It's a Wrap!

Today we wrapped shooting on the online Star Trek episode. It's been quite a ride. The decision was made to shoot the last two days in LA, first because we had some scenes on the Excelsior bridge and there was no such standing set built in Port Henry, and second, because the main New Voyages cast living out East was not needed for these scenes.
As it was, all of the actors involved in the Excelsior scenes already lived in LA. Only JOHN LIM – (young Sulu to the left with me) – needed to fly in to fly in to do his green screen work.

So while we were filming in Port Henry, crew people out here were busily building the Excelsior bridge. However, unlike in Port Henry, where fans have been building permanent sets to use in many episodes, we were only planning to use this one for one day and then strike it. Hence, we constructed only what would be seen on screen.

Basically, that meant the area of the bridge behind the command chair (a portion of these graphic displays you can see to the right, behind me and JOSEPH RENE, our hair wizard) and the command chair where Sulu sits.

In case you're wondering, Sulu’s command chair is a re-covered office chair.

The navigator and pilot sat on chairs 'borrowed' from the shuttlecraft and driven cross-country to LA by WINSTON ENGLE who was also carrying our footage with him, since he owns the computer it was transferred to and stored. Copies had been burned and sent on ahead but he was carrying the raw footage, making him a very important person.

Watching the green screen work between John and LIA JOHNSON (Dr. Chandris to the left with me again) was great fun. Although they had filmed the exteriors of the shuttlecraft back in NY and the two of them getting in and out of it, the interiors were going to be filmed here because the gravitational wave they'd be reacting to would be all optical effects. Hence, while they sat on the borrowed shuttlecraft seats in front of the green screen, they had no consoles in front of them. Out of camera sight, their fingers danced across a mike stand the crew had rigged sideways so they both could tap something on the same level line as each other. To their credit, they ACTED as if they had a full array of buttons and switches there in front of them.

They also had to simulate being buffetted by the gravitational wave. This looks on the screen a lot easier than it really is. The director can tell them to lean to the right, left, back and forward and he did. But it doesn't look right unless they each lean the same amount. And if one bounces up and down more than the other, that too doesn't look so good, either. And yet, they have to be able to synchronize their movements without looking at each other! When you see this episode, you will see what amazing pros they are in these scene.

I wish I could share with you some fun things that happened, but the shoot in LA went very smoothly as can be seen in the unharried looks on the faces of director MARC SCOTT ZICREE and thespian GEORGE TAKEI as they study some footage on Winston's monitor. For one thing, we had only a couple of scenes to do and most of the people working here had much experience working in production. It was also helpful that we were filming in the loading bay of a company which was in an industrial area on a side street on a weekend. We still had to contend with the occasional plane overhead, but we didn't have to contend with vehicle traffic on the main artery through town like we did in Port Henry. Or flies. No more wonderful blooper lines like Kirk saying, "There is no midnight in space. Just planes and flies."

GRACE LEE WHITNEY joined us to reprise her role of Commander Rand on the Excelsior. She's a lovely lady and she was quite entertaining -- with the colorful language used on most major sets to keep things moving through the inevitable setups and retakes.

The most difficult part was to find an Asian baby at the last moment to play Demora Sulu's daughter. We had several of our trusty crew people scouring all their friends and colleagues to come up with a suitable baby -- one who was young enough to be carried and who wouldn't demand her own trailer! With TV and Internet!

In the end, one of the guys connected with the company we were shooting in came up with the most perfect baby girl. Except there is a downside to having babies that young -- they don't like to be held by anybody other than their mothers and are quite vocal about it. And this one's mother was not the actress hired to play Demora. Still, it was cute to watch George making cooing noises and playing with the baby girl, getting her used to being with him -- for a short scene of maybe several seconds.

All in all, this was a great experience. As MICHAEL REAVES said in the interview I did with him for the Behind the Scenes documentary I'm producing, he's waited thirty years to sit in that captain's chair and hear them say these words. For all of us who grew up with Star Trek, who'd a thunk it -- that we'd be making an episode with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov... ever??? As professionals and as fans... together. Dreams do happen... and like Marc says, so does magic.

I Am Kirk!

Or at least I got to read his Voice Over line off camera. Today we were filming the shuttlecraft and Excelsior scenes for our Internet Star Trek New Voyages episode, "World Enough... and Time" and they needed someone to read Kirk's line for camera and actor cuing. Then James Cawley who plays Kirk will loop it over in post. After decades of Kirk being my number one hero, I deserve a fangirl moment, don't I? In all other postings, you will hear from the producer or the script-coordinator, but here is a moment for the girl who once wore the mini-skirted version of Kirk's green wrap around to masquerades.

On The Bridge of the Starship Enterprise -- Finally!

Four decades after the Starship Enterprise boldly went where no man has gone before, I finally made it to the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise and into the Captain's chair -- at least long enough for a picture.

Well, that's not completely true, I did make it onto the bridge and into Kirk's chair on the Paramount lot once, but it was in the dark and essentially in storage, courtesy of some young publicist who liked me back then, if you know what I mean.

Here, though, is a replica of the Enterprise so detailed and exact in Port Henry, NY that you think you have stepped into a time machine and been transported back to the 1960s. Apparently that has also been the reaction of those of the original cast and crew who have visited the sets of New Voyages in the last few years. "My god, it feels like I've stepped back into the 60s," was their common remark of awe.

New Voyages is the brainstorm of JAMES CAWLEY, a long time fan who started building sets in his grandfather's garage and also interned on one of the ST series in the costume dept. A man who obviously enjoys playing icons, he makes his money as an Elvis impersonator -- much of which he then funnels into making more authentic Star Trek sets and producing full-hour scripted Star Trek: the Original series episodes. I was told by several people during those long hours of filming that his Elvis show is one of the best, and that he tours with a full band and backup singers. And then pours it all back into his lifelong love of Star Trek.

I jumped aboard as script coordinator of this fourth episode when my friends and colleagues, MARC SCOTT ZICREE and MICHAEL REAVES wrote a fantastic script for Sulu called "World Enough... and Time", based on an idea that Michael pitched to Paramount thirty years ago. They wanted to do it back then as part of a second series featuring the non-top-three actors (read less expensive). They changed their minds and decided to do the movies instead. It's kind of like a "City on the Edge of Forever" for Sulu, but this time it's Sulu who has to sacrifice something he holds very dear to right the universe and save the Enterprise.

Not only did I fall in love with the script, but more importantly, GEORGE TAKEI did. With him aboard, several of us made the trek east to blend in with the fans who have been doing this for a pilot and three episodes before us, to lend the project our expertise and play out a fantasy that none of us thought we'd ever live.

I can't tell you how incredible this all felt. For those of us who didn't grow up in Hollywood and didn't know we'd eventually end up here in Hollywood, Star Trek provided us an avenue of expression. Many of us wrote stories, drew artwork, crafted and painted models. The more adventurous of us made song vids, in which images from multiple episodes of the show were married with the lyrics of a favorite song to tell a different story than the one the images came from.

With the digital revolution and the internet fans are now capable of mounting full-length episodes, complete with incredible special effects. I saw a work product DVD of some of the special effects from an earlier episode, and to my merely viewer eye, I couldn't tell the difference from those done by the TV series.

To give something to this incredible enterprise, I came to Port Henry to produce a behind-the-scenes documentary to celebrate this journey. I had great fun running around interviewing as many as the cast and crew as I could pull away from their work and get to sit down to talk to me. I was also planning on directing the shooting of footage, but I ended up needing to do very little of that -- because I had wonderful videographers with me that did most of it without prompting.

I had planned to give you all a running report in this blog -- a day by day account of what we were doing, but... and here's the beginning of our big city collision with rural America: No internet service. Not in any of the places we were. Some people could sit on the library's steps and tie into the library's wireless, but mine wouldn't recognize it. Of course, you could go in and use their computers, but the library functioned on small-town hours that didn't accommodate that we worked from about 10 am in the morning to 5-6 am the next morning. Yes, the glamour of Hollywood and working in TV -- no, no sleep. I was staying in a quaint B&B which didn't have a telephone or a TV in my room let alone internet. For 10 days, the entire world could have collapsed but as long as Port Henry was there, I wouldn't have known it.

So you're probably thinking, no games and no emails, big deal... Well, there are worse glitches than that. Since some of our computers are Macs and some are PCs -- with a variety of software on them, people in the industry are used to using the internet to bridge that incompatibility. My PC doesn't have Mac printer drivers on it but the Internet doesn't care. But here I couldn't just email the script revisions to the guy with the printer, and we couldn’t just tie into the internet to download the appropriate drivers onto my laptop.

But worse than that was the lack of cell phone coverage. Only Cingular and T-Mobile worked; Sprint and Verizon did not. So my cell phone worked and consequently mine got used a lot when we had to find someone or people wanted to check in with the people back home. The main problem though was that our working cell phones didn’t necessarily correspond with our available cars. This of course is not a problem for the actors – their schedules are set by the ADs and cars are always automatically dispatched to get them when they are needed. But the rest of us… it was a challenge to get to set each day. Sometimes, I got someone on set to dispatch a car for me, if people were already on set when I needed to go… sometimes I got the owner of the B&B to drive me and sometimes I prevailed on the generosity of the lady whose house I was supposed to stay in to come pick me and deliver me.

George had warned us that a friend of his had said it was like going into a third-world country to work and he shook his head and said, he’s been to third world countries and they weren’t like this beautiful rustic setting. And to look out the windows of the B&B into the nearby woods, it was beautiful, but I understand how the friend felt… as picturesque as the countryside was and as friendly as the people were, nowadays we are so totally dependent on aspects of technology that it’s difficult to function without them. At the end of the day, when filming is done, people do want to be able to contact their loved ones or go online to see what is happening in the world they left behind.

There were enormous challenges in the work environment. For example, dailies… the idea of dailies is to watch the footage that is shot the day before to make sure you have the coverage you need before you move too far away from the sets and scenes of that day, in case adjustments need to be made or things done over. Well, technology today allows you to look at the footage instantaneously, so that is not a problem, but… we needed to send the dailies to the editor back in LA each day. Except the nearest post office that could do an overnighter was in Fort Ticonderoga which was at least 20 miles away. And even so you’d have to have the package ready on set by about 1 pm to drive it there in time to make the pickup to an even larger post office. Forget FedEx.

And if you ran out of ink cartridges or paper or DVDs or water… that was another huge trek to Wal-Mart – to some degree we lived by Wal-Mart. But for all its challenges, we were making Star Trek. We had a young Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov saying dialogue, making gestures, and doing things that were very much the characters we had grown to love with the original actors. And we had an exciting story that was also poignant and heartwarming and gut-wrenching – one that kept you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

I’ve only seen bits and pieces of the footage, but it’s going to look great. The performances are fantastic – the actors really stepping up to the great script. George Takei was incredible. He is a slight man physically, but he seemed to grow in stature for Warrior Sulu – he had such a commanding presence that he seemed to stride larger than life through the corridors. The script also took him through an emotional wringer and he was totally up for the job. He shows his versatility and skill in this role.

Even circumstances played a unique challenge for him. We had a fly problem in the warehouse. And the flies just loved George’s leather and feather warrior outfit. Many times the take had to be done over because flies started buzzing around him. He was even sprayed down with insecticide to get through the takes.

Also of special note is CHRISTINE MOSES, who plays Sulu’s daughter. She does one helluva job and I’m not going to say anything more – you’ll have to just watch it. The special effects are going to be done by some of the best special effects guys in television – guys whose day jobs are doing the special effects for the Battlestar Galactica series.

One of my favorite moments was watching Sulu’s quarters being built. On the original series, Sulu’s quarters was a redressed Kirk’s quarters and the same thing happened here. They brought the walls out of storage, or took them from a different set, some of the walls I believe were from the sickbay set. They slid them into place and within a short period of hammering and painting, walla – we had Sulu’s quarters. What was awesome was how authentic the grid looked between the bed area and the ready room area. And yet, it was merely the grid that hangs over fluorescent lights. I’m sure that back in the day, that’s where they got their props as well – where they could be cheaply optained.

It wasn’t always an easy marriage between the pros that came out to participate in this episode and the fans who’ve been doing them. For the fans, it was totally a labor of love – they took vacation time from their jobs and came to make Trek… they functioned like it was their vacation to some degree – meaning they paid for their lodging, food, transportation, film, ink, incidentals like they would do on any vacation. But for those who came out from LA, it was them doing what they did for work. Even if most of them weren’t getting paid for it, and even if they were doing it for fun, for the most part, we don’t have other jobs to fund our adventure. Consequently, some of the expectations of what would be provided for them were different. But everybody did pull together and at the end of the day… we did make magic. And fulfilled the dreams of everyone who came to Port Henry to be a small part of the legacy of the series we loved and to work with one of the original icons we so admired.