Ah, scope creep…
You’ve got your budget, the money is available, but suddenly you realize that you want to do something really AWESOME, and now you need more money. It happens all the time in Hollywood. It’s happened to Star Trek multiple times. It happens for Marvel movies and other blockbusters. It’s happened to fan films like Renegades, Space Command, and Axanar. And now it’s happening to the Deep Space Nine documentary WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND.
It’s not like producer/show-runner IRA STEVEN BEHR and director ADAM NIMOY just squeaked by with their Indiegogo campaign last year. Not only did they exceed their initial goal of $150,000…they more than QUADRUPLED it with nearly $650,000! They even blew past four different stretch goals along the way.
So why do they need even more money now, just months away ? I’ll let Ira Behr explain it…
So that’s the story. The resampled footage looks amazing, incredible, AWESOME! There’s five minutes of clips from various episodes that now appears in glorious, vibrant, and crystal clear high definition.
But there’s also 15 minutes of standard definition footage, captured from the same DVDs you probably have on your shelf or the episodes you watch on Netflix or All Access. The problem is that, because the HD footage looks so good, the SD footage palls in comparison and makes the viewer think, “Why do some of the clips look so crappy?”
Unfortunately, although TOS and TNG were digitally remastered to HD from the original film negatives, the same treatment is highly unlikely for DS9. The process is expensive (even more so for DS9…as Robert Meyer Burnett explains in this interview), and the TNG remastered Blu-ray sets didn’t sell nearly as well as expected, so CBS is unlikely to throw more money down the Bajoran wormhole.
And thus, this is pretty much the one shot fans have to get more footage from DS9 remastered. Sure, it won’t be all seven seasons, but even another 15 minutes sure would be nice.
The documentary makers are now taking new donations for the remastering exclusively through their website. For $50, you get a special challenge coin. But for $500—and this is REALLY cool!—your name will appear superimposed over the remastered footage. Take a look…
To donate (or donate again!), visit their website:
Really cool! See the actor without the makeup and recognize the character is cool. Now I will be able to recognize the actor in the character! Rsrsrrs
That bottle of Kanar really pops in HD!
Doesn’t it, though? 🙂
There is NO SUCH THING as too much HD DS9 footage!! 🙂
True dat! 🙂
They should ask CBS to fund the HD footage. That way, CBS could use it as an opportunity to gage how much fans really want an HD version of DS9.
CBS doesn’t donate to fan productions.
No, they just sue them.
In all fairness to CBS, 99.8% of the time they don’t…one lawsuit in about 500 fan film releases (that’s a rough estimate that assumes fan series with multiple episodes are separate fan films). There might even be more than 500 Star Trek fan films out there, Jason; I just haven’t found ’em all, yet! If so, then it might actually be 99/9% that CBS doesn’t sue.
I guess I WAS being pithy. My bad.
“Pithy” and I are old adversaries. 🙂
Is a documentary technically a fan production?
Man, it THAT a loaded question!
The one fan film ever to be sued by CBS and Paramount was created in a mock documentary format. So I’m gonna go with the answer: “Why, yes…yes it is.” 🙂
That said, the DS9 documentary is being made using multi-tens of thousands of dollars in licensed footage from CBS, and it’s being produced by professions. But professions can be fans, too, and since CBS refused to make a DS9 documentary themselves, it was left to others–fans of the series–to step up and make the doc instead. So again, yeah, fan film.