Fan Film Features – Page 2

AKIRA YOSHIMURA reprises his role as SULU on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE…41 years later!

Does a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch count as a Star Trek fan film? Aw, who cares? This is still a really fun story…

The earth date was May 29, 1976, and Saturday Night Live (SNL) was about to air the 22nd episode of their first season. The cutting-edge sketch comedy series had become a late night TV hit, and Elliott Gould was the host for that week’s show. The writers had come up with a clever skit (that has since become a true classic) entitled Star Trek: The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise. The legendary JOHN BELUSHI played an over-the-top, Shatneresque Captain James T. Kirk. CHEVY CHASE played a perfectly deadpan Mr. Spock. And the awesome DAN AYKROYD played both Dr. McCoy and provided a voice-over of Scotty on the com from Engineering.

During the skit, the Enterprise is chased by a 1968 Chrysler Imperial with a tinted windshield, registered to a 20th century corporation known as “NBC” (which, according to the ship’s computer, used to manufacture cookies). The starship is boarded by Elliott Gould and Garrett Morris, two executives from the network announcing that Star Trek has been canceled due to low Nielsen ratings. Hilarity ensues…mostly thanks to the brilliant performances of the main actors.

DORIS POWELL as Uhura, CHEVY CHASE as Spock, John BELUSHI as Kirk, and AKIRA YOSHIMURA as Sulu.

There was only one problem at the time: SNL didn’t have an Asian comedian or actor available to play Sulu. Rather than leave the helm seat empty (which wouldn’t work anyway, as Kirk orders evasive action during the sketch), the producers grabbed one of the production designers, a Japanese-American named AKIRA YOSHIMURA, to play Sulu. There also wasn’t a black woman available to play Uhura, so a production assistant named DORIS POWELL was put into a red uniform (with the wrong rank braids). Both people were given a bit of of dialog to speak, although Yoshimura got nearly a dozen lines (and flubbed two of them)…but hey, at least he was willing to be on camera in front of millions of people!

Flash forward to May 6 of 2017. Actor CHRIS PINE (who plays James T. Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek movie series) was the SNL host, and the writers decided to once again feature a Star Trek skit. There was only one problem: it was four decades later and Saturday Night Live STILL didn’t have an Asian comedian or actor available to play Sulu!

Continue reading “AKIRA YOSHIMURA reprises his role as SULU on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE…41 years later!”

2017 Independent Star Trek Film Awards (now the “BJO’s”) WINNERS ANNOUNCED!

Hollywood has the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Golden Globes. Now Star Trek fan films have the Bjos!

Last year at the TREKLANTA Star Trek Convention, the second annual INDEPENDENT STAR TREK FAN FILM AWARDS were presented by none other than BJO TRIMBLE and her husband JOHN TRIMBLE. As most fans know, Bjo Trimble is celebrated as being the woman who saved Star Trek from cancellation in 1968 by organizing the great letter-writing campaign (among other achievements). She told Treklanta organizer ERIC L. WATTS how impressed she was with the entire awards program.

After the ceremony, Eric asked Bjo if she would endorse the awards by allowing them to be named in her honor, and she humbly agreed. So now we get to save a bit of time and typing and just call them “The Bjo’s.”

The 2017 Bjos were presented at and by the Treklanta Star Trek Convention last Sunday in Atlanta, Georgia. The panel of judges included Diana Dru Botsford, Keith R. A. DeCandido, John DeSentis, Matthew M. Foster, Andrew Greenberg, Robert Greenberger, Cheralyn Lambeth and Archie H. Waugh. Each judge had to watch through a combined total of nearly TWELVE HOURS of 33 different Star Trek fan films and rank them in twelve different categories!

The Masters of Ceremonies were Eric L. Watts and Brian Holloway. The presenters included David Gerrold, Gary Graham, J. G. Hertzler and James Horan. The award plaques were sponsored by Lawrence L. Fleming.

All of the entrants for the 2017 awards needed to have been released to the public during calendar year 2016. For a full list of rules, entrants, and winners from previous years, click here.

Eric posted this 15-minute video to announce the winners…along with photos of all of the judges and a full list of film entrants selected for review. But if you’d prefer a quick text summary of just the winners, here it is after some spoiler space…

Continue reading “2017 Independent Star Trek Film Awards (now the “BJO’s”) WINNERS ANNOUNCED!”

MELBOURNE – Interview with VANCE MAJOR OWEN, Part 2

Last time, we took a closer look at the new fan series MELBOURNE, shot at STARBASE STUDIOS and produced by VANCE MAJOR OWEN. This low-budget production has guest cameos from and shout-outs to SEVEN other fan films and series, tying a fair portion of the fan film community together with some shared continuity.

In Part 1 of our interview, Vance talked a bit about his own background as a fan and a filmmaker, and how his experiences with other fan productions led him to create his own. In the conclusion, we discuss more about the Melbourne project itself—its cast, production and post-production, and plans for the future.

So let’s get right to it…

Continue reading “MELBOURNE – Interview with VANCE MAJOR OWEN, Part 2”

ALEC PETERS discusses the new ATLANTA location for AXANAR! (interview)

Yesterday, I was told by several folks to look at this posting from CARLOS PEDRAZA’s Axanamonitor.com blog site. In it, he had had the “scoop” on where the new AXANAR PRODUCTIONS studio would be located, how big it was, the amenities it offered and didn’t offer, and even photos of the outside and inside.

There was only one problem: that WASN’T the new studio. It wasn’t the right building; it wasn’t even the right city! Carlos listed the new location as Gainesville, GA: “…about 55 miles northeast of Atlanta, actually a bit closer to the South Carolina border than to Georgia’s capital.”

Now, I’m not sure where Carlos got his information from, but for the last two weeks, I’ve been preparing an interview with ALEC PETERS about the new Atlanta facility, and I already had a whole bunch of information and photos…and they didn’t match what Carlos had posted at all. This seemed, to me at least, both curious and a bit troubling. One of us had the wrong information…and I really hoped it wasn’t me!

So I contacted Alec. I asked him if he’d made any last-minute changes to the location of the space that he’d be leasing. He said no, he was still leasing the same place—the lease was signed, sealed, and delivered—and no, it was not the same one that Carlos was reporting on Axamonitor.com.

Then I asked Alec if he would mind moving up our interview so I could get the correct information disseminated before people started thinking that Axanar was moving into some dumpy building in an economically depressed town more than an hour away from Atlanta.

DON’T BE FOOLED!!! This building shown on the Axanonitor blog site is NOT the building that Axanar Productions will be moving to. The correct image is the red brick building featured at the top of this web page.

Originally, I was planning to publish my interview with Alec sometime next week when the moving trucks are supposed to arrive. But I heard that Alec has a whole slew of local volunteers lined up to help unload the trucks and unpack things, and to be honest, I was worried that some of the volunteers might get confused and think they’d accidentally shown up at the wrong building…as the one in Carlos’ photo isn’t even the right color!

Anyway, Alec agreed to expedite his answers to my interview questions, and I just received them. So here is the CORRECT information about the new facility in Atlanta…

Continue reading “ALEC PETERS discusses the new ATLANTA location for AXANAR! (interview)”

MELBOURNE – Interview with VANCE MAJOR OWEN, Part 1

At the end of March, a new Star Trek fan production titled MELBOURNE (just that, no “Starship” in front of the name) posted its debut fan film: “Storm Front, Part 1.” One of several fan series shot on the sets of STARBASE STUDIOS (while they were still in their previous Oklahoma City location), Melbourne initially released two ultra-short vignettes, “Pen Pals” and “Pen Pals 2”.) But fans were really waiting for their first full episode to see what this new fan production would be all about.

Most successful Star Trek fan projects have a driving force behind the production, and in the case of Melbourne, that driving force is show-runner/producer/writer VANCE MAJOR OWEN (his friends call him “Vman”), who lives in Kansas with his wife of 17 years and his newborn son, Royce. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Vance for a very friendly interview. In fact, “friendly” is one of the best adjectives I could use to describe this warm and humble film producer from the Sunflower State. Since having our interview, we’ve actually become good friends, have spent hours on the phone talking Trek and swapping “Daddy” stories, and he’s invited me to appear on camera in an upcoming episode of Melbourne anytime I can get myself over to Arkansas (the new home of Starbase Studios).

So here’s what Vance had to say…

Continue reading “MELBOURNE – Interview with VANCE MAJOR OWEN, Part 1”

ALEC PETERS answers READER questions about the AXANAR FINANCIALS!

Last month, I published a blog where I provided a copy of the AXANAR financials, along with reporting on the go-forward plans for AXANAR PRODUCTIONS and INDUSTRY STUDIOS. Obviously, those plans have changed quite a bit over the past few weeks—as Tuesday’s blog pointed out—but the financials remain constant because they’re now a matter of public record.

In that same blog from last month, I also invited readers to submit their own questions for Alec via the comments section and received dozens of inquiries. It was a mix of questions from supporters and detractors, some about the financials and some about other things, but I submitted every one to ALEC PETERS, requesting that he try to respond to as many participants as he could.

It’s been a busy few weeks to be certain (with the Indiegogo campaign and finding new studio space in Atlanta). But a few days ago, Alec submitted his answers back to me. And so, without further ado, let’s see what he had to say…

Continue reading “ALEC PETERS answers READER questions about the AXANAR FINANCIALS!”

STAR TREK CONTINUES releases new BLOOPER/GAG REEL!

Bloopers. Gag reels. Behind-the-scenes flubs. Call them what you will, but they’ve been a part of the Star Trek fan experience since the 1970s when Gene Roddenberry first began bringing his TOS “blooper reel” to conventions to show hilarious outtakes by Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, and the rest of the original cast to fans in the audience.

The tradition continued with The Next Generation, and I recall owning bootlegged copies of both blooper reels on VHS tapes that I bought at cons in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The reason these outtakes are so special and treasured isn’t simply because they’re funny but because they give fans a glimpse into who these beloved actors and producers were as people…people who make mistakes and can laugh at themselves, cut loose sometimes, and have fun.

Not all fan films collect their bloopers and release them. Some don’t even have time to do multiple takes of the same scene. Others simply have collections of goofs and flubs. But the best of the gag reels contain just that: gags. It’s not just the missed cues and forgotten lines. Sometimes the actors know they’re going to have to do another take, and so they just go with it and have fun playing with the scene. And if we’re lucky, hilarity ensues while the camera is still rolling.

Such is the case with Star Trek Continues. They have edited together and released hysterically entertaining gag reels for all but their second episode. (You can view all seven gag reel videos at the bottom section of this web page.)

It’s no secret that I love this particular fan series and lament its impending conclusion in the coming year. But I don’t love STC only because of the great episodes it produces. I love it because of what I see on their gag reels.

I’ve worked on fan films, and it can be tedious, mind-numbing, stressful, exhausting, frustrating, irritable, and even confrontational. But it can also be a lot of fun. In fact, if it weren’t for the FUN, I can’t imagine why anyone would ever do it! STC‘s gag reels show us the camaraderie that can exist at the core of fan productions. Sure, the actors and crew work hard—incredibly hard!—but they play hard, too. They laugh at themselves, play practical jokes on each other, and keep their sense of humor through the seemingly endless late-into-the-night hours when shoots can shift between moving at a snail’s pace to a manic sprint in the span of seconds.

So I invite you to join me and others in celebrating Star Trek Continues in that most special of ways: sharing their laughter…

TRISTAN Production Crew releases new episode: “THE MONSTERS ARE WITH US”!

The folks at POTEMKIN PICTURES currently have two production teams actively releasing new Star Trek fan films. The DEIMOS production crew has released four episodes so far, ranging from 6 to 15 minutes. And the TRISTAN production crew (based in Pelham, Alabama where show-runner RANDY LANDERS lives) has just released their eighth episode: “The Monsters Are With Us.”

Like the rest of the several dozen films released over the past seven years by Potemkin Pictures, their budgets are meager, their costumes simple, and their sets minimal. Their cast members are recruited from local drama programs at nearby colleges and from community theater actors. But their stories have always been their strength, that this latest offering is no exception. It’s a fun little exploration of first contact gone screwy, with a compelling mystery that doesn’t get resolved until the end. I think that, given the right conditions, a story concept such as this one could have been expanded into the A-story of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Instead, we get a 14-minute, low-budget fan film with lots of heart.

It’s also worth noting that both Potemkin Pictures production teams have recently begun incorporating green screen compositing of actors against static backgrounds. Although this method of placing characters into virtual “sets” has been used extensively in numerous fan films since the first episodes of Star Trek: Hidden Frontier back in 2000, the Potemkin Pictures production teams have relied almost exclusively on practical (physical) sets like a bridge and transporter platform, and on-location filming both indoors and outside. I believe “The Monsters Are With Us” marks Team Tristan’s first foray into green screen, using it this time to create virtual corridors inside the Constellation-class starship Tristan.

You can watch the latest production below…

RENEGADES releases the trailer for “THE REQUIEM, PART 2” and seeks $80,000!

By now, you’re probably aware of how Star Trek: Renegades became RENEGADES: THE SERIES on the day the new fan film guidelines were announced…and how they surgically removed all traces of Star Trek from their Star Trek fan film.

But the show must go on! And filming completed for both Parts 1 and 2 of the first full episode of Renegades, “The Requiem,” after the release of the initial 90-minute pilot.

Starring Walter Koenig as an aging admiral named “Pavel” with a strong Russian accent, Nichelle Nichols as another unnamed admiral, and Tim Russ (who also directed it) as the Confederation Security Chief Kovok—plus a half dozen other Star Trek acting veterans from various series—“The Requiem, Part 1” was already completed and released and can be viewed here.

Now the time has come to finish post-production on Part 2, and that means another round of crowd-funding. Their first round of crowd-funding for “The Requiem” (called episodes 2 and 3 at the time) came via Kickstarter at the end of 2015 and raised more than $378,000! That covered production (sets, costumes, make-up, actors, production crew, equipment, studio, etc.) but not post-production (visual effects, sound, music, color balancing, editing, etc.).

A separate crowd-funding campaign for post-production was held using Indiegogo last August with a goal of $60,000 for “The Requiem, Part 1” and $150,00 for the completion of both episodes. And they nearly made it! A total of $138,580 was raised…allowing them to complete and release “Part 1” and nearly complete Part 2.

So let’s see, doing the math, Renegades needed $150,000 and raised just over $138,000. So that leaves…$80,000??? Yeah, you were probably gonna say $12,000, but this is crowd-funding math!

Aw, I’m just teasing…although Renegades really is asking for another $80,000. But like certain other fan productions (you know the one I’m talking about), when you’ve done successful crowd-funding, there’s always room for scope-creep, and Renegades is promising lots more than originally planned:

We are seeking post-production funding to expand and finish our visual FX work, and to finish up the audio, mixing and color correction. This campaign will also allow us to add many new VFX shots to enhance the story and dramatically increase the visual production value – if you’ve viewed part one, you’ve seen what an amazing job the team has done with the effects! Renegades: the Requiem is so close to public release, and we are eager to offer the dramatic conclusion to the film. Spoiler alert: the Renegades universe will never be the same!

You can donate by clicking on this link.

This time out, they’re doing their own internal crowd-funding campaign (no Kickstarter or Indiegogo) with some great perks. And in just two days, they’re already raised more than 10% of their goal! Please consider making a donation if you can.

And if you’re on the fence, this trailer for Part 2 should definitely put you in the mood to open your wallet!

VOYAGER CONTINUES releases its latest short episode “DERELICT”!

In the genre of Star Trek fan films, the universe (quadrant?) of the series Voyager is a rare setting. But one stalwart fan believes that the indomitable Intrepid-class starship, lost for seven years in the Delta Quadrant, is the perfect subject matter for a Trek fan production.

I interviewed David Whitney of STARFLEET STUDIOS as he was completing post-production on his first VOYAGER CONTINUES project: STAR TREK: RAVEN, which debuted last October as a 32-minute fan film. That film concentrated on events in the Alpha Quadrant during the time that Voyager was missing but ended with a scene on Voyager itself.

Now, half a year later, David just released his second effort, a 9-minute short film titled “Derelict.” This one focuses on two members of the crew—Harry Kim and Seven-of-Nine—on board a, you guessed it, derelict spacecraft. And while Raven used mostly green screen sequences where actors were composited against virtual backgrounds created in CGI, “Derelict” uses practical (physical) sets with consoles that had originally been created for and used by the television series Stargate Atlantis! (Those were provided to David Whitney by Glen L. Wolfe of the Trek fan series The Federation Files.)

“Derelict” a relatively small production, with only two actors who appear on screen along with two brief voice-over sequences. One of the voice-overs is a captain’s log from Kathryn Janeway that will stop you in your tracks wondering if a fan film somehow managed to convince Kate Mulgrew to appear! But in fact, it’s actually the voice of a male actor named Liam Holwarth-Mulgrew (he legally changed his name to add the “Mulgrew”) who does one of the best Janeway impressions you’ve ever heard.

Starfleet Studios is based in Iowa and doesn’t have the resources that some other fan productions do—like elaborate studios and professional or semi-professional actors and production crew. In fact, “Derelict” was filmed almost entirely in a garage! That said, if you celebrate fan films as I do, then you view projects like this for all that they DO accomplish, often with very limited budgets and resources.

So take a look…