In 1993, I was working on the pilot to a new science fiction TV series, which was getting ready to shoot in Santa Clarita Studios, north of the San Fernando Valley, where they were building sets for the interiors of a giant space station, Babylon 5. My boss, VFX supervisor Ron Thornton, was producing the visual effects using desktop computers to create digital

spaceships and environments. It was quite a breakthrough, and went on to win an Emmy.

In the run up to shooting, we shared studio space with John Criswell and Greg Aronowitz, who were creating all the creatures and makeup effects using a wild cornucopia of puppets of prosthetics. So it was a lively environment. Part way into prep, the producers turned to Ron and asked him to come up with some imagery to be used as ‘B-roll’ footage, to be projected live into monitors on set, suggesting busy life as usual on the Casablanca-style space station.

Various people came up with ideas for space station TV commercials and other funny gags, but the trick was to use available resources, without adding too much extra burden on the already chaotic production schedule.

My idea was to do a local news report, beamed from the surface of the planet orbited by the B5 space station. We poked fun at a rival show in the works at Paramount, a Star Trek spin-off -- Deep Space Nine -- also set on a space

station. I sketched out storyboards one night. Ron thought it was funny, he put a Mini-DV camera in my hands, and John and Greg provided a couple of aliens.

We shot off down the freeway, with Greg in alien garb, headed East to Vasquez Rocks, the famous location for many of Star Trek’s alien battles, and shot our little skit, reporting ‘live’ from Cestus III, where a Federation pilot (me, in my own uniform) had crash-landed on B5 territory. We ended up shooting our final shots as the sun was setting, illuminated by somebody’s car headlamps, but we completed the shoot, and everyone was happy.

Ron did not complete our plan of inserting the crashed spaceship, and for obvious copyright reasons ‘Captain Buck Starlight’ did not appear on air, but a short clip of Greg’s alien -- gesticulating wildly and speaking to the fish-head reporter

amid beautiful prehistoric sandstone rocks -- did appear on an array of TV monitors when the pilot aired.

A few years later, I added some crude home-made graphics, inserted a spaceship, dubbed in alien voices, and uploaded the video anonymously to YouTube. Greg blogged about it here, and for several years it lay unnoticed, buried among my puppy videos.

But just the other day Fans of J. Michael Straczynski -- Facebook home of the creator of B5 -- dug up the link and it went slightly viral as fans started commenting on the video 20 years after the event. Now, 4,000 clicks later, it seems most fans got the joke, despite my technical inaccuracies, which included an anachronistic Federation spaceship.

Live long and prosper.