For the fourth week in a row, I’ve got some AXANAR news that’s significant enough to warrant its own blog. And for anyone thinking, “Oh, you talk about Axanar all the time!”—my last Axanar blog prior to mid-January was three months earlier in mid-October.
Anyway, today’s new is actually VERY big, as it deals with Axanar‘s crowd-funding. As many of you are already aware, the legal settlement that ALEC PETERS signed with CBS and Paramount permitting him to produce and release Axanar as two 15-minute fan films does, in fact, allow him to crowd-fund them…and exceed the $50K guideline limit. But Alec isn’t permitted to use a public service like Kickstarter or Indiegogo; he must crowd-fund privately behind a firewall…which can be accessed at the following link:
https://aresdigital.axanar.com/
Alec also cannot publicly solicit donations (although others are allowed to), meaning that Axanar cannot take out advertisements or post the above link on social media, and Alec can’t ask for donations in YouTube videos or during interviews. It’s a challenging constraint, to be certain, but Alec has been diligent to abide by that requirement of the settlement agreement.
And indeed, even being limited to requesting donations only via e-mails to Axanar‘s existing donor list, it’s even more impressive that Alec and his team have been able to raise more than double what even the most successful post-guidelines Star Trek fan films have been able to generate even using public crowd-funding sites and being allowed to solicit donations on social media and elsewhere.
Last Thursday, the Axanar Phase One crowd-funding campaign finally crossed its $50K goal threshold, effectively paying for the first two of the four scheduled shoots—which happened in October and December of last year. The remaining two shoots, currently scheduled for March (previously February) at Ares Studios and April in Los Angeles, will complete all of the live-action scenes necessary to finish the two Axanar sequels. (A potential fifth shoot at a special Los Angeles location is still up in the air at the moment.)
The Ares Studio shoot is fairly minor, just some green screen interviews of Garth and his first officer Tanaka. But the April shoot is major, involving GARY GRAHAM as Soval plus a few other aliens and some humans (KATE VERNON?—no public confirmation on that yet). There will be some significant costs associated with that shoot, including green screen studio rental in L.A. plus prosthetics and make-up.
The estimated budget for these two shoots is around $30K (not yet finalized), and Alec will be launching a Phase Two campaign for that in March, along with debuting the first full Axanar trailer!
Now, you might be asking, “Wasn’t the Phase One goal $60K and not $50K?” Yes, it was. But $10K of that initial figure had been set aside for bridge set construction and materials. But since the bridge set is part of Ares Studios (a separate legal entity from Axanar Productions), and the bridge set is being used by many other productions—including my fan film INTERLUDE, VANCE MAJOR’s CONSTAR CONTINUES this summer, and a series of student films from the Gwinnett County Public School District—that $10K can and will be crowd-funded separately and publicly without violating the settlement.
Anyway, as you might have noticed from the top graphic, the Phase One total is currently $840 over the $50K goal (and still growing steadily). If you’re wondering what will happen to that extra $840 once Phase Two launches, Alec informs me that it and any additional donations from this point will be transferred into the new campaign upon launch, kicking it off with a head start.
So get ready for an exciting March, my friends, as we get our first significant look at the upcoming Axanar sequel films and the race to $30K begins!
In the meantime, the latest Axanar video update is below for even more Axa-news…