We've already announced that "The Holiest Thing" has some short framing bookend scenes to open and close the episode. Scotty lookalike Carl Sheldon plays the Chief Engineer who recounts the events of "The Holiest Thing" of ~80 years earlier. James Cawley has described Scotty's role in the episode as being "integral." Viewers, of course, will be able to make that determination for themselves when the episode is finally released. (I think we still need to get a couple more shots--which usually happens in early summer. So the episode's release is likely not imminent.)
That's a fine policy. Nobody can watch the episode before it is released anyway. Given the GINORMOUS amount of work that goes into them, the fact that you can't even get back your costs from viewers afterward, and that they will be watched and discovered by new viewers, once they have been released, for years, possibly decades, to come, I applaud getting it to the point they feel it's ready, then telling the viewing public when it will be available. I have never understood the whole idea of pressure on these fan film episode releases. If people want more, they should donate to the creators of them so that they can get better equipment.
Well, there's a certain amount of energy and excitement that comes from announcing an episode's release date. Heck, the next Star Wars movie has an announced release date. In our case, there's a bit of organizational motivation that comes with having to meet a self-imposed and announced release date. Personally, I've never actually been wild about that. There must be some way of motivating the team other than announcing a release date. If you miss the date, you'll never hear the end of it from your fans. If you actually hit your target, all that really happens (and rightfully so) is that people say "Whoop-dee-doo: they did what they said they were going to do." I guess the thinking is that we'll get great accolades for very impressively meeting our own self-imposed deadline. Candidly, my sense is that any disappointingly slow turnaround time by our team collectively is not due to a lack of motivation; it's insufficient money and jobs and life that get in the way. It's not like an announced release date enables us to overcome our numerous production obstacles. But in short, announcing the date in advance will, at worse, bite you in the butt, or, at best, be of no value at all. It just doesn't seem to be worth it. We'll see if we announce a release date before the episode is actually completed, fully uploaded, and successfully downloaded by our IT team. I hope we don't announce a date until it has been successfully downloaded in situ--but that's not my call.
A commercial film has to be booked into theaters and have ad campaigns and other tie-in marketing lined up, so a locked-in announced release date essential to a Star Wars in a way that doesn't apply to a fanfilm. For fanfilms it's all about self-imposed deadlines and getting people to hopefully tune in.
This is a reminder that our very first public screening of "The Holiest Thing" was not online: it was booked in advance and screened at the Alamo Draft House in Kalamazoo, Michigan a couple days before it was to be released online. So while the scale is certainly different than the upcoming Star Wars movie, we did (and do) indeed book our episodes in advance into theatres So we are sometimes under the gun to meet (small) self-imposed theater booking dates. (A rhetorical question: if it's a theater booking date, is it "self-imposed?")
Wasn't this film made last year? Honestly, I figure it would have been better to have just aired the version with imperfect coloration: At least we'd have something
You in a hurry? Yes, "The Holiest Thing" was almost released to the public on St. Valentine's Day of last year. We took a careful (and last minute) look at the episode and found it wanting in a number of ways. As has been mentioned lots of times, we figured it could be fixed relatively quickly. It turned out a better fix was also a more time-consuming fix. Fortunately, there's no rush on any of our episodes, so we took the time to fix all the episode's weaknesses. In the meantime, we shot (and completed our post-production on) "Mind-Sifter" and got it released on December 1st of last year. Now that the dust has pretty well settled on "Mind-Sifter," we can continue on our efforts to fix "The Holiest Thing." The color correction--instead of just pushing a button to correct the whole episode--was best fixed by disassembling the entire episode, doing the color correction on each individual shot, and then re-editing the episode back together. As long as it was all being disassembled, we could re-do the sound as needed. And as long as we were re-doing the sound, we could tighten up the music cues, too. And, the "Scotty" framing scenes which had been jettisoned in order to get our episode released on Valentine's Day--are now being added to the episode--stuff that hadn't been part of the Cut from last year. And lastly, as long as it has been this long to fix/improve the episode, there are a couple of shots we think we want to get that would make the episode even stronger. So we are planning on getting those in a couple of months as a last-minute addition to the episode. So, with any luck, look for the episode in mid-Summer. Like I've said: 1. Good 2. Fast 3. Cheap Pick two of the above.
Hey, I'm a master of cheap, and on occasion I'm even fast. I thought the existing cut of Holiest Thing was actually pretty enjoyable, so I'm sure the revised cut will be too. Looking forward to seeing it.