And so begins another Traks history lesson.
After my sophomore year of college produced Belch-O-Rama, Traks IV, and Sensitivity 101, I spent the following Summer not writing much of anything as I recall. I spent my days working and my evenings with my fiance, so not a lot of Traks was happening.
Once I got back to Old Dominion in the Fall of 1994, I decided that the time was right to pursue something I’d been wanting to do for ages: make a Star Traks movie.
Now this wasn’t going to be my first attempt at filmmaking. Okay. That makes it sound more grandiose than it was. We’re talking about stuff that was shot with a plain old home video camera on standard VHS tape. In any case, back in high school, my friends and I had made a few extra credit films for our classes. One of them, a modernization of The Aeneid involving mobsters, may include the most boring boat chase ever caught on camera.
Making a Star Traks movie was going to be a whole different level of challenge. First, we had almost no budget. Second, we had no sets. Third, we had no place to build sets even if we had a budget to do so. Fourth, none of us were really actors. Fifth…well, you get the idea.
Fortunately, we had Sensitivity 101, written during the previous school year, which, conveniently enough, was mostly set at Old Dominion. I wrote the script pretty quickly. Most of it was done in a single evening, which was also the night I was first introduced to beer by my RA at the time. After a brain-numbing marathon of typing, I stumbled down to his place just to get away from my laptop. He took one look at me and decided that I needed a beer, which was somewhat ironic considering he was supposed to be preventing underaged drinking on campus. Granted, I was 20 at the time, so it’s not like I was much underage. Anyway, this RA was from Norway, and he handed me a dark heavy beer. Since it was my first one, it has forever colored my beer drinking preferences. To this day I can’t stand most of the standard American brews like Budweiser and Coors. Coors Light seems to me to be carbonated water.
With that alcohol-fueled detour out of the way, back to the story. With a script in hand that took Sensitivity 101, renamed it Star Traks: Refresher Course, and turned it into something we could reasonably shoot on campus, we headed into pre-production, which in this case involved a trip to K-Mart where I bought red, gold, and blue long sleeve T-shirts to be used as the uniform tops. Coincidentally, the $50 bucks or less that I spent on those shirts was pretty much the whole budget. I asked everyone to provide their own black pants and shoes and civilian clothes for the 20th Century scenes.
Once shooting started, we did whatever we could, whenever we could, as fast as we could. Two long days were spent in a meeting room of the top floor of the Batten Arts & Letters building for scenes that were supposed to be in a runabout and an admiral’s office. We took over the rec room of our on-campus apartment complex, Powhatan Apartments, for the final scene in Seven Backward on the Secondprize. We talked a couple of my professors into being in the movie and letting us shoot in their classes. We swiped an empty classroom for other bits. We used an Enterprise-D toy and a runabout model shot against black posterboard with holes punched in it and light shining behind it for the space sequences. We made credits in a computer program but then had to film the monitor in order to get them on camera.
I was the “director,” although I can’t say that I did much directing. There wasn’t a lot of shot composition happening or coverage or anything like that. Mainly I set up the camera and hoped everybody got their lines right, which, considering the amount of technobabble Jaroch and Carr had to spit out on the runabout, was a challenge.
Two months later, though, we were done, and I set about putting the movie together. Remember this was 1994, and we had everything on VHS tapes. There was no digital video, editing software, rendering software, or any of that. At least not that was remotely affordable or available to the general public. It’s astounding to me how much changed and how quickly it changed after that. Ten years later, people were putting out incredible fan films with really amazing effects. Back in 1994, though, I had two VCRs and a sound board that allowed me to mix in some music. I edited the film together from the raw footage with the two VCRs. It was a painstaking process to find the takes and make sure that I was joining the scenes together as seemlessly as possible. We started every one with a fade in and ended with a fade out to make that somewhat simpler.
Finally, I finished my edit, and then on November 17, 1994, the day before Star Trek: Generations came out, we premiered it in the Powhatan Apartments rec room after a showing of Star Trek 6 and the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The response was…meh.
Look, it’s not a great movie. I won’t pretend that it is. The pacing is terrible, the shots are way too static, the lack of budget and the weaknesses of doing it on VHS really show, and my acting is…not good. Despite that, I am exceptionally proud of the movie because we finished it. We made a 45 minute long Star Traks movie.
After talking about it for this long, you’d think I’d be nice enough to give you a link or something. That won’t be happening. Sorry. While my friends made the movie with me, they would be none too pleased if it got out on ye olde Internet. I can’t say that I blame them. What I can offer, however, is the script that I wrote for the movie. What we shot ended up being slightly different. A couple of scenes were never actually filmed. But, for the most part, this is what we did.
Star Traks: Refresher Course
After the rush of finishing the first movie, I wanted to do another one based on the Traks short story “A Serious Case of the Stupids.” I had big plans for this one. We were going to figure out how to do effects, I was going to shoot coverage and close-ups and things like that. Unfortunately, we never managed to make it happen. The timing just never worked out. I did, however, write the script. That was a start at least.
A Serious Case of the Stupids
Now that we live in the age of digital video and affordable effects, Anthony and I occasionally bat around the idea of trying to do another movie. We still are faced with many of the same problems: no budget, no sets, no place to build sets, and so on. And we can add the fact that neither of us knows the first thing about green screen shooting (if we decided to go that way for the sets) or rendering computer graphics and effects. The bigger problem as I see it is the lack of a cast. We’ve graduated, grown up, and moved on with our lives. I guess we could just recast the parts, but it wouldn’t feel right to have anyone other than my friends playing these characters.