455 Films – Fan Film Factor

TO THE JOURNEY – LOOKING BACK AT STAR TREK: VOYAGER premiered Thursday night at PARAMOUNT in Hollywood! (report and review)

Back in early 2021, 455 Films, the folks who brought fans FOR THE LOVE OF SPOCK and DEEP SPACE NINE: WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND, held a new crowd-funding campaign for their third Star Trek-themed documentary film, TO THE JOURNEY – LOOKING BACK AT STAR TREK: VOYAGER. The previous two productions each took in about $650K from donors. But the Voyager documentary blasted past those numbers, doubling total contributions with more than $1.3 million from 12.4K backers—plus an additional $50K from a second Indiegogo in 2022 funding a series of special theatrical premieres when the film was completed.

Three premieres are happening this month, the first of which took place on Thursday night at the Paramount Theater at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The second will be next Tuesday in New York City on the upper West Side (in the same space that houses The Leonard Nimoy Theater), and the final one will take place in London at the Princess Anne Theatre on November 21.

If you don’t have tickets for these premieres yet, you likely won’t be able to get them (at least, not cheaply!), as they were offered exclusively to donors and were gone pretty quickly! Indeed, I missed my opportunity a few months ago by waiting too long. However, my good friend (and fan film donor-tuned-producer-turned-actor) RAY MYERS had an extra ticket and offered it to me. In exchange, I offered Ray our guest bedroom to save on hotel costs while he’s in Los Angeles (Ray lives near Dallas, TX). And thanks to a series of severe tornadic storms rolling through the central Texas on Friday, all return flights into Dallas were canceled, and I get to host my friend a whole extra day!

Behind us in the distance is Stage 4, one of four soundstages that housed the Deep Space Nine sets. Stage 4 included Ops, corridors, and quarters.

No sooner had Ray and I arrived at Paramount at 6pm Thursday—me in my Picard season 3 jacket and Fan Film Factor shirt; Ray dressed much more casually and debonaire—than I noticed L.A.-based fan filmmaker DAVID CHENG, also wearing a Picard season 3 jacket…

So yeah, we matched. And quite a few attendees came in uniform to the premiere, ranging from TNG to Voyager to First Contact to Picard-era—along with some creative variants. Ray was put to work almost immediately checking in people by a friend of his who was one of the event organizers….

If the interior of the Paramount Theater looks familiar, you probably remember it as the Coalition of Planets’ meeting chamber from the penultimate episode of ST: Enterprise, “Terra Prime.”

That gave David and me a chance to hang out in the lobby, chat, and take a few photos…

STAR TREK: VOYAGER documentary will include HD REMASTERING!

It’s been a dream of fans ever since Paramount and later CBS Studios decided to remaster TOS and TNG using original film negatives and redone CGI effects to create HIGH DEFINITION version of all of those treasured episodes. These special editions looked glorious…unbelievably better than when they first aired on television in standard definition.

Sadly, the owners of Star Trek lost their enthusiasm for this expensive process of remastering after the completion of the seven season of TNG in late 2014. No announcements were ever made regarding similar projects for Deep Space Nine or Voyager, and as it’s now been nearly a decade since work began on the TNG remaster. With CBS putting all of its considerable financial resources into producing (currently) FIVE different first-run Star Trek series, it’s unlikely any other pre-CBS Trek series will be getting the remastering treatment.

But all hope is not completely lost…!

When IRA STEVEN BEHR and the folks at 455 Films were making the DS9 documentary WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND—which was initially crowd-funded back in 2017 and released the following year—they were disappointed with the low SD quality of the footage. They had hoped to spend some of the nearly 650K that they had raised in their Indiegogo remastering a few of the clips that they’d be including. But seeing the quality of those crisp and vibrant HD scenes only bummed them out whenever they saw a lower quality clip.

Unfortunately, the process for remastering is quite costly, both in terms of time and especially money. You have to look through seeming endless reels of raw film, find the takes you need, digitize those segments, and spend painstaking hours adjusting light levels, color balance, and a ton of other details. The results are amazing—they just cost a ton of money…

SD to the left versus HD on the right…what a difference!

With nearly all of the money raised from their Indiegogo already accounted for, the folks behind the DS9 documentary held additional fundraisers to cover the costs of digitizing the rest of the more than 20 minutes of footage they were using, at one point even offering “sponsorships” of specific clips. In the end, the addition crowd-funding was successful, including live action scenes and some amazing remastered VFX sequences.

Now, it looks like Star Trek: Voyager might get the same HD treatment!

With ten days left, the Indiegogo for the new Voyager documentary by the same folks at 455 Films is already hundreds of thousands of dollars above their DS9 predecessor’s campaign. In fact, they’re nearing a MILLION DOLLARS (which will set a new record for crowd-funding a documentary film on Indiegogo).

There have been ample stretch goals—revealed one-at-a-time as previous stretch goals were unlocked—but when they crossed $750K, they revealed three more stretch goals, and two of them are for remastering footage…

Already, they’ve passed the first of these goals, with the next one in sight. It’s very possible that this documentary will indeed take in over $1 million in donations from nearly 10K backers. Click below if you’d like to be one of them…

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-star-trek-voyager-documentary

VOYAGER Documentary crowd-funder raises nearly HALF A MILLION DOLLARS in just 36 HOURS!

Wow. Just…wow!

Four years ago, when 455 Films—the production team behind the popular Star Trek-related documentaries FOR THE LOVE OF SPOCK, CHAOS ON THE BRIDGE, THE CAPTAINS, THE CAPTAINS CLOSE UP, STILL KICKING, and GET A LIFE—began crowd-funding for a major new documentary celebrating Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it took them a full week to reach $300K (and they finished their Indiegogo with nearly $650K).

A new documentary retrospective spotlighting Star Trek: Voyager just launched an Indiegogo campaign at 2am Pacific Time on Monday morning and had reached $300K barely nine hours later! As I type this Tuesday afternoon, they’ve crossed 490K with 4,869 backers.

Now, before anyone starts saying “Nyah, nyah…fans like Voyager more than DS9!” keep in mind that it’s always easier to crowd-fund a project when you have 1) an existing list of previous donors and 2) another successfully-completed crowd-funded project under your belt.

It also helps that this Indiegogo campaign has some pretty exciting perks at relatively affordable levels, like exclusive zoom calls (limited to no more than 50 donors) with duos of Star Trek celebrities from various Trek TV series…each for only $150.

Meanwhile, for donors with deeper pockets, three different “away missions” to sacred filming sites of Star Trek—Vasquez Rocks, Griffith Observatory, and the Japanese Garden (aka Starfleet Academy)—will be led by Trek cast members and limited to groups of just 40 donors…and those perks are $1,000 each (travel costs not included). Then $2,000 gets you access to a 10-donor dinner with JAMES DARREN, NICOLE DeBOER, CONNOR TRINNEER, DOMINIC KEATING, and maybe more. There are also perks at lower levels, like $36 T-shirts and lapel pins, and even perks at levels of just $15 or even $5.

The initial goal was a “modest” $150K, which was passed in the first few hours. Since then, stretch goals have fallen like dominoes…funding additional 3D graphics and animations, the filming of the Voyager reunion convention in London this November, expanding the scope of the documentary from 60 to 90 minutes, and composing an original score.

And that’s all just in the first 24 hours of the campaign—there’s still 29 days left!!!

What does all of this donated money actually pay for? The campaign page answers…

We are still in the early stages of production with more interviews and support footage yet to be filmed. Once that is complete, Post-Production expenses will need to be covered such as editing, music, animation, color-correction, sound mixing and CBS/Star Trek footage licensing. The more we raise on this Indiegogo campaign, the more creative ways we have of making this documentary unique.

Also, remember that the Ds9 documentary, WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND, ended up doing additional fundraising for special remastering of the original film negatives and VFX footage to provide clips to match the HD quality of the remastered Next Generation blu-rays—something ViacomCBS sadly does not seem likely to spend money on for the other pre-CBS Trek series.

Anyway, the Indiegogo campaign is up, there’s already more than 4,500 backers, and you can be one of them if you’d like to donate here…

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-star-trek-voyager-documentary#/