Another week, another $700 for the ol’ GoFundMe campaign for INTERLUDE. We’re just about half-way, and at this rate, we’ll make it to our $19,500 goal by mid-October. But we don’t have until mid-October—more on that situation at the end of this coming week.
In the meantime, we’re just $442 away from passing the $10K threshold. So if you haven’t donated yet or would like to increase your donation a weeeeee bit, operators are standing by…
https://www.gofundme.com/interlude
And now, the blog…
SPOILER ALERT!
By now, you know that the spoiler alert is there because this comic book one-shot tells the same story as INTERLUDE. So if you want to be completely surprised by the fan film when it comes out, then completely don’t read the 5 pages (plus cover) at the end of this blog.
Heed my words, humans.
Okay, if you’ve stuck around, you might be wondering how close the comic will be to the final fan film. The dialog is pretty darn close, but it’s not an exact match. The comic book needed to be truncated in places in order to keep it at just seven pages and not have all of the artwork covered up by word balloons.
But there’s also two places where you’ll discover that the comic and film will diverge quite a bit. One of those two places is at the end. But since we’ve still got two pages to go, I won’t spoil that for you just yet. I’ll discuss that divergence in two more weeks.
The other place where the two versions are different comes closer to the beginning—in fact, it’s right after the opening VFX sequence. Originally, the shooting script matched the comic book much more closely. But after VICTORIA FOX, my producer and the co-director for Interlude, read the shooting script, she had some feedback.
Now, I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t looking forward to making any more changes. I’d already sat with this script for nearly two years, tweaking it here and there, and I was pretty happy with it. So was ALEC PETERS. Why mess with “perfection”?
Well, it turns out it wasn’t quite perfect just yet…
Victoria is a very smart person, and she’s worked in the film industry for roughly a decade and a half. She knows what works in a script and what doesn’t work…and there was something in my script that Victoria felt was not working.
The presence of Admiral Ramirez in the original script was just kind of taken for granted and glossed over. But in fact, this is a very significant attack by the Klingons. It is the first time the D7 has been deployed, and it’s the first direct encounter between this new warship and Starfleet vessels. And the ambush just happens to come during a top secret mission transporting Starfleet’s commanding admiral. How did the Klingons know…or was this just a coincidence? The latter possibility seems highly unlikely!
But all of that was left almost completely out of my original script. After all, it’s a very short story! While it gets touched slightly at the end (sorry, minor spoiler there), Victoria felt that the reference to a top secret mission seemingly came out of nowhere. So one of her recommendations was to add some dialog between Garth and Jakande—right after the opening VFX sequence—where they discuss that very question: was this just a coincidence? This conversation provides some context for the viewer that it’s a top secret mission, and so the presence of Ramirez on board doesn’t seemingly come out of nowhere.
If you’re curious—since this fact isn’t revealed in the comic so it’s not a spoiler—the reason for Ramirez’s presence on the USS Ares is that he and Garth had traveled to get approval for his Axanar battle plan. They had met in secret with the highest brass from the other major member worlds: Vulcan, Andoria, Proxima, and Tellar Prime. The meeting had to be in person, since sending even a coded, encrypted signal over subspace would be too risky. The location of the gathering also had to be a secret, as bringing the highest brass to Earth all at the same time would draw too much attention and suggest to the Klingons that a major offensive was being planned…putting them on their guard.
So only a handful of people in Starfleet knew this meeting was happening or that Ramirez was on board the Ares (with Artemis escorting). And yet, somehow, the Klingons knew just where and when to ambush the two starships with a surprise attack using the three just-launched D7 battlecruisers.
As I said, at the end of the script, I do touch on the fact that this was a secret mission (just without so much detail). But Victoria felt I needed to establish the scenario earlier in the script so that the mention of the secret mission at the end didn’t seem to come out of nowhere.
It was actually really excellent advice, and I added some new dialog to improve the shooting script. Unfortunately, by the time Victoria gave me her feedback, it was far too late to adjust the comic pages. My illustrator, DANIEL FU, was already working on the final page, and the earlier ones had been long since completed. I wasn’t going to ask him to redo anything, so this is why the comic and film will not match exactly.
But page 5, well, that’s pretty much going to happen the same way in both stories—only the VFX in the film version is going to look incredible! That said, Daniel’s artwork is nothing to sneeze at either! Take a look (and remember you can click to enlarge each image)…
It reminds me of the Operation Vengeance. The American military operation to kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy on April 18, 1943, during the Solomon Islands campaign in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Axanar’s Four Years War and Earth’s World War II share a lot of similarities.