Wednesday, Jan. 20th, 2016
Today we continued our move to our new office space upstairs while the rigging team was sinatlling our lighting grid on the sound stage. Now our green screen is HUGE (as Donald Trump would say). It is 55′ x 32′ x 21′ with a five foot radius, making it one of the biggest in the valley. The lightning grid will cover over 1/4 of the sound stage area and allow us to put any set, including the bridge, under the grid, making shooting faster and easier.
This really makes the sound stage the best fan film sound stage in the country. Now both Star Trek: New Voyages and Star Trek: Continues each have full time 10,000sf+ facilities with standing sets. Having worked on the New Voyages sound stage (which I actually was responsible for finding for James Cawley) and having been on the Farragut/STC sets, I can say that both are nice. But neither facility is as large or flexible as ours.
So if all goes well, we will be making Star Trek fans films for a long time. Not just Axanar, but others as well, and hopefully other fan films will come use our facility.
Alec Peters
Executive Producer
It is amazing how far fan projects have come with the possibilities now open to fans due to crowd funding. We are witnessing a historic paradigm change here. I love it.
That Ares Studios facility of yours is really turning out quite nice! I agree that flexibility is just as important, and sometimes more so, than just having great fixed sets. Those massive green screens will allow you to do some amazing effects shots without all the hard expense of building complete sets. Great work, Alec and company! You guys are really bumping up things a notch or two. 🙂
Alec, excellent design and setup. If things go well and the studio is allowed to continue, it will be a great place to get fan films a working platform to use, and help spread the cost, increase the quality and make it so smaller cost productions can be realized. Kudos to all of you for such a well laid plan. Very well done!
Not sure why, but this piece of the construction makes the project seem excitingly real! The careful thought that has gone into all this (size, arrangement, location, infrastructure, equipment, flexible set construction) is truly impressive. Lighting is essential, and having that grid in place means that lights can be installed, and then cameras will be able to capture quality images. Can’t wait to see reports of the beginning of filming! Let’s make a movie!
Curious about your lighting plan. Renting? Who’s going to be the LD?