World building in science fiction is a big deal. People study for years to learn how to do it well. It’s the key to capturing your audience and creating a stage where you can present your story with some semblance of continuity and believability. It all has to work and work together to transport the audience to a completely different place. There’s no doubt that you can do some crazy things, and there are many books on the shelf that fly way off the handle with worlds that will melt your brain, but yet even those present their “universe” in such a way that the reader can grasp the concepts and be immersed in the story.

World building in books is a different animal than doing the same in a television series. It’s all about cost. Text on a page is considerably less expensive compared to complex set builds, sophisticated computer graphics, and whatever other costumes and props are required. Although the techniques from the writer’s perspective may be the same, the producer of the TV series has to look at the bottom line. Flying cars are expensive. Towering spires of office buildings reaching into the clouds, capped by snow, don’t come cheap. Holographic jumpsuits that allow one to download new outfits on the fly sound very cool, but again cost money. I think you get my point.

Computer graphics can only do so much. I honestly believe that over the last ten years we have become too dependent on CGI, which is why I think Moon was so refreshing–Director Duncan Jones went old-school and used models. Physical sets with CGI in the far background as extensions work well, but often when characters are presented overtop a complete CGI set it can’t help to look like a cartoon… at least some of the time. So often today actors show up and walk onto a sound stage that’s completely painted from top to bottom in electric lime green. The lack of practicals makes acting a challenge, and the resultant extra time for the director to direct, well… that costs money, too. Directing on a green screen is hard, and the lighting has to be just right or all the keying before the CGI is inserted will fall flat.

But remember that good CGI costs money, and in some cases can cost just as much as a set build, depending on what needs to be done. It isn’t a silver bullet, but because it has become easier to do on desktop machines, you see a lot more of it.

Add this all up and you can see the monumental task that the writers and producers of SyFy’s Caprica were up against. Cable television shows do not have the same number of viewers as broadcast networks, and edgy dramas even less so. Keeping costs down is the key to success, and the producers of Caprica have done an amazing job taking these issues into account when building the world of the Graystones and the Adamas.

Caprica is filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia. Back in the 90s many cable shows and sci-fi series escaped across the border for the Canadian incentives and favorable exchange rate. There’s been a history of budget-oriented world building from many series produced in the area. Stargate SG-1 was a great example. They built into the canon the fact that the Goa’uld kept most other human settlements primitive, so they could set up a bunch of tents in the BC woods, and voila, a whole new planet. They also used a lot of physical sets (reusing components as needed) with CGI extensions, and it worked. Travels to more advance planets like the Tollan could be accomplished at a college or modern office complex. It kept the costs down, but was done so well it sold the series for over a ten year run.

Caprica is following suit with using what the area has at its disposal. One of the greatest advantages they have is the fact that modern day Vancouver looks like a futuristic city with it’s densely packed skyline of recently built towers. On tight shots not much needs to be done to sell the look of an advanced human society. Go wide and it’s just as simple to drop in some CGI that’s far enough back not to look cheesy. It’s seamless and it works extremely well because Caprica, in a way, is supposed to follow the lines of development on Earth. At the end of the day the people of the twelve colonies are humans, and it’s only logical that a human society would follow a similar developmental path. I know that can be debated, but for the purposes of the Caprica world build it’s extremely effective.

Vehicles, in my opinion, are the most problematic. The producers of Caprica handle this problem by dropping in some odd-looking European models from decades past. Since the story is set over fifty years prior to Battlestar Galactica, it does the trick in a very cool and efficient way. It saves them from having to construct or modify vehicles–something again that is very costly.

I also like how they have taken cues from The Godfather and applied a lot of familiar images when creating the Tauron underworld. Chunky suits, dark apartments, and social clubs appear familiar and grounded, but twisted just enough to be believable as from another world.

I could go on about the cool old telephones, or how Lacy’s bungalow works against the modern city, or any of the other million little familiar things presented just askew to achieve a tour-de-force in science fiction world building on TV, but I do have to do other things today. In closing, let me say that Caprica should be applauded and studied by other genre producers with regard to cost effective techniques that look anything but. Two episodes and a movie in, I can honestly say that they’ve hooked me, and I look forward to the ride.