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On The HorizonWorking on something? With a 2D or 3D app? Is it SF - Fantasy - Real world? Let's see it!
To post art for Battlestar Galactica, go to our sister site- Colonial Fleets
STAR TREK: RETRIBUTION IS DONE AT LAST!!! Okay, so some shots in the epilogue sequence aren't fully rendered and there's no credit roll yet...but the important stuff is rolling off the editor right now, and as soon as I can throw it onto YouTube that's exactly where it'll be! Look for a link to appear right here. Stay tuned!
Just touching base, now that the first full cut of Retribution is complete and posted (it's broken up into 13 segments the same way Specter was, thanks to Fox making a copyright claim on another unrelated video from a few years back; I've disputed it but until it's resolved, I can't upload anything longer than 15 minutes), I'm going through and fixing all the bloopers and glitches throughout the picture. I know about Prentice's missing left boot (I knew it was missing later on but I didn't realize it was NEVER present through the entire film until yesterday) and the glitch with the eyes (they occasionally show through the eyelids when the characters blink), those I can fix, but the glitch with the combadges and rank pips disappearing as they move isn't so easy.
Since you've already stated that your cast was set in stone back on youtube, I was wondering if maybe the 2 characters I have in mind, along with the ideas I have, could be stored for a possible 4th movie to your CGI Star Trek?
Since you've already stated that your cast was set in stone back on youtube, I was wondering if maybe the 2 characters I have in mind, along with the ideas I have, could be stored for a possible 4th movie to your CGI Star Trek?
There won't be a 4th entry to this series, Redemption will be the third and final entry in this saga. I encourage you to post your ideas in full here in this thread, I'm willing to hear them and maybe there's a way I can integrate them. I said the cast was "largely" set in stone but the plot is still being fleshed out so if your ideas are good, I might still be able to integrate them.
There won't be a 4th entry to this series, Redemption will be the third and final entry in this saga. I encourage you to post your ideas in full here in this thread, I'm willing to hear them and maybe there's a way I can integrate them. I said the cast was "largely" set in stone but the plot is still being fleshed out so if your ideas are good, I might still be able to integrate them.
Very well... I might as well get this off my chest so I won't have to keep it all bottled up.
My idea is (or was) to have two new characters join the crew to the USS F. Scott Fitzgerald, both Starfleet officers, and have them get married when the current mission was over.
1. A tall male, about 6'2" in a red uniform with a scar on his left eye, but is still able to see from both. Rank: Com. Name: Zieg Sanchez
and 2. Was a female digimon in flesh and blood, 5'9" in a blue uniform. Rank: Lt. Com. Name: Rena Renamon. She wears a slightly big engagement ring that fits her, which was given to her from Zieg.
The intro plot was to open fadedly to a black room with just a single light in the ceiling and move down to one of your characters that was a high rank officer (Probably Captain Bradley Prentice) sitting in a single chair (it's what you call on being interrogated in the dark). The officer then hears someones' voice calling out to him/her, he/she answers and then some talk goes on until the mention of Section 31. The officer then starts to talk as to what happened as of late and then goes to the opening credits, and then over to the USS F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I'm not sure if this would peak your interest, but I have been putting a lot of thought into this idea. I'm not sure If I'll get any more ideas, but if I do, I'll post them here for you to see.
@BlackXANA28: I thank you for sharing, but that first idea is way too derivative for what I had in mind. (Honestly, the name for the male half that you proposed sounds silly to me, and I stopped reading altogether when I saw the phrase "female digimon")
I am intrigued by the second idea, a Section 31 tie-in would be great, but I can't think of any way to go about what you propose that wouldn't turn the whole film into a flashback. I hated it when Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis did that (those damned "12/24/48 hours earlier" subtitles drove me nuts, and eventually if one of those came up I'd tune out and go do something else).
That's my take on it at least, I'll let the membership around here sound off what they think before I make my final decision. I will add though that this film is going to move fairly quickly (I know I said that about Retribution too but this time I mean it), I'm going to develop my characters as much as I can but I'm not going to dwell on it too much.
Well, I thought it would work on the first one. I'm just one of those people who likes to cross a few things over for interest, or just to spice things up a bit.
No pun intended of course.
Though, I am, however, glad that you like the second one.
If I get anymore that pops in my mind, I'll let you know.
I'm hardly averse to crossovers myself, and if you watch Specter and Retribution and look carefully, you can see tons of examples of. (The TVTropes pages have full lists of them.) The thing of it is, you have to be careful about how you do it, or your audience will cease to take you seriously. I wasn't at all sure at first how my audience would react to the involvement of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the second film at all, much less the use of clips from the cartoon, but it was played straight and portrayed very seriously (and then never brought up again), to say nothing of backed up against an action scene to keep people from dwelling on it. The Back to the Future references at the end of the film were a little more direct than I prefer, but again, I didn't dwell on them, they were just present enough to make a point to the audience and then we moved on. Most of the others (with the exception of the Price is Right holoprogram) are handled the same way: chosen with care so that my likely viewing audience wouldn't be confused (i.e. things from other sci-fi franchises, like the Event Horizon or the Star Wars stuff), or things most people would recognize, like the FireFox logo in Prentice's quarters. The rest--the things like the gold models in the officers' quarters--were background objects, nice little touches that attentive viewers might recognize and appreciate but that weren't critical to the story. The exception to this is the Price is Right holoprogram, which while non-scifi is still infamous enough that the vast majority of ordinary people would probably still recognize it, and after "Captain Proton," Trek viewers could accept it as a historical holoprogram.
The key to most of these is subtlety. Even the Price is Right stuff was handled with a certain delicacy, playing its role when it was on screen but wisely not mentioned when not.
So, while I appreciate your appreciation for crossovers, I have a few problems with your first idea:
1) It's from what I would term a fringe interest (defined as something so far removed from what we're dealing with here as to be comically unrelated), which I doubt a lot of my viewers would recognize or, if they did see it alluded to here, would take seriously. (I know I didn't.)
2) All of the crossovers I worked in were handled with a certain subtlety, and in such a way that if viewers didn't like a particular one, it would be done and over with by the next scene. You'll notice that neither The Price is Right nor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is so much as hinted at when not on screen, and they get one scene each and that's it. Yours wouldn't be so easy to ignore by people who disagree; introducing and developing new characters to the mix with that kind of story arc in mind takes a lot of time and effort, and draws attention away from the established cast that we already care about. Remember, if I present the audience with a new cast member, I have to make it clear why they should care about said character. I don't see any reason why an audience would care about one character with a silly name, and another who looks like a kid's cartoon character, whose sole purpose in the story is to get married at the end. That's one reason why James Cameron's Titanic has the reputation it does--the Jack/Rose love story was widely viewed as a Plot Tumor, taking attention away from the primary story (what happened to the Titanic) for no good reason. I'll also refer you to the duo of Nikki & Paulo from Lost (see also: The New Guy, Out of Genre Experience, and Shoo Out the New Guy).
Think carefully before you propose crossovers. Ask yourself a few questions:
1) Does the element I propose to cross over break genre? If so, can it be worked in in an acceptable way?
2) Does it make sense on its own merits, or will the cast be required to devote screen time to explaining it?
3) Does it fit well with the rest of the continuity I'm trying to integrate it with?
4) What are my choices if I go to all the trouble to do it, but the audience responds negatively? Do I have an out?
In analyzing your two proposals, these are how I answer those questions:
1) The name doesn't fit with the Star Trek universe. Neither do Digimon in any way. They cannot be worked into the story seamlessly.
2) No matter how we cut it, the cast would have to devote screen time to explaining where these two characters suddenly came from, and why we should care about them as much as our established principal cast. (Actually, the reality is that we wouldn't care about them as much no matter what.)
3) No again; as previously pointed out, the name just sounds silly and...well, like I said, Digimon has no place in the Trek universe.*
4) If we spend so much time introducing these characters, and then it turns out the audience doesn't like them, we have no easy way to remove them from the story, because once they're there, they're there.
*Think about the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Didn't you cringe every time you saw Jar Jar Binks because of how wildly off-genre he was? A cartoonish (and I'll just come out and say it, childish) element like that is very much out of place in a serious universe like the Star Wars universe is. Or the original Battlestar Galactica--didn't you cringe whenever a scene focused on Boxey and Muffitt? Here we have a series about the remnants of the human race "fleeing from the Cylon tyranny," and we're focusing on this? Seriously? Was this a scifi show or a Saturday morning cartoon? For all its other problems, at least the reimagined version from 2004 took itself seriously.
I'll also add that from the very beginning with Specter, one of the elements that people say keeps them coming back is that it's writing that obviously wants to be taken seriously, which is unlike the vast majority of the other fan fiction you see out there. In my experience, what sinks most of them (aside from corny or otherwise incredibly poor dialogue) is that people start pulling crossovers like that without any regard for the quality of their work, and many of them come across as poorly executed hack jobs which are just a bunch of random elements jammed together (or worse yet, as "Franchise X is really just Franchise Y in a paper-thin disguise," to the detriment of both).
In short, silly names and icons from god-awful anime programs have no place in a serious story set in the Star Trek universe.
I'm hardly averse to crossovers myself, and if you watch Specter and Retribution and look carefully, you can see tons of examples of. (The TVTropes pages have full lists of them.) The thing of it is, you have to be careful about how you do it, or your audience will cease to take you seriously. I wasn't at all sure at first how my audience would react to the involvement of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the second film at all, much less the use of clips from the cartoon, but it was played straight and portrayed very seriously (and then never brought up again), to say nothing of backed up against an action scene to keep people from dwelling on it. The Back to the Future references at the end of the film were a little more direct than I prefer, but again, I didn't dwell on them, they were just present enough to make a point to the audience and then we moved on. Most of the others (with the exception of the Price is Right holoprogram) are handled the same way: chosen with care so that my likely viewing audience wouldn't be confused (i.e. things from other sci-fi franchises, like the Event Horizon or the Star Wars stuff), or things most people would recognize, like the FireFox logo in Prentice's quarters. The rest--the things like the gold models in the officers' quarters--were background objects, nice little touches that attentive viewers might recognize and appreciate but that weren't critical to the story. The exception to this is the Price is Right holoprogram, which while non-scifi is still infamous enough that the vast majority of ordinary people would probably still recognize it, and after "Captain Proton," Trek viewers could accept it as a historical holoprogram.
The key to most of these is subtlety. Even the Price is Right stuff was handled with a certain delicacy, playing its role when it was on screen but wisely not mentioned when not.
So, while I appreciate your appreciation for crossovers, I have a few problems with your first idea:
1) It's from what I would term a fringe interest (defined as something so far removed from what we're dealing with here as to be comically unrelated), which I doubt a lot of my viewers would recognize or, if they did see it alluded to here, would take seriously. (I know I didn't.)
2) All of the crossovers I worked in were handled with a certain subtlety, and in such a way that if viewers didn't like a particular one, it would be done and over with by the next scene. You'll notice that neither The Price is Right nor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is so much as hinted at when not on screen, and they get one scene each and that's it. Yours wouldn't be so easy to ignore by people who disagree; introducing and developing new characters to the mix with that kind of story arc in mind takes a lot of time and effort, and draws attention away from the established cast that we already care about. Remember, if I present the audience with a new cast member, I have to make it clear why they should care about said character. I don't see any reason why an audience would care about one character with a silly name, and another who looks like a kid's cartoon character, whose sole purpose in the story is to get married at the end. That's one reason why James Cameron's Titanic has the reputation it does--the Jack/Rose love story was widely viewed as a Plot Tumor, taking attention away from the primary story (what happened to the Titanic) for no good reason. I'll also refer you to the duo of Nikki & Paulo from Lost (see also: The New Guy, Out of Genre Experience, and Shoo Out the New Guy).
Think carefully before you propose crossovers. Ask yourself a few questions:
1) Does the element I propose to cross over break genre? If so, can it be worked in in an acceptable way?
2) Does it make sense on its own merits, or will the cast be required to devote screen time to explaining it?
3) Does it fit well with the rest of the continuity I'm trying to integrate it with?
4) What are my choices if I go to all the trouble to do it, but the audience responds negatively? Do I have an out?
In analyzing your two proposals, these are how I answer those questions:
1) The name doesn't fit with the Star Trek universe. Neither do Digimon in any way. They cannot be worked into the story seamlessly.
2) No matter how we cut it, the cast would have to devote screen time to explaining where these two characters suddenly came from, and why we should care about them as much as our established principal cast. (Actually, the reality is that we wouldn't care about them as much no matter what.)
3) No again; as previously pointed out, the name just sounds silly and...well, like I said, Digimon has no place in the Trek universe.*
4) If we spend so much time introducing these characters, and then it turns out the audience doesn't like them, we have no easy way to remove them from the story, because once they're there, they're there.
*Think about the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Didn't you cringe every time you saw Jar Jar Binks because of how wildly off-genre he was? A cartoonish (and I'll just come out and say it, childish) element like that is very much out of place in a serious universe like the Star Wars universe is. Or the original Battlestar Galactica--didn't you cringe whenever a scene focused on Boxey and Muffitt? Here we have a series about the remnants of the human race "fleeing from the Cylon tyranny," and we're focusing on this? Seriously? Was this a scifi show or a Saturday morning cartoon? For all its other problems, at least the reimagined version from 2004 took itself seriously.
I'll also add that from the very beginning with Specter, one of the elements that people say keeps them coming back is that it's writing that obviously wants to be taken seriously, which is unlike the vast majority of the other fan fiction you see out there. In my experience, what sinks most of them (aside from corny or otherwise incredibly poor dialogue) is that people start pulling crossovers like that without any regard for the quality of their work, and many of them come across as poorly executed hack jobs which are just a bunch of random elements jammed together (or worse yet, as "Franchise X is really just Franchise Y in a paper-thin disguise," to the detriment of both).
In short, silly names and icons from god-awful anime programs have no place in a serious story set in the Star Trek universe.
Ah... I beginning to understand at what you're saying about my first idea with the two characters. There's actually some background I'm working on that won't stop leaving me alone about it. I'm thinking if I should do it myself, but I don't really have the programing or the software to do it to get it out into the open (let alone that my computer is in the shop with a virus problem).
There's also one other thing that I forgot to ask yesterday, and this is a bit of a request if possible. Could you do the jingle (not the theme) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3blzGwd4xLg from 0:00 to 0:14) from the beginnings to the back to the future movies into the beginning in your Star Trek: Redemption? As well as a Saucer separation to the USS F. Scott Fitzgerald in a star ship battle scene (since it is upgraded Galaxy class star ship)?
Last edited by BlackXANA28; July 25th, 2012 at 01:20 PM..
I've decided to forego cast VOs until production of Redemption is complete. I had planned to do VOs for Retribution before proceeding, but the fun for me lies in producing these films, while adding VOs is tedious work. So what I've decided is that once Redemption is complete, I'll issue a casting call for all three films and just go from there.
That makes sense. That way, you can get the same voices for all 3 films and nobody can bail on you. I'll still watch Retribution, of course, but I look forward to all 3 films having voice overs (besides you. )
Trust me, you're not the only one As soon as the last piece of Retribution got posted, people started flooding my inbox wanting to do VOs. And you're right with that bit about people not bailing on me--that's exactly what happened with Specter, and I'm not willing to go through that again until I've had my fun. That debacle almost spoiled the experience for me! I'm determined to do this the right way, even if it irritates VO groups.
I call shotgun for any one time Character that's only on a computer screen. Just joking. My voice isn't all that good for a VO. I prefer to just write out a script and just post it on the net.
Speaking of which, @tnpir4001: about the first idea with those two character I mentioned, you can just drop it. I'm restarting that idea into something different from scratch. It'll take a while though, but I'm not sure if you'll be interested in reading it once it's done.
And don't worry, I'm doing my research first before hand on what they look like this time.
Last edited by BlackXANA28; July 31st, 2012 at 09:22 PM..
Reason: misspelled username
I encourage you to post your ideas if you have them to share, but the membership here (and elsewhere) can tell you that I'm extremely picky about outside ideas that I incorporate into my work.
On that note, the first piece of "Redemption" is up! It's little more than a half-rendered preview but it sets the tone of this story, in a much different way than its predecessors, and I think in a much more "traditional" manner. Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Vny352ZOc
Again, I'm restarting it from scratch and will take a while to get it out in the open, but that doesn't mean I can tell you on what I have in mind about it...
The script I'm writing takes place after ST: Redemption roughly about 5 to 20 years into the future (I have not come up with a title yet, but working on it). It starts out in the Q Continuum where one in particular Q speaks in front of the council. His desire is to go to Earth and attend to Star Fleet Academy as a Human, but will still have his powers on an emergency level (considering that he never used his powers at all in his life).
At the same time at the Academy, Kath (The name is temporary and not yet official), A princess who is Half Human and Half Caitian of Royal blood, also attends Star Fleet Academy. She meets Q in a Admiral's office, which at first, they don't get along very well. Kath challenges Q to a duel one night to meet with her alone.
and again, I'm still working on it on writing this all down. I'll have it completed in script form once it's done.
Whoa now, back it up. If you want to present some ideas for possible inclusion in Redemption, that's one thing. If you're going to go off in some other direction with a completely unrelated storyline, that's something else entirely, and I'll encourage you to create your own project thread. I and I'm sure everyone else will be happy to give you feedback on your concept there, but this thread is not the place for it.
Last edited by tnpir4001; July 30th, 2012 at 09:45 AM..
Re: Star Trek: Retribution
)
Just joking. My voice isn't all that good for a VO. I prefer to just write out a script and just post it on the net.
