Axanar Production Day 1 – It's a Wrap!

That’s it, folks! Production Day One of Axanar officially wrapped at 6:01 PM Pacific Time this evening amid a gorgeous Southern California sunset.

It’s been a good long twelve hour day here, with plenty of sweat and hard work, and more than a few sunburns, but at last, our shoot is complete. We finished with a series of wide shots of our characters, as well as some background extras, and coverage of our male character – filmed using a dolly – that will be cut together with similar footage of our female character shot first thing this morning.

Filmmaker Kevin Rubio – you’ll know him best from his fantastic short Troops – has been here all day helping out with the production, as has filmmaker and Axanar consulting producer Charles de Lauzirika, who’s been taking some really great candid photos of the cast and crew at work. Meanwhile, Bing Bailey is already busy “ingesting” all the 6K footage we’ve shot today (using the RED Dragon camera, for those of you who may be wondering) into our computers here at Ares Studios so that editing can begin immediately. And, as predicted earlier, director Rob Burnett is already planning to start that process right away tonight.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone here is thrilled with the quality of the footage we’ve gotten today. Our veteran actor even made a point this morning of saying how pleased he was with the final script pages we filmed today – a scene that Rob and I put the final touches on earlier this week in an effort to really make the dialogue shine. There’s certainly a special thrill in seeing words you’ve written spoken by great actors who can deliver on every nuance of a character. A lot of people on set today felt like they had to pinch themselves, seeing these characters come to life.

By tomorrow morning, a rough cut of the scene should already be complete. The cut footage needs to be delivered to Tobias Richter and his Light Works team in Germany by Monday morning, so that they can finish the background plates and VFX footage. From there it will get a color grading and the sound mix will be created.

The final scene will be revealed to all of you on July 8th, at the start of our next Kickstarter. Those of you who are already donors, however, will get an exclusive sneak peek before then – the details on that will be announced soon.

I think that about covers it! We hope you’ve enjoyed our posts today. Rest assured today’s shoot will be the subject of an upcoming Production Log video, so there’s more to come. We really can’t wait for you guys to see what we’ve created here. And with that, we’ll sign off for the day here at Ares Studios.

Well… except for one little thing.