No one is going to answer this? The Phase II guys are on here all the time.
Despite all the ass kissing above and the "it's free, so you have nothing to complain about" that is inevitable and has been in every New Voyages/Phase II (by the way, Phase II is a terrible name and you should have stuck with NV) thread since the beginning, there is something to complain about: With every single release, you get everyone's hopes up and then dash them. Don't give a release date unless it's a real and confirmed date, otherwise you're being cruel. It's a sh**ty thing to do to people.
And next comes the "we have a lot of technical stuff that needs doing and we want it to be perfect", but I rebut this by noting that you always have two or three other things that are in "pre-production" and so forth. If you stopped working on 3 or 4 productions all at the same time, you would be able to devote your time and energy into actually finishing a project on time for once.
Thank you for your input. It’s always gratifying to us to know that people take an interest in and are passionate about watching our productions.
1. Our name change met one important organizational need: letting our audience know that we were changing the focus of our series ever-so-slightly from being a slavish recreation of The Original Series (as we tried to do in our first five
New Voyages episodes), to a series that would try to incorporate elements that
weren’t from The Original Series. Some of these elements include elements from
The Animated Series, elements from
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (and subsequent
Trek movies), and, most importantly, elements from the ill-fated
Star Trek revival series that Gene Roddenberry and Paramount Television had planned for the late 1970s. Changing the name of our series has been a bit liberating for us. Actually, I’m not sure that the title
Star Trek Phase II is all that terrible. It’s not a great title, I suppose. But it does have the distinction of being the title that Gene Roddenberry used on his new
Star Trek series before that series ultimately got scrapped. (In fact, Gene probably got complaints about the title
Star Trek Phase II just as we have been getting. But we figured if Gene was going to call his series
Star Trek Phase II, that’s good enough for us. Of course, if that’s people’s biggest complaint about us, we’re in pretty good shape.)
2. It’s always difficult to know how forthcoming we should be with our predictions for release dates. If putting these things out was a fulltime job for any of us, we would know that we can expect people to be working on the project eight hours a day, five days a week--like at any job. But since these episodes are just for fun, and we’re doing them in our spare time for our hobby, the amount of time that any of us can spend is more unpredictable than a “real” production. We also know people seem to get real, real, upset when we predict a date and then we can’t meet it for whatever reason. But then when we decline to predict a still-uncertain release date, people then get equally upset at the lack of announcement. So, as others have said: the contradictory message of “don’t issue a release date until you are absolutely sure”/“why the hell aren’t you answering the release date question” can drive us a bit crazy sometimes—and can be despiriting. But we also know that it would be a bad sign if people stopped asking us about our release dates. (When people stop caring when or if we have a release planned, we’ll know that people have stopped feeling passionate about our series—and then we’re in real trouble.)
3. Here’s an important comment about working on multiple episodes simultaneously: the guy who does our film editing—meticulously gluing together all our little pieces of “film”--doesn’t actually get pulled away from his task when we shoot a new episode. So shooting a second or third episode doesn’t really slow down the editor at all; conversely, stopping pre-production or production on additional episodes wouldn’t really speed up our post-production process, either. We have a separation of duties. If our post-production team were in any way pulled away from their tasks to work on additional episodes, I could understand the concern. But it’s more like washing a second load of laundry when the first load is still in the dryer: if you really want to, you could wait until the first load is completely dried, I suppose, before you start washing the second load, but that’s just wasting time—because washing the second load isn’t actually slowing down the dryer. I don’t think anyone really says “your machine would dry the clothes faster if you devoted your time exclusively to drying instead of starting a second load in the washer.” Yet for some reason, people think “your editor could splice together the footage faster if the cameraman weren’t busy shooting another episode.” In short, from an efficiency standpoint, it’s probably to your advantage to do two tasks in parallel instead of in series whenever possible. When it comes to planning ahead, if all our
Enterprise sets burned down tomorrow, we’d really be kicking ourselves if hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to film more episodes when we still had the chance. Fortunately, we already have four episodes filmed! (Now if we just had more editors.)
Thanks again for your enthusiastic support. To help speed the whole process along, don’t forget that our series exists purely through the generosity of our fans. You can find out how to donate to our project here:
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/Donate.html
