Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Thanks for the comments! The CGI shots in the trailer were by Jon Carling. The CGI shot (Scene 0B) was by Bill Walker. I think they both did a good job on them. Bill used the refit Constitution mesh by Raul Mamoru over at www.trekmeshes.ch. Not sure if Jon did his own mesh or used the same or another one. We will be making sure everyone will be properly credited in the actual vignette closing credits and on the website. This just in: Bill will be sending a new Scene 0B this coming week to tweak the existing spfx a bit. He's also hard at work on Scene 0A which will feature his own starbase mesh. The set worked out very well; the footage that we looked at before we sent it off to our editor was outstanding. Jeff Green did a terrific job as our director of photography. He took the "Das Boot" approach, trying to make it like a submarine. We shot a lot of footage across the entire bridge. He's talking about using the steadycam on a good portion of the first episode, "The Void." We'll probably be shooting "The Void" in November; Jeff has a couple of plays to produce/supervise/direct over the coming months. But we're definitely going to shoot when it's a lot cooler. (This week we were over 100 a few times during the afternoon!) Our uniforms are interpretations of the Class B uniforms from the late TOS movie era. Patty Wright, late of Star Trek Phase 2, was in charge of the uniform tops. She did a terrific job on them, and we have shots of the blue and gold on our website. We also have white for the captain and black for the security chief which we haven't used yet. We'll be having Patty craft our medical tunics out of green. We had each actor provide their own black slacks and boots. Originally we'd planned on putting color piping on each pair of slacks, but dropped that for budget reasons. We also avoided shooting the feet since everyone had different types of shoes/boots on. My character's were probably the only shoes to appear in the episode, and he's only in this vignette (he's not a nice fellow). This week, we opted not to do anything. That gave my elbow time to recover (and it's feeling a lot better) and gave Ricky a chance to get a lot of his coursework done. This coming week, we're going to concentrate on the back door (rear alcove) and working turbolift. The following week, we'll be working on the captain's ready room. We may have to do some pickups in the coming weeks. We're hoping we don't.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Just a brief addition to the previous post: Jon Carling, who's doing the special effects from "The Void," said to be sure and credit the meshes he used as follows: 3-D Uprated Constitution Models: Dennis Russell Bailey, S-Stephen 3-D K't'inga Model: D. Bates (aka EBOLII) Jon also pointed out that the YouTube clip doesn't properly proportionalize his special effects. We won't be having this problem with the episodes; this clip was done using Windows Movie Maker, and the version we have on the computer that assembled it, seems to be ignoring the command to make it widescreen. Sorry about that; we tried ripping it several different ways yesterday, all with the same result. Oddly, when we post material that didn't go through WMM to YouTube (i.e. Bill Walker's special effects test), we didn't have any problem with that. Not to worry, our completed vignette will not have this problem since we're not using WMM on it at all.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Not gonna lie when I say I already knew that. Just wanted to see what I could do with it. The answer is clearly: not much.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Worked on this week's project--the turbolift--tonight. Ricky and I managed to get the background and other materials purchased. Kimberly began work on the padding. Tomorrow evening we're going to paint the background and the framing material while Kim glues the pads and covers them with the dark red material we've been using all along. Thursday we'll put it all together... After the turbolift comes the backdoor alcove. It's going to be very much a build like tonight's was, except that we're going to go with a two-piece assembly so that we can move it out of the way when we're not filming. Then comes the captain's ready room... Lennier1 gave us several good looks at what we can and want to accomplish with it. With Ricky moving to St. Augustine in two weeks, I'm hoping we can get the framing done on it before he leaves town.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film It's great to see all pieces come together. BTW: Do you have any plans for using social networking sites like Facebook to promote your project, get in touch with viewers and release updates? Seems to work quite well for projects like Intrepid.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Once we have our first vignette in hand, then we'll be promoting it more on FaceBook and other similar sites. We do plan on releasing it on a couple of different video venues, including YouTube. Honestly, given the grief heaped upon other productions for not finishing or keeping to their schedule, I'm afraid to promote it more than I already am.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film I'm kind of in that same boat. Pretty soon. we're going to do a bunch of short 2-3 minute "test" films that we can stagger out to the web as we make the real film. Having the standing sets will be quite useful for that, but as all of us know, even these little films take a huge amount of time and energy. I do think having a backlog of short things to post is a good idea, though. If anything, it makes people interested and get used to checking out your site.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Agreed. And I had no idea about the production time. A five to six minute vignette took us five hours to film. Good heavens, I really was clueless about that. I thought it would take 15 mins to an hour tops! I'm soooo glad we did a short vignette first so that we can actually plan a 3-4 day weekend to do the shoot for the first 30 min episode. We're beginning to re-examine our shooting script and see who needs to be present on which day of filming. Now that we've got an understanding of the process, we can proceed.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film One thing we found out when we were making our Star Trek videos back in the day is that in a closed set, filming around available actors wreaked havoc on our sound. We shot around an actor who was playing our Navigator and when we went back to pick up her shots on a different day in a tight close up, we found that all of her lines echoed back differently than the other shots with a mostly-full Bridge. As near as we could tell, the large number of bodies actually dampened the voices so it didn't echo as badly in the master shot -- something that didn't happen in the mostly-empty pick up shots. Of course, we were 16 and didn't really care, but I thought it might help you in a similar situation. Steve
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film The echoing is indeed a concern. One thing Jeff Green, our Director of Photography, wants for our next filming session is the addition of some sort of foam around the top of the bridge with a textured surface that will absorb some of the extra sound. That's not very high on our list of priorities, but it's definitely something to fix before "The Void" goes before the cameras. We've got to find the right material first, though.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film I wonder if you could position a couple of mattresses or large pieces of foam out of camera shot on some of the walls behind the camera? You could move them as needed and it might absorb the sound that's bouncing around the Bridge.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Funny you should mention that. One of the materials we're looking out is a bumpy mattress foam.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Maybe carpet padding would work also -- Just ideas. No practical experience on my end.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film It's all good. Whatever we choose needs to be white and (here's a new word for the lexicon) hot-glue-able to attach to the soffit we have around the top of the bridge.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film It was 48k stereo audio using a huge boom mike. We went through four boom mike operators while filming, including the neighbors' kid, my youngest, one of the cast, and even the director. The sound is too good, if anything. I just watched 30 secs of test footage assembled by our editor, Tom Scott. It's wonderful. I told Tom I'm still laughing in relief... Tom added a few ambient bridge sounds, and we're both looking forward to what Ralph Miller will do with it.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film 30 seconds' worth of test footage has now been posted to our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Potemkin1711 You can also get there directly by: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sCMRuzTAlQ
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Looking good so far. The bridge looks really good on camera. I hope you guys don't fall into the "left/right" dialogue delivery style a lot of fan films get sucked into, though. You've got that great bridge set, don't be afraid to show it in wide shot.
Re: New Star Trek Fan Film Thanks for the kind words. We see a few things we want to tweak, but in general, we're very happy with the bridge set. The "left/right" delivery thing is something we may have to watch for. We've got a few wide shots that weren't used in this exchange including a pan or two of the bridge. Our problem area with our set during this production (the back alcove) was a challenge to shoot around. Once we get the turbolift stand completed either this weekend or early next week, I'll be starting on that alcove. And then: the captain's ready room. Should be interesting to build that set since I've got to build it in a back corner of the back of the copy center.