Why did they only do half a season? If they were going to end it they either leave a cliffhanger or rap everything up but do it with a full season. I feel cheated I will not be buying the blu-rays after all.
shareWe were lucky to have gotten the final six. According to interviews with the cast and crew, they were originally planning on leaving us with the season four cliffhanger and then cancel the show completely.
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We were lucky we got 6. There's an interview with just three actors, the ones that played Pete, Artie, and Abigail where they explained about it. Basically they said that this show was the most expensive on Syfy to make including the newer ones and that a guy in charge(I don't remember his name) but I think the actor talking was saying how he really worked to find out how much money they had and how many episodes they could do and the number they came up with was 6. It is actually a nice number and they did all they could do in those episodes. It's why they kept saying it felt like more than 6 episodes. If they had a full season they probably would have had a villain that lasted more than a couple of episodes and had Claudia and Steve be in the telenovela or have Pete more involved with Claudia's sister storyline. It was a short season yes but it could have never been and Myka's fate would have been left up to fan fiction stories.
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Hey I'm quoting the guy that played Artie and I'm pretty sure some examples he gave were Eureka and Defiance. I guess those Warehouse 13 effects were costly. I remember reading that on Buffy the Vampire Slayer that it costs five thousand dollars to dust a vampire and they did that a lot so I guess computer stuff costs way more than what it looks like.
shareYeah, computer effects do cost a lot of money.
Rendering the effects themselves is pretty easy to do. Just feed it into the machine and let it chug away. However, where the expense comes in is with time.
See, special effects companies have what are known as render farms, which are basically banks of computers (sometimes numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands) that take on specific portions of an effect and render it, and all the portions are compiled together upon completion.
If you were to take a film and add rendered special effects, it would take one computer anywhere from a day to a week to properly render a one minute clip (depending on hardware). However, splitting out the task amongs several computers can cut down the time to two to four hours. Perhaps less, depending on the hardware used.
However, that speed does have a tradeoff: Power and Cooling.
A render farm must be constantly temperature controlled (usually around 50 degrees) so the heat buildup doesn't fry components. That takes a lot of power, as well as the power required to keep those machines running 24/7.
That takes a lot of money.
Excellent explanation, thank you. It always amazes me when people forget how bloody expensive effects are but then I'm forgetting that they don't understand what's involved in producing them.
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The ratings tanked after the torture episode in S3 and never came back. In fact they were slowly getting worse.
shareComputer graphics are expensive but I suspect that what might really be hitting the budget is all the location filming. I understand that's really expensive and they seem to be somewhere new every week.
shareSo that means that Syfy is losing money with each episode? That's what they seem to be saying. If they were making money on episodes, then they would want to produce more.
Or is all of this based on "Hollywood accounting," where a blockbuster movie can end up losing money somehow. Maybe the same sham accounting is used for TV shows too.
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SyFy considerate of it's viewers? Seriously?
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It seems that SyFy will cancel older shows (usually around 4-5 seasons) when they premiere newer shows. I am sure it all has to do with budgets, only bad thing is they cancel really good shows that have been on to gamble on a new series that may or may not be worth a crap.
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Yeah, they try.
Still glad they ended eureka in an acceptable way.
But seriously, 6 episode for W13.
I heard of the cancellation after the last one, and only because I was like what the *beep*, this cannot be the end, it was so rushed.
Before the last ep I wasn't even suspecting of the end of the show.
If I was really a fan of this show, I would be upset.
So they did a better job for eureka.
while TV shows do not always suffer this, when it comes to hollywood accounting its quite safe to assume that real production costs are half that of reported production costs and actual money they spend are above that of reported production costs. basically thanks to ridiculously overcomplicated laws hollywood movies is great for laundering money and they can do it in hundreds of millions per movie. and even make profit on top of that.
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Applied Science? All science is applied. Eventually.
I wouldn't buy the blu-rays, anyway. My preferred format is DVD for many reasons.
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