bigger than what it should be.

But how much tension is there between the different subgroups and forces? The most salient example from last year’s Con was the invasion of the uber-mainstream Twilight fans, who not only created a ruckus on the streets of San Diego, but also usurped all the seats of the largest pavilion, Hall H, to wait for their panel, locking out other fans from seeing their panels. (No one was stabbed.) In reality, the supposed clash of cultures is blown out of proportion, with most fans not really feeling the tension. To boot, Seidel pointed out that tension isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. She gave a metaphor of a rubber band, which only fulfills its purpose with tension. The different forces of Comic-Con work in different ways, if sometimes imperfectly. And that’s a good thing.

Incidentally,

if you are reading this and interested in participating in the week-long program in San Diego next year, visit the official website of the Comic-Con field study for more information. Some of the benefits include: attending the Comic-Con programs of your choice, learning the tools of ethnographic investigation, and presenting the findings as part of a presentation to the Comics Arts Conference. Dr. Matthew Smith, who leads the field study every year, is not just a veteran attendee of Comic-Con, but also the author of The Power of Comics.

COMIC-CON SPOTLIGHT ON: Charles Yu, author of How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, out in release September 7, 2010.

Here at ScriptPhD.com, we love hobnobbing with the scientific and entertainment elite and talking to writers and filmmakers at the top of their craft as much as the next website. But what we love even more is seeking out new talent, the makers of the books, movies and ideas that you’ll be talking about tomorrow, and being proud to be the first to showcase their work. This year, in our preparation for Comic-Con 2010, we ran across such an individual in Charles Yu, whose first novel, How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe premieres this fall, and who spoke about it at a panel over the weekend. We had an opportunity to have lunch with Charles in Los Angeles just prior Comic-Con, and spoke in-depth about his new book, along with the state of sci-fi in current literature. We’re pretty sure Charles Yu is a name science fiction fans are going to be hearing for some time to come. ScriptPhD.com is proud to shine our 2010 Comic-Con spotlight on Charles and his debut novel, which is available September 7, 2010.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the story of a son searching for his father… through quantum-space time. The story takes place on Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: try to change the past. That’s where the main character, Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. Accompanied by TAMMY (who we consider the new Hal), an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, Charles helps save people from themselves. When he’s not on the job, Charles visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished.

Questions for Charles Yu

Sci-fi author Charles Yu.

ScriptPhD.com: Charles, the story has tremendous traditional sci-fi roots. Can you discuss where the inspiration for this came from?

Charles Yu: Well the sci-fi angle definitely comes from being a kid in the 80s, when there were blockbuster sci-fi things all over the place. I’ve always loved [that time], as a casual fan, but also wanted to write it. I didn’t even start doing that until after I’d graduated from law school. I did write, growing up, but I never wrote fiction—I didn’t think I’d be any good at it! I wrote poetry in college, minored in it, actually. Fiction and poetry are both incredibly hard, and poetry takes more discipline, but at least when I failed in my early writing, it was a 100 words of failure, instead of 5,000 words of it.

SPhD: What were some of your biggest inspirations growing up (television or books) that contributed to your later work?

CY: Definitely The Foundation Trilogy. I remember reading that in the 8th grade, and I remember spending every waking moment reading, because it was the greatest thing I’d ever read. First of all, I was in the 8th grade, so I hadn’t read that many things, but the idea that Asimov created this entire self-contained universe, it was the first time that I’d been exposed to that idea. And then to have this psychohistory on top, it was kind of trippy. Psychohistory is the idea that social sciences can be just as rigorously captured with equations as any physical science. I think that series of books is the main thing that got me into sci-fi.

SPhD: Any regrets about having named the main character after yourself?

CY: Yes. For a very specific reason. People in my life are going to think it’s biographical, which it’s very much not. And it’s very natural for people to do that. And in my first book of short stories, none of the main characters was named after anyone, and still I had family members that asked if that was about our family, or people that gave me great feedback but then said, “How could you do that to your family?” And it was fiction! I don’t think the book could have gotten written had I not left that placeholder in, because the one thing that drove any sort of emotional connection for the story for me was the idea of having less things to worry about. The other thing is that because the main character is named after you, as you’re writing the book, it acts as a fuel or vector to help drive the emotional completion.

SPhD: In the world of your novel, people live in a lachrymose, technologically-driven society. Any commentary therein whatsoever on the technological numbing of our own current culture?

CY: Yes. But I didn’t mean it as a condemnation, in a sense. I wouldn’t make an overt statement about technology and society, but I am more interested in the way that technology can sometimes not connect people, but enable people’s tendency to isolate themselves. Certainly, technology has amazing connective possibilities, but that would have been a much different story, obviously. The emotional plot-level core of this book is a box. And that sort of drove everything from there. The technology is almost an emotional technology that [Charles, the main character] has invented with his dad. It’s a larger reflection of his inability to move past certain limitations that he’s put on himself.

SPhD: What drives Charles, the main character of this book?

CY: What’s really driving Charles emotionally is looking for his dad. But more than that, is trying to move through time, to navigate the past without getting stuck in it.

SPhD: Both of his companions are non-human. Any significance to that?

CY: It probably speaks more to my limitations as a writer [laughs]. That was all part of the lonely guy type that Charles is being portrayed as. If he had a human with him, he’d be a much different person.

SPhD: The book abounds in scientific jargon and technological terminology, which is par for the course in science fiction, but was still very ambitious. Do you have high expectations of the audience that will read this book?

CY: Yeah. I was just reading an interview where the writer essentially said “You can never go wrong by expecting too much [of your audience].” You can definitely go wrong the other way, because that would come off as terrible, or assuming that you know more. But actually, my concerns were more in the other direction, because I knew I was playing fast and loose with concepts that I know I don’t have a great grasp of. I’m writing from the level of amateur who likes reading science books, and studied science in college—an entertainment layreader. My worry was whether I was BSing too much [of the science]. There are parts where it’s clearly fictional science, but there are other parts that I cite things that are real, and is anyone who reads this who actually knows something about science going to say “What the heck is this guy saying?”

SPhD: How To Live… is written in a very atavistic, retro 80s style of science fiction, and really reminded me of the best of Isaac Asimov. How do you feel about the current state of sci-fi literature as relates to your book?

CY: Two really big keys for me, and things I was thinking about while writing [this book], were one, there is kind of a kitchiness to sci-fi, and I think that’s kind of intentional. It has a kind of do-it-yourself aesthetic to it. In my book, you basically have a guy in the garage with his dad, and yes the dad is an engineer, but it’s in a garage without great equipment, so it’s not going to look sleek, you can imagine what it’s going to look like—it’s going to look like something you’d build with things you have lying around in the garage. On the other hand, it is supposed to be this fully realized time machine, and you’re not supposed to be able to imagine it. Even now, when I’m in the library in the science-fiction section, I’ll often look for anthologies that are from the 80s, or the greatest time travel stories from the 20th Century that cover a much greater range of time than what’s being published now. It’s almost like the advancement of real-world technology is edging closer to what used to be the realm of science fiction. The way that I would think about that is that it’s not exploting what the real possibility of science fiction is, which is to explore a current world or any other completely strange world, but not a world totally envisionable ten years from now. You end up speculating on what’s possible or what’s easily extrapollatable from here; that’s not necessarily going to make for super emotional stories.

Charles Yu is a writer and attorney living in Los Angeles, CA.

Last, but certainly not least, is our final Costume of the Day. We chose this young ninja not only because of the coolness of his costume, but because of his quick wit. As we were taking the snapshot he said, “I’m smiling, you just can’t see it.” And a check mate to you, young sir.

Day 4 Costume of the Day.

Incidentally, you can find much more photographic coverage of Comic-Con on our Facebook fan page. Become a fan, because this week, we will be announcing Comic-Con swag giveaways that only Facebook fans are eligible for.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Street signs adorning the City of San Diego for Comic-Con 2010

Day 3 was Star Wars Day at San Diego Comic-Con International and we have something shocking to report, ladies and gentlemen. We did not see a single light saber, not one! Since we almost incurred an unfortunate eye injury last year due to an overenthusiastic Jedi, this was most welcome relief. For ScriptPhD.com, today was all about science and technology. In a day that could not have been more tailor-made for our website, we enjoyed panels with the eminent sci-fi television writers of today discussing writing for genre TV (a must-read for any aspiring TV writers out there!), a visit from the greatest science fiction writer in the history of science fiction, Ray Bradbury, a preview of next season’s sci-fi show The Event, and a panel on how exactly shows like CSI “tech” out with gadgets galore. Oh, yes, did we mention we got to hang out privately with the MythBusters?? With the help of our intrepid reporter Bryy Miller, we bring you the most complete Comic-Con coverage on the web. Plus, our Costume of the Day, after the “continue reading” cut!

The Write Stuff: Creating Genre Television

LOST. CSI. V. Battlestar Galactica. It seems that sci-fi, tech, and geek-chic television is everywhere. Not only is it a staple of prime time (across basic and extended cable), it’s an increasingly popular genre for which good writers are constantly in demand. Since we are SCRIPTPhD.com, an opportunity to listen in as a panel of some of today’s hottest genre television writers gave away secrets of their craft and advice for aspiring writers was irresistible.

Writing for Genre TV panel Part 1 (from left to right): Moderator Jeff Goldsmith, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Sarah Watson, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Ashley E. Miller

Writing for Genre TV Part 2 (from left to right): Steve Melching, Gabrielle Stanton, Jesse Alexander, Steve Kriozere, Charles Murray, and Mark Altman.

Since this panel consisted of so many writers, albeit a dream team thereof, there was only an allotted amount of time for three questions, each of which the panelists answered one by one down the line, and quite enthusiastically. The moderator, Jeff Goldsmith, who runs the industry rag Creative Screenwriting correctly pointed out that not only are they all working in TV, but if they weren’t on this panel, they’d be at Comic-Con anyway. He called them the “Algonquin geek table.” The first question was to ask each screenwriter what brilliant idea they had that would revolutionize a show they were working on at the time, but that couldn’t get past the network censors.

Mark Altman (Castle, Elvis Van Helsing) recalled creating a pilot called Elvis Van Helsing, but ABC went with The Middle Man instead. So he turned it into a graphic novel, and the rest was history. Charles Murray (V, Criminal Minds) actually recalled a terrific idea for an episode of Criminal Minds, where a serial killer would put a milk carton in someone’s fridge and the “Have You Seen This Person?” picture would be of the dead person. Clever, we thought! Steve Kriozere (NCIS, VIP) had the clever idea on VIP of casting Bruce Campbell to play Pamela Anderson’s uncle. The amazing and talented Jesse Alexander (Alias, LOST, Heroes) recalled a victory for geeks in the form of Heroes Season 1 in an episode entitled Days of Future Past where all the characters went into alternate future. He mentioned that it was so hard to approve and get on air, but the episode went on to win multiple awards. What didn’t make it? “Season 5.”
Steve Melching (Clone Wars, Transformers, The Batman) recalled writing for the animated series The Batman taking place in his first few years in Gotham City, and wanted (but failed) to approve a B story about a frat boy group dressing up in D-List costumes, committing fake crimes and then videotaping their subsequent ass kicking by Batman. We wonder why that didn’t get approved. Ashley E. Miller (Fringe, Terminator) wanted a Fringe follow up to the episode “Bishop Revival,” which had an immortal Nazi. He wanted a flashback episode to 1942, where we find out that Agent Phillip Broyles is 100 years old, and whacking Nazis. Jose Molina (Castle, Firefly) wanted a Firefly payoff episode with a 9-months-pregnant woman being evil, where the team kills her but they save the baby, and the episode would consist of three acts of “Three Men and a Baby.” Right. Sarah Watson (Middleman, Parenthood) recalled being hired to do a SyFy Channel movie of the week about an untapped volcano under Manhattan (seriously!), and she had grand plans for lava engulfing Statue of Liberty, taking over all of Manhattan island, but when the movie got produced the visual ended up being lava trickling out from under a garage. Robert Hewitt Wolfe (The Gates, Deep Space Nine) was writing for 4400 in its final season, and was obsessed with the idea of creating an aerosol promycin bomb over Seattle (hmmm, as a Seattleite, I booed this from the audience). The showrunners created a promycin bomb at the end. So the next time you think all TV writers are geniuses, just remember that for every great episode of your favorite show, there were many bad ideas tossed around in the writers’ room.

Next, Goldsmith asked the panel to recount (as diplomatically as possible) the stupidest network notes they’d ever encountered for a show script they worked on.

Mark Altman recalled working on a SyFy Channel movie where executives asked him to recap the whole plot at the beginning of the hour because of people tuning in from HBO. Charles Murray, while working on V, was told he couldn’t use the word lizard in an episode. How do you get past something like that, he was asked. “I left the show. That’s how you get past it.” Steve Kriozere revealed the #1 SyFy Channel rule of movies: don’t speak to the monster. Jesse Alexander, having worked on some of the greatest sci-fi hits ever, waxed more philosophical. Everyone has an opinion on these shows, but executives want the rules of the show’s world, they want everything spelled out clearly, a lot of exposition. They’re generally happier if the shows are procedurals, but sci-fi shows don’t have room for that—if all the secrets and exposition are revealed it drives people away from the content. Steve Melching pointed out that a lot of animated shows have hyper-sensors because they’re aimed at children. The dumbest note he ever received was that you can’t say “killer satellites.” Ashley E. Miller was reminded (we are shocked!) that you cannot have an 11 year old boy say douchenozzle on prime time TV. Jose Molina recalled an episode of Castle where a body is found in the teaser, the guys go through case, and find out that the victim was killed by a stiletto. Said the executives: “Does the killer have to kill with a shoe?” Sarah Watson revealed that the most annoying thing to writers on shows now is that they’re paid by sponsors, so writers have to put products into scenes strategically. Her worst example was an episode of a show with a surf competition…sponsored by Tampax. To make this work, they had to cover a poor actress’s entire surf bodysuit with Tampax logos. Robert Hewitt Wolfe was taken out to dinner by the main executives of a show he was working on and flat out asked to dumb down the series. Ahhh, the things you learn when the iron curtain goes down.

Finally, Goldsmith asked the panel to give advice to young TV writers (or aspiring writers) on how to best write for a budget, which is unfortunately what most young writers will face on television these days.

Without question, the panel answered unanimously that the secret in the writing is all. about. character. The best and cheapest special effects are two actors in a room with terrific conflict and terrific dialogue—that’s what’s compelling, that’s what’s intimate. Most physical action, they reminded us, is actually superfluous—only revert to it after all possible dialogue is tapped out. Ultimately, you must look at how what you cut (if you are forced to cut things) affects the character. If you put six people in a scene, make sure that all of them need to be in the scene, because it is extremely expensive to shoot. The writers lamented that networks sometimes have too much money, and a subsequent desire to compete with Transformers or Iron Man, which television can’t do. Writers must remember that character works for television, and you can have high-concept ideas for sci-fi. That’s why shows on cable, which are often budget-restricted, are so great. Sarah Watson reminded the audience that you can always make a show cheaper, and fantastic, with great writing and great dialogue. This is how Friday Night Lights, which shoots on a shoestring budget down in Texas, was able to survive for five seasons.

Mostly, in advice relevant to any writer reading this, they said not to repeat past mistakes.

The Event

The Event panel (from left to right): Ian Anthony Dale, Zeljko Ivanek, Laura Innes, Sarah Roemer, Jason Ritter, Blair Underwood, and producers Evan Katz, Steve Stark, Jeffrey Reiner, Nick Wauters and Jim Wong.

This television show, premiering in the fall of 2010, might be the new LOST, or it might be the new FlashForward. I’m not sure yet. The Event, a show that is so steeped in mystery that even its title is nothing more than Something Happens, was a show—and will be a show—with as many problems as it has concepts. Fortunately, all of its flaws are structural.

The pilot is laid out as three separate stories (well, actually, four, but one is extremely short in comparison) over the course of three separate acts. We actually start the show in the middle of the story when our hero, Sean Walker (Jason Ritter), hijacks a plane in order to save it, and then flash back to eight days earlier, and then forward to seven days earlier, and then once more to the present. It gets even more confusing when President Eli Martinez (the incredibly suave Blair Underwood) gets his go at the story, and then his segment goes back an entire year. The other two stories comprise of the father of Sean’s girlfriend, whose house and family are assaulted by unknown forces, and Simon Lee (Ian Anthony Dale), the supposed second-in-command of a secret government base/prison that lies at the center of The Event. It’s a shame that Lee’s section is so short, as Dale is a fantastic actor even within the confines of such little material. But perhaps the best acting comes from ER/West Wing (and Northwestern University!) alumna, Laura Innes, who absolutely nails her cryptic sayings as Sofia, the leader of the base/prison/thing-to-be-revealed-later.

The show will need to cut out some of the flashes in order to survive past its initial thirteen episodes, but it is definitely a unique format that works for this type of story. The writing was high-quality and so was the dialogue; there were no qualms there. It also revealed quite a bit about the world that had been set up if you looked closely enough. Co-Producer Evan Katz made the promise that answers would actually come a lot faster than with other mystery longforms. This is welcome, especially since I am of the belief that mystery shows can maintain the mystery if they answer questions in the right or clever way. Sometimes, it is even essential to answer them if you want the show to progress to its next level of weirdness. Blair Underwood was then asked what it is like to be the first Cuban president, to which he replied that there would be no Salsa dancing.

Katz then ended the panel the only way it could have possibly ended:

“The Salsa is not The Event.”

Spotlight On: Ray Bradbury

He is brilliant. He is one of the foremost technology predictors since Leonardo DaVinci. He is irreverent, utterly aware of his importance, and quite simply, the greatest science fiction writer in the history of the genre. He none other than Ray Bradbury. Ray has been coming to Comic-Con since the very first year of its inception. A devoted comics and graphic novel buff, he loves interacting yearly with fans, and gracing them with his musings, knowledge and appreciation. We were honored and somewhat overwhelmed to be there in person for Ray’s 41st Comic-Con panel, on the heels of his 90th birthday. Because Bradbury’s words speak for themselves, we bring you the panel through his eyes.

Ray Bradbury being wheeled in for his Comic-Con panel.

Bradbury, not shy about quips and bold statements, starts out his panel with a bang: “I want to make an announcement. Sam Weller and I are working on a new book together: Let’s Let The Cat out of the Bag.” In actuality, Weller and Bradbury released a brand new book of interviews (out June 29th) entitled Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. Weller has spent over a decade with Bradbury, getting to know him, studying his works, and acted as his guide during the panel (Mr. Bradbury has become a bit hard of hearing). Bradbury is currently working on a new book of 20 short stories entitled “Juggernaut” to be published next Christmas.

Sam Weller, middle, Ray Bradbury's biographer, led the panel and discussion at Comic-Con

On how it feels to be Ray Bradbury and if he ever marvels at himself, after a long, thoughtful pause, a hearty laugh and: “It feels mighty damn good.”

Fahrenheit 451 was among the most prescient sci-fi works of all time, predicting technology such as earbuds, flat screen televisions, school violence, and the rise of graphic novels. How did Bradbury predict all this stuff?

“The secret of life is being in love. By being in love, you predict yourself. Whatever you want is what you get. You don’t think about things; just do them. Don’t predict them—just make them.”

Of the technologies Bradbury predicted, he also warned about many, including rise of mass media. What tech would he like to see next?

Again, a thoughtful pause. “I’d like certain technologies to disappear. The internet is a great, big, stupid goddamn bore.” Keep in mind that when Bradbury was approached by an internet magnate to publish his works as e-books for the internet, he responded with: “Prick up your ears and go to hell!” The internet magnate? None other than the CEO of Yahoo.

Another strong, recurring theme of Bradbury’s panel was his love (adoration, really) of space exploration, most notably colonization of Mars and the Moon. Why? “Because we’re going to live forever. We should go back and build a base on the Moon, put a civilization on Mars. 500 years from now, we’ll go out into the Universe, and when we do that, we have a chance to live forever.”

Weller tried to get Bradbury to discuss the new book, once again evoking his crotchety sense of humour: “You can’t afford it. So get out of here and forget it.” In an extremely revealing, intimate moment, Weller pointed out that many Mars stories and works are inspired by and cut from Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, none more similar than the Twilight Zone. Bradbury then revealed something that many of his fans probably don’t know. “Rod Sterling came to my house many years ago. He didn’t know anything about writing sci-fi. So I took him down to my basement and gave him copies of books written by Roald Dahl, John Collier, a number of other great sci-fi authors, and myself. Rod Sterling forgot that he read all these books, and when he wrote his programs, he copied some of his ideas from me, and we got into a big argument.” The two never reconciled.

As we’ve mentioned, Bradbury came to Comic-Con in its first year, where he said only 300 people came to first meeting, quite different from today, where 1,000 people were gathered in his room alone. Why does he come so often? “Because I’ve been collecting comic strips all my life. I have 30 years’ of Prince Valiant Sunday illustrations put away, all of Buck Rogers. My background in becoming a writer was falling in love with comic strips.” How did they influence his prose and narrative? “Comic strips are full of imagination and glorious adventures. My all-time favorite is Mutts. A year from now, there will be a graphic novel of “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”” Bradbury is, in fact, the world’s greatest (and possibly oldest) fanboy. He is famous for writing fan letters to writers and other figures that he admires. He sent books to John Huston, the famous screenwriter and filmmaker. He sent a hand-written letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs begging him to come to a meeting of Bradbury’s science fiction society club.

Another thing fans may not know is that Bradbury is considered the patron saint of the American library system. He has been very active in rescuing libraries that are under fire because of budgetary crises. He recounted the story of his love affair with the library. “When I left high school, I had no money to go to college. I decided to not worry about going to college. I thought: “I will educate myself.” So I walked down the street, I walked into a library for 3 days a week for 10 years. Most of you in the audience can’t afford to go to college. But if you want to educate yourself, you can afford to go to the library. When I was 28 years old, I graduated from the library.”

The concept of time travel is explored in the short story “A Sound of Thunder.” If Bradbury could time travel, he was asked to what moment it would be? “Every. Single. Moment. Every single moment of my life has been incredible. I’ve savored it. It’s beautiful, because I’ve remained a boy. The man you see here tonight is a 12 year old boy, and he’s having fun!” How does he stay connected to his inner child? “Don’t worry about the future, or the past, you just explode every day. If you’re dynamic, you don’t have to worry about what age you are.”

Indeed, childhood is a theme of many of his short stories. Why is this so important to Bradbury? “Because I grew up loving carnivals and circuses. That’s why I wrote those stories.”

When asked if he had any regrets in life, Bradbury evoked the biggest laugh of the day: “I regret that I didn’t have more time with Bo Derek.” What’s the Bo Derek story? She came up to him in Paris train station, and exclaimed “Mr. Bradbury, I love you!” To which he responded, “Who are you?” She replied, “My name is Bo Derek. Mr. Bradbury, will you travel on the train with me?” With a stoic face he recalled replying: “Yep, I will!” The rest was censored.

Other than Be Derek, what was his greatest love? Bradbury turned philosophical. “I am the world’s greatest lover. I love to write short stories. I write them. I love to write novels. I write them. I love to write poetry. I write it. I love to paint pictures. I paint them. I loved directing a film. So I directed it. Those are my greatest lovers. I have loved all these things I have told you about.”

What authors inspired Bradbury growing up? “Edgar Rice Burrows. And Edgar Allan Poe—scared the hell out of me.”

Another fact about Bradbury that many people may not know is his rather illuminating and successful career as a designer and architect. He was asked how he got involved with designing the San Diego city center Horton Plaza. ”I designed a lot of other places all over LA. 50 years ago, the people who were building the New World’s Fair asked me to redesign the United States Pavilion. I helped build Epcot down in Florida. Because of those works, the people of San Diego came and asked for input in building The Horton Plaza at the center of San Diego.”

Aldous Huxley famously said of Bradbury, “You know what you are sir? You are a poet.” When asked who the poets are that have influenced his writing, Bradbury immediately responded: “Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.”

What are the things that keep Bradbury motivated now? “I have more work to do.”

On how his writing has changed over time: “It’s gotten more brilliant.”

As such a fan of Mars, Bradbury was asked how he feels about the ongoing Martian probes, and the real science evidence they have brought back to Earth. “I’m glad we are doing that [research], but we should be doing more. We should be going there in person. Not with a lander, but with a real rocket ship and landing on Mars.” In a rather endearing moment, Weller revealed that Bradbury has never driven an automobile. But he was invited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where scientists asked him if he’d like to drive the Mars Rover over Mars. So he hasn’t driven on the 405 freeway, but he has driven across Mars! The scientists even gave him a Martian drivers license.

Any futuristic technologies for cities that Bradbury would like to see? “Monorails all over LA and California. Get rid of the goddamn freeways!” As a Los Angeles resident, hear, hear, Mr. Bradbury!

What was the intended audience of Fahrenheit 451 and how does he feel about its rise to prominence as a true modern American classic? “I am not a science fiction writer. All my books are fantasy. But the one book that is pure science fiction is Fahrenheit 451. So I’m glad that I wrote it. I’m glad that you all feel that way about it too.”

Does Bradbury have a favorite work? “All of my books are my favorites. All of my books are my children. I love all my children.”

How does Bradbury feel about digital books? With a cranky grunt: “I’ve already told you that. I don’t like them. I think of iPads and Kindles as books with a computer screen. Real books smell, real books have memories.” We here at ScriptPhD.com would like to give that statement a heartfelt “AMEN!”

Finally, Bradbury, on turning 90 in a few weeks. How does it feel? “It’s been 90 goddamned incredible years!” To which the audience responded by singing him “Happy Birthday.” A surreal, incredible and special moment.

Teching Out on TV

The Teching Out on TV panel (from left to right): Pauley Perrette, Kristen Vangsness, Barrett Foa, and Rich Catalani.

This panel started out with an inundating montage of clips from tech-chic procedurals CSI and NCIS that involved technology of all sorts. It was part awesome and part utterly corny, as words to the song that was spliced in occasionally would find themselves on to the screen. I was afraid that this foreshadowed the panel being just a huge PR stroke for both shows, but I was later proven wrong. Despite the moderator speaking in a loud, fast, incoherent style of mumbling, the rest of the speakers (Anthony Zuicker, creator of CSI; Pauley Perette, CSI; Barrett Foa, NCIS: Los Angeles; Kirsten Vangsness, Criminal Minds; and Rich Catalani, producer of CSI) were very articulate about all aspects of technology on their shows. They strove to make it less a panel about technology on CSI and NCIS and more about technology and how it relates to CSI and NCIS.

The presentation started out with questions about how everyone got involved in their work, and more specifically, how they got involved in technology, or if they even were. Perette studied forensics in college, talking about how, back in her early years, nobody knew a thing about it. She related a story that the first time that her computer was hacked into, she tried to tell the police, but ended up having to explain to them what an IP Address was. Then, after shows such as CSI and Law & Order made technology and forensics mainstream, everyone was a part of a club that they felt they cultivated. “We all became semi-experts,” she said. “It’s been an incredible decade of change. What we’re showing on our show is the grand upmovement”. Vangsness was a tad in the opposite direction: she took teaching jobs in order to support herself, and one of those jobs was teaching PowerPoint to third graders. She now has images of third graders hacking into government installations to post spam of kittens.

Foa stopped the discussion at one point to explain to the audience that his show, unlike the original CSI, does not stare at a green screen when looking at his computer tomfoolery. It is all real. Which complicated matters greatly when Perette’s character met Foa’s in a crossover between their two shows. She had to literally teach him on set how to react to a green screen as oppose to a real image. Foa also related how the super-tech that we often think of as fictional and made up is actually real. The CSI writers have access to China Lake, a military outpost where they test experimental technology. Scary, huh?

But sometimes technology cannot save you, and honest-to-God legwork must be put into use. For one CSI episode involving a stampede of ants, they actually had to hire an Ant Wrangler and clean up all the creepy crawlies using a vacuum. CGI was expected to just look too ridiculous. Then, in a devilish sort of irony, the projector broke, so the panel was cut short and went straight to questions. Perette was met with a young woman who was going to major in Cellular Biology in college because of Perette’s performance on CSI.

Thus, the cycle continues.

MythBusters: Panel + Press Room Coverage

How popular are Discovery Channel’s MythBusters? Very. Each year, the group of geeky demolition rock stars, who prove and disprove popular science myths through the scientific method, represent one of the fan favorite panels at Comic-Con. This year was no different. Press pass notwithstanding, we barely squeezed into a sardine-tight hall full of science fans awaiting their heroes’ arrival. Take a look at the picture below:

A packed-to-the-brim house of 2,000 people awaits the entrance of the MythBusters.

As if the presence of television’s most explosive group wasn’t enough, the audience was tantalized two-fold before the panel. First, a montage video introducing the Busters had us cracking up with its over-the-top… what else?… explosions!

Their entrance was preceded by what else, but a montage of some of their greatest hits!

Then, a special guest, Geoff The Robot from The Late Show with Craig Ferguson, stepped out to proclaim his nerdy love of all things MythBusters.

Geoff, the robot from the Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Finally, to ear-deafening applause, Chris Hardwick of one of our favorite blogs The Nerdist (follow him on Twitter) introduced the MythBusters, who announced that they’ve signed up for 7 more years of glorious science. This is a very special Comic-Con for them. It’s the first time all five have come as a group, and it is gorgeous geek diva Kari Byron’s first Con.

The MythBusters all together at Comic-Con--a first for them! From left to right: Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, and host Chris Hardwick of The Nerdist.

The first thing the MythBusters wanted their fans to know is just how very real they are. Although they feel like royalty at the Con, when they go back home to San Francisco, MythBusters is far from glamorous. Inside their workshop, which is a workshop and not a studio, they are doing all of the stunts and building themselves. They get dirty, they get bruised, and they do all of the experimenting. Says Adam Savage: “If you see it, we built it.” Although Savage has started getting more involved behind-the-scenes, he explained that the team is so knowledgeable about how to build things, that it’s faster and more efficient for them to do the building than to leave it to someone else. Tory Bellici mused that it would be nice to have stunt doubles sometimes, to which Kari Byron quipped: “They’re not stunts when you fall off.” Did we mention that we love Kari? Jamie Hyneman, who initially signed up for MythBusters because of the allure of getting to try new things, is still having a hard time acknowledging being on TV. When asked what famous people he’d met because of MythBusters, he couldn’t recall one. “President Obama?” nudged Byron. “Oh. Yeah,” replied Hyneman hysterically. Not so for Grant Imahara, possibly the most famous robotics guy in the world. “Craig Ferguson called me the Keith Richards of robotics,” said Grant. “I’m not sure how to take that.”

The audience was treated to a highlight reel of the upcoming season, which promises to have the best, and most extreme, experiments yet. The team revealed some of the secrets. Adam Savage revealed that a scene of a Porsche flipping backwards violently was done to bust an old 1980s myth that classic sports cars are more aerodynamic going backwards than forwards. In an utterly bad-ass bit of reconstruction, the body of a Porsche chassis was cut off, flipped backwards on the car, then raced at 100 miles per hour. Any more questions, kids? A scene showing Kari puking violently (she joked that it was in her contract to have to throw up every year) was explained as an episode testing whether people really do get cold feet when they have to do something scary. For the team, scary meant picking, then eating, two of the most disgusting selections from a table of delicacies consisting of spiders, cockroaches, chicken feet and more. And where does the team get their constant supply of ideas? “Surfing the internet really works!” joked Grant Imahara.

As to whether the team is cognizant of how much they advance science and critical thinking, and actively try to build experiments around didactic aims, the answer is… NO! Jamie remarked that as a whole, the MythBusters are a remarkably curious group. They are curious about stuff, they try to figure it out, and do so in a methodical and logical way. But they never set out to do science. Which, honestly, in the opinion of this website, is why their science is so great.

At this point, the team shared fun and hilarious inside stories from their Comic-Con experience and tidbits from back home in San Francisco. Adam recalls being shocked at two geeks that came up to him at an autograph table with their baby, wearing a onesie that said “Proof that nerds have sex.” Despite his uncomfortable laughter, the duo then asked him to sign their baby! Another fan went up to Jamie and remarked: “I’ve been watching your shows since I was a little girl and now I’m a PhD!” We’re pretty sure Jamie was kidding, but Adam still poked fun back at him. “You’re old!”

Just in time for next week’s Discovery Channel Shark Week, Adam recalled a fan coming up to him a few months back with what the fan was convinced was a brilliant suggestion: “Dude, you know what you should totally do? You should totally prove that, like, punching sharks will make them go away! Seriously, dude, it would be awesome! You’d just punch them.” A brief pause from Adam. “8 months later, there we were, knee deep in sharks, punching them in the face…”

Kari revealed that she filmed the show up to her 10th month of pregnancy. She pointed out that it’s a myth that pregnancy only lasts 9 months. (BUSTED!) She was worried that her baby would never come out. Replied Grant: “With all those explosions and gunshots outside, I wouldn’t come out either!”

Finally, to a fan that asked whether the team is ever scared of an experiment as too dangerous, Jamie reminded him that danger is a relative term. Nothing the MythBusters do is any less dangerous than driving down a freeway at 70 miles an hour. The trick is to good engineering and survive by doing a good job.

The new season of MythBusters premieres in the fall. Find coverage of their Comic-Con panel and clips from the new season on the MythBusters website.

The MythBusters (and Geoff) chilling with us back in the press room after the panel. Aren't they all beyond adorable??

We got to spend even more time hanging out with the MythBusters (and Geoff) backstage in the press area to get even more scoop about the show. We all wondered about the research process that the team undergoes. First and foremost, Adam proclaimed that they “don’t ever get things tested because they’re too dangerous.” There’s nothing the team is afraid of, and no length of time is too long to wait for a payoff. The research can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 years. The team searched 19 months for a lead layer thin enough to do an experiment properly. By contrast, the poppy seed drug testing experiment took two hours. They ate poppy seed muffins at 9 AM, and tested positive for heroin at 11 AM (well into the next day).

When asked about their terrific rapport, the team reiterated that they very much enjoy each other’s company and socialize quite well. All of the process, from picking to carrying out experiments, is totally collaborative. Secondly, the team shares a bond because they know each other quite well. “It’s not like we’re a science show boy band,” joked Adam. Most of them have known each other and worked together well before MythBusters began. Unlike other shows, MythBusters goes on for most of the year (46-47 weeks) because the building portions of the segments are so time-consuming. The most important thing to Jamie is a strong sense of respect that trickles down all the way to the show’s loyal crew of 23 people.

For the future of the show, Jamie revealed an interest in looking at the dichotomy of destructive things that do good work as well, steam being high on his list. The team never gets inspiration from movie trailers or clips if there’s no story there and they’re not worthy of a myth.

Adam revealed the interesting fact that somebody actually bought the Corvette which had been fouled by a decomposing pig to prove that a decomposing body can destroy the inside of the car. Adam now associates the smell of cleaner with that episode, which makes him sick to this day. Was that the team’s least favorite experiment, wondered ScriptPhD.com? Grant picked the ear wax candle experiment, jokingly calling it the “seasickness experiment.” Tory picked the chili pepper cure experiment. (“Burns on the way in, burns on the way out!”), while Kari picked the water torture episode. The most destructive experiment to this day, much to the chagrin of OSHA and safety regulation organizations of San Francisco, was the Civil War rocket, tested with a wax core. The team thought they had a proper bunker in the shop, but unfortunately ended up setting fire to their ceiling!

On any potential Discovery Channel crossover shows, Adam revealed that he’d like to go out into the wild with Bear Grylls (and so would I!) while Kari revealed that she would not like to do a dirty job.

And for the highlight of my personal day…

The Nerdist and The ScriptPhD giving a thumbs up to geekdom!

Last, but not least, is our official Day 3 Costume of the Day. We chose this warrior for a simple reason. He braved the chilly convention center without a shirt, yet with a completely covered head. Now if that isn’t upside-down thinking, we don’t know what is!

Our Day 3 Costume of the Day

Incidentally, you can find much more photographic coverage of Comic-Con on our Facebook fan page. Become a fan, because this week, we will be announcing Comic-Con swag giveaways that only Facebook fans are eligible for.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Greetings from sunny San Diego, everyone! ScriptPhD.com is in the absolute epicenter of sci-fi, comics and the illustrative arts: Comic-Con 2010. Armed with a press pass, our wonderful correspondent Brian Stempien of Lefty Films, and an industrial-sized vat of Purell, we are proud to bring you four-day coverage that spans the nexus of sci-fi, graphic arts, design, technology, film, television, and of course, the forum that started it all, comics. Day 1 coverage includes an array of panels covering the origins that drive an artist’s imagination, the future of cultural arts in a digital age, the future of space exploration with Iron Man’s Stark Industries as a model, good sci-fi, bad sci-fi, sci-fi that will change your life, and a conversation with two leading visionaries of the sci-fi genre, J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon. ScriptPhD.com also got to chat with the stars and producers of our favorite forensics show, Dexter. Plus, we have a little secret teaser interview with a certain MythBusters star that we’ve been teasing for a good while now! As we always do at Comic-Con, we pick our Costume of the Day as part of our compete Day 1 coverage, under the “continue reading” cut.

The Spark of Imagination

The Spark of Imagination panel: (from left to right) Tony DiTerlizzi, Travis Knight, Mike Mignola, John Stevenson, Doug TenNapel, and moderator Geoff Boucher

What better way to begin a four-day celebration of visual imagination than a panel of distinguished artists and designers discussing the “spark” that originates imagination, how to harness concepts and ideas, and how they feel imagination informs the creative process. The panel consisted of Tony DiTerlizzi (illustrator of The Spiderwick Chronicles), Travis Knight (lead animator of Disney’s Coraline), Hellboy creator/writer Mike Mignola, Kung Fu Panda director John Stevenson, Doug TenNapel (illustrator/writer of Earthworm Jim), and moderator Geoff Boucher of the LA Times blog The Hero Complex.

Let’s be honest, creative types are weird, weird people, me being one of them. Unequivocal unanimity was reached that this very oddness, which might alienate a person from the mainstay of society, was the very fuel that drove creativity and imagination. Tony DiTerlizzi recalled being a daydreaming doodler from elementary school onward, never listening to anything his teachers or figures of authority said to him, almost inhabiting his own world. (Sound familiar, creative readers?) Travis Knight concurred, adding that spontaneity, a side benefit of idiosyncrasy, is absolutely essential to the core of imagination. Artists never really grow up; they start out as hermits hiding in basements, grow into high school kids that get shoved into lockers, and end up playing with dolls as adults. But in a way, he added, it’s wonderful and liberating to live on the fringes of society, to see things in a way that adults have forgotten how to. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola expressed amazement and awe at people wiling to be brave enough to create things for the sake of creation, even if it will never see the light of day. “Let’s face it,” Knight sighed. “There’s something wrong with us.”

Doug TenNapel shows Geoff Boucher prototypes for illustrations.

Recognizing and managing productive imagination when it happens were also a popular consensus among the group. It’s really easy to come up with stuff, maintains Doug TenNapel; it’s not really a special gift or ability and we all have it to some degree. The hard part is the execution in all forms of art. There are millions of ideas that will cross through our minds that will never see the light of day not because they’re not good, but because they aren’t viable. To develop those skills of managing and presenting ideas and putting them to use so one can make a living off of them, an artist has to become an “imagination editor” that parses out the ones that matter. Thank goodness Mignola refined that skill, or Hellboy never would have seen the light of day. He’d been drawing for years at conventions and other comics gatherings, usually on-demand for fans. After endless renditions of popular figures such as Batman, the fans wanted something more original, and Mignola sketched an early, rough inception of what would become Hellboy. Later, when asked to contribute a monster to a convention comic book, he recycled the character, drawing “Hellboy” on his belt to fill a blank spot on the page. Only later, when Mignola wanted to do his own comics, would the stories and three-dimensional world grow around that original central character.

DiTerlizzi also utilizes a character as a focal point for his stories. In order to care about a world, he reminded the audience, you must first care about the character that will inhabit it. How to come up with these characters and worlds? Research, imagination, and life experience! In researching a new character for Coraline, a model, Travis Knight watched YouTube videos of runway models. His biggest regret as he walked the halls of Comic-Con was seeing so many sequels, rehashes and remakes of 1980s TV shows and recycled concepts, and such a paucity of new thinking and bold ideas. This, Knight maintained, is the driving force for the future group of designers and illustrators.

Ultimately, making movies, TV shows, and even designing is inherently a collaborative process, one that the artist must accept if they want to derive the pinnacle of their imagination. John Stevenson ended the panel by emphasizing the three key concepts of successfully harnessing imagination: collaboration and sharing (all too lacking in the modern, fearful world of design and illustration), inspiring the people you’re working with as a leader, and thanking people and showing appreciation for those that have contributed to the betterment of a project.

Be inspired. Create. Let your imaginations soar!

Iron Man and Rocket Men: Is Stark Industries an Appropriate Model for Private-Industry Space Exploration?

The Iron Man versus Rocket Man panel (from left to right): moderator Jeff Berkwits, Mark Street, John Hunter, Chris Radcliff, Dave Rankin and Molly McCormick.

Iron Man was easily one of our favorite sci-fi movies from the past couple of years… and really, what was not to love? Geeky gadgets, innovative applications, and a true purview into the scientific discovery process (more on this later). More than a few mainstream publications have noted the strong ties the movie has to innovation (a couple of good ones can be found here and here). But a bigger tie-in can be argued between Tony Stark himself and the government contractors that constitute the vast majority of the space infrastructure, most notably NASA. So when we saw a Comic-Con panel devoted to exploring this very topic, we jumped at the chance to catch some of the action. Leading New Space entrepreneurs Mark Street (XCOR Aerospace) and John Hunter (Quicklaunch) joined Chris Radcliff (SD Space) and Dave Rankin (The Mars Society—San Diego chapter), with moderator Jeff Berkwits (former Amazing Stories editor) gathered to discuss what is right and wrong with NASA, and how the presence of small businesses can only help quicken the ‘space race.’

First and foremost, let’s define New Space. When we talk about Stark Industries, for example, we are talking about the most extreme example of the tech-based industry, representing the Lockheed Martins and Boeings (and to some degree NASAs) of the world—funded by the government, developing missiles, rockets, and even top-secret projects. New Space, and the small, innovative companies that are leading the forefront of its revolution, represent realistic opportunities for outer space exploration. They are Tony Stark working in his basement, on the cheap, on experiments that no one is seemingly interested in. In this case, it’s the idea of making space exploration available to ordinary people, not just military or astronauts.

The first half of the seminar consisted of a very heated argument about why more companies have not been able to take the lead in space exploration and where, exactly, NASA has stagnated so much. Mark Street pointed out the dichotomy between the entrenched business models of industry versus small companies, some of whom are already launching innovative space solutions and making a profit off of them. The established market, on the other hand, has a steady source of defined income, and no real incentive to decrease costs associated with space travel, which will take lots of investment and trial and error. Boeing isn’t building the next rocket, per se, but they are building airplanes thanks to already established rules and comfort zones. Smaller companies are ultimately able to address these problems thanks to risk-taking, failure, learning lessons, and innovating. John Hunter likened NASA to a modern March of Dimes, a philanthropic organization that was relevant back in the 60s, when it helped cure polio, but has since usurped 90% of donations for cost overhead and only 10% for actual causes that it supports. NASA’s budget of $18 billion consists of 70% “legacy” projects and 30% new innovation. What they need, he claimed, is new thinking, new risk taking. During the space war with Russia, “some of the dumbest guys I knew were looking for jobs at NASA,” Hunter maintains. “Because they knew they could study vortexes coming off of golf balls for the next twenty years.” Ouch.

To Dave Rankin, this was somewhat unfair. He invoked the sign at the X-Prize launch of Spaceship 1: “Spaceship 1: 1, NASA: 0”. To be sure, the X-Prize accomplishment was a worthy one, but NASA has been launching human beings to space stations for years, and they are still the only ones with a proven track record in the United States. Part of the problem is that because NASA is subject to political whim, it has no clear-cut focus with its identity (does it launch rockets, do basic research, innovate new technology, etc?). That lack of risk-taking at NASA is where you wind up with stagnation; it’s so big, with so many stake holders, that the sheer size lends itself to bureaucracy. The panel also brought up NASA’s two shining stars: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, and the Hubble Space Telescope. While JPL provides some of the world’s best robotics, such as the Mars Rover, the photography coming from outer space is simply amazing. “You can’t put a dollar value on some of what NASA does. It’s who we are as human beings, but you can’t make a profit off of it. As humans, we have to keep looking into what are the places of the universe and how did we come to be here,” said Chris Radcliffe. Quipped Rankin: “Let it not be said that government does not fund the arts.”

Take a look at a video of the first commercial launch into space:

Is Tony Stark a model for our current space industry?

The inspiration for New Space exploration—for sticking Tony Stark into a basement—is that we need some more inspiration from space exploration than we are getting from traditional launches, and that will involve sending more people into space. Chris Radcliffe gave an example of a young engineer working at Hewlett-Packard in its early days who had the brilliant idea that computers could be more than technical devices; they could be personalized, streamlined, and made accessible to everyone. Hewlett-Packard didn’t agree, so he formed his own company and made that computer. The man? Steve Wozniak. The company? Apple. The computer? The Apple I. Like many of the companies comprising the New Space revolution, the design process in Iron Man is from top down, but the fun part is in the testing—you never quite get the process right the first time around.

Overall, the panel was very optimistic about the future of space travel and exploration, but emphasized the importance of spin-offs and small companies as a means to accomplish that. The biggest hurdles they will face is lowering prices of going to space, and overcoming the bad publicity of any first deaths that may come from the danger factor. Foreign competitors will have an even bigger role in driving our exploration. China will keep us on our toes, as they are very good at taking an idea, copying it and productionizing it. What will be the role of these companies in space exploration? Chris Radcliffe is pretty sure that space tourism will succeed, but that it will only comprise about 5% of the market. But it will be enough to drive producing vehicles and rockets and spacesuits and supplemental research off of things that will make money. The NASA CRuSR project, for example, takes existing suborbital platforms and doing science (in this case access to space for a reasonable cost) that they otherwise could not do on their own.

One of the more lighthearted moments, amidst a lot of PhD degree flaunting both from the panel and several people who asked questions, was a gentleman who prefaced his question by saying “I work in a coffee shop.” The reply from the panel: “You’re my hero!” While he respected space exploration as an ideal, he wondered whether the enormous cost of availing space to the average man might be better spent on pragmatic problems that can be solved right here and right now. Unanimously, the panel agreed that expanding human presence in space can only improve standards of living for everyone. If we wait until all our earthly problems are solved, they maintained, we’ll never do anything else.

Dave Rankin gave perhaps the best reason why New Space could be the future of exploration. “Space exploration is a forum for humanity: when we find a new space, we try to fill it.” We think Tony Stark would agree.

State of the Geek Report

State of the Geek panel (from left to right): Moderator Jeff Bond, Steve Melching, Ashley E. Miller, Steve Kriozere, and Bill Hung and Todd Doogan.

From the more substantial programming of earlier in the day, we decided to devote the rest of Day 1 of Comic-Con to exploring our inner geek, with two panels looking at the best (and worst) of sci-fi in current entertainment. We started off with the “State of the Geek Report” panel, an exploration of the state of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in television and film today, and what the success of Avatar means for the future of movies. Steve Melching (The Clone Wars), Ashley E. Miller (Thor, X-Men: First Class), Steve Kriozere (Elvis Van Helsing), and Bill Hung and Todd Doogan of Digital Bits joined Geek Monthly editor and moderator Jeff Bond in discussing all things geeky in modern sci-fi.

Overall, the panel agreed that 2010 (largely carrying over from 2009) was one of the strongest years on record for sci-fi content. In some ways, we are at a peak of great sci-fi presence in pop culture and visual mediums, echoing 1982, considered by some to be the greatest year for sci-fi movies ever (Android, Blade Runner, ET, Forbidden World, The Wrath of Khan, Tron, etc). However, Bill Hunt maintained that Hollywood continues to try too hard to make every sci-fi film an “event,” and is getting excited for releases, but for all the wrong reasons. Not every film can be a blockbuster. In the past year, of the sci-fi films that got high marks from Jeff Bond, many were produced on extremely low budgets, including Moon, District 9, and the indie sci-fi film Yesterday Was a Lie. He also gave high marks to Star Trek and Avatar, which is where the panel took a big of a detour.

While Bond felt that the traditional, universal storytelling and high craft of Avatar made it a great success, Ashley Miller felt otherwise. Every dollar spent on the film was for aesthetics, and indeed, frame by frame, it is a beautiful film, including changing our expectations of what a 3D film should look like. However, as a complete work of art, it was shockingly lacking. To that, the panel brought up the point that what Cameron did with Avatar was harness 3D technology effectively, but the idea that every film now needs to be in 3D is ridiculous. Of recent releases, the brilliant Inception manages to be a challenging, engaging movie without the use of 3D technology.

Visionaries such as Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are given a lot of autonomy in their filmmaking—they are auteurists whose vision leads to the ultimate conclusion. Does sci-fi filmmaking lack for more Nolans and Camerons of the world? Autonomy, the panel decided, is earned. And not every director walking around is a Chris Nolan or James Cameron. Cameron made the original Terminator, which many feel is one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, on a shoestring budget. And Nolan used every penny of Inception’s mega-budget wisely. District 9 (which ScriptPhD.com loved) was shot in South Africa, with a native cast, on a very small budget. Moon, which we also liked, did all their special effects on model scale, with digital enhancements.

Ultimately, sci-fi is hurting most from studios turning everything into a “brand”: they are minimizing risk with constant remakes, but will ultimately have to swallow their tails and go towards original content at the risk of running out of material to remake. Sci-fi on television, which does not wallow in such an ignominious fate, is suffering from an embarrassment of riches. Highlights included Caprica, which invented an original, immersive futuristic world, and Stargate, which indulges in the essence of science fiction; to get the scope of wonder about other planets and life forms in the universe. (We will be joining cast and crew from both of these shows on Day 2 of Comic-Con!)

Abusing the Sci of Sci-Fi

The Abusing the Sci of Sci-Fi panel (from left to right): Moderator Phil Plait, Jaime Paglia, Kevin Grazier, Zack Stentz, and Sean Carroll.

From a discussion of the best of sci-fi, we went to what always ends up being one of our favorite Comic-Con panels, Discovery Magazine and Science and Entertainment Exchange’s “Science of Science Fiction.” Hosted by the hilarious, delightful and brilliant physicist Phil Plait (of the Bad Astronomoy blog), the panel was an equal mix of writers and scientists: Eureka creator/head writer Jaime Paglia, Battlestar Galactica and Eureka science advisor/physicist Kevin Grazier, Fringe writer Zack Stentz, and physicist/author Sean M. Carroll.

In perhaps one of the smartest ways we’ve seen yet at Comic-Con, the panel collectively provided examples of “good” and “bad” science on television and in film through clips. We’ll provide you with some of the highlights. Plait started the procession by admitting that he himself became interested in astronomy by watching Star Trek and Space:1999, and maintains that there is a lot of inspiring science in television and film, despite the bad. That said, his “worst” clip was from Armageddon, a scene Plait maintains is possibly the worst science film clip ever—Bruce Willis is supposedly on an asteroid and yet it’s raining! “Jerry Bruckheimer, you’re not in the audience are you?” He asked. “Armageddon. Worrrrrrrrrrst movie ever made!”

Paglia, bravely, picked scenes from Eureka as both his “good” and “bad” clips. The bad was a terrible attempt at an episode where nanoids have started to replicate biological organisms, while the good was an episode where Eureka made its own version of the Hadron supercollider. Quipped Stentz: “I have lived in Eureka in Northern California. Let me telll you…not filled with geniuses!”

Phil Plait REALLY dislikes the science in Armageddon.

Grazier, agreeing with Plait that Armageddon is the worst science film ever made, maintains that it has lessons of both good and bad science. In a scene showing the hypothetical impact of the impending asteroid (complete with overdramatic voiceover: “It has happened before, it will happen again!”), the shock wave of the impact is shown traveling around the Earth, which would not happen, while secondary impacts, which would happen, are omitted. The film was overly dramatic where it didn’t need to be, and yet missed out on an opportunity to show really scary science that was accurate. “It’s the only film that ever lost me in the first 30 seconds,” said Grazier. That said, the scenes showing post-asteroid tsunamis and other ramifications are so perfect, they could be a computer simulation for an asteroid impact on Earth.

Stentz, in a bit of writer’s defense, pointed out a bad scene from Fringe where the science was purposely abused in the service of an otherwise good episode. He wanted to illustrate that sometimes, you have to break the rules in order to tell the story you want to tell. Here, the writers wrote a story line where Walter’s hippocampus was “stolen” to remove his memory. To retrieve it, the team suggests implanting the memories (via the brain pieces) in the brain of someone who could interpret them. “I’m not a neurologist, but I know enough about memory to know that it doesn’t work that way. We knew that when we wrote it. We wanted the drama of a theft from someone’s brain, and how do you use them. That’s why you heard the line, ‘In theory, you shouldn’t be able to do that.’”

Carroll, ever the ambitious physicist, provided a theory, as opposed to just clips, against the philosophical backdrop of issues raised by the demands of narrative versus scientific accuracy. Take a look at the following Big Bang Theory clip of Sheldon explaining Superman and gravity:

This is the right way to think about science versus storytelling. A lot of writers are afraid of scientists because, frankly, we’re ANNOYING. We act as copy editors: “You can’t do this. You can’t do that.” But scientists are also good at telling you the consequences of existing laws, even if it ruins the romance of Superman. Science can make a story better by following this formula for conflict. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have the mysterious “Red Matter” from this past year’s Star Trek remake. No one knew what the stuff was, how it worked, just that it was a ball, it was bad, and you had to use a hypodermic needle to handle it. It’s far more interesting if you know the rules, can explain the science, and integrate that smartly into the storyline.

A lot of times, people think science fiction means anything can happen at any time, and that’s actually science magic. The rules don’t have to be scientific rules, but good drama comes out of limitations (scientific or otherwise), characters not being able to do something and coming up with another solution for it. As a working writer in TV/film, you want people wanting clarity on one side, but on the other had, you don’t want people to feel stupid and you can’t bore them. You can introduce science and technology in a way that heightens the excitement rather than taking them back to science class. ER used a writing trick to make this happen: one line of exposition, another line of exposition (medical jargon), then an emotional line telling you what happens. Ellen Page of the recent move Inception served this purpose as the audience member—what questions would they ask of the characters in the movie. To this degree, Carroll awarded Iron Man the award for best “science” movie of recent times, not for any specific science content, but because building the suit shows the true scientific method, and that’s how it’s really done in the lab!

Our intrepid correspondent Bryy Miller also went to two very exciting panels that covered a bit more mainstream pop culture. Here is what he had to report:

Tripwire Magazine

The Tripwire Magazine panel (from left to right): Joel Meadows, Andy Grossberg, Jeff Carlisle, and Rich Johnston

I had a theater class in high school, and we used to say that it was the most “un-schooly” class ever. It existed within the confines of the high school, but did not feel as constricting or regulated. Sitting in with the guys from Tripwire Magazine, a joint UK-American geek culture print, evoked the same feeling. It understood that the Con existed, but the speakers (Editor-in-Chief Joel Meadows, U.S. Editor Andy Grossberg, and Staff Writer Jeff Carlisle, and guest speaker Rich Johnston [editor of Bleeding Cool News]) were so aloof and full of intelligent confidence that everything seemed to fade away. They made the audience feel like they were a part of Tripwire – Joel even mocked the obscurity of their little magazine being at Comic-Con by proclaiming “welcome to the Tron panel, everyone!”

Their little magazine, starting as nothing more than fan scribblings in 1992, slowly gained notoriety over the years until they halted for a bit in 2003 due to their current publisher financially screwing them over. They got back on the horse in 2007, and since then, have gone on to catch things in geek culture such as the coveted first set visit for the superhero film, Kick-Ass. This proved to come back to teach them a further lesson in industry magazine politics, as the article was released a full year before it was assumed that it would. Tripwire covers everything in geek culture except music and gaming, and now they have set their eyes on new media such as webcomics and webserials.

“Anyone can get in, but how do you get people’s attention?” Grossberg mused, before giving Felicia Day’s The Guild as an example. A highly successful webseries about gaming, The Guild has a frothing following that has attained such levels due to catering to an audience that already surfs the web daily, and that would most likely consist of gamers. But Grossberg has another theory, and it is much more pernicious in nature as well as much harder to digest. “You know what they expect [newspaper] editors to do?” Grossberg asks Meadows, talking about the changing roles of businessmen in the digital age. The Editor-in-Chief simply replies: “Everything”. Turning to us, Andy Grossgberg comes to the summary of the thought that he started with The Guild, and that is that old media is dying because nobody has an attention span. He then goes on to lay out all of the various people involved in the making of a print comic versus the one or ones involved in making a webcomic. Carlisle then speaks up with his input on if you want to make money as a comic creator in the age of new media, “do a webcomic … everything will be the same thing [as far as everything being digital].”

This all went over fairly well until they asked to see a show of hands concerning who knew what they were talking about. Apparently, I was the only hand that shot up. It seems that the digital divide is still there, which scared me, considering we just spent an hour talking about how fast the winds of change are blowing. The panel ended with a heated discussion over which comic adaptation is the most “meta” because after all, this is Comic-Con.

EW Visionaries: J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon

EW Magazine's Jeff "Doc" Jensen chats with J.J. Abrams (left) and Joss Whedon (right).

Both J.J. Abrams (Alias, co-creator of Lost, What About Brian?, Cloverfield) and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly) are rock stars in the world of television genre writing. So it would go without saying that their combined might upon one singular panel would cause another big bang, or the birth of a unicorn, or at least get a boatload of fans churned up to Twilight-levels of excitement. That was the feeling in the enormous venue Hall H: that the world would halt for a brief hour while these two decided how to continue shaping it. Well, unfortunately, no unicorns were birthed. Fortunately, it was still a good time. Instead of the melding of ideas and thoughts, it was more of a dinner between two famous film people that enjoyed answering questions specifically asked of or about them. They would occasionally reference that the other dinner guest was eating at the sane table, but other than that, it could have been a Joss Whedon panel followed by a J.J. Abrams panel.

The moderator opened it up with a hum-dinger, asking Whedon if he was indeed officially announcing that he would be directing Marvel’s superhero team flick, The Avengers. At first, Whedon said that there was no official word yet, but then he followed that by saying the official word. This, needless to say, got a gigantic response from the unfathomably-huge, wide, and deep crowd. Abrams had nothing new, but gave a movie story none-the-less: when he was a small child, one of the crew members from The Exorcist mailed him an actual tongue from the movie. It was in no way related to what Whedon had just announced, nor was it a movie announcement, but it somehow felt like it was contributing to the larger narration of the panel. Abrams was then asked about his infamous draft of Superman Returns, in which Krypton does not explode and Lex Luthor is an alien. “It was not well received” Abrams sheepishly said, referencing the fan-storm that had swept the internet mere hours after it was put online. Abrams followed that up with talking about how he managed to team up with Steven Spielberg for Super 8, his mysterious monster move that, even though a teaser has been released, is not yet filming. “I was told that Steven Spielberg made movies when he was my age,” Abrams began “so they asked me and my friend to clean up some of his old movies…. They have in-house studios for that sort of thing, and they paid us $300, and I knew why they did not do that”. He added that the film would not be in 3D.

Whedon stated that he was fine with 3D, as long as it was done well. He was also fine with 3D as long as it was not in his upcoming horror movie, Cabin in the Woods – which it is. “I love it, it puts you in the space… [but] the movie has to work in 2D” he said. Abrams revealed that he was still on the fence regarding the issue, “everything gets dim… it seems less.”

Before a rather banal question and answer session filled with every Whedon and Abrams fanboy imaginable, Whedon took the time to talk about Dr. Horrible 2, the much talked about sequel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. When discussing the project, which would continue the story set forth in his webseries created during the Writer’s Strike (and has since become the second Whedon-written musical to become a staple of Comic-Con). “I missed my window,” Whedon said, on the topic of digital media “I was waiting for people to show up to the party.”

Even though the Q&A session was quite lame, and I do not like Abrams, something spectacular happened at the very end of the panel. A young lady asked if criticism is ever okay for writers, since her brother recently asked for some and then shut himself off from her when he received it. This clearly made Abrams livid, as he asked for the man’s phone number. His intentions were clear. That’s when I finally found something I liked about Abrams. I connected with him as a writer and as a human being. In the big picture, that’s what these panels are for. Not to showcase new projects or to grandstand, but to connect.

From the Press Room: DEXTER

ScriptPhD.com was extremely fortunate to join producers and stars of SHOWTIME hit Dexter on their way to their Comic-Con panel. Here’s some dirt that we picked up! (We promise to catch up with Michael C. Hall, who was literally rushed out before our very eyes, back in Los Angeles in a separate post devoted entirely to Dexter.)

Dexter star James Remar and producer Many Coto dish about Season 5.

The production staff at Dexter is getting a shake-up. This year, they’ve added several new producers, including Tony Goldwin (pictured), who visited Comic-Con along with the old guard to give us some insight into things we can expect from the show this season. Part of the strategy of the “new energy” is a shake-up of the show itself. The producers wanted to avoid the “one season, one adversary” formula and recalibrate the show’s content while delivering the same pleasing product to the audience. So expect a lot of differences this year with what Dexter deals with and whom he battles with (if at all).

Unlike a lot of other shows adopting the popular meme of “skipping time” for resolution, Dexter will pick up right where we left off to get all the blowback over Rita’s death. And what a lot of blowback there is! The newest change, producers tell us, is that Dexter is feeling a new emotion for the first time… guilt. It’s something he’s never felt before and quite new for him. Much of this is because he was so hopeful as the season ended that things might actually be heading towards a positive change, that he might get rid of the dark passenger, he was looking forward to a honeymoon with Rita, only to come home and find her dead and his son in a pool of blood. Dealing with that will be very difficult for him, but the producers couldn’t tease us with more. On top of all of this, people are starting to figure his tendencies out, which adds yet another layer of complexity.

ScriptPhD.com asked about the forensics of the show and how they’re keeping it fresh. Said Producer Sara Colleton: “Well, we have an expert who works with us, and they’re the tech person. You just keep up to date with what is used by police. What we don’t do is CSI-style, flashy, make-believe forensics. I don’t know how to go in your nose and down your throat and find a bullet and say “Here it is!” We really try to play by the rules in terms of how long a DNA test takes, what the limitations of top forensics are. We want those things to be real, because the conceit of the show is so unreal, that we want everything else to feel real.”

Dexter star Jennifer Carpenter dishes about Season 5.

Jennifer Carpenter (Deb Morgan) was very excited about Season 5′s changes, though she admitted that for the first time, she really didn’t know what was going to happen. In the beginning of the season, Deb hopes that she and Dexter have a certain kinship, because they’ve both experienced loss, but that isn’t quite what happens. She correctly noted something I’ve noticed a lot about Deb, which is that she does a lot of talking at Dexter, and not with Dexter, which leads to his typical one-word answers. Jennifer noted that a lot of times, women in particular are guilty of “filling in the blanks” with the stories we want to hear (guilty as charged!), which affects Deb’s relationship with Dexter. She felt a little pressure of Comic-Con, with such a concentration of die-hard fans that you have to please, but pointed out that this is also the great thing about Dexter; they hate you one week and love you the next. Jennifer also hinted at growing suspicion on Deb’s part about Dexter, who experiences his grief a lot differently than her, but that the sister part of her refuses to piece it together. We asked Jennifer about the growing stripping away of Deb’s vulnerability, and how much more of that we’ll see in the upcoming season, and frankly, what she thought of it as character growth. Here’s what she had to say:

“I have to say that last year, Keith Carradine (Lundy), his line “You’re confused, and now you’re not. We’ll figure it out together.” was the first time on the show that I’ve heard someone say (to Deb) I’m going to help you. And then immediately he’s dead. That one line helped me play [the character] for seven episodes. I think about it now and I could cry my eyes out. This year, I feel like it’s about standing up straight, choosing your words, how you enter a room, she’s not editing herself, but she’s calculating. She’s working like a cop. And a little less of a potty mouth.” But not too much, she promised us!

Finally, we are thrilled to publish an interview that we have teased you about long enough. As we await the yearly MythBusters panel, always a hit here in San Diego, we had the opportunity to get some pre-Comic-Con scoop from one of our favorite MythBusters about her new hosting adventure on the Science Channel. Check it out:

Interview with MythBusters’s Kari Byron

ScriptPhD.com: Head Rush will primarily be aimed at kid-enthusiastic presentations of science. How did your interest in hosting and putting this show come together?

Kari Byron: This has been a passion project that Debbie Myers [general manager of The Science Channel], The Science Channel and I have been talking about for a while. There is a disconnect at about the age of 12 where girls stop being interested in science. And we just wanted to figure out a way to get them, and obviously all kids around that age, interested in science in a way that they could be passionate about it as well. We figured if we could create a show that was cool, not talking down to them, we could keep that interest alive.

SPhD: You have a very non-traditional science background as a sculptor and painter. How important is it to you to convey that a layperson can have a healthy curiosity and passion about science?

KB: Well I obviously came to science a little later in life, and I think that’s why I have the same excitement that you’d have when you were a kid for it. I think having no science background makes it more accessible in the way that you don’t have to be a scientist to enjoy the science.

SPhD: This programs is affiliated with President Obama’s STEM initiative. You and I chatted a bit about girl power at the Discovery Channel 25th Anniversary party. What kind of responses do you get from girls that are fans of your work on MythBusters?

KB: It’s really cool! I talk to a lot of moms and teachers as well, and I get excited [that they use], I hate to use the word role model because I feel like I don’t deserve it, but it’s nice that they have a really positive response. They like seeing someone that’s more like them.

SPhD: What small sneak peek can you give us to tease fans during Comic-Con to get them super excited about watching the show?

KB: I’m actually so interested in the material that we’re doing, that I’m just amazed at the stories. We do a bunch of experiments that give a hands-on approach to science. [Head Rush] is so different from MythBusters that I can’t even compare it. We will be using clips from all the Discovery brand shows, and a lot of MythBusters, of course, but the Head Rush segment of it is its own beast. I don’t know who or what I can reveal!

There you have it folks! Kari is so excited about her new show, she is hard pressed to reveal any secrets to spoil it. We thank her and Discovery Channel for granting ScriptPhD.com a sneak preview. Head Rush will air on The Science Channel beginning August 23, Monday-Friday 4-5 ET/PT, and Saturdays, 7-9 AM ET/PT.

Comic-Con 2010 Costume of the Day: ….and the unanimous winner is…. Calendar Man! We gave points for creativity.

Calendar Man from the front.....

....and from the back!

For a complete album of pictures from Comic-Con (and many of the costumes that didn’t quite make the running for Costume of the Day, take a look at our our Facebook fan page (and become a fan!).

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ScriptPhD.com is extraordinarily proud to present our first ever Science Week! Collaborating with the talented writers over at CC2K: The Nexus of Pop Culture and Fandom, we have worked hard to bring you a week’s worth of interviews, reviews, discussion, sci-fi and even science policy. We kick things of in style with a conversation with Professor Malcolm MacIver, a robotics engineer and science consultant on the SyFy Channel hit Caprica. While we have had a number of posts covering Caprica, including a recent interview with executive producer Jane Espenson, to date, no site has interviewed the man that gives her writing team the information they need to bring artificial Cylon intelligence to life. For our exclusive interview, and Dr. MacIver’s thoughts on Cylons, smart robotics, and the challenges of future engineering, please click “continue reading.”

Questions for Professor Malcolm MacIver

Professor Malcolm MacIver. Image courtesy of Northwestern University.

ScriptPhD.com: Your first Hollywood science experience involved consulting for a sequel of the 1980s cult classic Tron. What was it like to dive in from the Northwestern School of Engineering onto a

set and work with screenwriters? What were some of your first impressions?

Malcolm MacIver: It was fascinating to learn a bit about how these huge expensive projects are structured. One specific thing I wanted to know more about was the role of writers in movies versus in TV. I had been told by friends in the industry that writers are typically less prominent players in movies than in top TV shows, were they can have considerable power. Consistent with this, we (the scientists who met with the Tron folks) were not introduced to the writers, who I believe were in the room taking notes, while we were introduced to all the other major players (director, producer, etc). I was also very curious to see how the group of scientists that I was a part of would interact with the movie makers. The culture gap is obviously huge, big enough for massive misunderstandings to blossom during superficially neutral discussions. During our meeting, our approach to the folks involved with the movie varied

from inspired to less admirable attitudes. The less admirable attitudes seemed to arise from the mismatch between the importance scientists can place on their own endeavors, relative to their endeavor’s importance to story telling.

An anecdote I like along those lines is about how the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson complained to James Cameron that when Kate Winslet looked up from the deck of the Titanic, the stars in the sky were in the wrong position. I liked Cameron’s response, which was “Last I checked the film’s made a billion dollars.” People love the story, not the positions of the stars above the Titanic. We all tend to overemphasize the importance of the thing we are closest to, and it’s a problem that scientists need to be especially attuned to in these contexts.

SPhD: You are now a technical script consultant for Caprica, the television prequel to Battlestar Galactica, providing insight into things like artificial intelligence, robotics and neuroscience. To date, what has been one of your biggest contributions to a final written episode that otherwise wouldn’t have made it in to the storyline?

MM: One of the themes of my research is understanding the ways in which intelligence is not just all about what’s above your shoulders. Nervous systems evolved with the bodies they control—the interaction is extremely sophisticated, and stubbornly resists our attempts to understand it through basic science research or emulation in robotics. Representative of this fact is that we now have a computer that can beat the world chess champion—a paragon of an “above the shoulder” activity—while we are far from being able to robotically emulate the agility of a cockroach.

One of the things we’ve learned about the cleverness that resides outside the cranium is that things like the spinal cord are incredibly sophisticated “brains” operating sometimes without much input from upstairs. Through some old experiments that are better not gone into, scientists showed that animals can walk with little brain beyond the parts that regulate circulation and breathing and their spinal cord. This is because the spinal cord can do most of what we need for basic locomotion without any input. The point is that control of the body is distributed—it doesn’t just live in the brain. The lesson hasn’t been lost on robotics folks; for example, Rodney Brooks popularized an approach called “subsumption architecture” based on this idea. So – back to Caprica: For episode 2, “Rebirth,” the show needed some explanation for why the metacognitive processor was only working in one robot. The real reason, as we know, is that only one had Zoe in it; but the roboticists were being pressed by Daniel Graystone as to why it wasn’t working in others. The idea that I gave them, which they used, was that it was because this particular metacognitive processor had distributed its control to peripheral subunits. Because of this, it had become tied to one particular robot. It’s an idea straight out of contemporary neuroscience and efforts to emulate this in robotics.

A prototype for the first Cylon, as seen on the television program Caprica. ©NBC Universal, all rights reserved.

SPhD: To me, one of the most fascinating directions of the show is the idea that the first Cylon prototype was born of blood, in this case Zoe Graystone, and because of that, carries sentient emotions and thoughts. What is the fine line between a very smart, capable robot and an actual being?

MM: To vastly oversimplify things, you can imagine a gradation in “being” from a rock to a fully sentient self-aware entity. Some of the differentiators between the rock and you include things like the impact of others on how you think about yourself. For example, categorizing a rock as a particular kind of rock has no effect on the constitution of the rock. This isn’t so for self-aware creatures: once a person is labeled a child abuser, it actually affects the constitution of the person so labeled. People treat child abusers differently from non-child abusers. People who are categorized in this way suddenly see themselves differently; and those who were victims do so as well. The philosopher Ian Hacking, who I studied with during my Masters in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, called this the difference between “Human Kinds” and “Natural Kinds.” Another differentiator is that, for what you refer to as an “actual being,” there is a sense of self-interest in continued survival. Because of this, such a being is susceptible to being harmed, and may also therefore have what an ethicist would call “moral worthiness.” Moral worthiness in turn imposes certain obligations in regard to ethical treatment. For example, returning to the rock, we wouldn’t say we harm a rock when we explode it with dynamite, and we wouldn’t accuse the person who did the blowing up of unethical behavior (certain stripes of environmentalism would differ on this point). Unlike a rock, all animals exhibit an interest in self-preservation.

A very smart and capable robot can be imagined which is not affected by how it is categorized by others, and does not have an interest in self-preservation. So, it would fall short of at least those criteria for full-on “being.” But, there’s a lot more that can be said here, of course.

SPhD: What aspect of the Cylon machine and their story, which is now at the heart of Caprica, do you find the most captivating, either as a viewer or a robotics engineer?

MM: The scenario of our inventions eventually becoming so complex that they begin to have an interest in self preservation, and thus can be harmed (and so may start to be candidates for ethical treatment), is one I’ve thought a lot about in the past. It’s a key theme of the show, too. That’s one aspect that fascinates me about the show. The other is the play between the different kinds of being that Zoe has—from avatar-in-a-robot, to avatar-in-virtual reality, to “really real.” It’s a fun fugue on the varieties of being that raises good questions about the nature of existence and mortality, among others.

SPhD: In your latest post for the Science in Society blog, you explore the theoretical question of whether the United States (or any country, for that matter) could develop a Cylon type of war machine. Do you feel there is a distinct possibility the military might ever pursue this option and how might it impact warfare strategy?

MM: I’m going to explore that in my next few posts—and I’m still formulating my thoughts. In their initial development, a more realistic metaphor for how such robot warriors will work with us is something like a dumbed-down well-trained animal, willing to follow commands but without much of a sense of what to do if something gets in the way, and little recourse to things like flexibly generating new behaviors like a real animal does. But I can’t foresee any significant barriers to the development of autonomous robots with more of the attributes of a fuller kind of being I mentioned to above. I feel the more relevant question is whether this is on the order of 10 years away, or a hundred. Once it happens, the question will then be whether the global community recognizes military applications of this technology as a potential threat in need of careful control, like nuclear arms, or not. That’s all for now – for more you’ll have to visit my blog!

An SR4 smart robot from https://www.SmartRobots.com, currently in use by engineers, designers, developers, project managers, entrepreneurs, students, and businesses. It comes equipped with Linux, wireless web connectivity, and expandability, and costs about $6,400.

SPhD: During last year’s World Science Festival, we covered a really interesting panel called Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon, which included a cross-section of engineers, ethicists and Battlestar actors discussing artificial intelligence, robotics, and the capabilities of modern engineering, which in some cases are very impressive indeed. In your opinion, what is one of the most significant or promising advance in robotics of the last few years?

MM: The maturing of what is sometimes called “probabilistic robotics.” This approach is what allowed the autonomous car Stanley to win the DARPA Grand Challenge, the challenge to have a vehicle drive itself with no human involvement over a challenging course in the desert. The basic idea is that while traditional robotics was concerned with making precise motions based on very well characterized inputs, what we need for robots to work in the real world is ways to handle the massive array of noisy and uncertain signals that are typically available to guide behavior. There are approaches from probability and statistics for doing this well. These approaches are integral to making robots have greater sensory intelligence. My own laboratory has developed a new kind of sensory robot using this approach, and it works very well.

SPhD: I have previously argued that television and film do more for promoting science by incorporating small, accurate pieces into an overarching story rather than basing an entire story on an unsustainable or far-reaching scientific concept. Thoughts?

MM: TV and film, when it is successful, is about telling a captivating story. The elements of good story telling (emotional connection to the characters, humor, insight into what it is to be human) have little in common with the elements of a good scientific concept (testability, explanatory power, coherence with the rest of what we know). So, yes I’d agree. Trying to do more than incorporate small bits is going to lead to your audience feeling like they are getting a lecture rather having a story shared with them, and no story teller should do that. Documentaries are an interesting hybrid, though—you need a good story, and if it’s about science, a good bit will be on the concepts. How to make that exciting and not spin out into yawn-provoking pedantry is quite the trick.

Malcolm MacIver, PhD, is a professor at Norwestern University with joint appointments in the Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering departments, and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology. He received a B.Sc. and MA at the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2001.

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