Blog Entries – Page 12 – Fan Film Factor

STRANGE NEW WORLDS avoids nearly every OUTDATED COMPLAINT in its SEASON 2 debut! (editorial review)

Pick a complaint…any complaint! A complaint about what? About any of the new CBS Studios-produced Star Treks. Goodness knows, there have been many—complaints that is, although there have been five series. Granted, LOWER DECKS and PRODIGY have been generally well-received, but DISCOVERY and PICARD have certainly struggled.

And while most fans would argue that Picard’s third and final season was the best and strongest Trek effort thus far of the “new era” (I will forgo using the term “Nu-Trek,” as it has taken on a negative connotation in certain circles), even Picard‘s latest masterpiece drew a few complaints along the way (cough, too dark).

So pick a complaint. And let’s see how the season two debut of STRANGE NEW WORLDS, “The Broken Circle,” measured up…

TOO DARK? NOPE!

Oh, why not give me something harder to start with! While SNW isn’t as brightly lit as TNG was, it’s by far brighter than either Discovery or Picard. The amount of care and detail that went into building those beautiful SNW sets and wonderfully colorful costumes is never hidden from view. And honestly, Star Trek has always had very strong lighting—perhaps a little too strong on TNG from time to time—and even the later “darker” series like DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise still showed wonderful detail and vibrance….harkening back to the days of TOS when color television was just emerging and bright lights and color saturation the cinematographers’ prime directive.

Discovery was too dark from the moment we first saw that bridge, and Picard certainly didn’t help alleviate the problem. But SNW checks (or Treks) the light box perfectly. Next!

Here are the 2023 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARD entries for BEST SHORT SCENE…

While all of the fan film award competitions feature categories that are common to every contest—like best fan film, best director, best actor, best music, etc.—what makes life extra interesting are categories that are unique to each competition. For example, the DIRECTORS CHOICE AWARDS have categories for Best Ensemble Cast and Best Portrayal of an Existing Character…categories that other fan film contests don’t offer.

In the case of the SHOWRUNNER AWARDS, we just added four new categories this year for Best Props, Best Original Set Design, Funniest Fan Film, and Most Clever Easter Egg. But returning from last year is one of our most unique categories—and one of my personal favorites!—Best Short Scene. This award is for a single sequence from a fan film that is two minutes or shorter, a sequence that is particularly exciting or gripping or dramatic or memorable. The standout elements can be the acting, writing, directing, editing, VFX, music, or any combination. The question is: which short scene does a judge find to be most impactful?

Last year, we had ten fan films that entered submissions into this category. This year, only five submissions came in for Best Scene, but they are each excellent! And best of all, each has a 60% chance of winning an award because we present an Admiral Award, Captain Award, and Commander Award in each category. (Remember that for next year, fan filmmakers: enter a short scene for a good chance at winning!)

I’ve just started creating the online ballot for the judges to record their votes in each of our 22 categories (that is a lot of work for both me to make the form and them to watch everything and fill it out!). And I need a convenient place for them to access all the short scenes in one place. What could be more convenient than a blog page, right?

If you’d like to view all of this year’s 23 fan film entries in their entirety, click here. But now net’s take a look at the five submissions for this year’s Best Short Scene, in alphabetical order by fan film…

From DOOMSDAY…

From THE NEEDS OF THE ONE…

From OUTBREAK…

From RESISTANCE…

From YORKTOWN: A TIME TO HEAL…

My son JAYDEN just graduated from SIXTH GRADE!

Wait a second…isn’t this a blog about Star Trek fan films??? What does Jonathan’s kid have to do with that?

Nothing at all whatsoever! So if you’re not interested in what I have to say as a proud father, feel free to skip this one. Most likely, it’ll just get views from family members and a few friends, and I’m fine with that. Y’see, Jayden knows I spend a lot of time blogging about fan films. But today I am going to blog about him.

Wednesday night, after his final day at Echo Horizon School after seven years, Jayden came into the kitchen as I was finishing making his dinner. As he walked to the refrigerator to get his milk, he said, “I’m sorry for growing up.”

Whoa.

On the one hand, yes, the last twelve and a half years have flown by at warp speed, and that tiny premie newborn that we brought home to Los Angeles from Shreveport, LA has grown nearly as tall as his old man and is already towering over his Mommy! But apologizing for growing up? No way!

I told Jayden that he never needed to apologize for growing up because he’s becoming such an incredible person…and Mommy and I get to be a part of it all. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to both of us.

And to inject a little Star Trek into this indulgently non-Trek blog, I see Jayden right now as my own little Deep Space Nine. What does that mean? Starting at the age of four, Jayden and I began watching Star Trek together…and one of my greatest blessings has been that he LOVES it. It’s one of our “things.” We watched TOS, TAS, TOS again (because he was too young when we first watched it to remember), TNG, the TOS and Generations movies in chronological order, and now we’re into season four of DS9 and about to start season two of Voyager.

3-year-old Cadet Jayden with Daddy at Starfleet Academy.

Jayden at age 5 sitting on the U.S.S. Ares bridge…still under construction.

Jayden absolutely ADORES Deep Space 9, although he’s lukewarm at best on Voyager (I’m kinda the same way, but we’re trudging on through the series). We just watched “The Way of the Warrior” and “The Visitor,” and as most fans of DS9 know, season four was the beginning of the four-season Dominion War arc. Therefore, I know what’s coming, and I am so looking forward to sharing those next 100-or-so episodes with him. And yes, we’ll need to get through Voyager‘s “Threshold” and debate whether “Tuvix” should have been separated, but Jayden will also get to meet Seven-of-Nine before too long and see other decent Voyager episodes that bring back Barclay and Troi. Jayden will ask me if Harry Kim will ever get promoted, and I’ll say, “Watch and find out!” (BWHAHAHHAHAH!) He’ll watch Sisko toast to his own tainted moral compass “In the Pale Moonlight,” discover Vic Fontaine, Weyoun, and see Gul Dukat’s descent into madness.

In other words, we’ve shared so much together, but so much more is coming our way! And that’s how I feel about Jayden himself. So let me tell you a little about this incredible person…

At long last, STALLED TREK: “THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FORECLOSURE” is released onto YouTube!

Putting the “stall” into STALLED TREK, showrunner/writer/animator/voice-actor/comedic genius MARK LARGENT finished creating his second puppet parody adaptation of a classic TOS episode, “THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FORECLOSURE” way back in June of 2021. But with the exception of those hundred-plus donors who contributed to his Kickstarter in mid-2018 and his follow-up Indiegogo campaign in early 2021 and received DVD/Blu-ray versions of the new fan film, no other fan(s) saw it…unless they attended one of 28 film festivals where “City” was an official selection.

And indeed, that is why Mark has held out releasing the film onto YouTube for so long. Many of those film festivals required submissions to NOT be available on YouTube. And so, Mark kept “COTEF” (his abbreviation) off of the Internet for nearly two years! The restraint and self-control paid off, however, as COTEF has gone on to earn a total of FIFTEEN awards. Take a look…

Wow, right?

Anyway, with one last hurrah as COTEF won BEST ANIMATED COMEDY SHORT at the MIAMI INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL, Mark finally decided to, without much fanfare, to post the hilarious puppet parody with the time-displacing rock donut onto the Internet. And you can watch it here…

Mark’s first foray into the 3D animation odyssey that is Star Trek puppet parodies came back in 2012 with the release of the first Stalled Trek, an adaptation of fan favorite TOS episode “Amok Time” titled “AMUTT TIME” (read my interview with Mark about that fan film here.) The gag in the title was that Mr. Spott was a Vulcanine and was going into heat, needing to return home to his betrothed T’Pomerian. If you loved what you just saw above, you’ll love what’s below just as much…

But wait, that’s not all!

After doing the aforementioned interview with Mark back in early 2016, we began talking about AXANAR and the CBS/Paramount lawsuit. This led to an idea for a parody of both PRELUDE TO AXANAR and the lawsuit itself. Mark and I quickly came up with a script, I supplied a few of the voices, and Mark did his usual lion’s share of the 3D modeling, animating, and render to create a Stalled Trek parody not of a TOS episode but of a fan film being sued for copyright infringement! You can check that one out here…

But wait, there’s even more Stalled Trek!

After raising over $4K in the 2018 Kickstarter, Mark learned that his go-to 3D application, Animation:Master, would no longer be supported for Macintosh, and Mark didn’t have the funds nor desire to purchase and transition to a Windows PC. Instead, Mark switched over to the open-source (i.e. free!) Blender 3D allowing him to remain on a Mac AND, as it happened, render his animated footage about 30 times faster!

The only problem was that he now needed to learn the new software as well as to import and/or recreate all of his characters and settings into the new 3D platform…

Oh, yeah? Well, who asked YOU…?!?! (editorial)

I don’t usually write blogs about trolls, but I’m not entirely certain that “CHUCK IN TEXAS” knows he’s a troll. It’s possible that he actually believes he’s being helpful in some way. So in an attempt to be “helpful” to this fellow myself—in the same way he was—I am writing this blog with the hope that somehow, some way, Chuck will read it.

Wait, who the heck is Chuck???

Last week, “Chuck in Texas” posted a separate criticizing comment on nearly every fan film on the AVALON UNIVERSE YouTube Channel. I have a screen cap of one of them…

The other comments were of a similar tone, critiquing everything from the quality of the wig worn by the Vulcan nurse T’Prin to the type of lenses that JOSHUA IRWIN was using to the shoot those films. After a few of these comments, Josh responded that he felt that Chuck was being rude. Chuck ignored Josh’s responses and kept right on posting.

“He was addressing me like I was a teenager who had never made a film before,” Josh told me, “saying obvious things like ‘Choreograph your fight scenes!!’ and ‘Invest in a real makeup crew!!’ and telling me to shoot more than one take….like I’m not already doing that.”

Eventually, after being ignored and just seeing more and more belittling posts popping up like mushrooms, Josh blocked “Chuck from Texas”—which effectively removed all of Chuck’s comments from the videos. “I don’t mind constructive criticism,” ” says Josh, “and in fact, if you look at the comments on my fan films, you’ll see a lot of that. But if someone is being rude or nasty, that’s just uncalled for.”

Normally, I’d completely ignore a story like this because such condescending criticism is a fact of life on social media, and Josh dispatched this guy quickly and without incident. But then I thought about it a bit more and realized that this could become a “teachable moment”…possibly for Chuck in Texas if he reads this but at least for others who watch Star Trek fan films and decide to be armchair filmmakers themselves.

Am I saying that no one should ever be allowed to express negative feedback of a fan film? Of course not! The world is full of people, and people have opinions. My issue is with the sanctimonious approach to telling someone how to “fix” their fan film. In short, unless you’ve made a better fan film yourself, you really don’t have a right to tell others how they should have made theirs. And you wanna know something funny? People who have made fan films do NOT offer unsolicited and condescending advice like that. They just don’t.

People who manage to produce fan films of their own realize what it takes to complete a project, and they (typically) offer their respect to other filmmakers. The anonymous “Chuck in Texas” offered no such respect, which leads me to conjecture that he has never completed a film production of his own. And perhaps that’s why he wanted to “help” with advice rather than doing any real work or having to make hard choices.

What kind of hard choices, you ask…?

The 2023 SHOWRUNNER AWARDS now have their final 21 entries!

Submissions for this year’s Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS are now complete. It feels like only yesterday when I announced the entrants for last year’s inaugural competition! (Well, maybe not yesterday…but certainly not a full year ago!!!) For our previous running, we had a whopping 38 Star Trek fan films submitted, totaling just a smidge under 13 hours of viewing time for our twelve judges.

This year, our number of entrants is a smidge below two-thirds of that: 21 fan films. That lower total isn’t too surprising to me. Last year, a quarter of our submissions came from one person, VANVE MAJOR, who decided to enter TEN of his CONSTAR saga fan films! Vance, who announced his final retirement from Star Trek fan filmmaking last year, has decided to sit it out this time, which is fine.

Other fan films like SQUADRON, THE HOLY CORE, BEYOND THE SUN, AGENT OF NEW WORLDS, PACIFIC 201, INTERLUDE, STAR TREK: FIRST FRONTIER, and CHANCE ENCOUNTER won enough awards last year that their creators didn’t feel the need to enter again, as a fan film is only allowed to win once in any specific category. One fan films has returned this year for a second chance at the winners’ circle, but most haven’t, resulting in fewer entries.

And speaking of entering the same film multiple times, I’m considering shortening the window of eligibility from 5 years to something less, like only 2 or 3 years. I still feel strongly that fan films should get at least one extra chance to compete, rather than being eligible in only a single year. But while the first year’s submissions spanned the full five years of eligibility (2017-2021), all but 3 of our 21 submissions for this year were for fan films released during the previous calendar year of 2022. It’s certainly something for the judges and me to discuss going into 2024’s contest, but feel free to chime in with a blog comment or e-mail to me your thoughts.

In the meantime, I am very excited about this year’s entrants because there will be ample more widely-competitive categories this time. Last year cleared out many of the “giants” (from a whole bunch of years) that were, admittedly, extremely hard to compete against. But that leaves this year with a significantly more level playing field.

So while the judges have only about 60% as many films to watch and judge this year (and only 5 and 2/3 hours needed to view them all), I suspect that judging those submissions is going to be MUCH harder. We shall see.

Like last year, the winners will be announced on Star Trek‘s anniversary of September 8, 2023. There are 22 categories this year, with three winners in each category: Admiral, Captain, and Commander level. I salute all of our 21 entrants for 2023, and I wish each of them the best of luck and encourage you, the reader, to watch as many as you can…

R.I.P. – STEVE “KORATH” ATWELL (1967-2023)

It is always a sad moment for the Star Trek fan film community when one of our own embarks on a final journey to what Shakespeare called “…the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Earlier this week, cosplayer STEVE ATWELL, who played the role of the Klingon Korath in multiple episodes of VANCE MAJOR’s CONSTAR CHRONICLES saga, passed away at the too-young age of 56 after battling an illness that he could not defeat.

Vance contacted me yesterday to ask if I would write a blog about Steve and noting his passing. Unfortunately, I did not know Steve and never even met him, and aside from watching his performances as Korath and occasional appearances on the CRITICAL NOT CYNICAL video podcast, I knew nothing about this unique man. So I suggested that Vance, who was quite close to Steve as both director and friend, write Steve’s eulogy, and I would publish it here.

I now turn the blog over to Vance Major…

My loyalty is to my house, as your loyalty is….

– Krorath (“Much Afraid”)

How do you sum up the life of one man into a few paragraphs? You can’t. Something is going to be overlooked. All I can tell you is what Steve Atwell meant to me and his impact on this community. He is known by so many of us as “Fan Films’ Greatest Klingon” for a reason: he lived the part so much.

I met Steve a few years ago at TOPCON when STARBASE STUDIOS had been part of the event, and I was asked to help out with the bridge there. As people from every fanbase walked by, I noticed this cosplay of a Klingon that was so detailed that I had to know who guy was.

I followed Steve around for a while before approaching him, as he is a pretty intimidating guy…especially in Klingon garb! But he was so warm and receptive to me and my questions. We discussed what I was doing in fan films and his involvement in cosplay and exchanged information.

It was a little over a year before I actually was able to get him into a film, as I was still new to creating my films at the time. But he took to it really well, and we became fast friends. I trusted him to change dialog if it didn’t fit what a Klingon would say, as he was not just an actor, he was a guy with experience with Klingon culture. It stemmed from cosplaying for years as the character of Krorath. He lived this. When I brought Steve on, it was not me making the character of Krorath for him, it was more like we were bringing his character of Krorath from cosplay into the fan films, and it worked. We had a trust that I began to put on screen that was very much behind our characters…a bond, if you will.

MEET THE JUDGES for the 2023 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS!

If you haven’t entered your Star Trek fan film(s) yet, the deadline is coming up in just over two weeks! Click here for the submission form page…

https://www.cognitoforms.com/JonathanLane1/_2023StarTrekFanFilmSHOWRUNNERAWARDS

Last year, the Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS had a FANtastic panel of twelve judges (including yours truly) who reviewed and voted on 38 submitted fan films. They all did a spectacular job!

Unfortunately, not everyone was available for a second year, and a few had to step down. But as they say, whenever a captain closes a hangar bay door, somewhere he/she/they open a viewport—or something like that. As such, I was able to replace the departing judges with new judges, some of them new to the world of fan filmmaking, others experienced veterans. And all of them, of course, remain showrunners of either a Star Trek fan film or series.

A showrunner plays a special role in the production. Sometimes they are also the writer and/or director and/or producer and/or a whole slew of other positions. But the most important thing about a showrunner is that they are where the buck stops. They are the central force that inspires, manages, coordinates, and motivates the team to finish the project. Yes, others involved in the project can also make sure that things get worked on and completed, but most often, the showrunner is the main person that a production cannot live without.

As such, showrunners tend to know about all aspects of filmmaking (or, like me, they were forced to learn fast!). So even if they don’t have enough skills or expertise to tackle every task themselves, they work closely enough with those who do to make sure they have the resources they need to get their specific job(s) done. And that’s why they make such great judges for fan films.

It’s no small commitment to agree to be a judge in a film competition. One needs to watch perhaps a dozen or more hours of the work of others—and watch carefully enough to remember (or take notes on) specific strengths and weaknesses in performance, technical production, and a host of other items in what will be, this year, a total of 22 separate categories! As a reminder, each judge submits their top five choices in descending order for each category, and they cannot vote for any of their own fan films as their top three slots.

And so, in appreciation and acknowledgement of their invaluable assistance in making these awards both effective and successful, I would like to take a blog moment to spotlight these talented fans who have each worked so hard to bring the labors or themselves and their teams to your computer screen.

In alphabetical order…

Unexpected fan filmmaking happens among the California wildflower SUPERBLOOM!

Wildflower season in Southern California usually peaks during a short window from mid-March through late-April, but it isn’t always a dazzling display. Many factors can affect the bloom, the amount of winter rain being the most obvious, but there’s also temperature (too much heat will dry up the flowers quickly), highs winds (too much blows away the petals), ongoing drought conditions, too many little critters chowing down, and even whether the previous year “used up” most of the dormant seeds under the ground.

This past winter, as you probably saw on the news, was a record-breaker for most of the West Coast and especially California…and MUCH needed! And despite the flooding and mudslides and people in the mountains having to climb out their their second story windows just to escape their homes under 25 feet of snow, all that water is precious after half a decade of way-below-average rainfall and severe drought.

And obviously, the wildflowers LOVE all that water!

As such, many folks in and around Southern California were crossing our fingers, hoping for a decent bloom and perhaps even one of those rare treats: a SUPERbloom. The last one of those we had was back in 2019, and it was a doozy! I myself got photos that year that looked like this…

Oh, did I mention I’m a nature photographer in addition to being a Trekkie? And I’m just as obsessed with both! During some superbloom years, I’ve driven literally thousands of miles in a matter of a few weeks, criss-crossing the map of Southern California going to all sorts of secret and not-so-secret places to photograph these beauties. All of the above images were taken in the Antelope Valley, part of the Mojave Desert near the town of Lancaster.

As it happens, a fan filmmaker named MATTHEW BLACKBURN, the creator the SURVIVOR series of Trek fan films, lives in the Antelope Valley. And back in 2019 while I was taking the above photos, he and his wife Katie were driving along Highway 138 when they saw the most magnificent field of orange poppies and another field of yellow coreopsis carpeting a grove of Joshua trees. Always thinking like a filmmaker, Matt stopped the car and changed into a Deep Space Nine jacket and tunic that was in his trunk (’cause we all have a Starfleet uniform in our trunk, right?). Katie was used to being Matt’s camera person, and they shot footage of him walking through the two fields, looking around, and falling backwards into the wildflowers. At the time, Matt had no idea what the footage would be used for, but at least he’d have it.

Ultimately, those clips made their way into LOST AND FOUND, a Star Trek fan film that Matt released two and a half years later in late 2021. The wildflower scenes appear during a hallucinogenic mind-scape sequence as Matt’s captain character battles a psychic entity trying to take control of him. You can see those shots beginning at 5:33 in the video below…

Could the WGA WRITERS STRIKE spell TROUBLE for the future of live-action STAR TREK??? (editorial)

Two things happened last week that could potentially affect the future of live-action Star Trek…and not in a good way. The first is that, at 12:01am on May 2, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) labor union, representing 11,500 writers, went on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The last such strike happened in 2007-2008 and lasted 100 days.

Remember that number, because it’s important, and I will discuss it shortly.

The following morning, Paramount Global—which owns CBS, Nickelodeon, and the Paramount movie studio…and holds the rights to Star Trek—announced its earnings to shareholders for the first quarter of 2023. The news wasn’t good. By the close of the NASDAQ on that same Wednesday afternoon, Paramount share prices had dropped more than $6 (or upwards of 28%) from the previous day…which is a huge loss for investors and in market capitalization for the company.

Now, before anyone jumps up and starts blaming ALEX KURTZMAN for this, the bad earnings statement is not his fault. In fact, Paramount+ added 4.1 million new streaming subscribers during the first quarter, reaching a total of 60 million worldwide. While that’s certainly less than the 160 million subscribers internationally for Disney+, the latter has just experienced a slight drop in the most recent quarter while Paramount+‘s subscriber base has continued a steady growth. The issue for Paramount isn’t viewership. Instead, there’s what CEO BOB BAKISH called a perfect storm of “peak streaming investment intersect(ing) with fiscal ad softness.” In other words, there’s a scramble at the moment to load up on content for Paramount+ (spending a LOT of money to produce new streaming shows), while at the same time, advertisers aren’t exactly diving in yet to purchase ad time on the streaming service (less revenue).

There are also other systemic problems that Paramount had long before Alex Kurtzman ever got involved with Star Trek, and the movie studio along with CBS have both struggled financially for decades. Most recently, Paramount had only one major theatrical blockbuster hit in 2022 (Top Gun: Maverick) with $718 million gross ticket sales, three movies in the $100 million range, and the rest only in the the tens of millions. (See the full list here.) Granted, all of the Hollywood film studios are struggling at the moment as movie box office revenue is declining worldwide with the rise of streaming services—which is why so many studios like Paramount have been throwing money into launching new projects.

Indeed, that is the main reason that ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) inked a jaw-dropping $160 million 5-year contract extension with Alex Kurtzman and his Secret Hideout production company. The idea was that Kurtzman would continue bringing out new Star Trek shows through at least 2026. Other streaming services like Disney+, Netflix, AmazonPrime, Apple+, and HBOMax were likewise spending like drunken sailors on content development, and announcements of new series and new seasons of returning series seemed to come almost weekly!

Then a harsh reality set in…