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Maurice
Starship Navigator
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 542
Location: 3rd Rock
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 Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2023 9:25 pm Post subject: Starship Exeter, Star Trek Fanfilm (2014) |
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Back in 2013–14 I collaborated with the director of a Star Trek fanfilm that had originally been shot in 2004 but the final act of which had never gotten out of post-production Hell. After I re-edited that ending, he and I worked together to get it finished. He took over doing the fine cut, color correction, and sound, while I focused on getting the many many visual effects done.
We finally released the entire film on May 1, 2014. In the subsequent nine years it's gotten over two million views on YouTube. Yeah, it's a fanfilm, so the acting is about what you'd expect. Hope some of you enjoy it.
Starship Exeter "The Tressaurian Intersection"
P.S. The part I worked on starts at 39:12
P.P.S There's a weird audio level drop after the opening credits until the act one fade to black. We can't fix it on YouTube.
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Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17637
Location: North Carolina
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| Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2023 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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Maurice, this is one of the best fan-made Trek movies I've ever seen. The direction, photography, FX, acting, scripting, and pacing are all top-notch! The pacing is very brisk.
The music and stereo sound is terrific.
Thanks for sharing this with All Sci-Fi. 
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958) |
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Maurice
Starship Navigator
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 542
Location: 3rd Rock
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| Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2023 11:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Bud Brewster wrote: | Maurice, this is one of the best fan-made Trek movies I've ever seen. The direction, photography, FX, acting, scripting, and pacing are all top-notch! The pacing is very brisk.
The music and stereo sound is terrific.
Thanks for sharing this with All Sci-Fi. |
Thank you. The script was by Dennis Russell Bailey, who co-wrote the episode "Tin Man" for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also built the CGI starships and rendered many elements of them used in the effects. For fun, I took his diagrams of the Tressaurian attack cruiser and made it like a missing page from the 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual.
The sets were custom built for the production. 2/3rds of the bridge perimeter was built, with two of the big control stations swapped from one side to the other as needed.
As I mentioned in the Idiocracy topic, that film was being shot at the Austin Studios in Austin, Texas in the summer of 2004. In the stage next door "The Tressaurian Intersection" was being shot. The Exeter crew took to dumpster diving cast-offs from Idiocracy, and the cargo bay of a wrecked starship includes many of such items, including a "Starbucks" sign that got remade into a cargo transporter console. Some Idiocracy crew caught them dumpster diving carpet scraps, and pointed them to a roll of unused carpeting and said "have at." So, aside from the bridge, the ship's corridors and other rooms are full of Idiocracy carpeting.
In fact, since Exeter was shooting at night, some of the Idiocracy crew occasionally wandered over and helped light some sets and so on. And the Exeter A.D. sweet-talked one of them into bringing their Chapman crane over to do the big opening shot dropping down into the bridge from 30 feet in the air. You can see that shot right at the top of the episode.
The A-camera dolly passes through the view of overhead B-camera at the start of a take
Exeter's makers wanted do everything possible via practical methods. They even wanted to do the spaceship shots with models, which proved too difficult, so CGI was used for that.
However, there are some physical models in the show, notably the wrecked starbase buildings and the crashed Kongo saucer. Also, the briefly seen shuttlecraft interior and a lot of the corridors and the full engine room seen in the wrecked starship were miniatures. The bodies strewn about were molded from action figures and cast in wax so that they could be pushed down flat on the deck. The Tholian head was a full sized prop. Even the transporter sparkles were filmed glitter in water in a glass container.
The rule on the film was that it should look like something that could have been made in 1969-70, so the visual effects were designed to look like models had been shot in the pre-motion control way with a camera dolly.
The "weirdspace" effects in the last act were my baby, and I videoed the lightning effects off one of those plasma disc things. I created custom patterns to run through a slit-scan tool, much like Doug Trumbull might have done. So, those weirdspace backgrounds were basically a CG simulation of a lot of double and triple exposure tricks you could do on an optical printer.
Materializing the lizard in space just off the ship's nose was my invention. 
Video showing how the black hole was put together. Excuse the "ling" typo on the image below.
Prior to my involvement, a few CGI tests had been done for the black hole at the end, but they all looked too CGI and didn't fit the look of the show. I hit on the idea of replicating a trick that had been used to create the galaxy seen at the start of The Rite of Spring in Fantasia, which was multiple exposures of levels of rotating artwork. I took that to the extreme, and there's even some negative images of penciled gas for the material seen being sucked off the star.
We got to screen it in a theater in Austin in late 2014. Funniest moment in the post-screening Q&A was when someone in the audience asked, "What advice would you give to someone who wants to make a fanfilm?"
Our director's reply: "Don't."
Here's a pic of the projection test before the audience arrived . . . 
. . . and then a post-screening Q&A. I'm the third from the left of the people standing at the front. Most the audience is in stadium seats off-camera to the left.
The whole project was a HUGE amount of work, but it's nice that it's still getting thousands of views each month 9 1/2 years on.
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mach7
Quantum Engineer
Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 395
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| Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2023 7:44 am Post subject: |
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Thanks Maurice!
I love both the Exeter films, but TTI was worth the wait!
It's great to read some of the background on the production.
Did the Exeter sets end up being used for Star Trek Continues? |
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Maurice
Starship Navigator
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 542
Location: 3rd Rock
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| Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2023 11:26 am Post subject: |
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| mach7 wrote: | Thanks Maurice!
I love both the Exeter films, but TTI was worth the wait!
It's great to read some of the background on the production.
Did the Exeter sets end up being used for Star Trek Continues? |
The sets were junked except for the bridge, which eventually ended up in Oklahoma City at Starbase Studios, then got moved someplace like Tennessee. I hear it was largely scrapped since then.
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
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Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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Location: North Carolina
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| Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2023 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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Wow, what an awesome discussion about an amazing film project! 
Maurice, I was enthralled by your description of the production details of Exeter. While watching it I was dazzled by the FX which you explained in your posts above, and learning how they were done was a real treat. 
Those fine images you included really added to our enjoyment of the post.
Please feel free to add more posts to All Sci-Fi about your fine work.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958) |
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mach7
Quantum Engineer
Joined: 23 Apr 2015
Posts: 395
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| Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2023 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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Of all the fan films I felt TTI was the closest to TOS in feel.
I wish you/they had done a few more.
I'm still mad that Axanar studios ruined the whole fan film
deal. |
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Maurice
Starship Navigator
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 542
Location: 3rd Rock
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| Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:30 am Post subject: |
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| Bud Brewster wrote: | | [...] scripting, and pacing are all top-notch! The pacing is very brisk. |
I forgot to reply this before. The goal was always to get the feel of an old action adventure TV show, which meant keeping the pace up. A lot of fan films have a real problem with tempo.
There's a lot of action in the last act, which I did the base edit for, but the trick was finding an editing rhythm. At a point when I had the sequence of shots assembled, I dropped the music from the Death Star trench run onto the sequence, not as a temp track but more to give myself a tempo to cut to. As soon as I had that, I pulled the music out and left it to our composer to do his thing.
| mach7 wrote: | Of all the fan films I felt TTI was the closest to TOS in feel.
I wish you/they had done a few more.
I'm still mad that Axanar studios ruined the whole fan film
deal. |
I had rewritten a script for them to serve as a third episode. The shipboard scenes were supposed to be shot concurrent with this film, but that turned out not to be possible. The script was titled "The Atlantis Invaders" and was largely set on a mining platform and in an undersea city on a water planet. Here's part of a set of thumbnail storyboards I did for an action scene for that.
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles |
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Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17637
Location: North Carolina
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| Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2023 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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| Maurice wrote: | | The script was titled "The Atlantis Invaders" and was largely set on a mining platform and in an undersea city on a water planet. Here's part of a set of thumbnail storyboards I did for an action scene for that. |
Maurice, that's an awesome concept! And your storyboard is very impressive. mrgreen:
Thanks for sharing this on All Sci-Fi! :
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958) |
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