Tuesday, June 27th, 2017
So now we have a first draft of a script for episodes IV and V of The Four Years War, the sequels to Prelude to Axanar. So what is next?
Well, two parallel tracks. First we work with the team on revising the script. That will take a few weeks. The good news is that since the script is only about 30 pages, it isn’t that hard. Getting David Gerrold to take time off of his prolific Facebook posts to read our script is our greatest challenge! 🙂
The second track is production! We are now officially in pre-production, so that means starting to talk to department heads about budgeting and planning out the shoot.
Now, for Prelude we shot two days (plus another half day when the director forgot to get some needed shots on our two day shoot). But basically two days, which, for 20 pages of script was plenty, especially since it was mostly green screen shooting actors talking. There were also 3 practical scenes as well, Kharn Walking, Ramirez giving his speech and Sonya seeing the destruction of Inverness and I have to give credit to Production Designer Scott Cobb, for making those scenes look so good and certainly Tobias Richter for the Archer Arena CGI, which is better than what they did for Enterprise!
So for 50% more script, should mean 50% more shoot days, or a total of 3 days. But we really need 5 to get everything we want and include one day of location shooting.
The other thing we are considering is how we executed The Vulcan Scene shoot, which went very well, and we shot a very complicated scene in a day. It was a much smoother shoot than Prelude, despite being much more complicated, so that is a blueprint for us.
Now, before then we will have to raise the money for the episodes, and that will really determine how much we can do. The good news is we only need about 1/10th of what we raised for the feature film, and we are way more efficient now and know a lot more than when we did Prelude.
So stay tuned for more info as we move this process along!
Alec
Just curious, where are you shooting?
Not close to deciding yet. We need to budget and raise the $ first.
I apologize, Alec, but this seems a little backwards. Don’t you have to know how much your facility cost will be in order to budget that out, in order to know how much funds you need to raise
How much you raise is not dependent on your budget, it is dependent on your ability to fund raise. When we know how much money we have to work with, then we can figure out what we can spend.
If you decide on Georgia, I have an actor to recommend 😉
Alec, have you given any consideration to my suggestion that you obtain the rights to “Alien Nation,” or “Dune.” With an Alien Nation reboot, you could establish the ‘look’ of the future, where Newcomers, humans, and hybrids are living in an advanced society and where Newcomers have risen to the top of many professions. You could explore the xenophobia and mistrust by some humans, you could show hybrids in society, you could show the advanced technology and means of travel, and you could give it a gritty ‘Sam Spade’ type of feel by following the central character, “Det. Buck Francisco.” You could even have a cameo or two by Michelle Scarabelli and/or Eric Pierpoint.
Possible plot: In the near future, humans and Newcomers are living in peace. But a routine murder of a human astronomy student leaves some unanswered questions, i.e. why was he monitoring deep space signals, and why are the Newcomer leaders trying to block the investigation. Det. Francisco finds a message hidden by the young scientist and translated before he was killed. The message, “Arrival Imminent. Begin Depopulation.”
Thanks Paul. The problem with any other property is we don’t own it. So we are looking at our own properties. We also are looking at some short films with famous Sci Fi properties that we do license, but they are short projects.
Thanks!
Alec