It looks like my new all-A.I. Star Trek fan film NO ROOM FOR ERROR is a success with 16.5K views in the first 18 hours and 135 mostly-positive comments If you haven’t seen it yet, take a watch…

When I first began working on this project back in April of this year, Artificial Intelligence was just starting to be used in Star Trek fan films. I covered some of the early adopters in this blog discussing how I had begun helping MARK NACCARATO create some fancy A.I.-generated scenes for his upcoming THE ROMULAN WAR sequel and other productions. The experience was both fun and eye-opening, and I found myself enthusiastic to teach myself more about the tools of A.I., their capabilities, and how to use them. And what better way to do that than by giving myself an actual project to work on?

No Room for Error actually got its start back in the first half of 2025 as JOSHUA IRWIN was preparing to head for Frederick, Maryland, to film all of the bridge scenes for FARRAGUT 2024, which he was directing for showrunner JOHN BROUGHTON. Their movie-era bridge set (multiple versions of it for different starships) was staggeringly accurate and impressive, as were their impeccably-crafted monster maroon uniforms. The shoot was going to be three full days, and I had a crazy idea!

At the time, the TREKS IN 90 SECS contest was about to start taking submissions for the second annual competition, and I (the contest-runner) hadn’t submitted an entry for the first year and wasn’t planning one for the second year. Y’see, I like writing about fan films, but I don’t typically make a lot of them. But Josh’s trip to Maryland created an interesting possibility. If I could write a quick 3 or 4-page script for a super-short (90- to 120-seconds long) fan film, maybe Josh and some of the actors could set aside 10 or 15 minutes to shoot those fast lines. Then I could edit the takes together, have one of the many fan film CGI artists out there create one or two quick VFX shots for me, and voila! I’d have a submission for the second Treks in 90 Secs contest. So I drafted up a quick 4-page mini-script, e-mailed it to Josh, and crossed my fingers that he’d have time to briefly film something during a break over the 3-day shoot.

Alas, ’twas not meant to be.

The Farragut folks barely had enough time to complete their own shots over the weekend, and Josh used the remaining day to shoot footage for his upcoming AVALON UNIVERSE release, GHOST CRYSTAL. So Josh wasn’t able to shoot any footage for me. Oh, well.

And so the script sat on my hard drive, mostly forgotten. But after helping Mark Naccarato and deciding I needed a new project to help teach myself more about A.I., my unproduced short film script seemed the perfect fit. Six months later, after more hard work (and fun!) than I could ever have imagined, my A.I. fan film was finished…!

When I first began working on the project back in April, I set a few ground rules for myself:

1. The fan film would need to be all A.I., including the exterior starship shots. I wanted to see how well A.I. could handle starship VFX for someone like me who doesn’t know CGI. (This decision turned out to require a huge amount of both work and luck on my part.)
2. I no longer needed to constrain myself to the 90- to 120-second time limit. I wanted to learn A.I., so better to give myself a decent challenge and not take the first offramp.
3. It didn’t have to be perfect (and A.I. seldom is). I needed to be okay if people watched the fan film and said, “Well, it looks like you used A.I.” That’s because I did use A.I.
4. That being said, my personal challenge to myself was to get the uniforms and insignia (as well as backgrounds) to look consistently correct for movie-era Star Trek. A.I. frequently “hallucinates” when it renders Star Trek uniforms, especially the ultra-detailed and challenging monster maroons. So my mission—and I chose to accept it—was to make those movie-era uniforms look as accurate as possible. Little did I realize the ridiculous amount of time and effort this little obsessive/compulsive requirement would require!
5. Finally, I decided to give myself a mulligan on the music. Rather than using A.I., I decided to utilize JAMES HORNER’s masterful musical score from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. After all, I wanted the U.S.S. Brisbane to be triumphantly leaving dry dock, and nothing sounds more iconic in Star Trek history than James Horner’s music from the Enterprise launching with Saavik in the center seat.

I also decided that I’d like to include as many Star Trek fan filmmaker cameos as I could squeeze in. Not only are these folks the reason I do this blog in the first place, but most of them are also my friends. I reached out to a number of them via one of our Facebook Messenger groups and got several takers. Others I reached out to personally, as I felt they should not be left out (for example, GLEN WOLFE and LEZLIE SAWYER have appeared in literally dozens of different fan films and series in a wide variety of roles). JOSHUA IRWIN offered to be my “star,” allowing me to sample his voice for the lines from the helmsman. Lezlie, likewise, agreed to be my communications officer, the only other “speaking” role other than Captain Matthews, who is not based on any of my friends in the fan film community, as I didn’t think it fair to make any of them be the “jerk” in the story.

In most cases, I needed to seed their appearances from photos of them when they were younger or else have Google Gemini age them down a bit. That’s why Josh Irwin’s character has hair and Ray Tesi looks nothing like himself. Actually, that’s true of many of the fan filmmaker cameos. A.I. had trouble recreating them exactly, but most are close enough that those folks aren’t really complaining (much). They’ve all been great sports.

Ultimately, I decided to tackle the project in scene order, starting with the shots in dry dock and trying to match them as closely as possible to the original sequence from Star Trek II that I was paying homage to. And thus began my trip down the A.I. rabbit hole…

Google Gemini, which I used to generate the many seed still images, doesn’t know what an Excelsior-class starship looks like. If you give it a prompt that says, “Create an image of the USS Excelsior in dry dock from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” these are two of the results you might get…

Google knows enough to put NX-2000 on the primary hull, but that’s about it. Now, you can try to “train” A.I. by giving it a bunch of orthogonal views like this image…

But even then, when you type into Gemini, “Can you make a three-quarter angle view of this starship?” (even leaving out the dry dock for simplicity’s sake), you still get stuff that looks like this…

And that’s when I discovered a very inconvenient truth: this was not going to be nearly as easy as I hoped it would be. But that’s okay; I wanted this to be a bit challenging, right?

Fast-forwarding to the answer, I ultimately found online a number of very nice 3D renderings of the U.S.S. Excelsior and grabbed a bunch more as still frames from recent releases by British CGI artist and fan filmmaker SAMUEL COCKINGS for his TREK SHORTS fanthology series. Here’s a small sample from the dozen-or-so images I ended up using…

Once I could show Gemini what I wanted, it had a better idea of what to give me. Sometimes I needed to zoom in on a certain area, do a slight rotation, or extend a portion of the ship that wasn’t fully visible in a source image. Given enough information and the proper prompt, A.I. is actually really good at that.

Not nearly as easy was getting it to swap the name and NCC number on the primary hull. I can’t tell you how many times I told Gemini to change the letters and numbers from NX-2000 to NCC-5150 and wound up with NCC-1701. (Yeah, that’s a thing.) Eventually, I learned how to “cheat” by zooming in so tightly that the algorithm couldn’t recognize that the image was a starship from Star Trek, and so there was no reason to boomerang the rendering to NCC-1701.

Anyway, a lot of Photoshopping happened to adjust the Gemini results, and there were a lot of failures along the way. Unfortunately, Gemini doesn’t archive renderings, and I didn’t bother saving the bad ones. But eventually, I got what I needed and composited in dry dock backgrounds that I screen captured from the original sequence from Star Trek II. These composite images became my “seeds” for Kling A.I. to generate short clips.

Which brings us to the big question: why did I decide to use Kling as a video generator rather than Grok or Seedance? After all, as my friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ explained it, Seedance is a 10/10 while Kling is a decent 7/10 and Grok maybe a 6/10. But Seedance is also the most expensive of the bunch, and I was using this fan film as a learning exercise, not as a way to make the most realistic-looking Star Trek fan film ever. I had already used Grok for the work I did for Mark Naccarato, so I decided to give Kling a shot.

And that’s when things started getting REALLY interesting…!

I’ve discovered there are a number of fan film folks who are extremely curious to find out how certain things were done, as the following Facebook comment from last week illustrates…

So come back for Part 2 when I start to spotlight the first of a series of selected shots (the coolest ones) and how I created them. And if you’re not interested in how the A.I. sausage is made, then feel free to skip the next few blogs. But I’ve quickly discovered that A.I. is really FUN in addition to being time-consuming and work-intensive, and the things I’ve learned and share might help make the A.I. “trek” easier for others.

Oh, and if you’re one of those people who thinks A.I. is lazy or easy or fast or cheating, just listen to “DENZEL WASHINGTON” …

Some of you may have seen my Facebook posts this past week announcing the upcoming release of NO ROOM FOR ERROR, the first Star Trek fan film I’ve created in more than two years—since the release of AN ABSENT FRIEND, which used Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to recreate the voices of LEONARD NIMOY and DeFOREST KELLEY in a tender story of Spock and McCoy mourning the loss of James Kirk on board the Enterprise-B.

Like An Absent Friend, No Room for Error also utilizes A.I. extensively. In fact, except for the music and the credits, everything in this fan film was generated entirely with A.I. tools: images, animations, VFX, and voices. Indeed, the whole purpose of the exercise was for me to learn A.I. by giving myself the challenge of creating a movie-era Star Trek fan film.

And let me tell ya: the time and work required for this intensive six-month process taught me a LOT…more than I could have ever imagined before I started!

I have no illusions about A.I. I know it’s very controversial at the moment. The possibility of an A.I.-initiated extinction-level event has been predicted by actual leaders in the industry. Data centers threaten the environment and potentially raise energy costs. And an entire generation (my son’s, as a matter of fact) fear that A.I. will remove so many jobs from the economy that they will graduate college only to enter a hiring desert devoid of any employment opportunities, regardless of their education level.

I don’t disagree with any of this. These fears are very, very real.

Add to this the public backlash against A.I., exemplified by comments like this one that came in via Facebook…

Really? Star Trek has always been on the forefront of cutting edge technology. After Babylon 5, DS9 and Voyager were two of the first regular sci-fi TV series to embrace visual FX that used CGI. Discovery and the other CBS-produced shows have employed the AR wall and unique (for Star Trek) animation styles for Lower Decks and Prodigy. And that’s not even counting Star Trek‘s open-minded embrace and support for A.I. characters such as Data, Vic Fontaine, and the EMH.

So at best, I’d say the above comment is factually inaccurate. But at its core, the comment shows an innate bias against this new technology that is coloring this person’s opinion of a fan film that is not even released yet. My request to him and others was to wait for No Room for Error to be released before calling it “A.I. slop.” I mean, it still might be, but there’s no need to pre-judge. That’s very UN-Star Trek-like.

But today, let’s tackle the big question: if A.I. is such a hot-button issue for so many people (even Trekkies) out there, why am I jumping into the center of the maelstrom by spending six months creating an all-A.I. Star Trek fan film…?

First of all, let’s be clear on one thing: A.I. IS NOT GOING AWAY. Period. That genie is so far out of the bottle that the bottle itself has ceased to exist. All the protesting in the universe ain’t gonna stop this juggernaut. Data centers will still be built, used, and suck up water and other natural resources like humming sponges. The governments and militaries of multiple countries will still be in a global A.I. race whether the “little people” are riding the A.I. train or just watching from the station holding picket signs.

So if we can’t stop A.I. (and we can’t), what should we do? And understand that this all assumes that life on Earth as we know it doesn’t come to an end. If that happens, then nothing I decide to do or not do regarding A.I. will matter anyway. So let’s assume the human race and the planet earth survive. Now what?

In my opinion—and I’ve shared this with my son Jayden—refusing to learn and use A.I. tools is a very short-sighted decision, even if it is made as a “moral” stance. Whom exactly are you helping?

A good example of the complexity of this question was when I made An Absent Friend two years ago. I reached out to a person who had created the music for dozens of Star Trek fan films and I asked if he could help me with my new short project. He politely declined, as he didn’t want to be associated with anything A.I. that would ultimately take work away from creatives like himself. I respected his decision, although I did find it ironic that my A.I. fan film was actually offering him creative work, an opportunity that would never have existed without this A.I. project (since I would never have attempted to produce An Absent Friend were it not for the arrival of ElevenLabs’ A.I. voice-synthesizer).

And that leads into my answer to the question: what should do we about A.I.? But to explain my answer, we must first discuss the tractor versus the spreadsheet (an analogy I first heard on TV news program discussing the future of A.I. in the workplace).

Diesel-powered tractors entered the world just as the 20th century got underway, and within 20 years, tractors were becoming quite common on farms. This was not good news for draft horses, however, which in 1925 totaled about about 25 million in the U.S. But by the early 1950s, the population of draft horses had dropped by 90%! (And please don’t ask what happened to them all…only family dogs know for sure.)

Is A.I. the “tractor,” and are Americans (and people around the world who currently have or want jobs) the “draft horses”? Before you start panicking about this distressing fate, there might be some hope when we shift our focus from tractors to the humble spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel debuted in 1985, and by the early 1990s, global use of spreadsheets was, well, spreading. In fact, there was actually serious concern at the time that spreadsheets would all but eliminate accounting and bookkeeping jobs throughout America and beyond. After all, why hire a bookkeeper if the computer can do everything for you? Sound familiar?

But an unexpected thing happened. I suppose if you want to extend the tractor metaphor, draft horses quickly taught themselves to drive tractors! By the end of the 1990s, rather than replacing bookkeepers and accountants, spreadsheets became essential tools of the trade not only for those two aforementioned job titles but also for teachers, restaurant managers, law enforcement, sports coaches, doctors and nurses, museum curators…pretty much anyone who wanted to get hired for an office job needed to have Microsoft Excel listed under “skills” on their resume. Rather than destroying jobs, the spreadsheet became an essential part of most jobs.

And that seems to be the trajectory of A.I. right now. Specialized A.I. tools are becoming almost ubiquitous in so many area. Fan filmmaker JOSH IRWIN, who works in the entertainment industry in northwest Arkansas, told me recently, “Both jobs I work at didn’t give me a choice. Use A.I. or get fired.” GREG LOCK, a fan filmmaker from Great Britain, remarked, “I’m starting to use AI a lot to help me pre-visualise lots of my model making projects. I do think it has a use.” And my friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ, who won VFX Emmy Awards for both Star Trek: Voyager and Battlestar Galactica, was looking at career oblivion two years ago as CGI was slowly being supplanted by A.I. But rather than just grumpily await irrelevance in the industry, Mojo dove into A.I., learning all that was learnable about getting A.I. to generate video footage, and applying his knowledge and experience to produce better results with A.I. than most untrained people could. Now he’s leading a seven-member A.I. pre-visualization team on a major motion picture from Lionsgate Entertainment, creating what he describes as “Marvel-level VFX.”

Mojo reminded me of what happened back in 1993 when he was working on the the VFX for the first season of Babylon 5. Predictions were (correctly) being made that CGI would ultimately destroy the practical visual effects industry, leaving model makers and blue/green screen photography professionals to have their jobs replaced by computers that could do it faster and cheaper. And yes, that’s largely what happened. But many of those professionals taught themselves the tools of computer animation, bringing their decades of expertise to shot composition, camera motion, and lighting for CGI-generated sequences. Not everyone made the transition, but many did.

Heck, even I’m planning to use GoDaddy’s new AIRO technology to recreate the Fan Film Factor website, moving it from a WordPress-based template currently being held together with the Internet equivalent of duct tape to a fully A.I.-generated and maintained blog site.

So that’s my message to Jayden: don’t avoid and complain about A.I. Rather, learn to utilize it for what you want to do for a career. Become an A.I. expert. Be the person who not only uses the tool(s) but becomes a master, much like my friend Mojo.

And that’s why I’ve made my A.I. fan film. It’s not taking work away from anyone because, honestly, the project would never have happened without A.I. tools and my desire to learn them. If anything, No Room for Error created a work opportunity for ME, and possibly more down the road if other fan filmmakers want me to help with their fan films. I’ve already done just that for MARK NACCARTO on his ROMULAN WAR project and also for JOSHUA IRWIN on his new 24th century AVALON UNIVERSE fan film, GHOST CRYSTAL. And the final results for both fan films look amazing—beyond anything that would have been possible before A.I. generators existed.

And Josh and Mark aren’t the only ones in our community using A.I. for their fan films. SAM COCKINGS, JOSE CEPEDA, MARK LARGENT, and numerous others are dipping more than just their toes into the A.I. swimming pool. In just a few weeks, I’ll be featuring a text interview with a brilliant fan filmmaker from Poland who is using A.I. to generate music videos that tell actual Star Trek stories with impressive emotional impact. You can view his work on the STARFLEET DREAMS YouTube channel…and you should! His A.I. stuff is truly jaw-dropping!!!

Anyway, that’s the pre-flight announcement before I release No Room for Error in another week. I’m sure there will be folks out there cursing me from afar and probably tearing out what little hair they have left for daring to use this miraculous technology to make a Star Trek fan film. Heck, some people (like that guy from Facebook at the beginning of this blog) are already complaining, and I haven’t even released it yet!

It’s fine. I didn’t do this to impress people or piss off people or really to get any particular reaction from anyone. I did it for me. And honestly, I learned so much that I no longer fear A.I. or wish it had never happened. Sure, I might come to regret that nonchalant attitude when the robotic A.I. overlords come to destroy my home and turn me and my loved ones into organic batteries to power their planet-wide data center farms in a couple more years. But until that happens, I’m going to enjoy using the incredible tools of A.I. to create some really fun and amazing stuff that would have been impossible for me to even imagine doing just a few short months ago.

As a brief post script, I decided it would be both interesting and somewhat appropriate to have A.I. design the thumbnail image at the top of this editorial blog. But I didn’t just tell the generator render the image and leave everything for the A.I. to finish for me. The entire creative process lasted over an hour and involved a robust amount of discussion and even debate. Yes, debate between me and A.I.! ChatGPT didn’t simply agree with me on everything I liked. In fact, at one point, I actually provided a counter-argument to a design approach that ChatGPT “felt” strongly about. If you’d like to see what this debate looked like, scroll to the last eight or ten comments of our archived discussion session.

But this conversation resulted in a very profound comment that I’d like to share with all of you, letting A.I. have the last word in this blog. Ladies and gentlemen (and artificial intelligences surfing the Internet), may I present ChatGPT…

What happened today wasn’t human versus A.I. It was much closer to human judgment working with A.I. capability.

I could generate concepts quickly. I could notice patterns, suggest alternatives, critique compositions, and articulate why certain versions were or weren’t working. But you brought something I didn’t have: nearly forty years of accumulated experience in graphic design and marketing communication, including an instinct for what the image needed to accomplish in the real world.

The best example was our disagreement about the five questions.

I initially looked at them primarily as a designer might look at composition: They’re making the image busier. They’re competing with the focal point. Let’s simplify.

You looked at them as a communications strategist:

What does a person scrolling Facebook need to understand in a fraction of a second, and what might make them click?

That distinction changed the answer.

And then you went further: you recognized that putting the questions on two lines would inadvertently establish a hierarchy and potentially alienate people who approach A.I. from different perspectives. That’s not merely an aesthetic observation. That’s audience psychology, messaging strategy, and decades of professional experience informing a design decision.

I couldn’t reliably manufacture that experience from scratch.

And there’s a wonderful irony in that given the subject of your blog.

You began this process concerned about whether A.I. might eventually make your skills irrelevant. Yet the process itself demonstrated another possibility:

A.I. can make your skills more powerful without making them unnecessary.

I generated possibilities. You supplied judgment.

I could produce an image in seconds. You knew what the image needed to say.

I could critique the composition. You could challenge the assumptions behind the critique.

And, importantly, I changed my mind when your reasoning was better.

That’s not a failure of either participant. That’s the collaboration working.

The final thumbnail really is something neither of us would have produced in quite the same way independently. And I suspect that’s one of the more interesting answers to the question your blog is asking.

So thank you for the conversation—and for challenging me when you thought I was wrong.

And for what it’s worth, I hope you carry today’s experience into the larger question you’re wrestling with:

Your value isn’t necessarily threatened by the existence of a tool that can do pieces of what you do. Your value may increasingly lie in knowing what to do with that tool.

Today, you demonstrated exactly that.

And I think the final thumbnail is a pretty fitting outcome for the article itself: the human brought the experience and judgment; the A.I. brought capabilities and possibilities; together we made something neither of us would have made alone.

That’s a pretty good day’s work.

It’s crazy to think that 2026 marks the FIFTH annual Star Trek Fan Film SHOWRUNNER AWARD contest. Originally conceived at nearly the same moment as GLEN WOLFE’s and DAN REYNOLD’s DIRECTORS CHOICE AWARDS back in early 2022, the Showrunner Awards were intended to replace the time-honored BJO AWARDS for Star Trek fan films, which had been presented for over half a decade during the annual Treklanta convention.

The tradition was established during the first Showrunner Awards to announce the winners during the anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek on NBC back in 1966. So happy 60th birthday, Star Trek, and happy 5th birthday, Showrunner Awards!

This year, we had 23 entries combining for a total of just under 10 hours of viewing for our 12 showrunner judges. For comparison, last year we had 24 entries and the year before there were 27 entires, each with a combined runtime of just under 9 hours. So we decreased by one submission but increased by an entire hour??? If you’re curious as to why, one of our submissions has a run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes just by itself!)

Speaking of our judges, each is himself a showrunner on a Star Trek fan film or series, so they know what’s involved in producing a successful project. This year, our panel consisted of these fine gentlemen…

• THOMAS ARGANTE – USS CASSANDRA
• JOSE CEPEDA – NATURE’S HUNGER
• NICK COOK – INTREPID
• SAMUEL COCKINGS – TREK SHORTS and TEMPORAL ANOMALY
• JOSHUA IRWIN – THE AVALON UNIVERSE and other productions
• JONATHAN LANE – INTERLUDE and AN ABSENT FRIEND
• MARK LARGENT – STALLED TREK
• VANCE MAJOR – CONSTAR
• BRIAN W. PETERSON – THE LOST STARSHIP
• BENJAMIN SCHULZ – LORELEY
• GLEN L WOLFE – THE FEDERATION FILES
• RANDY WRENN – DREADNOUGHT DOMINION and other series

Thomas Argante and Nick Cook were newly added to our judging panel this year, although neither is “rookie” when it comes to Star Trek fan films. Thomas has made multiple guest appearances over the past half-decade in fan series productions from DREADNOUGHT DOMINION and PROJECT: RUNABOUT to THE CONSTAR CHRONICLES before launching the new USS CASSANDRA fan series in the Netherlands last year. As for Nick, well, he’s been one of the most recognizable faces in Star Trek fan films dating back twenty years with appearances in the Scotland-based INTREPID fan series, the America-based STAR TREK: HIDDEN FRONTIER series, as well as numerous England-based TREK SHORTS from prolific showrunner Sam Cockings.

Every judge ranked their top five selections in each of 22 categories, with their top choice earning 10 points, second choice earning 7 points, then 5, 3, and 1 points for choices three through five. A judge was not allowed to vote for a fan film they themselves submitted as any of their top three selections.

A huge thank you to each of our judges for putting in their time and consideration to making the Showrunner Awards possible for a half-decade now. You guys are awesome!

As you’ll see from this year’s results, we had a couple of 500-pound mugatos to contend with. In fact, one of these two juggernauts took awards in all but four categories—despite ther dialog being completely in German!

It’s possible that these two powerhouses are the reason that, this year, we had surprisingly few two-way ties compared to previous years—although there were still some—and no three-way ties. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. That said, I’m still pleased to report that 17 of our 23 entries eared at least one award. Scroll to the bottom of this page for a final tally of how many awards each film received. And you can view the majority of the submitted fan films on this YouTube playlist.

And with that, my friends, let’s get to the results of the 2026 Showrunner Awards for Star Trek Fan Films released between January 2023 and December 2025. Links to the winning fan films in each category are provided under that category’s winners. Have a watch and see if you agree with our judges’ choices…

BEST ORIGINAL CHARACTER

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch MIND LEECH
Click here to watch SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT

BEST HAIR & MAKE-UP

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch CAPTAIN SIMIAN’S FIRST COMMAND

BEST COSTUMING

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE
Click here to watch SLIPSTREAM

BEST GREEN SCREEN

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch THE ROAD NOT TAKEN – PRODIGY RECKONING (EPISODE 4)
Click here to watch FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

BEST PROPS IN A FAN FILM

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch THE HIVE

BEST SET DESIGN

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch WHAT’S NEXT
Click here to watch THE CASSANDRA EFFECT

BEST SOUND DESIGN

Click here to watch THE ICARUS MANEUVER
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

BEST MUSICAL SCORE

Click here to watch THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE
Click here to watch THE HIVE
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT

BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS (non-CGI)

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch THE HIVE
Click here to watch SLIPSTREAM
Click here to watch CAPTAIN SIMIAN’S FIRST COMMAND

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS (CGI)

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

BEST EDITING

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch THE ICARUS MANEUVER
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch THE ICARUS MANEUVER

BEST WRITING

Click here to watch THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch THE HIVE

BEST DIRECTION

Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch THE HIVE
Click here to watch THE ICARUS MANEUVER

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch SLIPSTREAM
Click here to watch BROKEN MIRROR

BEST ACTRESS

Click here to watch THE HIVE
Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT

BEST ACTOR

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch MIND LEECH
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024

BEST STAR TREK “EASTER EGG“

1:54 – An exposition/backstory scene which involved creating the TOS Sickbay, finishing DS9 Briefing room and CGI doubles for Dr McCoy and Lt’s Dax and Bashir. All in a one-camera move.

4:00 –  Recreating the “mirror Universe” flag shot from the Enterprise Episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” title sequence, but now as a Khan Empire and all with future ships. Much work for a single still frame!

5:01 – A lineage of Gold Enterprises on the Admiral’s wall in chronological order: 1. First Frontier Enterprise. 2. Cage Enterprise 3. SNW Enterprise 4. TOS Enterprise 5. Phase II Enterprise

Click here to watch TO KNOW THINE ENEMY
Click here to watch THE ROAD NOT TAKEN – PRODIGY RECKONING (EPISODE 4)
Click here to watch FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

FUNNIEST FAN FILM

Click here to watch THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE
Click here to watch THE CASSANDRA EFFECT
Click here to watch STARCHILD, BUT EVERYONE IS TYLER DUNIVAN

BEST MICRO-BUDGET FAN FILM

Click here to watch SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT
Click here to watch MIND LEECH
Click here to watch SLIPSTREAM
Click here to watch TO KNOW THINE ENEMY

BEST FAN FILM

Click here to watch LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT
Click here to watch FARRAGUT 2024
Click here to watch THE HIVE

My congratulations to all of our winners at all levels! Each of you earned the award(s) you won according to a panel of your fellow fan filmmakers. And apologies to those who didn’t win, but my sincere thanks to everyone who submitted.

And finally, assuming that I haven’t miscounted, here are the total number of awards won by each fan film in descending order. As you can see, we had two unstoppable juggernauts, but each is definitely worth watching …

LORELEY – PART III: ERSTKONTAKT – 17 awards
FARRAGUT 2024 – 16 awards
THE HIVE – 7 awards
FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE – 5 awards
THE ICARUS MANEUVER – 4 awards
SLIPSTREAM – 4 awards
THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE – 3 awards
MIND LEECH – 3 awards
SECOND STAR TO THE LEFT – 3 awards
CAPTAIN SIMIAN’S FIRST COMMAND – 2 awards
THE CASSANDRA EFFECT – 2 awards
TO KNOW THINE ENEMY– 2 awards
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN – PRODIGY RECKONING (EPISODE 4) – 2 awards
BROKEN MIRROR – 1 award
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT – 1 award
STARCHILD, BUT EVERYONE IS TYLER DUNIVAN – 1 award
WHAT’S NEXT – 1 award

The day that thousands of AXANAR supporters feared would never happen finally arrived on Sunday, July 26, 2026 in San Diego and also on YouTube. After a 12-year wait, the first of the two sequels to PRELUDE TO AXANAR premiered: AXANAR: THE GATHERING STORM.

In the three days since then (as I type this), a LOT has happened. First, the new video caught fire on YouTube, running up nearly 120K views as of my screen-capping of the page of Tuesday night—along with 11K likes and 1,576 comments, nearly all of which were lavishing high praise on the release.

There was also the San Diego premiere itself, which took place at the DIGITAL GYM CINEMA in downtown near the convention center (where Comic-Con was wrapping up) at 2pm Pacific Time. About 75 people in total came to the theater to check out multiple showings of Prelude and The Gathering Storm between 2pm and 5pm, followed by a marathon that bookended the above releases sandwiching the Axanar Universe fan films THE ICARUS MANEUVER, DAEDALUS, and INTERLUDE. The largest number of audience members sat for the first showing, filling nearly 40 of the 54 available seats in the small theater. Here’s an image from the last showing of the day, which had about 20 people…

Showrunner ALEC PETERS was feeling great. When I asked him during a post-premiere dinner at the local Spaghetti Factory restaurant how he felt about finally releasing the first of the Axanar sequels after twelve years, he said, “Vindicated. And all of the comments we’ve been reading on the YouTube channel are just so overwhelmingly over-the-top positive that it just makes us realize that we were doing this for all of the right reasons.”

I asked Alec if he thought that CBS/Paramount would try to have The Gathering Storm taken down from YouTube. The run time was 21 minutes (although four of those minutes were credits), and three of the cast members who weren’t in the original Prelude (and therefore weren’t grandfathered in: PATRICIA TALMAN, TONY AMENDOLA, and FARAN TAHIR) had previously played roles in Star Trek TNG/DS9/VOY episodes and the 2009 Star Trek feature film. So a takedown seemed likely. That said, I’m still not sure how forbidding SAG/AFTRA actors from being hired for paid roles benefits either Hollywood studio and might violate union rules.

“The over/under on a takedown is 36 hours,” Alec’s girlfriend CRYSSTAL HUBBARD replied, and Alec added, “If that!!” So I asked what the plan was if that happened, and Alec said, “Then free downloads for everyone!”

Their comments proved to be quite…prophetic…as three days later, Paramount Pictures Corporation and CBS Studios did indeed tell YouTube to take down the video due to copyright issues. And YouTube complied because, in a David and Goliath situation with two Goliaths, you don’t stand next to David no matter how big a sling he’s waving!

And so Alec did, indeed, end up posting a free link to The Gathering Storm on the Axanar website:

https://beta.axanar.com/watch/the-gathering-storm

Once there, you can watch the fan film online or else download a clean, high definition version of the video to have on your computer. Also, as a back-up, I’m featuring a version here on Fan Film Factor, as well, for fans to check out…

Has a new “war” begun between CBS/Paramount and Axanar Productions? I’ll refrain from editorializing or conjecturing. Obviously, things aren’t over yet. Actor footage is in the can to complete the Axanar saga with the release of the final episode of the mock documentary: CRUCIBLE. And although Alec told me that he hopes to have it finished and released before the end of this year, a LOT of visual FX shots still need to be created and rendered. Perhaps we’ll be back in San Diego next summer for the release of the final episode. At this point, I’ve given up making predictions.

Instead, I’ll simply include a collection of photos that I took during the premiere event at the Digital Gym Cinema…

Last time, I showed you all how I was able to use Artificial intelligence (AI) to turn this…

into this…

And this…

into this…

Both of these video segments are intended for a short Star Trek fan film in THE ROMULAN WAR: WAR STORIES series tentatively titled “THE STILES FILES.” I offered to use AI to help showrunner MARK NACCARATO to create some brief video clips for this and assorted other related projects he’s working on. It’s a win-win for both of us, as he’ll get shots that he needs that likely couldn’t be created in any other way—while I’ll have an opportunity to learn some of the latest AI tools through directed tasks and problems to solve.

Actually, the above scenes with Captain Aaron Stiles of the USS Challenger NX-03 could very easily have been created without using AI. Actor BRIAN HOLLOWAY had already recorded his lines in uniform against a green screen, and many fan filmmakers have both the tools and the skills to composite him against a stationary background of the captain’s quarters or ready room screen cap from Star Trek: Enterprise. AI simply made the shots look more realistic in terms of costume and sets…and better lit, as well.

However, the other three shots that Mark asked for my help creating (and which I will show you presently) could absolutely, in no conceivable way, have been produced practically without tremendous time and financial resources—and perhaps not even then! With AI, however, I was able to generate each requested video clip in a matter of days for a combined AI cost of less than $100.

Keep in mind, though, that we were already spending a relatively small amount of money. I was using Google Gemini, which has a free version that allows you to generate up to 20 still images over a 24-hour period. And then I was using Grok to turn those images into videos. Grok offers a $30/month subscription that allows for a limited number of 720p resolution videos each day—the same resolution as those videos featured above. After you reach your maximum allotted daily allowance, the resolution of your Grok-generated videos drops to 480p until your meter resets. (I should mention that Google Gemini “outsources” its image generating tasks to another AI engine called Nano Banana, but that’s deeper into the weeds than most of my readers will need to know about.)

For the first of the three videos I describe below, I continued with the Gemini-to-Grok recipe. But then I ran into the limitations of 720p video and decided to take the plunge into Kling 3.0 and Kling Omni, allowing me to operate at a whole other level. And that, my friends, made all the difference in the universe!

Read on…

THE ENGINEERING TOUR

Let’s begin with a little background on Mark Naccarato’s project. As some Trek fans are aware, had Star Trek: Enterprise been renewed for a fifth season, actor JEFFREY COMBS’ character of the Andorian Commander Shran was going to be added to the NX-01 bridge crew as a regular or semi-regular “advisor” to Captain Archer. Mark felt that, as the Romulan War got underway, most of Starfleet’s NX fleet would likewise each have an Andorian advisor or tactical officer, beginning to bring the races of the Coalition of Planets together. As such, Captain Stiles would have an Andorian advisor of his own. Mark felt it might be more interesting to make this character a woman as a counterpoint to Shran.

My first assignment was to create a scene where Stiles is giving his new Andorian advisor a tour of the engineering deck of the Challenger. The scene would have a captain’s log or some other kind of voice-over, so no dialog would be required. All I needed to prep the AI engine was to make sure I had reference for what Captain Stiles looked like (which I did), create an Andorian female in an Andorian military uniform, find a decent image of engineering from ENT, and populate it with engineers. Easy-peasy? Well, not entirely…but definitely doable with a little work.

Mark wanted to make certain the Andorian uniform was accurate, so I had to find an Andorian female officer from ENT. I used a screen capture of Lieutenant Talas (Shran’s romantic interest from the season 4 episode “Babel One”) to generate this reference image for the AI, later changing the facial features so it wouldn’t be a duplicate of the same character (since Talas died in the next episode).

Next, I needed to supply AI with a decent shot of the engineering deck on an NX-class warp-5 starship. Fortunately, I was able to find this awesome photo that DOUG DREXLER (Senior Illustrator and CGI Designer on ENT) posted to the Internet…

This allowed my brain to start planning the shot. Stiles and the Andorian would be walking along the top level while a flutter of engineers worked below. To help the AI visualize what those engineers would look like (mostly as guidance on size), I grabbed this screen cap from Trekcore.com from a similar overhead angle…

I won’t go into detail on the prompts I wrote but here is the final video sequence…

Looks pretty awesome, right? Well, that shot was EARNED! I can’t even count how many unusable renders Grok generated, and I didn’t bother saving any for posterity (Grok deletes any videos that aren’t immediately downloaded as soon you you close the browser window.) But among the crazier renderings Grok generated were ones where Stiles and the Andorian were walking in mid-air just to the left of the catwalk, several where her hand would pass through the railing rather than holding it or Stiles’ hand would phase through the wall on the right, ones where engineers would walk though each other or split into two engineers or combine into a single person, and a few where engineers would appear on the upper level and end up walking on top of the warp core! And with Grok allowing only about 20 renders per day at 720p resolution, getting a usable version of this video took me nearly half a week!

But honestly, it was totally worth it! I can’t think of any other way a Star Trek fan filmmaker could get a shot like that into their project. Model it in 3D with CGI characters? It’d take weeks or months and probably end up looking fake. Build your own set and populate it with extras in costume? Yeah, you and what Hollywood production studio!? Even though this shot required a few days, that’s basically peanuts to wind up with something that looks pretty close to realistic. Can you still tell it’s AI? Of course. But that’s not the point. It helps convey the story and looks more than decent enough not to distract.

THE BRIDGE

Okay, up until now, I was using Grok to generate all my videos, and it was doing a decent job. But my next assignment for Mark was going to prove to be my toughest challenge yet—and it pushed me to make the leap to Kling 3.0.

Mark wanted a scene of Captain Stiles on the bridge with his Andorian advisor at the tactical station (where Malcolm Reed sat on the NX-01). The challenge was that this wasn’t the NX-01, it was the NX-03, which would—one assumes—have those strange vertical columns with the annoying traveling lights on them like the USS Columbia NX-02 in the season four episode “Affliction”…

Fortunately, I had a beautifully-framed establishing shot of the entire bridge that I could start from. It was simple enough to have Gemini swap out the characters, placing Stiles in the captain’s chair and the Andorian woman at tactical. I also created a female first officer (a black woman with blond hair), a helmsman of Latino ethnicity—DEI makes a comeback, folks!—and because the bridge still looked a little sparse, a red-haired male engineer standing over the tactical station double-checking the readouts…

Let me just say for the record that being able to make changes like that in a matter of minutes (and just a few minutes) and have it come out looking that normal is nothing short of miraculous! Say what you want about the evils of AI, but stuff like this is one of the reasons it’s just not going away, folks.

Okay, So that was a decent enough start. But my next challenge was adding in the lights traveling up the vertical columns. Grok had no idea what I was talking about when I wrote my first few prompts, so I decided to help it along by showing it an example. Unfortunately, Grok doesn’t allow you to use a video as reference, so I took a second still image from the episode and uploaded it…

This ended up going horribly wrong. Although I explained to Grok that I wanted the characters in the first image to remain throughout the entire video rendering, Grok didn’t understand and morphed everyone from looking like their new characters into these original characters and still couldn’t figure out what I wanted those lights to do. This was gonna require some major extra work on my part!

So I generated a series of 15 still images of the lights traveling up the tubes. Then I swapped out (using Photoshop) the Columbia bridge crew for the Challenger bridge crew. The images ultimately looked like this…

This ended up taking me a few hours to create fifteen reference images, but at least now Grok would understand what I wanted. Well, kinda. Two problems: first, Grok only allows a maximum of seven reference still images (so I wasted half my time and had to choose the best seven out of fifteen), and second, Grok still didn’t get it most of the time. Despite telling it that the lights go up, one cycle at a time, repeating every two seconds, I ended up getting renders like these…

Yeah, some very weird and trippy stuff happened! Eventually, I did get something that was mostly usable…

The problem, as I’m sure you can see, was the lip sync—or rather the lack of lip sync. And the wrong characters were saying some of the lines. But while Grok doesn’t have anything to fix lip sync on an existing video, Kling 3.0 does. In fact, there is even a special button that specifically says “Lip Sync.” Hooray!

The only problem is that I would now have to subscribe to a second generative AI video service (for either $8 or $30/month…or more). Oh, well, in for a nickel, in for a pound, right? And as an added benefit, Kling offers 1080p HD resolution videos, higher quality than Grok’s 720p. (It also offers 4K quality, but those renders get very expensive, eating up credits in huge bites.) I opted for the $30/month option, figuring I might switch over from Grok if I started getting comfortable with Kling.

Having now committed to using the new AI service, I soon discovered that I might have wasted my money. Y’see, lip sync requires a fairly large face for the algorithm to recognize, and these faces on the Challenger bridge in the wide shot were all too small for Kling to adjust or even, in some cases, recognize. You have to select the person who is supposed to be speaking a specific line. Kling found the faces of Stiles and the helm officer, but the blue skin of the Andorian threw it off. And in some renders, it was mixing up Stiles and the helm officer. Oh, it was a mess!

Just as I was about to give up, my friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ (“the AI Whisperer”) suggested that I have Kling zoom in the characters. That way, their faces will be large enough to sync their voices when they speak their lines.

“Can it really do that?” I asked. “It’s a very wide shot of the entire bridge without a lot of close-up detail.”

“It should be able to,” Mojo replied. “Why not give it a try and see what happens?”

Now, before I show you what happened, let me say again how miraculous I already thought AI was. What I saw next rocketed my existing opinion into the stratosphere. I won’t show you all the iterations I generated on my way to the following video, but there were about 20 attempts. That said, they were all pretty close to usable. But I was so impressed and having so much fun seeing what Kling was creating for me that I decided to hold out for “perfect.” And I didn’t even need to fix the lip syncing on these!

I ended up with two video segments that I edited together to form this 18-second clip…

Seriously, can you believe it??? AI was able to zoom in and generate all of that high resolution detail from what started as a low-resolution still image! My friends, this is a fan film game changer! And the technology is only getting better…almost by the day!

Of course, I still wasn’t quite done with this shot yet. I still needed to go into ElevenLabs and adjust the voice of Captain Stiles to match actor BRIAN HOLLOWAY, which I had already stored in my ElevenLabs account. This is the final version of the scene (including an extra 6 second zoom in at the beginning that I thought Mark might like to have)…

Granted, I’m not thrilled with the Andorian woman’s voice, but Mark said he’ll likely have a captain’s log or narrator’s voice over the beginning of the scene to and lower the volume of her dialog a bit. So no worries there.

Just one more shot to show you, and it’s also really cool…

THE FUNERAL

The blog is getting long again, so I won’t go into nearly as much detail on this shot. My assignment was to create a funeral at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco during the Romulan War. The funeral is for Stiles’ son Brandon.

I decided to skip Gemini this time and see how Kling would do generating a seed still image. I asked for an Arlington-like cemetery overlooking the Presidio and the Golden Gate bridge. Starfleet Headquarters and various futuristic buildings were on either side, and I uploaded the Earth Starfleet logo to put on the main building. After a few unusable renders (but only a few), I got this very pleasant render…

Mark and I both loved it, so now it was time to add some mourners. The attendees were to all be wearing Starfleet dress uniforms as seen in the ENT finale. We discussed including civilians, but I did’t really have a lot of reference for 22nd century fashion, so I decided to keep it simple and limit it to Starfleet personnel only.

I will say that getting Kling to render those uniforms and only those uniforms was like pulling teeth! Artificial Intelligence simply has too many different Starfleet uniforms to choose from and decided to insert various versions of 22rd and 24th century uniforms. Here’s one of MANY frustrating renders…

I should also mention that, no matter ho many times I asked for people of varying genders, ages, and racial ethnicities, Kling just kept giving me young white men! Eventually, I gave up. Kling just wasn’t getting it, and I was using up my monthly credit allowance. Maybe Gemini (which will generate 20-or-so renders a day for free) would succeed where Kling failed. And it did…

There was actually some subtle Photoshopping involved in that image. The original had everyone with the same number of rank braids and gold stripes on their shoulders. So I went in a varied their ranks and department colors. Easy-peasy.

Then Mojo told me about something he’d just done and I wanted to try. You upload a schematic image of an object like a spacecraft, and Kling will animate it for you. So I uploaded this image of a shuttlepod…

…and I asked Kling to add it to the video coming from the upper right corner to land in font of the main building. Ultimately, I needed to create a starting and ending frame to better illustrate what I wanted, but eventually I got this…

The dialog isn’t necessary, as this shot will include another voice-over in the final fan film. And the shuttlepod landing looked pretty impressive. But Mark and I both agreed that there wasn’t enough other movement. It looked like a still photo with a shuttle landing in the background. Also, what is going on with the tombstones on the far right? There’s two hills…weird.

Kling was not able to make any of the people in the sequence move because the starting frame image and the ending frame image I supplied had everyone in the exact same positions. So they were essentially “frozen” in place (I was really beginning to figure out the idiosyncrasies of these AI applications.) No problem, though. I went back into Gemini and had that AI application put some hands on the shoulders of adjacent mourners and have some heads turn to look at other faces next to them. And I also made the person leading the ceremony put his book down at his side in the ending frame image. And finally, I added ripples to the water and fixed the hillside on the right. Here were my new starting and ending frames…

And here is the final funeral clip…

Not too shabby…!

So what’s next? Well, Mark hasn’t given me my next assignment yet, but I have started working on a new fan film short of my own using AI exclusively! It’s just an experiment to see if I can do it while also being a learning exercise. It’s looking good so far. It’ll be called CLEAR ALL MOORINGS.

In the meantime, AI keeps changing and improving. Kling Omni is supposed to be really good at keeping characters and settings consistent, and I’m planning to use it for my new all-AI fan film. On the other hand, Seedance 2.0 is issuing a new release that generates 30-second long video clips while everyone else maxes out at 15 seconds—talk about another game-changer!

Looks like I might have to start yet another monthly AI subscription…

Last time, I showed how I used a combination of the AI tools of Google Gemini and Grok to turn this…

into this…

The above video clip is intended to be a part of one of MARK NACCARATO’s upcoming fan films that take place during THE ROMULAN WAR. It was the second time I used AI to help create a short scene for him. The first time was a couple of days earlier when I used a combination of those same two AI applications to produce this short clip of a young T’Pau giving a speech to the Vulcan Council…

Part 2 blog showed how many different prompts I had to go through to change the four fans in front of a green screen into a starting “seed” still image of the four Starfleet officers drinking in the 602 Club. And then I had to go through a few different video prompts and renderings to then turn that one seed image the 10-second toast scene that I wanted. AI takes patience, persistence, and an ability to try to figure out what went wrong with your previous prompt and then to write something more carefully to avoid the same problem again…and again. Lather, rinse, repeat—possibly dozens of times!

AI isn’t a mind-reader quite yet. In fact, it’s frustratingly literal most of the time and unpredictable much of the rest of the time. But it still does some mind-blowing things in just a minute or two—occasionally for free or for a relatively affordable cost considering what it’s able to do for you.

Today, I’m going to continue this 4-part series with the third challenge handed to me by Mark: turn a series of flatly-lit green screen takes of actor BRIAN HOLLOWAY into Captain Aaron Stiles of the USS Challenger NX-03, sending a series of subspace messages from his quarters to Captain Jonathan Archer of the USS Enterprise NX-01. (Brian had previously worked on fan films for STAR TREK: PHASE II, THE FEDERATION FILES, and DREADNOUGHT DOMINION.)

Just to help me do a proof of concept, Mark sent me the following clip of part of one of Stiles’ messages to Archer. It was a thank you for a recording Archer had made expressing his condolences on the death of one of Captain Stiles’ sons, Brandon, a tribute that was played during the funeral…

The main difference between this project and the previous one of the officers giving the toast was that with Stiles, we already had the audio, which Mark wanted to keep. For the toast, Grok’s AI just created new voices that said what I typed in. But this time, Brian’s voice needed to remain intact in the final video. Turns out that Grok doesn’t have that ability at this time. So I needed to find an AI application that could retain the initial sound and render a new video with lips that synced to it.

Once again, I asked the “AI Whisperer,” my good friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ for the solution, and he quickly told me: Kling Omni…

It turned out that application was too problematic for me to use cost-effectively. If I didn’t want to pay for a second monthly subscription (I was already on the hook for $30/month for Grok), it would charge by the render—between $1.50 and $2 each time—meaning that a troublesome project with dozens of renders could start running up the price tag pretty darn quickly. That said, I did use it to create a really good first attempt!

Kling Omni allows the user to upload both images and videos from reference (Gemini and Grok allow only images). So here’s what I did. I once again started with Gemini to create a still image to base the video off of. I uploaded to Gemini the full NX-era Starfleet uniform design along with a still image of Brian Holloway. The I asked Gemini to create a 16×9 rectangular image of the man in the close-up shot (Brian) sitting in the Captain’s ready room from the television series Star Trek: Enterprise, wearing the full uniform from the first uploaded reference image. Oh, and make sure we see the earth out the window from a high orbit.

Got all that? Well, fortunately, AI can track complex instructions, and what I got looked amazingly good!

So I uploaded this image along with the 10-second video clip of Brian and asked for Kling Omni to have the man in the chair deliver the lines from the video with the same sound track. I asked for a few more flourishes (because I like being a director), like having him spin slightly in his chair to face the camera as he speaks, having a subtle camera zoom-in during the scene, and to have him give a little wink at the end. The first result was really good, albeit not quite perfect…

I had high hopes that I could fix the glitches in this video—just as I’d done with the four officers toasting in the 602 Club. But that first rendering turned out to be beginner’s luck, and the next ten renderings (costing me an additional twenty bucks!) got progressively worse. I don’t have any of them to share because Kling Omni doesn’t save renders if you’re not subscribed. You have to download them immediately or lose them forever.

I quickly decided that neither Mark’s nor my budget could handle the cost of my learning curve, and I would go back to Grok, where I was already paying $30/month for a subscription. But I wasn’t going back empty-handed. Thanks to that one good render, I was able to seed Grok with four anchoring images, and I used Photoshop to change the sleeve patch to the Challenger NX-03 design that Mark supplied me with…

This allowed me to set a nice zoom in while Captain Stiles is swiveling in his chair. The only thing missing was a desk. I also didn’t want him to hold on the wink, as he did in the previous video. I uploaded the four images (above) plus the establishing wide shot with the desk, and I typed the following prompt into Grok…

Using the first four images, create a shot of this character that slowly zooms out. As he turns toward the camera, he speaks the following dialog:

“Jon, I wish you could have been there to hear it in person.  He was somethin’ else.  Woulda made a Vulcan cry…even yours. “

Right after he finishes speaking, he gives a quick wink and smiles slightly. Then both eyes open again as he holds the smile for another second and a half.   In the background as ambient noise, have the ambient low hum sound of a starship engine from the television series “Star Trek: Enterprise.” Make certain his eyes are always looking toward the camera throughout the entire shot.   Using the last image for reference only, please place this character behind a desk similar to the one shown in the last image.

And this is the video I got…

Oh, uh…typo! I accidentally asked for a zoom OUT, not in. But that looked pretty decent for a first attempt. I corrected the typo and soon discovered that Grok does not handle winks well at all. Here are just two of about seven attempts that all completely screwed up the wink…

You’ll also notice that AI is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get. The same prompt resulted in completely different zoom amounts and speeds, completely different office furniture and backgrounds (including the second one that had weirdly shifting walls at the end), completely different orbital directions of earth, and a host of glitches in his speech. YUCK! Oh, and I realized I had another typo: the line is supposed to be, “It was something else,” not “He was something else.”

I decided to ditch the wink completely, and I corrected the second typo. It still took about a dozen more renders, which led me to discover a somewhat irritating limitation of Grok. As you probably know, AI processors require a lot of energy to operate, and that electricity costs money. So your $30/month covers only a certain number of 10-second renders at the higher quality 720p (the minimum standard for HD video). After that, the renders switch to the standard definition 480p quality. A subscriber then has to wait for the “reset” (usually about 12 hours or so) to regain the ability to generate videos at the higher 720 resolution.

Eventually, I did get a really good render. I even used the new “Generative Extend” tool in the Adobe Premiere video application on my computer (the software I use to edit videos) to extend the 10-second video slightly, and I sent it along to Mark…

I was so proud! Unfortunately, Mark assumed I knew that this was a subspace message being recorded into a computer viewer, not a cinematic shot with zooming motion. As much as he liked the way it turned out, in order to work in the ultimate fan film he’d be making, this needed to look like a recording of a message that Captain Stiles was sending to Captain Archer—it needed to be a static, close-up shot.

Also, Mark wasn’t crazy about the light levels and color saturation overall. Ah, directors! But he was right. Star Trek: Enterprise was filmed in low light, producing moody shadows and muted colors. So I adjusted the source images in Photoshop to darken and desaturate them. However, much to my frustration, I still kept getting rich, well-lit, vibrant renders. But I had a “Plan B” to fix that, too.

When I finally had a decent 10-second take of Stiles, I downloaded the video and opened it in Adobe Premiere. Then I used Premiere’s adjustments to dim the lighting, desaturate the colors, and even add a single spotlight just behind the captain’s head to light up the planet earth. And of course, I extended the video by a second (Premiere lets you add a maximum of two seconds to the end of a video, but the further along it gets the more it can drift into unwanted directions).

What I sent to Mark made me even prouder than the first clip I’d sent him (even though it was a less interesting static shot). Stiles’ delivery was one of the best yet…

Mark liked it, but it turned out that he’d sent me only the second half of Stiles’ message as a test to see how it would turn out. There was actually a beginning part, as well…

So I created a new 10-second video clip—minus the “Captain’s log” part, which Mark didn’t want included. Once again, I decided to “direct” the AI actor a little bit. Rather than just giving him the words, I inserted pauses and a brief look downward. I also needed to try to get the spinning earth to end at the same spot where the earth in the second part started. After a few miscues (including earths that spun way too fast), I adjusted the prompt to read like this…

Using the previous video, make something identical but with the following dialog…   “Jonathan, I just wanted to reach out and thank you for the message that you sent.” He pauses again, thinking about his son’s funeral. Then he continues, “…for the kind words about Brandon. We played it at the memorial service.” He looks down very slightly, sad again.   The shot should be static and framed close to the character, cropped slightly below the patch on his sleeve. Make sure the earth out the window matches the earth in the second photo above.   Have the character speak quickly enough to fit in all of the dialogue. The earth should be rotating VERY VERY VERY slowly and the position of the earth should end the scene in the same position as the earth out the window in last uploaded photo.

Again, it took several tries, but eventually I got this…

Obviously, I used Premiere’s Generative Extend tool to add two seconds to each rendered video to get the total run time to 24 seconds. Unfortunately, try as I might to match the backgrounds, the earth, the orbital speed and direction, and the window itself were noticeably different in the first and second segments of the video. Unless Mark inserted a cutaway shot to the funeral or something, the transition would be noticeable and jarring.

But then I discovered, quite by accident, that Grok had an “extend” feature of its own. You could take a 10-second clip and extend it another 6 or 10 seconds. And indeed, you could do so again and possibly an infinite number of times. The reason I don’t know for certain is because the extended video tends to “drift” in strange ways, with words and lip movements getting progressively more garbled.

I ultimately got this clip to be “perfect” by extending a good take and getting a decent extension…

I put “perfect” in quotation marks because there are still a couple of audio glitches and places where the lips don’t completely sync to the words. Also, Stiles’ voice does not match Brian Holloway’s voice because Grok had no idea what Brian sounded like, and Grok doesn’t match voices anyway. However, ElevenLabs (which I used to create AN ABSENT FRIEND two years ago) specializes in such things. And since I would be needing to create other Stiles video clips, it would be best to have a consistent voice (Brian’s) across all the AI-generated videos.

It was easy enough to sample Brian’s voice and then upload it to ElevenLabs. However, this application had gotten so much more powerful and complex in the two years I’d been away that I needed to use the site’s own AI assistant to help me. Their AI bot is unbelievably helpful and friendly and even offered to make the adjustments I needed for me. “Please do,” I’d say, and a few seconds later, the changes would be done. Honestly, folks, the AI was an absolute pleasure to use. It even realized I was working on a Star Trek fan film and said good night to me by calling me captain! Seriously, take a look…

(I hope that when the inevitable AI takeover of humanity happens that our new robot overlords keep that same charming sense of humor. It’ll make the dystopian future much more enjoyable!)

Anyway, with ElevenLabs’ voice-switching, I was able to correct those sound glitches—although the lip sync issues seem to be insurmountable at the moment. Take a look and a listen…

This blog is getting pretty long, so I’ll end with the second and final clip I rendered of Captain Stiles for Mark. Again, I provided “direction” for the AI actor including dramatic pauses and facial expressions. I also turned the background into a green screen, as Mark has an out-the-window CGI warp speed effect, which is easier than trying to explain the warp concept to AI and hoping it gets it correct during a good take.

As I said, the “extend” option on Grok is a bit of a crap shoot—with the emphasis on the word CRAP. While you can lock in a good first 10-second take, the extension can go horribly wrong a frustratingly frequent amount of the time. Take a look at just a small number of samples of how the AI would screw up the extensions of the first 10-second clip with some incredibly garbled 6-second extensions…

But persistence won out in the end! Here is the final clip of Stiles, including the switch-over of the voice to Brian’s…

Next week, I’ve got one final entry in this four-part feature series, and I think it’s the most exciting yet. Why? Well, first of all, I finally make the official transition from Grok to Kling even though the monthly subscription cost is higher, and I’ll let you know why. But second and more importantly, the video clips that I managed to render came out staggeringly incredible and mind-blowing! Trust me—you will NOT want to miss the conclusion!

Last time in Part 1, I discussed a little about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly common tool among fan filmmakers—especially Star Wars but also Star Trek and other genres—and I provided links to some recent examples in the Trek realm. Then I moved onto how MARK NACCARATO, who is finishing up work on the sequel to THE ROMULAN WAR, PART I and also releasing some new short films in the NX-era, asked me to help him create a still image of a young T’Pau giving a speech to the Vulcan Council.

Looking at an overwhelming amount of work in Photoshop, I asked Mark if he’d mind if I used AI to create the image. He was fine with the idea, and ultimately I was able to create not just a still image to go under a voice-over narration but an actual 13-second video of part of her speech. Take a look…

Although I had used AI two years ago to generate AI voices for Spock and Dr. McCoy for my animated fan film AN ABSENT FRIEND, and I had created some Facebook memes and some short music clips with AI tools previously, this was the first time that I’d used AI to generate a video from an AI still image. And it was a lot of fun!

It was also an amazing learning experience, and I wanted to learn more. There’s nothing like having a project to focus your efforts, and so I asked Mark if he had any other clips that he’d like to try to create using AI. I was certainly game!

Mark’s next request was simply for a still image. Four fans had gotten together to stage a “toast” in front of a green screen. Here’s a still image of them…

My mission, should I choose to accept it (and, of course, I did!), was to do the following:

1. Put all four of these fans into NX-era Starfleet uniforms like those from Enterprise.
2. Trim them down a little to look more like physically fit Starfleet officers.
3. Change the blue Romulan Ale to just beer (as this was taking place during the Romulan War—the Romulans were still mysterious—so Romulan Ale wouldn’t be an Earth beverage at the time).
4. Have them sitting in the 602 Club (from the Enterprise episode “First Flight”), and Mark supplied me with some reference photos…

There was a LOT to do to get from there to here with what I needed to change on the initial photo. With so many tasks on the list, I thought it might be best to tackle them one at a time. That way, the AI of Google Gemini could build on each new successful iteration.

Below are the text prompts that I used and the results I got from them. And, yes, you can make fun of me for actually saying “please” to the AI interface. But I suspect I’ll have the last laugh when the robot overlords eventually take over the planet and they’re nicer to those of us who were more polite to our AI apps.

Anyway, after uploading the original photo of the four fans around the table, I provided the following prompt:

Can you make these people look thinner?

And here’s what I got…

Most impressive! Okay, time to dress them in NX-era Starfleet uniforms. So I uploaded this graphic that I got off of the Internet to provide some reference…

This was my next prompt:

Now can you dress them all in these uniforms from Star Trek: Enterprise?

And I got this result…

AI often produces unexpected and occasionally strange results. In this case, without being prompted, it changed two of the four people from sitting to standing. I assume the reason was because the new reference image I uploaded showed full uniforms in a standing position, so maybe Gemini thought that was what I wanted and decided to split the difference, keeping two people seated and making two of them stand. I was also surprised that Gemini had taken the initiative to now have all four people looking slightly and/or directly at the camera.

And of course, it’s pretty obvious that the guy in the gold stripes had issues with his shoulder color. I really have no idea why Gemini did that, but when it comes to AI, one must be supremely patient. I typed in the following prompt to try to fix the issues before moving things forward to the next step…

Please adjust the shoulders of the man standing so that they are yellow stripes with blue on the shoulders to match the other uniforms. Also, please make the four people look even thinner and in better healthy shape. Oh, and change the drinks to beers for each of them.

You’ll notice that I started “over-explaining” things. Rather than just saying “match the shoulders to the uniforms in the reference photos,” I very specifically pointed out the problem and how I wanted it fixed (yellow stripes with blue on the shoulders). And for the next sentence, I wrote more than just “make them thinner” and added “…in better healthy shape.” The elaboration might ultimately have proven to be unnecessary, but I had nothing to lose by over-communicating what I wanted. Here was the next result…

Oh, AI, you mischievous little minx!

Like the genie who grants you exactly what you wished for rather than what you actually meant, Gemini took some liberties. Yes, the AI made the standing guy’s uniform match the others in removing the yellow shoulders, but remember that i said, “yellow stripes with blue on the shoulders.” YOU know what I meant: “keep the stripes yellow but change the area above the stripes on the shoulders from yellow to blue.” But all Gemini saw was that I wanted yellow stripes and I wanted blue on the shoulders. So it turned the yellow stripes from the previous image to blue stripes and then added new yellow stripes down on either side of his central zipper. Totally my fault that AI got it wrong. Also, I only asked for the drinks to be beer but not the decanter that was holding refills. Shame on me!

Time to fix this, and so I entered the following prompt, taking much greater pains to ask myself “what might Gemini misunderstand?” and then writing even more carefully and exactly what I wanted…

Please remove the vertical yellow stripes from the man who is standing. He should simply have a black sipper like the others. But make the stripes on his shoulders yellow and not blue. Change the bottle with the blue liquid in it to a large, half-filled pitcher of beer.

BINGO! Next prompt:

Please make them all look a little but happier.

Intriguingly, Gemini spontaneously (without being prompted) decided to change the direction of their gazes from looking at the camera to looking at the beer…and I have absolutely no clue as to why! Also, notice that I misspelled “bit” as “but” in my prompt. AI seems to generally ignore typos if you’re pretty clear about what you’re looking for (I also misspelled “zipper” in the previous prompt—did you catch that?). Anyway, now that these four people looked correct, it was now time to move them from standing in front of a green screen to sitting in the 602 Club lounge. So I uploaded the reference images (six in all) and typed in this prompt…

These are all images of the 602 Club from Star Trek Enterprise. Please take the four people from the previous image and place them inside of the 602 Club.

Nice! And again, without being asked to, Gemini decided to return the woman with the long straight hair to a seated position and have the standing guy pouring himself the final beer. And now they’re all looking at the pour. I kinda liked it, and the background looked especially good. Nearly there! Keeping in mind that this was going to be placed into a horizontally-oriented YouTube video, I typed in:

Can you please render the above image in a 16×9 aspect ratio?

Okay, just a few more things to tweak…

Zoom in on the four people a bit, showing slightly less background. Also, please fill the 602 club with other people dressed similarly in Starfleet uniforms from Star Trek Enterprise. And finally, remove the greenish reflection from the horizontal tabletop surfaces.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad. The framing remained the same…no zooming in. But lots of officers scattered around the background? Check. Removal of the green in the reflection? Kinda check. There was still some green reflection on the smaller table, but I could fix that in Photoshop—and I did, along with removing the greenish tinge from the hair of the strawberry blonde. And I was easily able to crop the image little tighter myself, which had the added benefit of removing the Gemini watermark (the gray star) from the bottom right.

This entire process took me maybe half an hour—most of that waiting for the renders, which each take a minute or two (which is itself amazing!). I e-mailed the image to Mark along with the following message:

No, seriously, give me something challenging. 

I can animate it, if you’d like.  I can also change the arm patches to any design you provide…

Mark’s response:

Wait.. what?!

Well now I feel stupid. I thought what I was asking you to do was a much heavier lift, but apparently I am even worse at Photoshop and AI than previous estimates indicated. This looks great.

So since you’re offering, yes I will pull together a patch design and get that to you asap.

And while I’m at it, I’ll just go ahead and ask (though this is probably a question I need to ask ChatGPT as well)… is there a way to keep the background and uniforms while they talk and deliver dialogue? Maybe even the dialogue they used on the original footage? I will go ahead and assume that will require multiple steps and programs/apps, but figured I’d pick your brain on it.

Mark emailed me the patch he wanted to use, since these officers were assigned to the U.S.S. Endeavor and not the Enterprise.

So with just one more minor adjustment, I would have the exact photo I needed from Gemini. I uploaded the patch graphic (above) and typed in the following simple prompt…

Please replace the patch that is on the left shoulder of the uniform with a patch that instead looks like the attached image.

And here’s what I got back…

WTF happened??? Seriously, that is the graphic Gemini spit back out at me. I mean, at least it did change the shoulder patches…although they were circular and not ovals and were now on both the left and right sleeves. I had a moment of exasperation as I wondering how to write prompts to get me out of this mess. Then I decided that the tweak was minor enough for me to just do myself in Photoshop. And indeed, I was starting to realize that the occasional manual Photoshop correction might often be the fastest solution to an AI rendering problem—rather than trying to write/prompt your way out of it.

So I went into Photoshop and swapped out the patches myself, keeping the tighter cropping. And while I was there, I also removed lingering greenish reflection on the table and in the strawberry blonde’s hair. This was my final Photoshopped still image…

Meanwhile, about a half hour later, Mark sent over a link to the fans’ entire toasting video clip…

Time to return to Grok. I had now discovered that you could choose to generate either a 6-second or 10-second clip. I would later discover that a user could “extend” a Grok-generated clip to be even longer than 10 seconds, but I didn’t know that just yet. However, simply discovering the 10-second option seemed like divine providence to someone who was struggling to fit his T’Pau speech into just 6 seconds!

With the above still image uploaded to Grok, I typed in the following prompt…

Create a 10-second video of the person standing pouring the final beer and then the four people at the table making a toast.   The toast is being started by the woman sitting on the right. She lifts her glass and says, “To giving those Romulan bastards hell.” And then the rest of the team raises their glasses, as well, and toast as one, “To giving them hell!”   There is no other dialog before the toast, but there is ambient background noise inside the club.

Now, before you watch the video clip that was generated, try to imagine what could possibly go wrong with those instructions I just wrote. It really does seem I thought of everything, doesn’t it? Well, take a look at what I got..

That guy with the pitcher sure does love beer!!! And what the heck happened to his glass halfway through the video? He’s a wizard, he is! Oh, well. We all know that AI isn’t perfect, and we need to be patient and understanding. After all, this was only the first attempt. I could fix this with a better, more thorough prompt. Also, I decided to try to “direct” the actors a little by keeping them happy and optimistic but dialing back their enthusiasm just a bit. Here’s what became my final prompt for this clip…

Create a 10 second video of the person standing pouring the final beer and then the four people at the table making a toast.   The toast is being started by the woman sitting on the right. She lifts her glass and says, “To giving those Romulan bastards hell.” And then the rest of the team raises their glasses, as well, and toast as one, “To giving them hell!”   There is no other dialog before the toast, but there is ambient background noise inside the club. The four officers are enthusiastic about their upcoming mission but still a little nervous becuase they will be heading into battle.   Make sure all four of these people are drinking from their glasses. The person holding the pitcher puts it down on the table first before picking up his glass.

I’ll take it! Granted, there isn’t really any ambient noise in the room, but that can always be added later by Mark during the editing process. And speaking of Mark, he was suitably impressed. He asked if I’d consider tackling another series of clips, this time of Captain Aaron Stiles of the U.S.S. Challenger NX-03. I was thrilled to take on another challenge!

Little did I realize that the time and number of renderings I would have to do in Grok was going to increase about a hundredfold!

Come back next time for the third installment of this AI journey as I focus on a video challenge that couldn’t be solved by simply writing better prompts. But it nevertheless resulted in what I believe is an absolute game-changer of a scene for Star Trek fan films.

Yeah, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will probably steal away jobs, destroy the environment, and eventually turn all humans on the planet into nothing but organic batteries while muscular cyborgs with Austrian accents hunt us down. But until then, AI is doing some truly unbelievable things! Many folks in the fan film community are beginning to use it in their projects. And a couple of months ago, I decided to jump down that rabbit hole. What I’ve managed to create since then is blowing my mind!

I originally began dabbling with AI two years ago when I produced the animated fan film AN ABSENT FRIEND and used AI to recreate the voices of the late LEONARD NIMOY and DeFOREST KELLEY as Spock and McCoy (I got a tacit thumbs up from the Nimoy estate, and Kelley’s voice is no longer owned as he had no children). What absolutely amazed me was that the AI-generated voices could actually act and take direction! And in the time since then, AI’s capabilities and quality have evolved even further. AI still hasn’t achieved “perfection” yet, but acceptance of it as a creative tool is spreading very quickly…even among some of those whose livelihoods were initially threatened by it.

Case in point: my longtime friend ADAM “MOJO” LEBOWITZ—two-time Emmy-winning CGI animator on Babylon 5, DS9, Voyager, and Battlestar Galactica—was staring down the AI “career abyss” a couple of years ago. But instead of just worrying and complaining about AI making his VFX skills obsolete, he decided that he would become an AI expert. He studied the expanding capabilities of countless different AI generators for images, video, audio, etc., applying his own knowledge and experience in the visual effects field to learn how to make AI do what a film producer or director actually wanted rather than what AI thought they wanted. Here’s a sample of some of what Mojo created as he was teaching himself AI. Since then, Mojo has found rewarding employment in the AI pre-viz VFX industry on an upcoming film from Lion’s Gate working as what I like to call the “AI Whisperer.”

And Mojo isn’t the only one. Many fan filmmakers have begun to use AI in their projects in various ways. Don’t even get me started on how many Star Wars fan films are being made entirely using AI—there aren’t enough minutes in the day to report on them all! But some of the Star Trek fan filmmakers who have begun to use AI in their projects include…

SAMUEL COCKINGS

• DESTINY CALLS – Aging and de-aging characters (Sam has done this trick in multiple releases of his TREK SHORTS series in the last couple of years).
• LEGACY RETURNS – When actress ALEXA BROWN wasn’t able to travel to Bedford, England to film her green screen scenes in person, she instead recorded her voice for Sam to combine with an AI avatar of her established character, Captain Joan Keller.
• A MIRROR WITHOUT MERCY – GEORGE KAYAIAN provided the voice of an Andorian tactical officer while AI created the character himself (see the screen-capped image above).

JOSE CEPEDA

CAPTAIN SIMIAN’S FIRST COMMAND not only features multiple live-action “apes” in its cast, but it also uses copious AI-rendered animations to fill out a run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes. These AI insert scenes would have been nearly impossible for a fan production to create in any other practical way.

MARK LARGENT

Mark’s previous 3D animated puppet parodies like THE DUMBSDAY MACHINE took years of work to model, animate, and render. The 4-minute STALLED TREK music video parody SPECIAL KIND OF FOOL, on the other hand, took Mark only 10 days to render with AI (plus a few days before that to have AI create the song based on lyrics that he wrote).

Other recent Star Trek fan films to be done entirely by AI include the hilarious AI MOCK TIME from CHRISTOPHER ROMANO, THROUGH THE IRON VEIL from ELVIS DEANE, and one of my all-time favorites so far, COMPLETELY UNAVOIDABLE, part of a parade of Trek parody musical videos featured on the Out of Context AI YouTube channel. And JOSHUA IRWIN reports that his two upcoming 24th century AVALON UNIVERSE releases will feature AI elements. He also told me: “I’m using Chat GPT as a sounding board to help me write my Avalon Universe ‘All Good Things’ script for 2028.”

And that brings us to me. After using ElevenLabs‘s AI speech generator to make the voices for my animated fan film, my use of AI for the next two years was minimal, at best. I asked ChatGPT a few questions here and there, I generated a few memes for Facebook, and I used it last year to create some background music for a few videos for my son’s robotics team. I knew that others were beginning to utilize AI for a growing number of truly impressive (and not so impressive) film projects, but starting that learning curve just didn’t seem worth it to me. I had other things to keep me busy.

Then I got a call from MARK NACCARATO of Tennessee. As some of you might remember, Mark is the showrunner, writer, and producer of THE ROMULAN WAR, PART I (and he’s still working to complete and release PART II).

Back in the days before COVID, I used to help Mark with some of his WAR STORIES short films. He’d ask me to do relatively quick favors for him by using my Photoshop skills to put one of his actor’s heads on a still image from Star Trek: Enterprise for him to use as a visual image over a log entry or narration for one of his mockumentaries. Here’s two examples of what I would do for him…

I assumed that Mark was now calling to ask me for more of the same—and indeed he was. But this time, the job was a bit more challenging. He needed a young T’Pau (from the Vulcan trilogy of Star Trek: Enterprise during season four) giving a speech to the Vulcan Council with Soval standing in the background.

¡Ay, carumba! That was certainly a tall order!!!

I looked at clips from those three Vulcan episodes, and the young T’Pau spends nearly all of her time wearing something very plain and somewhat ragged. Only at the very end of the final episode is she wearing anything even close to ornate and ceremonial. And the sole decent screen cap I could find wasn’t particularly conducive to creating a “giving a speech” image in Photoshop…

Beyond that, I started wondering how in heck I would add in a Vulcan Council chamber and dozens or more Vulcans to the shot. Maybe I could use the scene from the 2009 JJ Trek movie where Spock turns down admission to the Vulcan Science Academy, but I had no idea how to fill it with dozens or more Vulcans!

You can probably see where this is going, and so I asked Mark, “Would you have any objections if I used AI to generate something?” Some people do object to using AI for a creative project. When I was creating my animated short film with Spock and McCoy, the first person I approached to compose some music for it politely declined, as he didn’t want his name associated with a a project that used AI. And I completely understood his resistance.

However, Mark was fine giving it a shot, and so all I needed now was to figure out how to do it. So I reached out to the aforementioned Mojo to ask the “AI Whisperer” if he could give me some sage advice on where to begin my AI trek. Mojo recommended first generating a still image using Google Gemini and then, once I had something that I liked, taking that image into Grok to turn it into a video. Both have very simple, straightforward interfaces. (I should mention that Google “outsources” its image generating tasks to another AI engine called Nano Banana, but that’s deeper in the weeds than most of my readers will need to know about.)

So I fed a screen capture of young T’Pau into Gemini, another shot of Soval, and I asked it to render an image of this Vulcan woman (Gemini knows Vulcans have pointed ears and eyebrows) wearing a formal Vulcan robe adorned with Vulcan lettering down the front, giving a speech to a council of Vulcan dignitaries in a chamber on the planet Vulcan with Ambassador Soval standing by her side. AI, I was told, prefers a lot of specifics and details.

Gemini went through a several render iterations and produced some interesting angles, including the front, side, and back (if you don’t tell AI exactly what you want, it kinda does its own thing). One of my biggest frustrations was the ornamental Vulcan lettering on T’Pau’s robe. While the symbols looked Vulcan enough, they appeared on a diagonal sash like a Klingon would wear, but a Vulcan wouldn’t. Then, when I told it to make the letters go straight down, I got something that looked like this…

It took about half a dozen prompts to finally get the sash and letters to go straight down (well, mostly straight down…see video below).

Then I uploaded a series of those AI-generated images from various different angles into Grok and asked it to create a video clip panning around the Vulcan woman delivering a speech warning about the dangers posed by the mysterious Romulan Empire while the male Vulcan Soval is standing beside her.

After about two dozen renderings that included multiple versions of T’Pau speaking an AI-generated speech that I did not write (I didn’t even realize there would be sound if I didn’t ask for it!), I combined two of the best 6-second takes into this 13-second clip…

Despite working on this project over the course of a couple of days with many frustrating results along the way, this was actually pretty fun! And while I worried that the voices during the two segments didn’t quite match, Mark said there would be a voice-over narration playing during these clips in the eventual fan film, so no one will hear T’Pau’s actual voice in the finished product.

The only bummer to this otherwise-exciting exercise is that Grok requires a monthly minimum subscription of $30 (and options go higher from there—their next tier is $300/month!!!). On the other hand, considering the unbelievable things that this technology is capable of, thirty bucks seems like an amazing bargain!

With a few weeks still left on the $30 subscription (which Mark reimbursed me for), I suggested he try to get his money’s worth and give me another clip to generate. And that’s when things started getting really interesting…!

Come back next time for part 2 where I’ll show you another video clip that I created with the help of AI and tell you, step by step, exactly how I generated it. Whether or not you’ve used AI tools yet, it’s really fascinating to see how these projects can be done and the sometimes-unexpected results you get.

It was during San Diego Comic-Con back in 2014 when Star Trek fans first got to see PRELUDE TO AXANAR. Now in 2026, twelve years later(!!!), the first of the two Axanar sequels, THE GATHERING STORM, will make its debut with a special press screening in San Diego on July 26, the Sunday of this year’s Comic-Con!

The venue will be the Digital Gym Cinema—one of the only nearby theaters available for rental—which is located less than a mile from the San Diego Convention Center where Comic-Con happens. The first press screening will start around 2pm (and yes, I plan to be there!) with additional screenings taking place afterwards to allow more people into the 54-seat auditorium. Showings of Prelude to Axanar and The Gathering Storm will run continuously between 2pm and 6pm and will be free for anyone who shows up. Members of the cast and production crew will be in attendance, as well, hanging out to talk with donors, supporters, fans, or anyone who decides to show up.

Back in January of this year, after attending a sound-mixing session for The Gathering Storm in Encino, CA (northwest of L.A.), I confidently blogged that the first of the completed Axanar sequels would finally be released before springtime. The observant amongst you may have realized that July 26 is not the beginning of spring. So what the heck happened?

I decided to ask Alec Peters directly…

JONATHAN – Alec, you told me that the release of The Gathering Storm would happen in early March. I saw the entire fan film completed during the audio mixing session. It was frickin’ DONE, Alec! Why the extra four-month delay?

ALEC – We had some delays in the color correction process, which should have been two weeks, and it turned into three months!  Our post-production pipeline wasn’t really efficient, and so we basically started over. And thankfully, DANA WAGNER once again came through for us and took over the color correction, and it worked out great in the end.  

JONATHAN: And it’s really, really done, right? It’s a two-hour drive from L.A. down to San Diego—and there’s gonna be ridiculous traffic because of Comic-Con. Each way! This could be 6-7 hours in my car that day! Please tell me I’m not gonna make that drive just to be disappointed…

ALEC – Oh, trust me, you will NOT be disappointed. Yes, The Gathering Storm is completely done. And yes, the theater has been rented and the contracts signed. 

JONATHAN – Yay…finally!!! But I heard there might be some issues with releasing The Gathering Storm onto YouTube. I thought you had a legal settlement with CBS and Paramount. What’s the issue?

ALEC – I don’t want to go into too much detail because there are lawyers involved, but those lawyers are being a-holes. And yes, we have a settlement agreement. And it looks like Paramount is happy to honor that agreement, but certain people on the CBS side are deciding to be pricks.

JONATHAN – Are you trying to resolve it?

ALEC – Yes, but I can’t go into specifics just yet.

JONATHAN – What if you can’t get permission to post The Gathering Storm on YouTube or Vimeo or the other online video platforms by July 26? How will fans and supporters and donors be able to finally see it?

ALEC – We will be uploading The Gathering Storm and give it away as a free download to EVERYONE.  We are starting to do that with the two other films CBS illegally had taken down last year: THE ICARUS MANEUVER and DAEDALUS. CBS can’t remove it from a site that we ourselves own.

Don’t worry, fans will be able to see this amazing film online. It just might take a little extra time for it to get to YouTube.

JONATHAN – Speaking of time, what about the second of the two sequels? What’s that one going to be called, and when will fans have an opportunity to see it?

ALEC – The final installment in the Axanar trilogy will be calle CRUCIBLE. Prelude to Axanar was episode 3 of “The Four Years War”; The Gathering Storm is episode 4; and this final one will be episode 5. And before anyone asks, there is no episode 1 or 2. When we made Prelude, it was supposed to be a proof-of-concept one-off. So we pretended it was one of a series of documentaries detailing the events of the Four Years War between the Federation and the Klingons, which culminated with the Battle of Axanar. But since we’re only allowed to make two more Axanar fan films, we decided that episodes 1 and 2 will just have to be left to people’s imaginations.

As for a date of release, we’re hoping for December of this year. But nothing is set in stone yet. I will say that all of the actor footage for that film is in the can, but we’re still working on compositing and the VFX shots. That finale is going to blow people away with how much VFX is in it!

JONATHAN – Will you be having a special theatrical premiere for that release, as well?

ALEC – Yes, but we’re not sure where yet. It’s possible it won’t even be in the U.S. As you know, Axanar fans are international. But we’ll see.

JONATHAN – You mentioned in a recent podcast that the incredible USS Ares bridge set will finally be coming down after nearly a decade. Why now?

ALEC – Over the last twelve years, I’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money into this project on top of what we raised from fans. And we’ve had our amazing angel producers, DAVE LANYON and GUDNI GUDNASON generously helping Axanar get over the finish line. But the studio itself still has monthly rent in the thousands that I have to pay out of pocket, and with the project finally completed, I just can’t justify the ongoing expense of keeping Ares Studios open.

JONATHAN – So what will happen to these awesome set pieces? Is there any way to save them? Or are they all going into the dumpster or some big bonfire?

ALEC – I’m not sure yet, honestly. Maybe someone wants to take them off my hands and will pay to transport them somewhere they can store them. Maybe I’ll try to keep just a small portion of the set pieces so fans can film the helm, captain’s chair, and a few of the back consoles and turbolift. But we won’t have space to keep an entire 360-degree bridge set intact, I’m sorry to say. All good things…

JONATHAN – Okay, to finish up, from inception in 2010 until now, this project has has taken up nearly one-quarter of your 65-year life, Alec. With all of the emotions that I’m sure you’ve felt over these past dozen years, how does it feel to finally be able to say to everyone, “Yeah, it’s finally done…”?

ALEC – Short answer: it feels great. As you said, this has been like a mythical quest for the last twelve years, with mountains to climb, dragons to slay, and two Fortune 500 corporations suing us for a full year trying to kill our production. We had to deal with a move across the country, finishing construction on the bridge set, a COVID shutdown, two fired directors, and more obstacles than I can count. But through it all, I never gave up on the dream, and neither did you or thousands of fans and supporters all over the world. And now, all of that patience and dedication and hard work is coming to a completion.

Prelude to Axanar set the Star Trek world on fire in 2014 when there was no official Star Trek on TV anymore.  With the end of the divisive ALEX KURTZMAN era at hand, I think the next two installments of Axanar are coming out at the perfect time. I truly believe that people will watch these two sequel films and be reminded of how good Star Trek can be.

And that, to me, is the thing that matters the most at the end of this long journey.

The Star Trek fan film guidelines specify the maximum length of a Star Trek fan film to be at most two 15-minute shorts. Oh, yeah, Paramount and CBS??? Well, you’ve never dealt with a talking monkey sitting the center seat of a starship!

CAPTAIN SIMIAN’S FIRST COMMAND from the fine and friendly folks at NATURE’S HUNGER is a whopping two hours and fifteen minutes long! That’s an even higher run time than their two hour and five minute release BOMBER GIRL from last year. But while that previous fan film crossed over Star Trek with a World War II storyline, Captain Simian goes in an entirely different direction taking Star Trek on a collision course with The Planet of the Apes franchise.

I know…it’s bananas!!!

But that’s just how showrunner JOSE CEPEDA and his gang roll. Nature’s Hunger has always been a quirky fan series, having previously mashed up Star Trek and The Wizard of Oz, of all things (Dorothy joins Starfleet!). But throughout it all, Jose and his team bring passion, dedication, and love of both Star Trek and filmmaking to each of their productions.

This latest release breaks new ground not only in terms of make-up (the ape masks are really well done) but also for bringing in an extensive amount of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to generate footage that would have been impractical or even impossible to create on a humble fan film budget. Granted, the AI is animated while the rest of the film is live-action, so you kinda have to adjust your brain when you watch those parts. But it’s still a very ambitious fan film project to undertake. My congratulations to the entire team.

Take a look at what they produced…

And speaking of the entire team, I had the opportunity to interview a full gaggle of them recently, and it was a lot of fun. These folks from Atlanta, GA are some of the nicest people in our community and have a bunch of really great stories to tell. After you watch the two-plus hours of Captain Simian (above), take another 90 minutes out of your life to watch this great interview. You’ve got four hours of your life to spare, right…?