So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately. I started the ultimate Star Trek saga a few months ago. I did the same thing last year, went through the entire Trek catalog in order, so I am flying the Geek Flag high these days. Most people who know me also know that I am a HUGE Trek fan and I am pretty into video editing and recently I’ve become interested in effects as well.
So one thing I’ve been drawn to is fan films. It’s always great to see people so passionate about something that they pour this much time and effort into it. The biggest example of fan film work in the Trek universe is Phase II. They aim to recreate the 60’s style Trek that many grew up on. For a fan production they have incredible sets and a near full fledged TV production sized set up and virtually TV quality visual effects. Obviously the big knock on fan films is the acting. In most cases the people in these are not professional actors (although many fan series have had professionals as guest stars) some of them are amateur actors and some not even at that level. But with Phase II if you watch all of their episodes in progression not only does the film making improve but as they work with more and more professionals you see improvements in the acting as well.
Well that leads me to this post. There is a fan film series out there called Hidden Frontier which takes place in the TNG/DS9 era of Trek and it has quite a large number of episodes and spin offs.
So I have decided to go through and watch it all and then write down my feelings on the series. Once Phase II adds a few more episodes to their list I will likely do the same for them as well. Since there are so many HF episodes I will be breaking it down in to seasons.
We are starting with Season One of course. The first season featured six episodes with a three part pilot. The first season began in 2000.
The Stories: C
Much like Phase II I fully understand that the first episodes are more like a “proof of concept”. Things are going to be rough around the edges. For me I did not really get a sense of who the characters were, just not fleshed out all that well. I suppose that is to be expected though. Other than that the actual stories were not all that bad sans “Two Hours” which saw a time travel plot involving the Titanic which I thought was a little over the top. A new Trek villain was introduced (The Grey) which is obviously based off of the stories of Alien Abduction we here about every now and then. Not a whole lot has been fleshed out with them yet either. The stories were not as bad as I was expecting though.
The Visuals: D-
The visual effects were about as bad as I expected them to be. HF’s secret to pumping out so many episodes is that they do a lot of Keying (Green Screen) in their episodes. So in almost every scene we had some kind of screen replacement used as a substitute for a set background. Sometimes these were used well, sometimes not-so-much. The biggest problem was really the poor quality of some of the backgrounds and of course the Keying artifacts (green outlines around the characters) would tend to distract from the story at times. I was surprised that I found myself not as distracted as I thought I’d be. All of the space and ship scenes were done as 3D models. It was nowhere near TV quality effects, the renderings were pretty decent and just passable enough to keep me from clicking the “X”.
The Audio: D+
The sound quality wasn’t poor per say, but it was definitely not clean. You could understand lines easily enough but the audio could be fuzzy at times. The sound effects used were straight out of Trek so they sounded okay by-in-large, but given the age of the episode and home production quality at the time they aren’t as crisp as you’d want. The scores used are also straight out of Trek and Galaxy Quest and while the actual quality of the sound was pretty average you can never go wrong with a quality film/TV score. Although I found the Galaxy Quest theme kind of cheesy which fit for the actual film but it didn’t work for me with this show.
The Acting: D
By-in-large it was pretty poor. But there were a few bright spots that I found to be fairly acceptable performances. The actresses who play Jenna McFarland and Robin Lefler did pretty good jobs especially with Lefler since that is a role that originally appears in The Next Generation and had to be recast. For the most part much of the fleshing out that most characters didn’t happen in the first season because of the lack of acting chops and of course you have people trying to find a comfortable fit in these roles.
THE FIRST SEASON: D
So this might not seem like a good thing. In fact most people would tell me to stop watching right there and the thought did cross my mind. But I’ve decided to continue on with the series. With a crew of people that only want to improve you would have to think that there will be improvements (hopefully everywhere) over the next few seasons.
For the most part the episodes were cut together pretty well and the stories were decent enough to keep my interest enough to watch the next one. I can’t really see the show declining in quality in season two (although I could be surprised) so I am looking forward to checking it out.
You can download and watch season one of HF for free from http://hiddenfrontier.com/episodes/s1.php
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