The year is 2187. Earthforce is part scientific exploration organization and part law enforcement agency having jurisdiction over the entire solar system. Though humans have managed to make interplanetary space travel commonplace, and have established small colonies outside Earth (on Mars, for example), they have yet to encounter alien species; moreover, because of technological limitations, they are not able to venture beyond the confines of the solar system until they make first contact with the People of Light, a benevolent society on a distant planet called Veles, and form the Solar Alliance with them. This series of videos focuses on the newly-appointed commanding officer of the Earthforce ship Floda, Captain Florence, as she deals with bands of illegal miners, mounts rescue operations, mediates in disputes on Earthforce's behalf, helps forge the Solar Alliance with the People of Light, and conducts scientific research while commanding the Floda's patrol of the solar system.
All imagery created by Jamie Fraser and Florence
From episode 1, "Her Debutant Battle"
From episode 2, "Mission into Mystery"
From episode 3, "The Bigger They Are..."
From episode 4, "Peril on Pluto". Many attempts at creating a ship design for the Greyhound were made and discarded before the decision was made to use an unused design from the "Her Debutant Battle" set.
From episode 5, "Crisis at Kraken Lodge". The originally desired approach for the scene involving the Floda's second-in-command, Commander Gardner, was to depict him in the exact same uniform style as Captain Florence's. However, when Florence proved unable to duplicate the uniform style exactly, Jamie decided to try generating the character himself as an African man in his thirties, the idea being to digitally graft the head onto the shoulders of the raw Captain Florence figure and crop out everything immediately below the shoulders. Every time Florence generated the image of the man, though, the head was poking out of the top end of the frame on the iPhone, thus requiring another rendition because it gave the impression that this was the way the photo as a whole was going to look too. Unfortunately, the head-grafting idea didn't work out either, and so a stock shot of the Floda flying through space was substituted instead.
When the final shot for the Kraken Lodge guest room was chosen, Corel PaintShop Pro had to be used to create the matte insert of the artist's impression of Kraken Mare in the window, as Titan's atmosphere has no oxygen for trees to survive in, and its temperature is about -180°C. Unfortunately, the technical language in the software's interface was too advanced for Jamie's background, and so Jamie consulted this video for instructions on how to do the matte in that software.
From episode 6, "Gravity and Greed", which marks the first appearance of androids, and in particular Captain Florence's android sister Lieutenant Kara.
From episode 7, "Big Yellow Taxi". As originally scripted, there was supposed to be an angle favoring the Brogan android, with Lieutenant Kara reaching out to him from outside the lower right corner of the frame and the android grabbing her wrist. Throughout the many attempts to achieve this look, Florence had difficulty rendering this not only in terms of picture composition, but also in terms of keeping Kara in uniform.
From episode 8, "Between the Candle and the Star". Florence included a few alien designs for the Velesian Magistrate, but Jamie wanted the Velesians to look human. If they did not, they would not have been able to infiltrate Earth so easily in the first place, and making them alien-looking would have created potential problems, both in terms of avoiding intellectual property infringements with alien designs of other shows and Florence's ability to convincingly reproduce the designs for future episodes. (From a production standpoint, this is also why Earthforce has imposed the navigation limit of 30 AU's from the sun.)
Depicting the planet Veles turned out to be problematic at first. Since the Velesians can breathe oxygen, it made sense to try to design an Earth-like planet for them. Jamie was looking for a complete view of the planet so that the depiction of the Floda in orbit around it could be depicted as a left-to-right flyby, but Florence's first attempts looked like the eastern hemisphere of Earth, favoring Africa, the Middle East and India, necessitating the alternate angles that would see the Floda enter frame from the bottom instead..
From episode 9, "Between the Darkness and the Light". For financial reasons, no new face-swapping was possible for this episode; as a result, more use than usual was made of existing raw imagery done for previous episodes.
From episode 10, "Sins of the Father". After multiple attempts were made to depict the Patriarch slumping forward in his chair, it was decided to use a detail from the "bowing martial artist" image noted in the episode credits.
From episode 11, "Phœnix". Many attempts were made to create a depiction of Station Hermes, the spacecraft manufacturing and maintenance facility owned and operated by the Dark Ones on Mercury: the design Jamie had in mind consisted of several landing decks on the left, accessible by a cylindrical shaft on the right, depicted in a 16:9 frame. When it became necessary to include a text box with the image, the decision was made to simplify one of the designs that Florence created and crop some of the design out. In the process of creating the initial designs, though, Florence inadvertently created what Jamie felt was a perfect design for the Phœnix.
A few attempts were made at creating a depiction of the Floda's roamabout, but none were deemed acceptable, and so the decision was made to use a negative image of one of the designs created for "Gravity and Greed" instead.
For the scene depicting an off-duty Lieutenant Kara trying to chill and watch FlixNet too (an idea pitched by Florence in February 2024 in connection with AI in general), a realistic selfie of Florence generated August 15, 2024 was used as it looked sufficiently different from her to be considered a different person altogether. This image is the basis of all depictions of Lieutenant Kara.