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Fan made traveller movies?

The Thing

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Ok, there's a group of very dedicated, hard working star trek fhans (Trekkers, to be respectful of them. Only disrespectful, rude or ignorant people call them trekkies.) that are making amateur trek videos called "Star trek the new voyages" on volunteer labor and virtually no money.

Here's their website: http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/

I saw part of one at a recent convention and just downloaded the premier episode, "In harm's way" which wasn't bad for a very amateur, no budget flick. Mostly CGI, but still it told the story. The story wasn't too clear or explained, but I hear they got better with time and plan to download more of these free, PD videos.

Now, why I'm posting this on a traveller forum: I'll admit traveller has nowhere near the fhan base of name recognition the trek brand dows, but dammit, traveller and it's fhans have been around for about 30 years now, and a lot of traveller fhans have more than the usual amount of little grey cells tucked away in their cranial cavities, so maybe we should start thinking about the idea of doing a traveller video.

I guess the first step would be getting MM's permission, but I don't see him as being the kind of arrogant, petty, venal ⬛⬛⬛⬛ that would stand in the way of something like this as long as it was done on a non profit basis, also it might help generate free publicity for T5.

The second and most important step would be coming up with an intelligent and coherent plotline that was both firmly set in the traveller universe yet had enough appeal to interest general SF fhans, trekkers, SW fhans, etc.

Then we need a good writer to do the dialogue, and test audiences to review it for comprehensibility.

Really, I don't think a traveller fhan video couldn't be done, especially if we use a lot of CGI. Even that could be done on a cooperative basis if the scenes were set up by the film makers using a commonly available renderer, then the scenes could be divided into segments and segments could be emailed to volunteer traveller fhans with good computers who would render a handful of frames, then email the rendered frames back for assembly. This would divide the rendering time and work between a lot of traveller volunteer players and speed things up a bit.

So, does anyone want to see about getting this ball rolling or are we going to let the trekkers have all the fun?
 
It could be done, and not necessarly live action. Last I looked there were at least 6 other groups doing live action trek movies and one using CGI all the way and I think there has been one Serenity/Firefly fan movie and several Star Wars ones.

I have a feeling there might be Traveller fans in the Fan Movie community and if there are some might be inclined to help out.

We could ask Marc. Worst he could say would be no.

Great Idea, Thing.
 
I'm in. Not sure what I can help with yet, but it's always sounded like fun. I think we had a thread about this last year or so.
 
Oh, is it time for this discussion again already...?

There's no reason why we couldn't do this, we just need to get organised and DO it. It won't be easy, so we'd have to keep it simple, at least for our first attempt. I have a half-finished screenplay around here somewhere...
What page are you up to? I'm up to page 58 on mine.
 
I suppose you could use 'The Movies' suitably modded to do it, but it would be a huge, huge, huge amount of work.

Ravs
 
The idea of making it pure CGI has a great advantage to it, it means we could do aliens without them looking cheezy or something. I mean, if we have live actors for humans and zhodani, then we have a mask or a CGI of an aslan or vargr they'd look hokey, but if they're all cg then they all look equal.

BTW, what aliens would we want to put in a traveller movie? I think we need aliens but which ones? Aslan would be too much like klingons, and make it look like we're trying to have psuedo klingons to make it appeal to trekkers.

Vargr could work but we'd need to slip in an explanation of their origins.


The hivers are about my favorite traveller aliens because they look so unlike any established aliens and act in an alien, tho not sensless, manner.
 
I agree, CGI would be the best way to go. Besides the problem of Alien's in live action you also have the cost of sets, props and costumes.

Star Trek:Aurora does a nice job using CGI only and each episode is about 20-30 minutes long.

Andrew, I love your work. Thanks for the You Tube plug. :)

One other thing, has anybody on the board seen Stone Trek? Just Imagine Traveller set in the Flintstones universe the way Stone Trek does Star Trek. Bouldercasters anyone?
 
Modelling and animating living things is pretty hard (that's why there aren't many in my movies!) It's probably easier to do that live-action. At first, I'd say stick with humans.
 
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