i hardly tolerate handyman or other unusual camera techniques (I’m looking at you Discovery season III finale: why are those people shown upside down?!) in live action as well: they give me motion sickness.
I must be the odd one out because I go through this from time to time, despite a passion for my career. So it fits very well in my own life and what I see from people around me. The amount of captains might be unrealistic but it is certainly something I have experienced and relate to. I wouldn't mind more story and character variety but I wouldn't be sad to see it continue.
The problem with the Reluctant Captain topos is that it typically portrays said captains as having gone through some trauma and it's some outsiders that keep pushing them to "get back on the horse" as if that will cure their problems...as if they just need to [hu]man up and suck it up.
Speaking of "getting back on the horse" as the wrong advice... @Mark 2000 and I are exploring in depth the trauma that comes from being a Starfleet officer in Mark's Star Trek: The Webcomic. We're exploring the aftermath of a landing party gone horribly wrong for one redshirt and what that does to him. We also discuss mental health care in the 23rd Century. Check it out: http://trekcomic.com/comic/2021-04-20/ So not only am I stating what I want in a fan film, but I'm trying to tell the stories I want to see in them and in Star Trek in general.
And, unlike the arguments that I often have with other fan film writers, Ryan and I never argue over plot. I rewrite him and he rewrites me. The action doesn't matter. What we discuss is always story and character. How does the character look to the audience? Is how they're acting in line with who they are? Does this scene reenforce the theme or hurt it? I deleted a whole helper character from this story and replaced them with a conflicting one. Ryan rewrote half of my scenes to make the main character more active than passive. I also know that in my solo scripts Ryan has been awesome at saying this whole plot thread doesn't work, or this scene is not saying what you want it to. And I can try to explain my way out of that, but it made a better product to listen to an outsider seeing something they don't love on sight and reworking it. And I love my strips so much more thanks to that input.
I want a fan film to expand on the "Star Trek" story. I want characters that are unique to the "Star Trek" setting. An Andorian working at Starfleet Intelligence, a Romulan assassin, a descendant of Khan, etc. I don't want to see yet another generic human from Earth starting their first mission, nor do I want to see a generic assassin chick with a goth name saving the universe. Basically, I want a story, not just some dweeb's wish fulfillment fantasy.
Love fan films; watched many of them. Many are so creative with the story telling, far better than most of TOS stories actually ha! Love the dedication of the cast but the bad acting...
I'm going to defend the reluctant captain trope. I've never been involved in making a fan film, but I have written a lot of fan fiction over the years, and looking at it through that lens, I think a reluctant captain provides a hook for the writer, the character, and the audience. Why is this captain reluctant? So, that raises questions that might, or should be, answered. Further, it is an easy way to create a character arc. Consider Sisko, Pike, and Burnham. Kirk in Generations. Kirk in Beyond. Even Admiral Picard. If you start off with a captain that's great at what they do, and love to be there, where do you go with them? I can only see taking a character like that and then deconstructing them, breaking them down, and then I imagine there would be complaints about the captain being too much of a downer. Now, you can keep the captain more of a blank slate as well, but then they aren't that interesting. Which means the other characters need to be, or the stories really need to be involving for the audience. But if you have an interesting captain, ensemble, and stories all together, it's even better. You can also have more "even keel" (for lack of better words) captains like Kirk (TOS), Archer, Janeway, and Picard. But Kirk was giving enough personality traits, as well as Shatner's charisma, and a now legendary ensemble. Picard and Janeway were similar to Kirk in some ways. Though with Archer, he came across as too bland (despite the backstory with the Vulcans) and there wasn't enough focus put on making the ensemble as interesting as it could be to bolster him, though they did make attempts, especially with Trip, T'Pol, and Phlox. Unfortunately, it got really dicey when it came to Mayweather, Sato, and Reed, like the writers forgot about them at times.
Just do something like Hidden Frontier again. That's what I want. Imagine how good it could look today with those Roddenberry Archive virtual sets and modern CG for ship battles. It's mad how watchable HF is. Even when the acting is under par and the stories lacking, it's edited so tightly every episode was a breeze.
As much as I like the other fan films (and I like many of them), Hidden Frontier was the series that made me fall in love with the fan film concept and made me want to make one myself.
Good dialogue with decent acting or even just natural acting. People often act way too stiff and boring. The cameras are often static and lingering on scenes too long. I think it should just be a couple of people in a room talking about some problem or go out in a forest and have some interesting concept. To me I feel like if you can strip away the visuals and it was just audio it should still work.
Cawleys production were bitchin' but he went in a huff and cancelled production, I know about the guidelines but he could've finished what he already started atleast (the guidelines allowed that).
No, they didn’t. Not explicitly anyway, Mignogna decided that they did and that they were “guidelines, not rules”, which is the commonly held opinion now, but there was nothing in there guaranteeing he wouldn’t be sued by completing his series.
My opinion may seem a little bit conservative but theese points are really important for me personally : 1) Good uniforms, tools and interiors looking exactly like ones of the film's era. I wouldn't like seeing TNG-like shuttle in TOS era, and I'd hate to see too large/small/wrong colour pips etc. (a good example is a VOY episode "live fast and prosper" where two aliens dressed like Janeway and Tuvok) 2) Following the Canon and Canon Timeline. Again, TOS era starship cannot look like something from 25th sentury (like Pike's Ent in comparison with TOS Ent) and Picard cannot meet Borg before he did it in TNG (a bit exaggerated example) 3) Something new, a new story. Khan is dead, all his crew is dead, we saw it in the TWOK. No more Khan. (except for Botany Bay's past, of course) and similar characters, like Soong being used again and again! (Or name Soong is so common in the galaxy?) 4) No Borg Queen. 5) No dark bridges. TNG and TOS were good, and I hate trying to see something on theese new darker-than-D's-night-shift-light-level bridges. Now, what I'd like to see: A story that continues a TNG episode like "conspiracy" (with mind-controlling bugs) or similar, so the ship's mission could be related to Ent-D's discovery of "X", so ...starship was sent to investigate the "X". The Berman-era series (TNG, DS9, VOY please correct if 'm mistaken) have got a lot of such stories, and they have good potential for continuation. OR Something entirely new. A film about Excelsior, or any of named-only ship (such as Endeavour, no canon stories at all), her adventures, maybe another point of view on events of Canon, e.g. participating in the Battle of Wolf 359.
In his defense, Paramount/CBS was the first to express that commonly held opinion. https://www.startrek.com/fan-films
I honestly don't know what I want from fan films but rather what I don't want which is admittedly less constructive. I don't want more war stories pew pew photon broadsides despite the yet to be finished Axanar introducing me to modern fan films all those years ago. I don't want people framed portrait style in front of a static green screened bridge set that looks like they just copy pasted an upscaled jpeg from deviant art behind the single actor by themselves. I understand that's a cost savings measure and makes things possible that otherwise wouldn't be but I prefer having some sort of interactable element/prop on screen as well. I don't expect everyone to build entire sets but I don't think putting a futuristic table/chairs from Ikea on screen or a custom build console stand is unreasonable. Just put something tangible for the actors to interact with as well as to give it a third dimesion. Additionally, I'm fine with whatever era folks want to set their story in but I'm not a fan of people showing up with jarringly different uniforms from different shows on screen at the same time (and, yes, I know official nutrek did that too) unless it's a time travel story (though I also consider that an overused trope anyways). And finally, less callbacks to official trek and more new story lines instead without existing canon characters popping up. Even official massive budget Star Wars suffers greatly from this in that their "galaxy far, far away" is incredibly small with the same two to three dozen people constantly popping up. I think we've lost the exploration aspect of trek in many fan films like we used to see with STC and NV and I'd like to see that within the scope of whatever budget the films have.
No defence needed: now that interpretation is pretty much widely accepted, but I think that Cawley’s “they might sue me” approach was totally understandable at the time. Very good points: having a set, even a cobbled together one, helps a lot the actors and the director. That is usually a cost-saving measure, unfortunately. For our movie I would have wanted different uniforms for a scene set 11 years in the past, however in the end I couldn’t justify buying 4 or so new uniforms with no guarantee they would look good on the actors while we had several good-looking ones already. Not for a single scene lasting a couple of minutes and pretty much with no budget. So…Present day uniforms in the past it is. That is life! Amen with that!