News A Long Way From Home - A Star Trek Fan Production Released!

[Power543]

After months of work, I've now released my second finished Star Trek Fan Film!

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

This one had a wonderful cast including Nick Cook from Starship Intrepid, some fun Trek universe ideas and I really pushed myself with the visual effects.

For this project I really learned how to do the interior sets as well, which made the all the difference to get this project to the place it is today!

Super proud of it and the team that worked on it so please check it out!

 

[Maurice]

As ever, congrats to anyone for finishing a film. It's a handsome production. The GS work is very good.

Some nits: The sound aboard the Intrepid is not great and stands out by comparison, and I suspect that might be inadequate soundproofing. There are some issues with crossing the line and directional continuity that could use more attention in future productions. And the whole show feels "empty," and I’d suggest at least putting some ND people wandering through the background of the ship bridges.

But here's the rub: for all the technical finesse there's no story. Zip. A random technothing happens, and reams of made up nonsense technobabble is spewed to resolve it. In fact, I cannot recall ever encountering this many minutes of nonstop pseudojargon. It quickly becomes numbing. It's a waste of fine characters to reduce them to rattling off nonsense words instead of letting them make decisions and logically solve problems.

My advice: Nick's a decent writer. Collaborate with him on your next script, and listen to what he has to say. Add some story to all the tech. Then you'll have the best of both worlds.

 

[Mark 2000]

And here's the rub: for all the technical finesse there's no story. Zip. A thing happens, and reams of made up nonsense technobabble is spewed to resolve this thing. In fact, I cannot recall ever encountering this many minutes of nonstop pseudojargon. It quickly becomes numbing. It's a waste of fine characters to reduce them to rattling off nonsense words instead of letting them make decisions and logically solve problems.

The sins of Voyager can’t help but rub off on what it inspires. I watched the “Flashback” episode recently and the entire teaser is a five minute stream of technobabble concerning cooking eggs. Even though the story revolves around an incident in Tuvok’s past, the solution is a technical one that says nothing about Tuvok.

 

[USS Intrepid]

Just a quick comment since I’m at work and don’t have much time to reply.
I don’t want to comment on much of this as, beyond making a few tweaks to some of Hunter’s dialogue, I’m just an actor here.

However, I did want to say that any sound issues in the Intrepid scenes are my fault, not Sam’s. We had no crew due to lockdown, so nobody was really monitoring audio, and it was recorded directly into camera (in our kitchen) which we don’t normally do.

I failed to notice the sound levels were too low for the mic set up until later in the day, so Sam had to boost them in post. I did offer to loop the dialogue but ultimately we didn’t go down that route.
Thanks for the kind words and the feedback.

 

[batboy853]

This is pretty cool. I sort of lost interest in the story, but still you got something released great job! (I've come to realize recently writing a script is hard.) Great job with collaborating with the cast from Intrepid. @USS Intrepid I think that it is cool how you are willing to help other fan productions in anyway you can. Nice cameo from Michele Specht, but took me a minute to realize who she was (I almost thought she appeared in one of the Hidden Frontier series.)

There were times where I would see a flash of a film scratch that looked out of place, almost like there was a render error

The VFX for your ships are incredible! The Sets are pretty good for the most part. The bridges were on point. The shuttle looked a little bit rough, especially for how much it was featured. I would recommend looking over your material settings for your LCARS, and also compare the LCARS for the shuttle to what they looked like on the original sets for the show. For your next attempt I would suggest that you check out the Set Blueprint Exchange thread as well as the archive.

When the intrepid flies in, it felt like there was missing sound as the ship flew by? But of course in space there is no sound so maybe it was intentional?

Great job, can't wait to see how your shorts go!

 

[Bixby]

The biggest thing I noticed was how the short would never let the actors emote and act. Everything goes at breakneck speed. The ship vanishes, the actor doesn't have a chance to be shocked and confused for more than a split second before a long-winded speech (this is probably my biggest gripe from the Berman-era Treks, so little feelings, so much blabbering)

Movies and tv are supposed to be a visual medium, the story should be explained just as much with the actions as with dialogue. If I want to have the characters tell me everything, I can just read a book.

My other bane from the Berman years: that bloody excruciatingly tedious holodeck!

That said, nice special effects and the leading lady was appealing, not an easy thing to do.