g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, March 14, 2005
11:19 - Any sufficiently advanced fandom is indistinguishable from canon
http://newvoyages.com/

(top) link
Well, this is quite an interesting find. Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan production that picks up where the Original Series leaves off. And it's actually quite good.

"New Voyages" is our vision of Star Trek. A Star Trek set in the 23rd century and created in the 21st. It's a Star Trek with a familiar look, a familiar crew, but something new, and we think, something special.

There are other fan films - some want to imitate the 60's look and feel of the show - some are focused on other parts of Roddenberry's universe, and all are made with love and passion.

However, New Voyages is not the Trek of the 60's. It is the Trek of the future; a Trek that looks as modern and flows as fast as any action adventure show on TV today.

New Voyages was created in April of 2003 by James Cawley and Jack Marshall.  Our goal is to tell stories that fall within the 4th and 5th year of the five year mission.  These "short films", continue the original 5-year mission of the Enterprise and are produced at a rate of 2 per year.

Rather like MFT3K (but with a lot more CG budget), New Voyages has two episodes out so far (with the support and consultancy of Gene Roddenberry...y...y...yyyy's son), and a third—reportedly featuring Walter Koenig—in production right now. Only the second episode (which is quite a bit better than the first) is available for download from the site directly, but you can get Episode 1 from some of the mirror sites listed. WMV format, several pieces. And it's definitely worth the download.

Something that worried me appears to be true, though: I noticed that James Cawley, the co-creator and major motivating force, also plays Kirk. And my experience tells me that a person is seldom at once a good writer, director, producer, and actor. This case is no exception. While the guy does in fact look a good deal like the young Shatner (I'm not sure where that hairdo comes from, though), particularly in the first episode the most striking thing one takes from his performance is how good the actors from the original show actually were—and how hard it is to be a good actor. Now, there's a point in Episode 1 where the principals experience premonitions of key moments from later Trek outings, chiefly the memorable cruxes of all the TOS movies; and after this moment, Cawley seems imbued with a new sense of the character, and thenceforth—and throughout the second episode—he's got a lot of Shatner's more signature mannerisms and gestures and facial expressions down eerily pat. Even his bemused making-fun-of-Bones smile looks authentic. It's quite spooky.

The rest of the casting seems to follow the same tendencies; the guy who plays Spock is a pretty miserable stage presence, McCoy could stand to affect a bit more of a Southern demeanor if they're going to make reference to it in the script, Uhura is unremarkable, and Scotty and Chekhov (who looks sort of like Rather Dashing: "Vhere's my wottage?") get to hide under their thick accents such that they're as believable as the originals, which is to say that caricatures are easier to imitate anyway. But some of the secondary characters—the helmsman, various bridge crew, the guys on the other side of the viewscreen, the woman in charge of the Gateway station—are all quite excellent. It's almost as though the key roles were all snapped up by friends of Cawley's, regardless of acting ability; and as the roles cascaded down the food chain, they were able to reach further and further into the realm of people who knew what in fact they were doing.

All in all, a very impressive piece of work. The writing is indeed fast-paced, sometimes painfully so—precious little time is spent on establishing shots or reaction shots which would have helped clarify context a great deal; and the ships zoom around in space the way not even the modern CG versions do, and I'm not entirely sure in a good way. But the effects are everything that 2005 budget production software provides for us, which means that the overall effect is a good deal more impressive than the TOS episodes themselves, and the inevitable corniness is right in character with it (right down to the viewscreen that apparently has a line director, where if someone else on the remote ship's bridge starts talking, the camera cuts to them, then zooms in dramatically on their face, etc). They could stand a little more practice with editing, as some of the more convoluted space-time-wedgie storylines get really hard to follow, especially if you're not intimately familiar with all the episodes and later productions that they reference. One of this project's potential weaknesses is that it's perhaps a little too self-aware—perhaps it's not best to draw too much jocular attention to Scotty's inflated repair time estimates and how reverse time-travel always seems (by some remarkable coincidence) to take the crew back to the very year in which the show was filmed and other such well-chewed foibles, lest this turn into Galaxy Quest—but the payoff comes in some really spectacular allusions to the later Trek universe, which of course the original series couldn't have done, and one can hardly help but be impressed. Also there are some genuinely stirring moments, such as Decker's "final report" video, which are very well handled—the writers clearly have some talent to work with here.

Paramount might have something to say about this, but if the Roddenberry estate is backing this project, it might well attain the status of "canon" among the fans. I've never been more than a casual enjoyer of the various Trek series, but I can appreciate a labor of love when I see it, and these guys loooove what they're doing. It shows.


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