During the second-to-last weekend of June, the town of Frederick, Maryland was the site of a complex and challenging shoot of not just one Star Trek fan film but TWO! The location was a facility that has been dubbed by some FARRAGUT STUDIO 3, and the fan films were FARRAGUT 2024 (a 23rd century TOS movie-era fan film and sequel to last year’s FARRAGUT FORWARD) and GHOST CRYSTAL (the first of three new AVALON UNIVERSE episodes episodes set in the 24th and, eventually, 25th centuries).
But before I continue, let me briefly mention that both productions have active crowd-funding campaigns that, while having met their original goals, are still in stretch goal mode…
To donate click to Farragut 2024, click here.
To donate to Avalon Universe, click here.
And now, let’s talk about this amazing fan film shoot!
Many of you may have seen photos posted online by various members of the cast and crews of both productions. But what you probably don’t know is everything that went into making this 3-day shoot happen and what went on behind-the-scenes to make it all come together.
Let’s start with the two men behind these projects: Farragut showrunner JOHN BROUGHTON and Avalon showrunner JOSHUA IRWIN. Josh serves as director for both of these fan films, and John, in addition to starring in Farragut as Captain (Admiral?) Jack Carter, also specializes in meticulous costume-making and set construction…and he will be moving forward to direct the upcoming FARRAGUT FINALE.
Some fan films require minimal preparation and planning. Farragut 2024 is NOT one of those. Other productions require moderate preparation and planning. Farragut ain’t one of those either! Nope, Team Farragut has been meeting weekly for more than a year and half, with the various department heads gathering virtually via Microsoft Teams to discuss every aspect of this project: make-up, CGI, costumes, sets, direction, line production…everyone was expected to attend these weekly meetings, hosted by John (who runs a pretty tight ship both in the 23rd century and also in the 21st!).
You might be thinking that having weekly meetings for over a year for a Star Trek fan film is overdoing it a bit, but the fact remains that most of these folks have known each other as friends and colleagues for years or even decades, and many of them come from community theater backgrounds where regular production meetings are pretty standard.
Fast forward to this past April, and Farragut had an outdoor location shoot planned. Unfortunately, the weather made other plans, and rain was forecast throughout Washington, DC and the surrounding areas. But that was okay. A studio shoot had already been planned two months later for the weekend of June 20-22 (Friday-Sunday), so the team could simply tack on a short Thursday afternoon shoot and film the two outdoor scenes within walking distance of the studio, as neither scene required recognizable scenery—unlike their previous location scenes, which were shot in and around famous DC landmarks.
But once again, fate and the weather weren’t cooperating…
As Josh prepared to make the 17-hour-one-way drive from Bentonville, Arkansas to Frederick, Maryland, for the big weekend shoot, picking up VFX artist KEITH HAMILTON in Little Rock along the way—as well as camera rental equipment in Memphis, Tennessee—the forecast for Thursday in the Maryland tri-state area was again filled with rain.
This didn’t change Josh’s plans too much, however, as the two of them still headed out on Wednesday morning, with the only caveat being that they had to arrive in Memphis no later than 4:30pm to pick up the rental equipment. They drove on for another few hours after that, spending the night in a small motel between Nashville and Knoxville, leaving at 8am, and arriving in Frederick in the early evening on Thursday. Had the Thursday shoot not gotten rained out, Josh told me, they simply would have driven further the first night, gotten less sleep, left earlier Thursday, and tried to arrive by late morning.
So what about that rained out Thursday outdoor shoot, you ask?
Well, that’s where the ambitious pace of the weekend came into play. Notice that the title of this blog lists FOUR bridge sets. Three of them were for Farragut 2024, and while they used the same basic set components, each needed to look like a different starship bridge: the USS Farragut for scenes shot on Friday, and then the USS Constitution on Saturday in the first half of the day, and finally the USS Decatur (a Belknap-class cruiser) on Saturday…
The differences between the three bridges are subtle but still very important. The most obvious changes, of course, are the console animations—with the starship engineering schematics needing to display the correct class of vessel. Also notable are the chairs, especially the command chair. MICHAEL BEDNAR (pictured in the middle photo above and playing Captain Robert Tacket of the USS Constitution) built his own command chair. And John Broughton (Jr., that is, as John’s dad, JOHN BROUGHTON, SR., also works in the Farragut set construction department) helped Mike Bednar build a special command chair for DAVID AGRINSONIS, who plays the captain of the Decatur, and let him take the chair back to his home in Cleveland as a thank you for David’s long-time support of Farragut Films stretching all the way back to their STARSHIP FARRAGUT days in Kingsland, Georgia.
Fortunately, the time needed to “switch out” those many bridge set elements allowed the cast members to walk outside of the studio and shoot their two exterior scenes. One of the sequences called for a night shot, so when principal photography on the Farragut bridge wrapped late on Friday at about 9pm, the actors who were needed for the nighttime scene, along with the director, lighting, camera, and sound folks, stepped into the fresh evening air while the set crew got the Constitution bridge ready for shooting first thing on Saturday morning. VERY efficient!
On Saturday, after shooting through all of the (fewer) Constitution scenes, the non-set crew broke for lunch while the bridge was switched over to the Decatur. Then the final bridge scenes for Farragut 2024 were filmed, some additional green screen footage was shot, and finally the actors and filming crew walked outside to shoot the last exterior daytime scene. And with that, principal photography on Farragut 2024 was officially wrapped.
But things were far from over—not by a longshot!
Come back tomorrow for Part 2, where everything—including the bridge and uniforms—travels forward in time from the 23rd to 24th century, as our spotlight transitions from Farragut to Avalon.
In the meantime, we’ve got some wonderful set detail photos from Friday and Saturday taken by VFX guy Keith Hamilton (who, as you can see below, got to make a Farragut 2024 cameo as a chief petty officer). Here are some of his best shots from the first two days (click on any image to enlarge and see it in more detail), and look for more of Keith’s photos in tomorrow’s blog…
