The beauty of the fan film genre is that with the help of today's high quality consumer video and audio equipment and high powered home computers just about anywhere can become the setting for do-it yourselfers who want to produce a show with a potentially world-wide audience. Star Trek fans seem to be especially busy with their own takes on the various incarnations of the Trek Universe.You can find crews hard at work on Star Trek tribute shows from Scotland to Oklahoma City. (I haven't heard of any such efforts in the Tampa Bay area. If you know of any drop me a note.)
One crew that's made it all the way from set construction to shooting to finished product is based in the rural southern Georgia community of Albany, the home of fanzine publisher Randall Landers. Landers tells Examiner he had been toying with the idea of doing a stop action animation show, but says he was inspired to go the live action route by the work of other fan film producers.
Landers recruited his friends Ricky Thompson and Van Buchanan and they got to work. Given the amount of Star Trek based fan productions, making a new show stand out is a challenge. We asked Landers what makes Potemkin different. "I guess our approach. We've gone with actors for the most part, as opposed to fans. We've worked with the local colleges for the talent pool, and brought in additional actors from the local theaters. We're very proud of them; they're wonderful to work with." Georgia Southwestern University Drama Professor plays "Captain Grigory" with the gravitas you'd expect from a Star Fleet Captain and having trained actors in nearly every role prevents the cringe inducing moments that mark some fan productions.
The Potemkin crew is hard at work with at least one full length feature and several vignettes in various stages of production and post-production. Landers says his team is focused on stories that are not character dependent. "We write generic scripts with characters like SCIENCE OFFICER and NAVIGATOR and then as we approach the filming date, we begin to sub in the characters whose actors are available for filming. Not everyone appears in every episode as we often concentrate on a landing party rather than the 'command crew.' And we're not above killing off a character; you can never tell with any of the episodes who's going to appear and even who's going to survive."
With a good supply of shows in the post-production pipeline and scripts for season 2 in the works, Projet Potemkin could give Albany, Georgia a prominent spot in the Star Trek Universe.
Please feel free to comment on this article. You can e-mail me at Lutzninja@aol.com.
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