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Star Trek: Renegades Working On Episodes 2 and 3 (kickstarter.com)
JoSch1337 writes: The last time Star Trek: Renegades was on Slashdot was in 2013. It's an independent, canon-faithful Trek series with high production values and some of the actors from the TV shows. Since their original campaign, the team has produced an amazing pilot episode 1 and is now gathering support to produce episode 2, and even episode 3 if they reach their stretch goal. From the Kickstarter page: "Star Trek Renegades is an independent, fan-funded and supported Internet television series, executive produced by Sky Conway. Renegades features a combination of familiar Star Trek character and actors, plus a collection of hot, new rising actors. Set a decade after Voyager's return from Delta Quadrant, ST: Renegades focuses on a team of fugitives, who are on the run from the Federation while secretly working for the head of Starfleet intelligence, Admiral Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) and Tuvok (Tim Russ, who also directs) to root out internal corruption within the Federation as well as external threats."
I backed the original campaign, but they never sent a link to the video. I feel cheated by getting it from Slashdot.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I watched the pilot and the overall plot is very cool. The effects are great too. The dialog can be a bit flat but given the production level its probably about as good as one can ask. I really wish CBS would pick this series up. I know that they plan a new show in 2017, but is it enough to get me buy into CBS All Access? Maybe. But give me two new Star Trek shows, and yeah, I'm definitely in! I bet a lot of fans would feel the same way.
Pavel Chekov, also known as Alfred Bester, fighting corruption in the Federation? Ha! The Alfred Bester and his corrupt Psi Cops were no match for John Sheridan, and were hoping to find a much weaker opponent in the Federation.
I watched the three episodes of Trek continues a while back. There were only three back then.I haven't had a chance to watch the latest two. Some of the actors could have been better, and it takes a little bit of getting used to them not being the same people as were in TOS. But the stories were pretty good, and the sets, wardrobe and effects were spot on. While you could make better special effects on most home PC's, they kept all of the CGI looking pretty damn close to the original series. I enjoyed it enough that I re-watched the original series again afterward.
The Next Generation ships were models.
--fatboy
I see that you traveled back in time to make this post. I trust that your journey from 2016 went well. And kindly PM me with some stock tips.
Some of those fan productions have been quite good; not as good as the very best of any of the series, but a hell of a lot better than you'd think if you imagine them by the standards of typical fan fic. These are labors of love, and they're genuinely entertaining -- although I admit to being a little prejudiced in favor anything that someone obviously put so much care into.
As for competition, well one of the big difference between a pro and a dedicated amateur is that a pro can work a lot faster. These fan productions put out an episode every year or two; the official series churned out 25-30 episodes per year. In a way this was te franchise's artistic downfall; for the entire run of Deep Space 9 there were TWO Star Trek series in production; TNG in 94 and Voyager from 95 on. That meant they were putting out something like 50 episodes a year, and toward the end of the DS9 run it began to feel like they had more episodes on the broadcast schedule to fill than they had stories to tell. There were a number of episodes in DS9 and Voyager which damaged the franchise's reputation, which is a shame because both series at their best could be quite good.
The problem with these amateur productions is that even when they're surprisingly good they don't produce enough product; the problem with the series has consistently been that they've produced *too much* product. What I'd like to see is something like the old Columbo TV series, which put out a half dozen "movie of the week" episodes per year: less quantity (although not too much less), more quality.
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It's about the final battle in the war with the Klingons, set just before TOS.
They have a documentary-style leadup to it, called Prelude to Axenar. It's got decent production values, some good and logical story telling, and shows promise for what they want to do. Also some Trek alumni - Tony Todd, John Hertzler and Gary Graham, reprising his Enterprise role Ambassador Soval.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
How hard is it for them to model and texture a couple ships and use a proper raytraced render?
How hard is it for you to look past it? When I go back to Babylon 5 things look pretty ropey, but I'm not watching for the special effects.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I am pleased to fucking death. That's been out and I missed it?
And Jonas fucking Quinn as a starship captain. Holy crap I am geeking out.
Wooden acting? Compared to what, Enterprise? (The Archer, nice irony there) The sucky thing called Voyager perhaps? Two good things about Voyager though: Seven of Nine (Elaborate.) and Tuvok. Nimoy is my childhood idol, but Tim Russ plays the best Vulcan, sorry, and he's in it too. And Checkov is an old man. Cool.
Thin plot? Whatever. It's a fucking science fiction show. Bad guys are going to end the Earth, and our gallant crew saves it. Yeah it's been done before. It's a good one for doing a pilot and introducing the cast. Bite me.
And they're going to make two more. Holy crap I love the internet!
Having seen the first episode, I have serious reservations regarding the writing.
The whole thing was a bit too rapid fire - they desperately tried to shoehorn in as many characters and plot devices, leading to a somewhat confusing plot. I can understand some confusion as a metaphor for the federation's condition, but I fear that is just an overanalysis of writing that is... let's say it could use some improvements.
Given the smorgasbord of planned returning characters (Just about half of DS9's cast, by my estimate), I'm not holding my breath for any big improvements. Also, two/three episodes in and they're already bringing people back from the dead in some way (Alternate reality, time travel, Bajoran prophets/wormhole aliens (ugh...), lost sibling, transporter clone... Take your pick. I'm betting on the prophets.).
I also submit that any character whose name is spelled with double Xs is automatically a Mary Sue. Silly inner monologues don't help. In fact, I just realized that the captain's logs were a convenient way of doing an inner monologue-esque segment without adding too much disbelief that needs to be suspended.
tl;dr - Don't expect the world, but it's still better than Season 2 of TNG.
I saw the first episode and while I'm not a Star Trek fan, but I've watched every episode from all the series and most of them multiple times, I couldn't watch more than about 20 minutes of this. I'm not particularly picky (e.g., I liked Voyager and even the first two seasons of TNG and all of Enterprise) but this was unbearable. And I thought my threshold for science fiction movies in general is rather high. I'm still willing to give it a try if someone thinks otherwise.
That was two mostly independent production teams. DS9 started falling apart because they couldn't leave it to it's own cannon; they had to keep lacing it back into TNG, and Voyager. The entire basis of Voyager was lost somewhere around episode 2, it seems... 70 THOUSAND lightyears from the federation, so they have ZERO contact. Yet, not a season went by that didn't string them back to the alpha quadrant somehow.
(That was the downfall of Stargate atlantis AND universe, too.)
B5's gfx were rather impressive for the era -- and the Amiga used to make them :-)
Renegades makes me think I'm watching someone play a video game. And not a top of the line game. The open part in the mines gave me the impression of an oil rig lit with some walmart desk lamps.
And a word on audio... execute whomever handled sound. I have my speakers turned to max. The sound card turned to max. And youtube turned to max. And most dialog is still too soft.
It seemed to me that both DS9 and Voyager ran out of story ideas at the same time; perhaps it was a coincidence.
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As much as I'm an Amiga fanboy 4ever, that rumor needs to DIE, they used a wide mix of SGI workstations, Pentium & DEC Alpha renderfarms and even Macs for compositing for the actual series, only the pilot episode mostly had effects created on Commodore HW. ;)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/...
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/...
Sorry for being pedantic, but this IS Slashdot after all
Voyager was a fundamentally broken concept. The idea of course was to get out of the Alpha quadrant and free the writers to do new things without having to deal with all the built up cannon. What they forgot is that Star Trek is always a interstellar soap opera or western, its about the people.
What would people do in Voyagers situation either A) give up on the idea of ever getting home and find a place to start a new life, or B) Do little else but try to get home.
The writers went with (B) so rather than free themselves to do 'new things' within the Universe of Star Trek they bound themselves from episode 2 on into having to cram everything into the context of an inescapable over arching plot arc, which they could never resolve either without basically ending the series. It could never been anything more them mediocre for those reasons.
DS9 was far and away the best. It was actually the most exploitative of the real problems we face today and even somewhat forward looking. The story got a lot more interesting because being in a relatively fixed location they had to continue to deal with slow back burner type problems and conflicts. They could not just warp off to some new system and start telling a different story the next week. Where DS9 went wrong was making the Profits a little to real and actually having them interfere. The show was better when they were more a religious myth that appeared to be based on actual events from interaction with a long gone alien race. When they myth and reality could not be separated the show was more interesting.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html