Star Trek Fan Films

[lpetrich]

Welcome aboard! - Star Trek Channel | A continuing journey. -- has a big list of Star-Trek fan movies and series episodes, and also their production groups. I've watched some of them, and some of them are rather impressive productions. It certainly helps that one can use CGI for outer-space scenes and special effects.

There is now a large number of such productions, and I haven't seen enough of them to get a good overall picture of them. Judging from the uniforms, it's mainly TOS-era ST that's represented, with some TNG/DS9/VOY-era ST and a bit of ENT-era ST. No post-reboot ST seemed in evidence from what I saw.

[The Lone Ranger]

I've seen a few of them. The writing, acting and direction vary wildly from production to production -- my general impression, though, is that they tend to demonstrate that acting, directing, and writing aren't nearly as easy as most of us would like to think.

That having been said, some of them are pretty impressive when you consider that they're fan-made films, and some of these fan films have been good enough and with sufficiently high production values to have drawn in "real" actors. (Off the top of my head, some of the actors who have appeared in various Star Trek fan films include Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Timothy Russ, Gil Gerard, Herbert Jefferson Jr., and Lou Ferrigno.)

A very few are of really remarkably high quality. In particular, if what we've seen so far is representative of the final product, Prelude to Axanar is going to be excellent, and will probably be as good as or better than many of the theatrically-released Star Trek films.


And as you pointed out, it helps that with modern CGI, the special effects in many of these fan films are vastly superior to the original effects in ST:TOS, and as good as or better than those in later shows like TNG and even Enterprise. (Of course, the makers of the fan films have an advantage there; they have months or even years to get the effects done; they aren't trying to get all of their special effects thrown together in only a week's time.)

[lpetrich]

Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger

I've seen a few of them. The writing, acting and direction vary wildly from production to production -- my general impression, though, is that they tend to demonstrate that acting, directing, and writing aren't nearly as easy as most of us would like to think. ...

Thanx for your response. It is a much more sensible one than what I got elsewhere, a response that dismissed them outright as having bad acting and bad writing.