How I ended up editing SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT from TALES FROM THE NEUTRAL ZONE… (part 1 of a 2-part blog)

This is going to be a different kind of blog today. Usually, I write from the perspective of being on the outside looking in. This time, however, I stepped in as film editor on a very special Star Trek fan film starring a courageous young actress who is on the autism spectrum. And therein lies a tale…a tale from NEUTRAL ZONE STUDIOS.

It was the spring of 2024, and my friend JOSHUA IRWIN was feeling quite overloaded…and no wonder! Ever since branching out beyond producing his series of AVALON UNIVERSE fan films, Josh has been one of the most in-demand filmmakers in the entire community. He gets asked to direct, do lighting, camera, cinematography, special FX, sound, and editing on what seems to be an endless parade of projects ranging from fan films like FARRAGUT 2024 and fan series like DREADNOUGHT DOMINION to fanthologies like THE FEDERATION FILES and TALES FROM THE NEUTRAL ZONE. And as the year began, Josh had no loess than SIX different fan films that he helped shoot, produce, wrote, and/or directed…and he needed to edit each of them.

Some of these were major projects, like the series finale of the 23rd century run of Avalon Universe, an upcoming release to be titled THE ONCE AND FUTURE CAPTAIN. Others were mid-size projects, like a story for Tales from the Neutral Zone called HISTORY NEVER FORGETS (still unreleased) about the crew of the Enterprise-C before its destruction. And then there were three “small” fan films with minimal raw footage that had each been shot in about a day or less with run times of maybe 15 minutes or so. With work life, family life, and fan film life commitments piling up, Josh asked me if I’d be willing to help him edit one of these three shorter fan films.

This request didn’t come out of left field. Josh and I had worked closely on the edit for my AXANAR Universe fan film INTERLUDE, and even though I drove him nuts (and maybe a little vice-versa), we actually worked quite effectively together—finding some compromises when we didn’t agree or else one or the other of us putting our foot down—and wound up with a very nice final cut. Josh understands that I don’t know a hundredth of what he does about the finer points of film editing like levels and color optimization, but he knows I have a good feel of which takes work the best and how to piece together a good rough edit.

“If you can just assemble the cuts in the timeline, Jonathan, I can do all of the rest,” Josh told me. “And even if you edit only one of these shorter films, it’ll really help lighten my workload.” And I was happy to do it. I actually enjoy editing a film, at least on a basic putting-the-pieces-together level. Now the only decision I had to make was which of the three fan films to tackle.

They were each intriguing in their own way, and I thought about them as a drove a very scenic Route 74 through the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains northward toward Palm Springs during a gorgeous wildflower bloom in the area…

As I descended 3,000 feet on a winding road down from the mountains into the Coachella Valley, my decision was made for me when my iPhone’s music playlist came to the 1969 song “Make Your Own Kind of Music” by Cass Elliot. One of the three fan films had been written by the mother of a daughter who had grown up on the autism spectrum and was now a very functional, charming, and well-adjusted adult…willing to play the lead in a Star Trek fan film. The script was somewhat biographical/autobiographical and had an unexpected plot twist.

As I listened to the song, I thought of a young child named Bruce, a member of my son Jayden’s sixth grade robotics team who was also on the autism spectrum. Bruce’s neurodivergence and ADHD was much more significant than the actress who starred in this particular fan film, as I doubt Bruce would have been able to focus enough deliver pre-written lines in front of a camera. But I nevertheless thought of all of the Bruces and other neurodivergent children and adults out there who might draw inspiration from seeing “one of their own” play the lead role in a Star Trek fan film.

As I listened to “Mama” Cass Elliot sing the words “Nobody can tell ya…there’s only one song worth singin’… They may try and sell ya…’Cause it hangs them up to see someone like you…” I imagined that song playing over the closing credits, and I actually began tearing up a little. I got back to my in-laws’ house in Desert Palms, texted Josh, and told him I’d made my selection.

Before I talk further about my edit, let me show you how the finished fan film turned out…

This was actually one of the last fan films to be shot in Neutral Zone Studios at the Kingsland, GA location before the sets were moved last year to Sandusky, OH. The writer, RUTH McCARTNEY, had been a long-time volunteer, and in appreciation for her many years of service, RAY TESI was only too happy to let her take over the sets, with Josh Irwin directing, to produce her very first Star Trek fan film starring her daughter Sara.

The title, SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT, is a play on the directions to Neverland from the play (and Disney movie) Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie: “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning.” And yes, Captain Kirk quotes that same line at the very end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

So why change “right” to “left”? Most people are right-handed. And for a long time, being left-handed was seen by many world cultures as being somehow aberrant or even cursed—and every effort was made by parents to get their left-handed children to favor their right hand in order not to be bullied or persecuted. If that’s not a perfect metaphor the struggles of neurodivergent children and their parents, I don’t know what is.

I took Josh several months to prepare all of the raw footage onto a single hard drive and ship it to me. The reason for the delay? I wouldn’t be able to work with the files in their native format, so Josh turned them into simple mp4 files that I could easily import into my copy of Adobe Premiere and start editing.

There were several dozen files with different scenes, different angles, and different takes. There were voice-overs, reaction shots, B-roll footage…lots to watch through! The first thing I did was to rename each file with titles like “Captain talks to computer in her quarters” and “Fight in Engineering.” That made it easier to go through the script, scene by scene, and assemble the film—like putting the pieces of a puzzle together.

Actually, while the puzzle analogy is mostly relevant for editing, it’s not entirely accurate. A puzzle typically has only one way for the pieces to fit together. But with a film edit, you often have multiple options and combinations of shots, takes, and clip segments you can choose to go with. And no assembly is intrinsically right or wrong—only different—although a good editor can often find cuts that come together more strongly than other assemblies. Indeed, there’s a saying in the film industry that a good edit can save a bad movie and a bad edit can ruin a good movie. In fact, this is even true of the original Star Wars back in 1977, which, as the following video explains, was “saved in the edit”…

Obviously, I’m not comparing a 15-minute fan film to one of the greatest sci-fi films ever created. I’m simply pointing out that editing is an integral element in the ultimate success or failure of the finished project. So with that understanding in mind, I began to piece the puzzle/film together.

We had no VFX ready yet, so I knew those segments needed to be blank inserts describing which CGI shots would be inserted there. The film began with a long captain’s log, which was, fortunately, broken up by the insertion of a brief cutaway scene where the captain of the USS Potemkin says goodbye to captain of the Constitution. It wasn’t a bad scene, per se, but it didn’t really grab the viewer ether. And this is where my first significant editorial decision came about.

As it happened, Josh accidentally handed me the perfect solution without even meaning to. There were a lot of voice-over segments in the film—captain’s log, computer, Klingon commander, Captain Kirk, and the arguing parents at the end—and so many of the files that Josh copied onto the hard drive were audio mp3s. But among those was an audio clip for a completely different Star Trek fan film, THRONE OF ZEUS, of DAN SCANLAN doing an absolutely amazing Scotty impression . There were only two lines: “Scott here,” and “Aye, Scott out.” But those were enough to create a little extra scene over some still-to-be-created VFX where Captain Fairchild interacts would interact directly with Scotty. So I inserted a couple of lines said by myself, intending for Sara McCartney to record those lines later so Josh or I could add them to the final edit. In the end, her mother Ruth (who had final approval) liked the idea, but she wrote alternate lines for a different character, voiced by Josh himself, to say to Scotty. And instead of lengthening the VFX shot, Josh obtained video footage of the transporter from nearby WARP 66 STUDIOS in Northern Arkansas to show during that brief scene.

Another drop-in from WARP 66 was the shot of an empty sickbay. During the scene of Captain Fairchild on the bridge, we had cutaways to an empty corridor and engineering—both shot at Neutral Zone Studios—to show that the ship was deserted. But because we had two consecutive takes of Sara that were slightly out of sync, we would have needed to cut from one shot of Captain Fairchild to a nearly identical angle that didn’t quite match—which would have looked awkward. The fix, of course, is a cutaway shot, and we had the perfect opportunity, as the captain had just called down to sickbay, and we could show that no one was down there, either. We just needed a shot of an empty sickbay, which Josh was able to drive a couple of hours to the studio to get.

While I won’t go into every editorial decision that was made, there are two more that I think are interesting. The first came during the final scene of Cathy’s “Personal Log” in Neutral Zone Studios thanking Captain Kirk. I wanted that to lead directly into the song “You’ve Got to Make Your Own Kind of Music” that would play under the closing credits. Unfortunately, that scene and dialogue goes on for over a minute, and the introduction to that song is only 10 seconds. I reached out to two musicians that I knew who created music for fan films to ask if they could “extend” the song’s introduction, but one wasn’t particularly familiar with guitar (he was more keyboard focused), and the other composer was swamped with work and unavailable.

Figuring that I could always find somebody later on, I wanted to show Josh and Ruth what I had in mind for that scene and I needed something quickly as I was nearly finished with my final edit. So I did something I wasn’t entirely sure about: I went to an A.I. music generator. It took about 25 tries and having to give the prompt increasingly specific instructions beyond “Create a two-minute musical introduction to the 1969 song ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music’ by Cass Elliot.” I had to specify “uplifting” then “mellow and thoughtful leading into uplifting” and details like “acoustic guitar, soft violin, and light drum only” and “NO PAINO!!!!” A.I. can be really stupid and kept throwing in piano…even with the prompt telling it not to! But eventually I got a piece of music that, while not a perfect and seamless introduction, still sounded quite decent. In fact, when Josh and Ruth listened to it, they both agreed that keeping it in the final edit was a good idea.

And finally, there was the question of what to do with the closing credits. Josh had initially intended to end the film like an episode of Star Trek…with a series of still frames with people’s names overlaid. But while this episode STARTED like a TOS episode, it didn’t end that way. And Cass Elliot is a far cry from Trek composer Alexander Courage. Ultimately, I decided to use a series of clips from the fan film itself, which I think ended up working amazingly well. I’m particularly happy with the spot in the credits where the title Second Star to the LEFT appears just as the song lifts up in intensity as it moves into the first chorus. It was my idea to capitalize the word “LEFT” because of its importance in symbolizing something that isn’t seen as quite “right.” Also, the video footage of Captain Fairchild running through the corridors has her going toward the left…just a wee bit of subtlety there.

All in all, I uploaded six different work-in-progress edits to my Google Drive for Josh and Ruth to look at, each with a little more of the timeline completed, and always incorporating their feedback and change requests from the previous iteration. The entire process took about 4-5 weeks. If you’re curious, this is what my sixth and final rough edit looked like…

If you compare it to the finished fan film above, you’ll notice a number of obvious and maybe not-so-obvious changes. Josh added a very nice mix of classic TOS music, VFX, and sound effects. He adjusted the brightness and contrast levels of the video to create a more stark 1960’s “style”look” along with removing stray noises from the set. And as I mentioned, he added his own voice-over to the Scotty scene and increased the reverb on Captain Kirk’s voice-overs. Ruth also wanted to alter some of the on-screen text wording during the transition from past to present and also leading into the closing credits. And a final change was removing the still images of William Shatner’s Captain Kirk (since we’d been listening to the voice-overs of VIC MIGNOGNA from STAR TREK CONTINUES) and replacing those images with close-ups of the command chair which DAN REYNOLDS of WARP 66 Studios was kind enough to grab for Josh at the last minute to save him another multi-hour round trip drive to and from the studio.

All in all, everyone in both the cast and crew, as well as most YouTube viewers appear to be very happy with the results. Second Star to the LEFT debuted on Star Trek‘s 59th anniversary on the Neutral Zone Studios YouTube channel and then five days later on the Avalon Universe YouTube channel—with about 11K views in the first week, almost a thousand likes, and nearly unanimous positive comments.

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Next time, I’ll be featuring a recording of a live interview that Josh did with Ruth and Sara McCartney, Ray Tesi, myself, VFX artist KEITH HAMILTON, and MICHAEL SEAN CARTER discussing the film in much more depth. See you back here for that.