The work of production designer Stephen Roloff has earned him three Gemini nominations this year, two of them for his collaborative efforts on Atlantis Films’ TekWar series: Best Visual Effects (along with Bob Munroe, Derek Grime, Claude Theriault and John Gajdecki) and Best Production Design (with Adam Kolodziej). He is also nominated as a coproducer (with William Shatner and John Calvert) for the series which has earned a nod as Best Dramatic Series.

The sci-fi worlds of authors such as Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury have ingrained Roloff with the curiosity and creativity of projecting how humans will survive the changes we’re experiencing now.

‘People see a lot of the old structures falling apart; political, social, and economic,’ says Roloff, ‘(but) we’ve actually learned to be resourceful and more resilient and responsible with the environment,’ he says. ‘We’re living with less more intelligently.’

An ethos he carries in his own profession, Roloff recycled the set of Maniac Mansion, an Atlantis Films production for ytv (Family Channel in the u.s.), to create a similar environment for the head office of the Cosmos detective agency in TekWar.

After completion of TekWar, Roloff reworked the set for Atlantis’ upcoming dramatic series Traders, which debuted Feb. 1 on CanWest Global.

In many productions, Roloff has used computer models to visually translate his ideas for the set to the director as well as to the design and art departments. It’s also one way to curb the cost of building actual models.

‘The natural intent is to make everything as good as it can possibly be, and make it look as though you have spent a lot,’ he says.

‘Establish your priorities and spend money on the visual elements that will have the most impact.’

Although Roloff’s expertise to date is predominantly for the small screen, he is currently production designer for Cosmic City, a short imax film about life on board a space city of 10,000 people set in the year 2095.

Cosmic City has grown from a 15-minute film originally created for Tokyo’s now-defunct 1996 World Trade Fair to a 37-minute film mixing live action and computer animation. There is no release date yet, although Imax Corp. is aiming for this fall.

When comparing the two projects, Roloff says: ‘TekWar was purely entertainment and Imax attempts to be speculative fiction.’ Cosmic City is well-researched and rooted in fact with help from writer and coproducer Toni Myers. Myers has worked with nasa and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum, and has sat on advisory panels that specialize in ensuring scientific accuracy in films.

The stereoscopic vision of an imax film allows viewers to feel like they’re part of the environment and this level of detail goes well beyond that of television, because the resolution in imax is 24 times that of television and the eye needs time to scan the images on the screen. As a production designer, it’s Roloff’s responsibility to provide enough visual layers and interest so the viewer gets neither bored nor overwhelmed with the images.

‘With television you can cheat the eye. It’s like jazz. It’s improvisation,’ whereas imax is more like a classical symphony which is structured with attention to detail, he says.

Roloff is also working on Night of the Twisters, based on an Ivy Ruckman book, where the challenge is to create a Nebraska setting that is ‘as Norman Rockwell as possible.’ Its simple, undramatic sets were pulled apart by cables and overlapped with a computer image of tornados generated by Calibre Digital Design.

Roloff sees television as a more collaborative medium than film; its directors walk onto a set where the crew members already know one another and are co-operative. ‘One brilliant vision is fine, but the rest of the time I find it’s best to have a team effort,’ he says.

As the image becomes more artificial and the toys of the trade become more elaborate, Roloff sees filmmaking going in a divergent course, with one path employing traditional, documentary and realistic techniques and the other an increased reliance on technology that will require an alliance of the director, producer and writer with computer artists, visual effects supervisor and post-production supervisors.

‘It’s architecture without rules,’ Roloff says. ‘The only limits are with money, time and personalities.’