Condorcon
Happy Monday all!
This weekend was CondorCon, where we had back to back panels on Saturday. The first panel was A Short History of Axanar. I talked about how Axanar started with my first story about Garth while I was at law school and how James Cawley got me started in fan films. I showed the "Origins" teaser with me as Garth which has never been released.
After the “Origins” teaser, I showed our first Kickstarter video and talked about how that campaign set the trajectory for Axanar. We followed that discussion up with a screening of the trailer for Prelude to Axanar. To keep the momentum up for the next panel, we started things off by watching “Prelude to Axanar” and then followed that up with a Q&A with fans.
Brin Famous Scfi Fi author David Brin is a huge Axanar fan!
Of course everyone wanted to know about the lawsuit! Since I can't talk about the case, I basically just said everything I’ve been saying on the blog and in social media. We want to resolve the case and get on with telling our story, but the legal process has to be given time to play out. Our prolonged discussion of the technicalities in the case was probably boring for the people who were more curious about Axanar itself, but it seemed like everyone was behind us and excited to see a positive resolution for everyone involved. I know that is something I have said many times – and I’m going to keep on saying it until we get everything worked out. Not only do we support fan films more than any other production, (we even have a weekly Fan Film Friday blog highlighting a different production each week on our website), but we firmly believe that coming to a positive resolution resolution on this lawsuit could be a positive step for all fan films. Why? Because right now there are absolutely no guidelines for Fan Films from CBS (the rights holder). Unlike Lucasfilm, who actively promotes fan films and even has a fan film contest, there are no guidelines from CBS, who won't even tell you what you CANNOT do.  When you talk with them, they make it very clear they will tell you neither what you can nor what you cannot do … only when you cross the line. Of course, they don't tell you where the line is! We hope that one thing that will come from this suit is more brightly colored line drawn around what is and is not permissible for fan films in the future. So keep the faith Axanarians and we’ll keep goin! LLAP, Alec Peters