Fan Film Factor – Fan Film Factor

Announcing the WINNERS of the 2nd annual TREKS IN 90 SECS contest!

The whole idea behind TREKS IN 90 SECS was to challenge the assumption that it was impossible to make a decent Star Trek fan film that was 15 minutes or less in length (a limit set by CBS and Paramount’s fan film guidelines). Not only did fans quickly prove that it was possible, fan films have thrived these past nine years despite this limit. So if fans were clever enough to cut things down to 15 minutes, could they be even more clever enough to cut things down to just 90 seconds???

Last year, nine groups of fan filmmakers took up the gauntlet to submit ultra-short films to our inaugural contest. This year, we had ten submissions (although one was previously submitted from last year…which is allowed for a short film that wasn’t in the top three previously). This year’s submissions were due at the end of July, and voting was open on Fan Film Factor from August 3rd through 24th.

Awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place have now been given to the top three vote-getting fan films who now get to brag and copy-paste their “certificate” graphics onto their YouTube, Facebook, and social media pages. Amusingly, this year we had a tie for second place, with the same fan filmmaker getting the same number of votes for both of his submissions.

But all of the submissions are winners in my book—for taking up the challenge in the first place and finishing their super-mini-fan films! And that’s why I’m including all ten submissions on this page, along with their final vote totals (as everyone got at least some votes), so fans can see each of the submitted films…

1st Place – THRONE OF ZEUS (28 votes)

2nd Place – THE BIGGEST FLAW IN STARSHIP DESIGN (23 votes)

2nd Place – WHEN YOU’RE NOT A MAIN CHARACTER ON A STARSHIP (23 votes)

3rd Place – TOUGH TO KILL (20 votes)

TASK FORCE-78: BREAKAWAY! – A 90 SECOND MUSIC VIDEO (13 votes)

TASK FORCE-78: MISSION POSSIBLE – A MUSIC VIDEO MASH-UP (13 votes)

SHIPS OF THE NIGHT – SALISBURY COLONIAL DEFENSE FORCES (8 votes)

WRATH REDUX (7 votes)

COMING HOME (2 votes)

GIFT OF THE MANTICORE (1 vote)

Time to VOTE for your favorite TREKS IN 90 SECS fan film!

We have a total of TEN entries for our second annual TREKS IN 90 SECS contest—one is a returning entry from last year—and since each fan film runs between 90 and 120 seconds, you can watch all of them in less than 20 minutes!

You can vote for up to three of your favorite videos, and once you make your selections and click the “VOTE” button at the bottom, that’s it and your ballot is locked. So choose wisely!

Voting ends at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, August 24. Then the three ultra-short films with the highest number of votes will be declared the winners, and results will be posted at the end of this month.

Click here to cast your ballot!

Less than FOUR WEEKS LEFT to submit your ULTRA-SHORT fan film to this year’s TREKS IN 90 SECS contest!

We now have five official entries, so it’s a horse race, folks! But I would like a few more ponies at the starting gate if possible.

Just a quick reminder that submissions for this year’s TREKS IN 90 SECS contest are due on or before July 31, 2025 if you want your ultra-short fan film in the running. That’s less than four weeks away!

And if you didn’t place in the top three Treks in 90 Secs films last year, FEEL FREE TO SUBMIT YOUR ULTRA-SHORT AGAIN.

As a reminder, here are the very simple rules:

The fan film doesn’t need to be “exactly” 90 seconds. It can be less or even a little more. But if you run over two minutes, it’s not gettin’ entered.
The fan film needs to be Star Trek related in some way.
The fan film must be a complete “story” (however you want to define that term). It can be funny, dramatic, sad, exciting, all dialogue, no dialogue, whatever you’d like. But what it can’t be is a segment from an existing fan film. It needs to be 100% new.
A maximum of three fan film submissions per entrant.
Deadline to enter is midnight Pacific Time, July 31, 2025.

To submit your entry, post it to YouTube and send me the link either via e-mail at jonathan (at) fanfilmfactor (dot) com or message me on Facebook with the link.

The three top winners get to brag, so send me those links!

Only a month and a half remains to submit your ULTRA-SHORT fan film to this year’s TREKS IN 90 SECS contest!

Just a quick update and reminder that submissions for this year’s TREKS IN 90 SECS contest are due on or before July 31, 2025 if you want your ultra-short fan film in the running. That’s just a month and a half away!

Right now, we have three submissions and a fourth on the way…which is certainly a good start. And just to encourage some more submissions, if you didn’t place in the top three Treks in 90 Secs films last year, FEEL FREE TO SUBMIT YOUR ULTRA-SHORT AGAIN.

As a reminder, here are the very simple rules:

The fan film doesn’t need to be “exactly” 90 seconds. It can be less or even a little more. But if you run over two minutes, it’s not gettin’ entered.
The fan film needs to be Star Trek related in some way.
The fan film must be a complete “story” (however you want to define that term). It can be funny, dramatic, sad, exciting, all dialogue, no dialogue, whatever you’d like. But what it can’t be is a segment from an existing fan film. It needs to be 100% new.
A maximum of three fan film submissions per entrant.
Deadline to enter is midnight Pacific Time, July 31, 2025.

To submit your entry, post it to YouTube and send me the link either via e-mail at jonathan (at) fanfilmfactor (dot) com or message me on Facebook with the link.

The three top winners get to brag, so send me those links!

The 2025 SHOWRUNNER AWARDS now have their final 24 entries!

Submissions for the 2025 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS are now complete. The window of eligibility to enter this year was any Trek fan film released between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024—although the majority of our submissions were released last year. This was our first time limiting submissions to only a three-year window instead of our previous 5-year window. We seldom if ever got submissions from that far in the past, so three years feels like a better number…still allowing a “second chance” and even a third one.

This year, we have 24 entries combining for a total of just under 9 hours of viewing for our 12 showrunner judges. For comparison, last year we had 27 entries with a combined runtime of just under 9 hours, so things seem to be holding fairly steady in the number of Star Trek fan films and relative length of those entered into our show.

As we’ve done for the previous two years, the winners will be announced on Star Trek‘s anniversary of September 8, 2025. There are 22 categories this year, with three winners in each category: Admiral, Captain, and Commander level. I salute all of our 24 entrants for 2025, and I wish each of them the best of luck. (Honestly, I wish they ALL could win!)

I realize that I say this every year, but once again, we have some really amazing Star Trek fan films this time—of all different runtimes—that cover the gamut from comedic to dramatic to suspenseful to thoughtful to parody/farce and even a music video! Some are episodes of ongoing fan or fanthology series, others are stand-alone releases. There are fan films shot on sets, on location, on green screens, some with heavy VFX, some light on VFX, a few with elaborate make-up and costuming, cool props, and several really standout acting performances and even original music. We truly have some of the best of the best that the world of Star Trek fan films has to offer this year!

So I strongly encourage you to watch as many of these marvelous productions as you can. Here are all of our entries for 2025 alphabetically by title (with the fan series indicated where applicable)…

Meet this year’s JUDGES for the 2025 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS…

The submission window for the 2025 Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARDS is now open and will remain so until midnight Pacific Time on May 31, 2025. Any Star Trek fan film released publicly between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024 is eligible for entry regardless of the person or team producing it. Note that this time we are trimming our eligibility window from our previous 5 years down to just 3 years. Few if any entries were typically submitted from fan films over 3-years old, so the reduction seemed like a reasonable decision.

The online entry form is located here…

https://www.cognitoforms.com/JonathanLane1/_2025StarTrekFanFilmSHOWRUNNERAWARDS

As usual, our judging panel remains at twelve, made up of people who have, themselves, served as showrunners on one or more fan films or series. This provides each judge a unique and personal perspective on what goes into making a fan production in our nearly two-dozen categories. In other words, our judges are knowledgeable and experienced in filmmaking which, I truly believe, brings a high level of expertise to our competition—along with our sister contest, the DIRECTORS CHOICE AWARDS, which just wrapped up earlier this month.

And it is for this reason that, each year, I publish a blog spotlighting our judging panel and what they have accomplished in the world of Star Trek fan films specifically. Ten of our twelve judges are returning from last year, so their write-ups (see below) will probably look familiar to you. The two judges who decided to leave the panel this year both departed on good terms. GREG LOCK, who began working on STAR TREK: AMBUSH back in 2014 and finally released it in 2022, felt that he should have a more recent fan film project under his belt before returning as a showrunner judge. The other judge to leave us is more of a “swap.” GLEN L. WOLFE and DAN REYNOLDS are the co-owners of WARP 66 STUDIOS in northern Arkansas and the co-showrunners of THE FEDERATION FILES fanthology series. Each year, one of the two of them “tags out” to give the other a turn. So in 2025, Dan will be taking over Glen’s spot, who in turn took over Dan’s spot in last year’s competition.

Our one brand new judge this year brings an international perspective, joining SAMUEL COCKINGS as one of two non-U.S.-based judges. I am referring to German wunderkind BENJAMIN SCHULZ of the fan series LORELEY. More on Benjamin (and everybody else) below…

Where did JONATHAN go?

Don’t look now, but my last published Fan Film Factor blog was on January 9th! And for a guy who prides himself on posting at least one or two new blogs a week, that’s almost an eternity of radio silence! Indeed, it had gotten so noticeable that one fan filmmaker actually IM’d me recently to ask if I’d survived the recent Los Angeles wildfires. (I was tempted to respond, “No, I died in a smoldering inferno last month. I’m writing to you from the Great Beyond…and they have Star Trek reruns!”)

So what did happen?

Well, as I mentioned in my final blog of 2024, I had been spending quite a bit of time finishing the writing of a new book on day trading. (Don’t laugh! I’ve gotten quite good at it, folks. And something has to pay for my next fan film!) But the book came out in late January, so that doesn’t explain my lack of blogger productivity for much of January and all of February.

I could, of course, blame the wildfires that devastates L.A. and left a number of our friends effectively homeless. But fortunately for myself and the Lane family, homes on the west side of Los Angeles were spared from the fiery maelstrom. I did volunteer at an organization called Project Angel Food (mostly chopping vegetables), but that didn’t take away too much blogging time.

No, the two reasons for my lack of new fan film blogs these past two months were twofold: the DIRECTORS CHOICE AWARDS and robots.

Usually, I simply report on the annual Directors Choice fan film awards. But this year, due to my entering of my own fan film, AN ABSENT FRIEND, into the competition, I am also a judge. And as it turns out, there were FIFTY-FIVE different entries this time out!!!! Some of them I’ve already seen, as they are Star Trek fan films. But others are superhero, Alien, Nightmare on Elm Street, Harry Potter, Ghostbusters, The Last of Us, Power Rangers, Narnia, and a host of other sci-fi/fantasy/horror genres. And many of them are truly excellent and worth watching (for example, this one and this one). But while some of them are fairly short, others have run times of thirty minutes to over an hour…and there’s quite a few of those! So I’ve been spending a LOT of time just watching dozens and dozens of different fan films so I can cast an informed ballot before the March voting deadline.

As for the robots…

2024 Star Trek Fan Film YEAR IN REVIEW

First, my friends, I must apologize for being a bit less diligent in my coverage of Star Trek fan films this past year. Granted, I’ve still published over 65 blogs since January 1, 2024, but that’s compared with 90 blogs in 2023 and 114 in 2022.

The reason behind my diminished output is that I’ve been spending much of this past year co-authoring a book, which I’ve only just completed (it will be out early next year). It was a paying gig, so it needed to take priority. It’s actually my third co-authored book, my first being Starship Spotter (with ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ, ROB BONCHUNE, and ALEX ROSENZWEIG) and my second, Being Santa Claus, still available for purchase in various formats here on Amazon.

But enough about me!

Let’s get started looking at what’s been happening in world of Star Trek fan films for the last twelve months. As usual, I won’t have enough time or space to get to everything, but here are the biggest stories of the year…

IS CROWD-FUNDING STILL A THING?

Sadly, the year kicked off on a bit of a sour note as a debate began to rage on social media whether Trek fan films should continue crowd-funding. It began when RANDY LANDERS announced that POTEMKIN PICTURES would no longer do any public crowd-funding. But then he added (somewhat forcefully) that he felt that other fan productions shouldn’t crowd-fund either. Things got heated from there. And sadly, in part because I didn’t agree, Randy told me to no longer cover any of his Potemkin releases on Fan Film Factor…and I have, of course, complied with his wishes, albeit regrettably.

Perhaps ironically, not many fan productions chose to crowd-fund this year. In fact, I only counted four during all of 2024 (well, technically five, since FARRAGUT FILMS ended one campaign and began another shortly thereafter), and those were for:

FARRAGUT FORWARD/FARRAGUT 2024
NEUTRAL ZONE STUDIOS (to fund their move from Georgia to Ohio)
TREK SHORTS
STALLED TREK: THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE

In previous years, crowd-funding campaigns were much more prolific. Now, it seems they are diminishing in frequency and, in general, bringing in less money (although FARRAGUT FORWARD did reach $47.5K before wrapping). Will 2025 continue to see this phasing out of crowdfunding? I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.

Announcing the WINNERS of the first-ever TREKS IN 90 SECS contest!

Well, that didn’t take long! What I mean is that the first-ever TREKS IN 90 SECS contest is now completed, and we have our winners. In the end, nearly 250 votes were cast within a 3-week period—with each voter being allowed to choose up to three favorite ultra-short Star Trek fan films with runtimes between 90 and 120 seconds.

The whole idea behind Treks in 90 Secs was to challenge the assumption that it was impossible to make a decent Star Trek fan film 15 minutes or less in length (a limit set by CBS and Paramount’s fan film guidelines). Not only did fans quickly prove that it was possible, fan films have thrived these past eight years despite this limit. So if fans were clever enough to cut things down to 15 minutes, could they be even more clever enough to cut things down to just 90 seconds???

Apparently, the answer was a resounding yes! Nine groups of fans and fan filmmakers took up the gauntlet to submit ultra-short films to our inaugural contest. Submissions were due at the end of July, and voting was open on Fan Film Factor from August 4th through 25th.

Awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place have now been given to the top three vote-getting fan films who now get to brag and copy-paste their “certificate” graphics onto their YouTube, Facebook, and social media pages. But all of the nine submissions are winners in my book—for taking up the challenge in the first place and finishing their super-mini-fan films! And that’s why I’m including all nine submissions on this page, along with their final vote totals (as everyone got at least some votes), so fans can see each of the submitted films…

1st Place – RED SHIRT IRREGULARS (67 votes)

2nd Place – THE GROUNDING (52 votes)

3rd Place – NEW DATA CARD (31 votes)

COOPER (21 votes)

A ROOSTER ONE DAY, A FEATHER DUSTER THE NEXT (18 votes)

WRATH REDUX (17 votes)

HARRY KIM’S NIGHTMARE (14 votes)

MISSION POSSIBLE: TASK FORCE 78 (13 votes)

BLUE STUFF? (12 votes)

Remember to VOTE for your favorite TREKS IN 90 SECS fan film…and other updates!

Hey there, folks! Jonathan has returned from a very nice (and hot!) summer vacation with extended family, and I’m ready to dive back into Star Trek fan films (instead of diving into the pool)!

First up, I wanted to remind you all to please vote for your favorite (up to three favorites) TREKS IN 90 SECS ultra-short Star Trek fan film(s). Click here to cast your ballot! We have nine entries for our inaugural contest, and since each one is between 90 and 120 seconds, you can watch all nine of them in less than 15 minutes! And there are some real gems in the mix. It looks like about 60 people have voted so far (assuming each person voted for the maximum of three films), but there’s still two weeks left to register your preference(s)—voting closes at midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, August 25.

And speaking of voting, I’m excited to say that ten of the twelve SHOWRUNNER AWARDS judges have now submitted their completed ballots, leaving only two whom I still have to nag. That means that everything is on schedule to announce this year’s winners on September 8.

Meanwhile, it’s a good thing I’m rested, because fan filmmakers have certainly been busy lately! I’m currently setting up interviews with the creators behind the latest PROJECT: RUNABOUT fan film “IT’S ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS,”and I’ll be covering SAM COCKINGS’ latest opus, PRODIGY RECKONING (episode 3 just premiered this weekend with some stellar acting performances along with Sam’s usual awesome CGI effects) once a few more episodes are released.

Also on short-range scanners are a new release, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, from JOSHUA IRWIN and a brand new fan filmmaker due out in a few weeks, as well as the highly-anticipated FARRAGUT FORWARD, set to debut extremely soon. FARRAGUT FILMS showrunner JOHN BROUGHTON says it will be a “game-changer,” and from what has been shared by him and director JOHNNY K. so far, I truly believe John is making a serious understatement!

And finally, I’m working hard to set up a pair of video interviews with two different groups of German fan filmmakers. The first group, EUDERION – INFINITY, has been releasing Star Trek fan films for more than 16 years! The other group, LORELEY, are relative newcomers who have quickly leapfrogged to doing some of the most advanced fan filmmaking currently in active production.

And of course, I am certain that there will be more…LOTS more! This is truly the golden age of Star Trek fan films, my friends, with so much to watch and enjoy. And I’m here to cover as much of it as I can.

Remember to vote for Treks in 90 Secs, and I’ll be blogging again soon!