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Ask the Space Command Team About All Things Sci-Fi
Marc Zicree, Doug Drexler, David Raiklen, and Neil Johnson are the guys behind the fastest funded film project ever on Kickstarter, Space Command. The project will feature a number of Star Trek vets behind the camera and a number of Trek actors are also involved, including Armin Shimerman, George Takei, Ethan Phillips and Robert Picardo. The team has graciously agreed to take some time from trying to make a crowd-funded movie, building spaceships, and exploring alien worlds to answer your questions. Ask as many as you like but please confine your questions to one per post.
I've seen your kick starter page and even the video but you fail to mention: What is the overarching plot of "Space Command?"
To each of you, what is your opinion on the current state of science fiction in today's films? Obviously, there's been an increase in all film categories with more movies coming out but what do you like and dislike about films in this era? Care to comment the remake of Total Recall? Or 3D in blockbusters like Avatar?
My work here is dung.
When do you think that the human race will realize the need to harvest materials from extraplanetary sources rather than trying to lift them out of the gravity field of earth?
Hard sci fi or Soft sci fi? There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years, or at least soft sci fi outnumbers hard sci fi by about 200 to 1. In books I'd dare say the ratios approach 50:50 or at least not as intensely skewed.
Your kickstarter page lists Asimov and Clarke as partial inspiration implies hard sci fi, yet also has PR stuff about how people "like the look" which implies ultra-soft sci fi.
For people who don't know the difference, just Fing google it, or wikipedia it, and the reason why its important is people who like one genre invariably can't stand the other genre and even make comments about how they can't imagine why someone would like the opposite genre. Sometimes the trash talking is the easiest way to understand the perspectives.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Comment on how "hollywood accounting" and "kickstarter accounting" interact with each other, if at all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Hi,
Why are there wings in space? Surely we should have ships without wings and we should have a LOT more robotic mining & self replicating mining factories!
Thanks,
-Tim
PS. From a humanity inspiration perspective the self replicating mining factories just make sense. Mine it, melt it, print it = new space ship; new factory.
it will actually allow us to MAKE the first of our four initial SPACE COMMAND films
So you've got the bills paid... that means you release to a torrent site and make profit off tee shirt sales or signed movie posters or ?
If you're not willing to CC license, then how much more would the kickstarter have to be to CC license?
Is product placement in the financial picture as per above (like they happen to use ipads as tablets, or whatever they use as a computer interface boots up with a Apple logo?)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What is your sustainable funding and distribution model, and do you see any potential interaction with commercial spaceflight endeavors?
As being very impressed by Bear McCreay as soundtrack componist: Have you asked or are you planning to ask Bear McCreary for writing the sound track for Space Command?
Looks very promising. Interested to see what comes of it.
Short question: How will you keep this show from ending in suck?
Longer version of question: see here. The Lifespan of a TV Show.
Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Wasted stories start out good but then get stretched out to the point that the writer simply loses interest and is phoning it in. Television suffers from this disproportionately because network execs are selling viewer eyeballs to advertisers and don't really give a damn what goes between the commercial breaks. They'll keep a show going until it's no longer profitable and cancel it. Hence you get what's depicted in the Cracked post above. I can think of a lot of shows that started out strong, ended terribly, and don't hold up for a rewatch.
Do you have a plan? Something better than the Cylons because they said they had a plan and most certainly didn't.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Will there be a video game?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
please read the evil overlord-list before finalising the script. there are so many stupid villains it would be refreshing to have one that doesn't make stupid decisions all the time
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Of all the things that have to be done to make a good movie (Script, acting, cinematography...), when it comes to Science Fiction, probably the most important is creating a consistent universe. How did you go about trying to do that - did you consciously set down an write a "Bible" or did you just wing it?
Will there be a way to volunteer new ideas? For example... new alien species, planets, technologies, etc.
There might be some great new concepts "out there" by people who are not involved with the movie industry.
- will the soundtrack be dubstep?
- will Jery Rian be in the movie? (any role is ok)
- will it have soundeffects, even in space?
- art house or hollywood style?
- can I sponsor anything in the movie? e.g. that someone logs into the internet and opens my website vanheusden.com
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
If one were interested in acting on the show, how could he or she get involved?
I've noticed that scifi shows these days tends to come in two categories: those that make fun of themselves to be funny and those that try to be realistic by being dark and miserable. Will Space Command conform to these recent trends? Or will we finally see a return to a plot that doesn't toy with the viewers emotions?
In your case you put together a proposal for a film and found the funding for it, but do you think this sort of technique could be used to fund existing franchises that are in danger of being cancelled? Personally I would love to have been able to fund another series or movie of Stargate Universe. Would it be best for the fans to start such an effort, or should it come from the producers of the show? It might be a hard sell if the fans were just asking for another series without any hint of what it might contain, which could only come from the producers.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What is the premise of your story? What universal human themes will you deal with? What questions are you asking about life, the universe, and everything? And how is the setting 'in spaaaace!' going to help you ask these questions? I've read that some notable sci-fi writers are providing inspiration for the show, so I'd love to hear what sort of message your show will ultimately turn that inspiration into.
Is reading SFF is a factor in the SFF Movie Industry producers such as yourselves? If so, what Science Fiction or Fantasy are you reading right now? Or What has been, so far, your favorite SFF book? And (Or) who is your favorite SFF author? Thanks for the great memories of watching your stuff the first time.
The list of actors signed up seems to be deficient. Every Science Fiction series must have at least one role for Jeffrey Combs. It's the Law!
Action & Adventure or Moralizing Emo?
:), latter :(
imo - former
except maybe if you're on a James Cameron-level budget. The opening scenes of Avatar and the flight scenes in Apollo 13 are the only time I've ever seen anyone try and do zero-G realistically. One with a lot of CGI and wirework, the other by filming on a vomit comet. Don't want to do that? Then you have to say you've got some form of artificial gravity, to explain why the people are walking around, almost exactly as though they were at 1G. And artificial gravity is a real game-changer.
Don't want warp drive? Then you're stuck in one system, because space is big. Or the whole crew has to go into cryo-sleep for decades at a time to get anywhere. This latter could actually be fun in a TV series, where halfway through the first season, they celebrate the thousandth anniversary of leaving Earth, and realise that by the time they get home, entire civilisations will have risen and fallen.
Don't want aliens? Then humans and the environment are going to have to be the hostile forces. This can work - the RGB Mars trilogy does it well enough, but the books are a bit slow, and any adaptation would have to trim a lot out to get a watchable film into a couple of hours.
I remember being quite disappointed a while back - watching some astronauts working on the ISS on NASA TV. I've been a geek since I was even slightly sentient - I was 4 when Armstrong landed on the moon, and the first word I ever learned to write was 'zero' as it was the word that launched spaceships. So I was a bit peeved to find that watching real astronauts, working EVA on the real space station, was actually boring as hell after the initial 'Wow, they're on a space station!' had worn off. It was just some guys doing careful, methodical work, and being *really* careful not to drop their tools.
how can you shave points off the backend and do favors for everybody if its all out in the open? Anyone whose seen Barry Primus classic film "Mistress" (Robert Wuhl) will laugh thinking about this.
Wasn't Space Command a registered trademark of the Zenith corporation at one time? I wonder if their successors in interest might have a claim or could it be argued that the trademark has now lapsed? Those of a certain generation might recall that this style of television remote gave rise to the term "clicker" in reference to the distinctive "clicking" sound made when a button was pressed. This clicking sound was a combination of the spring loaded release of the miniature hammer inside the device and it's subsequent impact with the internal aluminum cylinders which were tuned to produce the ultrasonic tones necessary to control the basic television functions. Even today this primitive form of remote control still has one advantage over the modern ones, it requires no batteries.
Hi,
Can the at least some of the good guys be good from normal family background/history without being cardboard cutouts, orphans, raised by zebras, incredibly rich, brilliant beyond almost belief, or other unusual stuff?
I get tired of the messed or unusual upbringing family background schtick....
Thanks