A mysterious message draws the Starship Intrepid to an ancient world. As always, thanks to everyone for all their hard work on this one. These things wouldn't happen without the hard work and dedication of the many people that work on them. We make these films because we enjoy them. They're not professional endeavours, and they're certainly not free of flaws, but we hope some of you may find something to enjoy.
Watched it on both Vimeo and YouTube. Nicely done, and generally well photographed. A good location makes for a lot of free production value.
Nicely done--I enjoyed this. A beam-down in the start would've added a lot of good Star Trek feel to it, but chosen lake/seaside location and cinematography were excellent. Nice musical score, suits the mood well. Only thing that seemed out of place... sneakers on your lieutenant?
Thanks guys, glad you enjoyed it. Regarding the Converse. Unfortunately the actor didn’t get the footwear memo (my fault). There wasn’t anything we could do about it by that point, and it would have cost us a couple hours to try and get suotable footwear at that point. I wasn’t behind the camera so had no idea how prominent they were until I saw the footage. There was a beamdown in the script, but the director didn’t want to use it since he felt it was a bit cliched. I tend to agree, but I don’t think it would have hurt either.
Got you. I guess post-production black overlay on the Converses would've been a bit too time consuming for the effort involved. As for the beam-down, you could dub in a distant materialization sound in the beginning while the camera pans around the place. Then when you cut to the landing party, there they are. As opposed to just "suddenly there."
Yeah it simply wasn’t practical for us to rotoscope the shoes, assuming we even have done it convincingly. As for the transporter, that’s certainly a valid suggestion, might even have been the better choice, it just wasn’t the direction we ultimately decided to go with it. Normally we’d do an orbital shot and a beam in, we just decided to do something different this time. We also wanted to go more old school hence the use of a matte painting for the cityscape rather than CG. Of all the things we did with it, that’s possibly the one I’m most proud of.
Gosh I love the scenery in your films, Nick. It really adds some tangible, picturesque scope to Star Trek that we don't often see.
Next episode, throw a line in the script where someone asks "How's your foot, is it still bothering you?"
The beamdown is cliché and a given. In a Trek film it's analogous to a car pulling into a driveway. Unneeded. The one way you might've dealt with the shoes would be to use the white to pull a luminance matte with which you could lay black over white parts of the shoes, but no guarantee that would work.
Thank you Aaron, that means a lot. I guess we use what we've got, and we're fortunate enough to have some really lovely locations. Wish we had some sets though too. Thank you, I appreciate the kind words. Glad you enjoyed it. Ha! Might steal that. Not something that was thought of, I might try playing around with that myself.
Always happy to help. If you revisit it, I have a couple of thoughts on how you could make the closing matte shot look even more convincing.
Enjoyed that little story, out from your main arc, but Intrepid crew doing that forgotten Starfleet thing, exploring! Well done all. Hey wait, no ship shots, no battles, is that allowed? Are those castle ruins, or just old buildings? Mark
I'll have a chat to you about that later. I didn't edit this one so I'm not that keen to mess with someone else's creative chocies, but I'd be interested in your thoughts as always. Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah sorry, no ship shots, no battles. Maybe next time. The structure is an old Lime Kiln at Boddin Point. It's a pretty gorgeous spot and I'd always wanted to shoot something there. This script just fitted perfectly, though the weather conditions weren't the most conducive.
My thought has to do more with the intersection of the painting and the water than anything. It's pretty simple.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to the edit so I’d need to start over. I wouldn’t mind having a bash at it as an exercise though.