Fan Film Factor – Exploring the world of Star Trek fan films.

How I made my ALL-A.I. Star Trek fan film NO ROOM FOR ERROR… (feature, part 3)

In Part 2, I started taking a deeper dive into how I made NO ROOM FOR ERROR, my first-ever all-A.I. Star Trek fan film. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look…

There’s a tiny bunch of negative nellies on Facebook dismissing this fan film as “A.I. slop,” which seems to be a catch-all phrase like “woke” that has no specific meaning beyond “it’s something I don’t approve of.” But one of the implications of the term “A.I. slop” is that you just fed a prompt into an A.I. engine and let the algorithms do all of your work for you.

While that might be true in some cases, for those of us pushing the limits of A.I.—and I think this fan film does that to an extent—a LOT more goes into this process than just writing a prompt. And this series of blogs is intended to not only show how much more but also to help and possibly inspire others who are tackling the challenges of A.I. and might learn from some of the things I figured out.

Today, I’m going to do a deep dive into how I created the sequence of Captain Matthews emerging from the turbolift…

Although this shot lasts for only 14 seconds, it took me weeks to complete!

As often happens with A.I. shots, the tail ends up wagging the dog. What I mean by this is that beggars can’t be choosers, and you have to start with the resources that are available. Fortunately, thanks to THE RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE (by the way, I did reach out to TREVOR ROTH at Roddenberry Entertainment about this project, and he is aware of it) and their amazing Hard Surface Artist DONNY VERSIGA, I had beautiful and intricate renderings of the U.S.S. Excelsior bridge from a myriad of angles. But if I wanted to use the highest quality of those renderings, I had limited choices of angles. Granted, there were still plenty of renders available, but if I wanted someone to emerge from the turbolift, for example, this was the image I had to work from…

I won’t go into too much detail yet about how I populated the bridge with Starfleet personnel, but I will say that the fact that the chairs at the consoles in the back were pushed in and not pulled out caused me no end of consternation as I tried to put officers and crewmen into them! Fortunately the short sequence on the bridge of the U.S.S. Excelsior from the beginning of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country provided me with a very convenient way of dropping in both a helmsman and navigator, as well as two crewmembers behind the captain’s chair…

In fact, I daresay that, if it weren’t for those three minutes of Excelsior footage from the beginning of STVI (and elsewhere in that film) and also from STII, I’d have never been able to make No Room for Error in as little as six months.

Anyway, let’s start going through the process of getting Captain Matthews to walk out of the turbolift…

How I made my ALL-A.I. Star Trek fan film NO ROOM FOR ERROR… (feature, part 2)

Last time, I premiered my new all-A.I. Star Trek fan film, NO ROOM FOR ERROR, which took me nearly six months of many long days and nights to complete. The purpose of the project was to teach myself the tools of Artificial Intelligence for filmmaking by presenting myself with the task of actually creating a short Star Trek fan film. And to make things even more challenging, I decided the setting would be an Excelsior-class starship during movie-era Trek—some of the most difficult uniforms and set backgrounds for A.I. to tackle correctly and not screw up!

If you haven’t seen the short film yet, here it is…

I forgot to mention in Part 1 that the original title of my script was CLEAR ALL MOORINGS. And that title nearly stuck. I was working on the closing credits when I realized that simply putting the title at the end of the fan film wouldn’t work in keeping the “punchline” secret. And that was because the YouTube page would show Clear All Moorings as the title right there under the video the entire time. Not wanting to give away the gag, I decided at almost the last minute to change the title to No Room for Error.

The fan film was too short to create a decent trailer without revealing too much, so in the week and a half leading up to the release on YouTube, I posted about two dozen still images to Facebook. This resulted in a number of comments like this one…

So I’ve decided to do a deep-dive into how I created some of the cooler shots for this fan film and how I managed to avoid some of the most common A.I. failures when it comes to rendering movie-era Star Trek. If that’s not your thing, then feel free to skip my next several blogs. I’ll be writing them specifically to help others, as I’ve learned that generative A.I. artists seldom keep their “tricks” secret and instead openly share the methods they used to achieve their results.

When last we left off, I had discovered that I needed to find actual stills of the USS Excelsior and adjust those—using a combination of both Google Gemini‘s free A.I. engine for generating images plus TONS of Photoshopping (often repeatedly for the same still). Then the time came to animate the lights turning on for the opening sequence. My tool of choice: Kling A.I. in order to learn what it could do. And it could do a LOT!

It could also screw up a lot…

How I made my ALL-A.I. Star Trek fan film NO ROOM FOR ERROR… (feature, part 1)

It looks like my new all-A.I. Star Trek fan film NO ROOM FOR ERROR is a success with 16.5K views in the first 18 hours and 135 mostly-positive comments If you haven’t seen it yet, take a watch…

When I first began working on this project back in April of this year, Artificial Intelligence was just starting to be used in Star Trek fan films. I covered some of the early adopters in this blog discussing how I had begun helping MARK NACCARATO create some fancy A.I.-generated scenes for his upcoming THE ROMULAN WAR sequel and other productions. The experience was both fun and eye-opening, and I found myself enthusiastic to teach myself more about the tools of A.I., their capabilities, and how to use them. And what better way to do that than by giving myself an actual project to work on?

No Room for Error actually got its start back in the first half of 2025 as JOSHUA IRWIN was preparing to head for Frederick, Maryland, to film all of the bridge scenes for FARRAGUT 2024, which he was directing for showrunner JOHN BROUGHTON. Their movie-era bridge set (multiple versions of it for different starships) was staggeringly accurate and impressive, as were their impeccably-crafted monster maroon uniforms. The shoot was going to be three full days, and I had a crazy idea!

At the time, the TREKS IN 90 SECS contest was about to start taking submissions for the second annual competition, and I (the contest-runner) hadn’t submitted an entry for the first year and wasn’t planning one for the second year. Y’see, I like writing about fan films, but I don’t typically make a lot of them. But Josh’s trip to Maryland created an interesting possibility. If I could write a quick 3 or 4-page script for a super-short (90- to 120-seconds long) fan film, maybe Josh and some of the actors could set aside 10 or 15 minutes to shoot those fast lines. Then I could edit the takes together, have one of the many fan film CGI artists out there create one or two quick VFX shots for me, and voila! I’d have a submission for the second Treks in 90 Secs contest. So I drafted up a quick 4-page mini-script, e-mailed it to Josh, and crossed my fingers that he’d have time to briefly film something during a break over the 3-day shoot.

Alas, ’twas not meant to be.

The Farragut folks barely had enough time to complete their own shots over the weekend, and Josh used the remaining day to shoot footage for his upcoming AVALON UNIVERSE release, GHOST CRYSTAL. So Josh wasn’t able to shoot any footage for me. Oh, well.

And so the script sat on my hard drive, mostly forgotten. But after helping Mark Naccarato and deciding I needed a new project to help teach myself more about A.I., my unproduced short film script seemed the perfect fit. Six months later, after more hard work (and fun!) than I could ever have imagined, my A.I. fan film was finished…!

To use A.I. or not to use A.I.–is that even the QUESTION??? (editorial)

Some of you may have seen my Facebook posts this past week announcing the upcoming release of NO ROOM FOR ERROR, the first Star Trek fan film I’ve created in more than two years—since the release of AN ABSENT FRIEND, which used Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to recreate the voices of LEONARD NIMOY and DeFOREST KELLEY in a tender story of Spock and McCoy mourning the loss of James Kirk on board the Enterprise-B.

Like An Absent Friend, No Room for Error also utilizes A.I. extensively. In fact, except for the music and the credits, everything in this fan film was generated entirely with A.I. tools: images, animations, VFX, and voices. Indeed, the whole purpose of the exercise was for me to learn A.I. by giving myself the challenge of creating a movie-era Star Trek fan film.

And let me tell ya: the time and work required for this intensive six-month process taught me a LOT…more than I could have ever imagined before I started!

I have no illusions about A.I. I know it’s very controversial at the moment. The possibility of an A.I.-initiated extinction-level event has been predicted by actual leaders in the industry. Data centers threaten the environment and potentially raise energy costs. And an entire generation (my son’s, as a matter of fact) fear that A.I. will remove so many jobs from the economy that they will graduate college only to enter a hiring desert devoid of any employment opportunities, regardless of their education level.

I don’t disagree with any of this. These fears are very, very real.

Add to this the public backlash against A.I., exemplified by comments like this one that came in via Facebook…

Really? Star Trek has always been on the forefront of cutting edge technology. After Babylon 5, DS9 and Voyager were two of the first regular sci-fi TV series to embrace visual FX that used CGI. Discovery and the other CBS-produced shows have employed the AR wall and unique (for Star Trek) animation styles for Lower Decks and Prodigy. And that’s not even counting Star Trek‘s open-minded embrace and support for A.I. characters such as Data, Vic Fontaine, and the EMH.

So at best, I’d say the above comment is factually inaccurate. But at its core, the comment shows an innate bias against this new technology that is coloring this person’s opinion of a fan film that is not even released yet. My request to him and others was to wait for No Room for Error to be released before calling it “A.I. slop.” I mean, it still might be, but there’s no need to pre-judge. That’s very UN-Star Trek-like.

But today, let’s tackle the big question: if A.I. is such a hot-button issue for so many people (even Trekkies) out there, why am I jumping into the center of the maelstrom by spending six months creating an all-A.I. Star Trek fan film…?

Announcing the 2026 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARD WINNERS!

It’s crazy to think that 2026 marks the FIFTH annual Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARD contest. Originally conceived at nearly the same moment as GLEN WOLFE’s and DAN REYNOLD’s DIRECTORS CHOICE AWARDS back in early 2022, the Showrunner Awards were intended to replace the time-honored BJO AWARDS for Star Trek fan films, which had been presented for over half a decade during the annual Treklanta convention.

The tradition was established during the first Showrunner Awards to announce the winners during the anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek on NBC back in 1966. So happy 60th birthday, Star Trek, and happy 5th birthday, Showrunner Awards!

This year, we had 23 entries combining for a total of just under 10 hours of viewing for our 12 showrunner judges. For comparison, last year we had 24 entries and the year before there were 27 entires, each with a combined runtime of just under 9 hours. So we decreased by one submission but increased by an entire hour??? If you’re curious as to why, one of our submissions has a run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes just by itself!)

Speaking of our judges, each is himself a showrunner on a Star Trek fan film or series, so they know what’s involved in producing a successful project. This year, our panel consisted of these fine gentlemen…

THOMAS ARGANTE – USS CASSANDRA
JOSE CEPEDA – NATURE’S HUNGER
NICK COOK – INTREPID
SAMUEL COCKINGS – TREK SHORTS and TEMPORAL ANOMALY
JOSHUA IRWIN – THE AVALON UNIVERSE and other productions
JONATHAN LANE – INTERLUDE and AN ABSENT FRIEND
MARK LARGENT – STALLED TREK
VANCE MAJOR – CONSTAR
BRIAN W. PETERSON – THE LOST STARSHIP
BENJAMIN SCHULZ – LORELEY
GLEN L WOLFE – THE FEDERATION FILES
RANDY WRENN – DREADNOUGHT DOMINION and other series

Thomas Argante and Nick Cook were newly added to our judging panel this year, although neither is “rookie” when it comes to Star Trek fan films. Thomas has made multiple guest appearances over the past half-decade in fan series productions from DREADNOUGHT DOMINION and PROJECT: RUNABOUT to THE CONSTAR CHRONICLES before launching the new USS CASSANDRA fan series in the Netherlands last year. As for Nick, well, he’s been one of the most recognizable faces in Star Trek fan films dating back twenty years with appearances in the Scotland-based INTREPID fan series, the America-based STAR TREK: HIDDEN FRONTIER series, as well as numerous England-based TREK SHORTS from prolific showrunner Sam Cockings.

Every judge ranked their top five selections in each of 22 categories, with their top choice earning 10 points, second choice earning 7 points, then 5, 3, and 1 points for choices three through five. A judge was not allowed to vote for a fan film they themselves submitted as any of their top three selections.

A huge thank you to each of our judges for putting in their time and consideration to making the Showrunner Awards possible for a half-decade now. You guys are awesome!

AXANAR: THE GATHERING STORM premieres in SAN DIEGO, gets TAKEN DOWN from YouTube by CBS and Paramount, but it’s still available to watch online!

The day that thousands of AXANAR supporters feared would never happen finally arrived on Sunday, July 26, 2026 in San Diego and also on YouTube. After a 12-year wait, the first of the two sequels to PRELUDE TO AXANAR premiered: AXANAR: THE GATHERING STORM.

In the three days since then (as I type this), a LOT has happened. First, the new video caught fire on YouTube, running up nearly 120K views as of my screen-capping of the page of Tuesday night—along with 11K likes and 1,576 comments, nearly all of which were lavishing high praise on the release.

There was also the San Diego premiere itself, which took place at the DIGITAL GYM CINEMA in downtown near the convention center (where Comic-Con was wrapping up) at 2pm Pacific Time. About 75 people in total came to the theater to check out multiple showings of Prelude and The Gathering Storm between 2pm and 5pm, followed by a marathon that bookended the above releases sandwiching the Axanar Universe fan films THE ICARUS MANEUVER, DAEDALUS, and INTERLUDE. The largest number of audience members sat for the first showing, filling nearly 40 of the 54 available seats in the small theater. Here’s an image from the last showing of the day, which had about 20 people…

Showrunner ALEC PETERS was feeling great. When I asked him during a post-premiere dinner at the local Spaghetti Factory restaurant how he felt about finally releasing the first of the Axanar sequels after twelve years, he said, “Vindicated. And all of the comments we’ve been reading on the YouTube channel are just so overwhelmingly over-the-top positive that it just makes us realize that we were doing this for all of the right reasons.”

I asked Alec if he thought that CBS/Paramount would try to have The Gathering Storm taken down from YouTube. The run time was 21 minutes (although four of those minutes were credits), and three of the cast members who weren’t in the original Prelude (and therefore weren’t grandfathered in: PATRICIA TALMAN, TONY AMENDOLA, and FARAN TAHIR) had previously played roles in Star Trek TNG/DS9/VOY episodes and the 2009 Star Trek feature film. So a takedown seemed likely. That said, I’m still not sure how forbidding SAG/AFTRA actors from being hired for paid roles benefits either Hollywood studio and might violate union rules.

“The over/under on a takedown is 36 hours,” Alec’s girlfriend CRYSSTAL HUBBARD replied, and Alec added, “If that!!” So I asked what the plan was if that happened, and Alec said, “Then free downloads for everyone!”

Their comments proved to be quite…prophetic…as three days later, Paramount Pictures Corporation and CBS Studios did indeed tell YouTube to take down the video due to copyright issues. And YouTube complied because, in a David and Goliath situation with two Goliaths, you don’t stand next to David no matter how big a sling he’s waving!

And so Alec did, indeed, end up posting a free link to The Gathering Storm on the Axanar website:

https://beta.axanar.com/watch/the-gathering-storm

How I’m using AI to help MARK NACCARATO make THE ROMULAN WAR… (part 4 of 4)

Last time, I showed you all how I was able to use Artificial intelligence (AI) to turn this…

into this…

And this…

into this…

Both of these video segments are intended for a short Star Trek fan film in THE ROMULAN WAR: WAR STORIES series tentatively titled “THE STILES FILES.” I offered to use AI to help showrunner MARK NACCARATO to create some brief video clips for this and assorted other related projects he’s working on. It’s a win-win for both of us, as he’ll get shots that he needs that likely couldn’t be created in any other way—while I’ll have an opportunity to learn some of the latest AI tools through directed tasks and problems to solve.

Actually, the above scenes with Captain Aaron Stiles of the USS Challenger NX-03 could very easily have been created without using AI. Actor BRIAN HOLLOWAY had already recorded his lines in uniform against a green screen, and many fan filmmakers have both the tools and the skills to composite him against a stationary background of the captain’s quarters or ready room screen cap from Star Trek: Enterprise. AI simply made the shots look more realistic in terms of costume and sets…and better lit, as well.

However, the other three shots that Mark asked for my help creating (and which I will show you presently) could absolutely, in no conceivable way, have been produced practically without tremendous time and financial resources—and perhaps not even then! With AI, however, I was able to generate each requested video clip in a matter of days for a combined AI cost of less than $100.

Keep in mind, though, that we were already spending a relatively small amount of money. I was using Google Gemini, which has a free version that allows you to generate up to 20 still images over a 24-hour period. And then I was using Grok to turn those images into videos. Grok offers a $30/month subscription that allows for a limited number of 720p resolution videos each day—the same resolution as those videos featured above. After you reach your maximum allotted daily allowance, the resolution of your Grok-generated videos drops to 480p until your meter resets. (I should mention that Google Gemini “outsources” its image generating tasks to another AI engine called Nano Banana, but that’s deeper into the weeds than most of my readers will need to know about.)

For the first of the three videos I describe below, I continued with the Gemini-to-Grok recipe. But then I ran into the limitations of 720p video and decided to take the plunge into Kling 3.0 and Kling Omni, allowing me to operate at a whole other level. And that, my friends, made all the difference in the universe!

Read on…

How I’m using AI to help MARK NACCARATO make THE ROMULAN WAR… (part 3 of 4)

Last time, I showed how I used a combination of the AI tools of Google Gemini and Grok to turn this…

into this…

The above video clip is intended to be a part of one of MARK NACCARATO’s upcoming fan films that take place during THE ROMULAN WAR. It was the second time I used AI to help create a short scene for him. The first time was a couple of days earlier when I used a combination of those same two AI applications to produce this short clip of a young T’Pau giving a speech to the Vulcan Council…

Part 2 blog showed how many different prompts I had to go through to change the four fans in front of a green screen into a starting “seed” still image of the four Starfleet officers drinking in the 602 Club. And then I had to go through a few different video prompts and renderings to then turn that one seed image the 10-second toast scene that I wanted. AI takes patience, persistence, and an ability to try to figure out what went wrong with your previous prompt and then to write something more carefully to avoid the same problem again…and again. Lather, rinse, repeat—possibly dozens of times!

AI isn’t a mind-reader quite yet. In fact, it’s frustratingly literal most of the time and unpredictable much of the rest of the time. But it still does some mind-blowing things in just a minute or two—occasionally for free or for a relatively affordable cost considering what it’s able to do for you.

Today, I’m going to continue this 4-part series with the third challenge handed to me by Mark: turn a series of flatly-lit green screen takes of actor BRIAN HOLLOWAY into Captain Aaron Stiles of the USS Challenger NX-03, sending a series of subspace messages from his quarters to Captain Jonathan Archer of the USS Enterprise NX-01. (Brian had previously worked on fan films for STAR TREK: PHASE II, THE FEDERATION FILES, and DREADNOUGHT DOMINION.)

Just to help me do a proof of concept, Mark sent me the following clip of part of one of Stiles’ messages to Archer. It was a thank you for a recording Archer had made expressing his condolences on the death of one of Captain Stiles’ sons, Brandon, a tribute that was played during the funeral…

The main difference between this project and the previous one of the officers giving the toast was that with Stiles, we already had the audio, which Mark wanted to keep. For the toast, Grok’s AI just created new voices that said what I typed in. But this time, Brian’s voice needed to remain intact in the final video. Turns out that Grok doesn’t have that ability at this time. So I needed to find an AI application that could retain the initial sound and render a new video with lips that synced to it.

Once again, I asked the “AI Whisperer,” my good friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ for the solution, and he quickly told me: Kling Omni…

How I’m helping MARK NACCARATO make THE ROMULAN WAR…using ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! (feature-part 2 of 4)

Last time in Part 1, I discussed a little about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly common tool among fan filmmakers—especially Star Wars but also Star Trek and other genres—and I provided links to some recent examples in the Trek realm. Then I moved onto how MARK NACCARATO, who is finishing up work on the sequel to THE ROMULAN WAR, PART I and also releasing some new short films in the NX-era, asked me to help him create a still image of a young T’Pau giving a speech to the Vulcan Council.

Looking at an overwhelming amount of work in Photoshop, I asked Mark if he’d mind if I used AI to create the image. He was fine with the idea, and ultimately I was able to create not just a still image to go under a voice-over narration but an actual 13-second video of part of her speech. Take a look…

Although I had used AI two years ago to generate AI voices for Spock and Dr. McCoy for my animated fan film AN ABSENT FRIEND, and I had created some Facebook memes and some short music clips with AI tools previously, this was the first time that I’d used AI to generate a video from an AI still image. And it was a lot of fun!

It was also an amazing learning experience, and I wanted to learn more. There’s nothing like having a project to focus your efforts, and so I asked Mark if he had any other clips that he’d like to try to create using AI. I was certainly game!

Mark’s next request was simply for a still image. Four fans had gotten together to stage a “toast” in front of a green screen. Here’s a still image of them…

My mission, should I choose to accept it (and, of course, I did!), was to do the following:

Put all four of these fans into NX-era Starfleet uniforms like those from Enterprise.
Trim them down a little to look more like physically fit Starfleet officers.
Change the blue Romulan Ale to just beer (as this was taking place during the Romulan War—the Romulans were still mysterious—so Romulan Ale wouldn’t be an Earth beverage at the time).
Have them sitting in the 602 Club (from the Enterprise episode “First Flight”), and Mark supplied me with some reference photos…

How I’m helping MARK NACCARATO make THE ROMULAN WAR…using ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! (feature-part 1 of 4)

Yeah, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will probably steal away jobs, destroy the environment, and eventually turn all humans on the planet into nothing but organic batteries while muscular cyborgs with Austrian accents hunt us down. But until then, AI is doing some truly unbelievable things! Many folks in the fan film community are beginning to use it in their projects. And a couple of months ago, I decided to jump down that rabbit hole. What I’ve managed to create since then is blowing my mind!

I originally began dabbling with AI two years ago when I produced the animated fan film AN ABSENT FRIEND and used AI to recreate the voices of the late LEONARD NIMOY and DeFOREST KELLEY as Spock and McCoy (I got a tacit thumbs up from the Nimoy estate, and Kelley’s voice is no longer owned as he had no children). What absolutely amazed me was that the AI-generated voices could actually act and take direction! And in the time since then, AI’s capabilities and quality have evolved even further. AI still hasn’t achieved “perfection” yet, but acceptance of it as a creative tool is spreading very quickly…even among some of those whose livelihoods were initially threatened by it.

Case in point: my longtime friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ—two-time Emmy-winning CGI animator on Babylon 5, DS9, Voyager, and Battlestar Galactica—was staring down the AI “career abyss” a couple of years ago. But instead of just worrying and complaining about AI making his VFX skills obsolete, he decided that he would become an AI expert. He studied the expanding capabilities of countless different AI generators for images, video, audio, etc., applying his own knowledge and experience in the visual effects field to learn how to make AI do what a film producer or director actually wanted rather than what AI thought they wanted. Here’s a sample of some of what Mojo created as he was teaching himself AI. Since then, Mojo has found rewarding employment in the AI pre-viz VFX industry on an upcoming film from Lion’s Gate working as what I like to call the “AI Whisperer.”

And Mojo isn’t the only one. Many fan filmmakers have begun to use AI in their projects in various ways. Don’t even get me started on how many Star Wars fan films are being made entirely using AI—there aren’t enough minutes in the day to report on them all! But some of the Star Trek fan filmmakers who have begun to use AI in their projects include…