Science Fiction On Television - Science Fiction Television Production Process and Methods

Science Fiction Television Production Process and Methods

The need to portray imaginary settings or characters with properties and abilities beyond the reach of current reality obliges producers to make extensive use of specialized techniques of television production.

Through most of the 20th century, many of these techniques were expensive and involved a small number of dedicated craft practitioners, while the reusability of props, models, effects, or animation techniques made it easier to keep using them. The combination of high initial cost and lower maintenance cost pushed producers into building these techniques into the basic concept of a series, influencing all the artistic choices. By the late 1990s, improved technology and more training and cross-training within the industry made all of these techniques easier to use, so that directors of individual episodes could make decisions to use one or more methods, so such artistic choices no longer needed to be baked into the series concept.

Read more about this topic:  Science Fiction On Television

Famous quotes containing the words science, fiction, television, production, process and/or methods:

    “There are some things in science which should be brought to light. There are others, doctor, which should be left alone.”
    —Griffin Jay, Maxwell Shane (1905–1983)

    “Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”
    —J.G. (James Graham)

    “Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.”
    —Marc Fumaroli (b. 1932)

    “Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
    —Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    “I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war.”
    —Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    “I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.”
    —William Howard Taft (1857–1930)