Short Treks are coming

While they'll have far more resources at their disposal than a fan film could ever hope for, I'm curious what they'll come up plot-wise within the very time constraints they've put Star Trek fan film makers under.

 

I put it here due to the running time being basically that which the guidelines state for fan films and the inevitable comparisons that will arise.

 

Um, okay, but the forum is "Fan Productions" not "Whatever Is the Same Running Time As Some Fan Productions". But we'll see how they stack up.

 

Don't think this belongs here at all, but whatever.

 

It's not like this forum really spends all that much time talking about fan productions anyway. It's all Axanar.

Which made sense when it was a live lawsuit! But now it's, like, where's muh Starship Melbourne new episode discussion thread?

 

I dunno. Did you post one?

 

Well, I know that several producers just are no longer interested in posting updates here. They consider the environment caustic. And I have to admit that I'm feeling that way myself.

 

The Axanar thread gets attention because people like drama, and the whole guidelines thing and the reaction/overreaction to same has certainly thrown cold water on the Trek fanfilm scene. I'd rather see people here sharing their work and discussing it.

Too often what people share are fire-and-forget posts simply designed to get views and not to have a conversation; "Here's our film" and that's that. Maybe we all could be a little more, "Tell us what motivated you to tell that story? What challenges did you face?"

I think the recent topic on The Fall of Starbase One was a fine example of a filmmaker engaging with his audience on comments both praising and critiquing. So it does happen.

 

This would be great. I've posted something like a zillion threads saying, "Hey, here's a thing I made, what do you think?" I'm eager to engage and discuss it, Lord knows there's a lot I have to learn, but it's crickets 9 times out of 10 -- and it's gotten much worse since the Axanar thread took over.

The 1 out of 10 good conversations was why I persisted -- I once turned a critic into beta reader who improved the show for the next five years, which alone was worth five years of zero-reply threads -- but that's been a lot harder as this forum has moved completely away from paying attention to anything but a dead fan film that's been sued out of existence and will almost certainly never produce another minute of footage.

I mean, the team I work with spent a year making a 90-minute audio drama for the 50th anniversary starring Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, Robin Curtis, and Joanne Linville, all reprising their original roles, with some frankly lush soundscapes and some pretty cool original music by our composer, who worked his butt off to get it out in time. "Tomorrow's Excelsior" finally came out a few months after the guidelines (leading us to be very, very careful in what we said in our publicity), so there was certainly something to discuss there just in terms of releasing stuff in the shadow of the guidelines.

It's not mine to say whether our 50th Anniversary episode was good, but it was certainly doing enough to be worthy of comment in a self-styled Fan Production forum. Instead, we just got comments from an actor on the show and a donor to the episode -- both of whom I treasure, but it's hardly critical discussion.

Meanwhile, the Axanar thread grew by ten pages.

Maurice, I know you're someone who does actually engage with folks, you post original stuff, you really do put in time to advise other fan shows, so this isn't really directed at you... but, honestly, if what folks want is a "Bash Alex Peters" and "Praise The Guidelines" forum (and, fair enough, I contributed to Axamonitor, I get it), okay, you can't force people to care about fan productions. So let's rename this forum.

A random thread about CBS making short-form Trek films fits perfectly in that forum. But this forum still says "Fan Productions" at the top.

I'm frustrated, Randy's frustrated, and I know others who are frustrated or who have simply left. And it's an absolute bloody shame, because this forum was an unsurpassed place to talk about fan productions for many, many years.

 

Sadly, I think audio drama is a harder sell than a fanfilm, and I think it's because audio has to work harder to grab an audience since you don't have the images of the sci-fi future to hook people with and most of us are less forgiving about flaws in sound than picture. I'm a big fan of OTR (Old Time Radio) and stuff like the Big Finish Blake's 7 shows, but a lot of fan audio productions are hard on my ears and make me tune out, so I've steered away from many of them.

Here's a blunt question: do people actually want to engage in real discussion or do they just want praise? Because it often feels that many fan filmmakers want kudos alone and anything even mildly critical is rebuffed or ignored. A question I always ask in interviews is "Tell me about your biggest success and what you learned from it and then tell me about your biggest failure and what you learned from that," because I think there's value in hearing about both the good and the bad.

Opinions?

 

I checked that thread out, and I see your point. That said, since you had TOS and TOS movie actors performing in it maybe indicating that in the topic title would have helped draw attention: Nichols, Koenig, Curtis in Excelsior Audio Drama! or something like that. Visibility is always key.

I recall I did start listening to it but never got much past the first 15 minutes (but this thread isn't the place to discuss the particular whys). I suspect I did not comment in the thread because I intended to give it another shot and somehow didn't.

 

FWIW, Excelsior is probably my favorite fan production. Binged everything last year and was sad when I reached the end (to date). Hope to see (hear) more. Kudos.

 

The reason why it's pretty inactive in this section apart from the Axanar thread is that there aren't that many releases right now (no offense to Potemkin Prods who do release on a regular basis, I do watch them but have a preference for TOS era productions) There aren't any more STC productions to come and those were always a car accident in written form...
I've been busy these last few weeks which prevented me from joining in here and there, but eventually Farragut and Valiant and ambush and Yorktown should see the light of day and provide a bit of activity here.

 

It's a good and fair question.

I genuinely want discussion. Discussion -- praise and criticism alike -- improves my show. At the very least, it lets me know what people really think, which gives me a clearer picture of the audience even if I don't act on it in some way. And it gets discussion going, which means more buzz, which means more views. And sometimes I've been able to take a critic on board in a way that's truly transformative for my show. So: all talk about my show is good for my show.

On the other hand, a long long time ago, I used to write fan film reviews (under a pseudonym) (uh... a different pseudonym than Wowbagger, I guess). They were pretty generous, I thought -- I generally simply declined to review anything I thought was garbage -- but I also had some criticisms, and those criticisms often came with a bit of good ol' fashioned snark. I had readers to please, after all! But I was surprised by the amount of blowback I got, even on overall positive reviews. There was even a Big Name who should have been able to point at his gala premiere and shrug off mild criticism from an unknown blogger earning $5/article... but did not.

This wasn't true of everyone; Nick from Intrepid was very open and warm, because of course he was, everybody loves Nick for good reason. But it was true of enough that I understand your wariness to engage in genuine feedback, even with those of us who want it. Because how can you tell those open to feedback from those who aren't?

And, of course, the Unwritten Code of Conduct for fan producers is that we never say anything critical about our own brethren in public, which sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the discussion room before the discussion even starts. I don't know, maybe that code isn't valid anymore, now that so many of the Bigs who enforced it are gone.

This is wonderful to hear and it makes my day. Thank you. We've finally got the new episode half-done, and -- for once -- there's another in production right behind it, so we might actually achieve our goal of "an episode every four months" for once!

Yeah, that was something we wanted to do but didn't feel safe doing at the time. The guidelines had JUST come out, after all, and they said NO ORIGINAL ACTORS in pretty bright letters. We committed publicly to CBS on our Facebook page to not promote our episodes that way.

So we had to scrap our extensive plans to market the episode as "Chekov and Uhura's Final Adventure!" and instead sell it as... a "fun 50th anniversary adventure that takes the crew back in time!" or whatever we came up with. It was really underwhelming, we knew it was underwhelming, and we were counting on word-of-mouth to pick it up and spread the word the way we couldn't. When it didn't, that was frustrating. (Heck, even if it had, the inability to shout to the world about this unbelievably fun thing we had done was frustrating.)

(And that, at least, was not the fault of this board.)

I am filled with the usual mix of dread and eagerness to learn about your reasons. If you do ever get around to sharing them, I will only let you see the latter in my reply.

I don't think I buy this. Sure, the biggest bigs are gone now, but what's been left behind is a pretty stable ecosystem. Curt Danhauser releases something every few months, Vance Major Owen and Dreadnought Dominion are running along smoothly, "Potemkin" is really an umbrella with a number of low-budget series trucking along (a bit like Hidden Frontier in its heyday), a few audio dramas exist, and weird but loving fan tributes like this come out about every month...

The fan film landscape right now reminds me of what it was in about 2007, before the Big Money became the central fact of fan filmmaking. I mean, look at this thread, which gives you a little snapshot into production in the first quarter of 2009.* Lots of audio, a couple films of wildly varying quality, lots of "in production" announcements that mostly never went anywhere. Doesn't that feel like now?

Except that we, today, also have a decade of amazing fan films to look back on as well. Yet it seems -- to me, anyway -- that this board is far quieter and less dynamic than it was ten years ago. I can't prove the Axanar thread is the primary culprit, and it certainly isn't the only one, plus, hey, memory distorts, so maybe I'm remembering a golden era of discussion that never actually existed. But I sure do miss it.

*(I've tried repeatedly with mods to get this thread updated over the years, but to no avail. Not sure I've tried since the last changeover.)

 

Are the Farragut people still planning on doing Farragut Forward, or did they scrap that concept in the wake of the Guidelines?

 

My understanding is they left Trek behind after the Axanonsense.

 

That's unfortunate, but understandable.