Star Trek: New Voyages

In the last block at school, each class takes everything they have learned and works on a group project that is designed to as accurately as possible reflect how things would be for us in a real job.

Normally what happens is the school creates a short film from the ground up, including pre-production, principal photography, and post-production. These films are typically 4-5 minutes in length and alternate between fully animated features and live-action.

However, in the real world, a visual effects artist will have little involvement in the pre-production and filming stages of a production. Typically the movie or episode, or whatever will be shot and then sent to a visual effects house for the post-production work.

In the case of our class, we get the special treat of working on a project that is not only similiar to a real world project, it is a real world project. There is a web-based fan production of Star Trek called Star Trek: New Voyages. It is really quite popular and has a huge viewership. I think I heard something like millions of downloads. In any case, they have shot episode 3 of the show, and now that episode is in our hands for post-production.

This is a great opportunity for us because what we are doing is essentially the same as a real job minus the pay :) However it also means a lot more work. Remember how I said that the student films are typically 4-5 minutes long? Well we have a 44minute episode to do, with somewhere around 400 visual effects shots. Despite that however, we're all very excited about the project. A bunch of us are Star Trek fans, or just Sci-Fi fans in general. Beyond that however, is that this show has garnered a lot of attention. This includes the attention of people in the industry and people in the Star Trek alumni so to speak. The previous episode starred Walter Koenig who played Chekov in the original show, and was written by sci-fi great, D.C. Fontana. Our episode stars George Takei who played Sulu in the original show, as well as Grace Lee Whitney who played Yeoman Rand. Our team is lead up by Ron Thorton who has ties to some of the best in Sci-Fi visual effects including Babylon 5 and Star Trek Voyager. We also are learning from Lee Stringer of Battlestar Galactica fame.

At this point, while I am allowed to say that i'm working on this project, I really can not do much more than that. I would love to show behind the scenes stuff as it is worked on, but stuff like that has to be approved before it can be released. I will however be keeping a sort of "production diary" that I will eventually release, even if it isn't until after we're done. I will also attempt to get things approved everynow and then to show you all :)