If you haven't already, you should check out this production from OTOY, the company behind the amazing Roddenberry archive and the above clip of Saavik. It was made with the cooperation of Paramount and has William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy's widow listed as executive producers.
The story is... vague and open to interpretation by the viewer and ties in with the other shorts that they have produced. As noted in the Saavik clip, the lack of dialogue was a deliberate choice and the whole idea came from a feeling from the people at OTOY that Kirk and Spock deserved to have a final farewell between them.
All three versions of Kirk are portrayed by Sam Witwer and Spock by Lawrence Sellek, but with the digital mask technology used as seen above, they are near indistinguishable from Shatner and Nimoy, and it was shot in real time without post production.
According to Sam Witwer, the whole point of the endeavor is to give actors and their families a way to own and copyright their own image and likeness in perpetuity, so it can't be used without their permission.
And to top it all off, the end result, as seen in Unification, actually comes off looking much better than Luke Skywalker did in The Mandalorian or John Delancey did in those first few moments that we saw him as Q in Picard season two.
And yes, that is Gary Lockwood reprising his role as Gary Mitchell from the second Star Trek pilot, Where No Man Has gone before. And yes, that is indeed Robin Curtis, portraying Saavik using traditional prosthetic makeup to age her up.
The relevance to this conversation is that a much easier way now exists to make actors appear as they were 20 years ago. And that same technique could also be used to simply bring a new actor in altogether wearing the digital mask, with the original actors permission of course.
Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread into a discussion about Unification, I just wanted to note how easy it would be to bring Gandalf and Frodo into T
he Hunt for Gollum.
Unification discussion...
Not sure this counts as fan production, given that Shatner and Curtis came back and there is a certain level of official involvement, what I’m sure is that once I understood what I was actually witnessing I got very emotional.
www.trekbbs.com
Roddenberry archive.
The Roddenberry Archive: Legacy of the Starships Enterprise
roddenberry.x.io
Be warned --one can spend hours here getting lost in their faithful recreation of starship bridges and the DS9 Promenade and among other locations.