AnimationStar Trek: Retribution

tnpir4002

To anyone who isn't already familiar with my work, I'm the producer of the (hopefully infamous) fan film Star Trek: Specter. If you haven't seen it, you can view the Director's Edition on YouTube with this conveniently organized playlist, or see the first two hours (in unbroken one-hour parts) of The Ultimate Edition on Vimeo. For discussion on that project, visit the Project Thread here at SFM.

This thread, though, will serve as the melting pot of creative ideas, concepts, and most importantly media concerning the sequel to Specter, titled Star Trek: Retribution.

To get us started, some links that you might find helpful:

• Star Trek Retribution Wiki
• Preview Clip 00001: "Mission Briefing"
• Preview Clip 00002: "Rimward Station"

This film is set in 2388, ten years after Specter, but still in the "alternate" timeline we saw at the end of Specter. By now, ten years have passed since the Shinzon incident, and one year since the supernova we saw in Star Trek XI. The Romulan Star Empire has been in a state of civil war for the past nine years, but shortly after the supernova they suddenly stopped fighting each other, and now seem to be mounting an invasion of the Federation. When the movie starts, the invasion fleet isn't yet operational, giving Starfleet a little time to stop it from happening.

At the center of the conflict lies a piece of evidence the Romulans claim to possess, evidence which shows a Federation starship destabilizing the Romulan sun just before the supernova reaction began. With little time to save the Federation, Admiral Thornton dispatches the USS F. Scott Fitzgerald, now under the command of Captain Bradley Prentice, to determine the authenticity of the evidence, and to investigate rumors that the source of the evidence may be human...a human who has now assumed command of the Romulan fleet.

The plot is still a work in progress but some very cool things are planned for this project. For right now, have a look at the two clips that are posted and let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

count23

Ok... you'll need to clarify there, when you say "Romulan Star Empire" are you referring to the faction of the entire Romulan nation, or are you referring to the whole lot, cause half the Romulan Empire (The Imperial Romulan State) has joined the Federation as of 2386, just before Spock left.

Dr-Timelord

First!


aww dammit you beat me too it Nadesico

I suppose since what is left of the Romulan Empire is in factions, You'll have to come up with a cool name for this rogue faction that refused to join the Federation.

Second clip is pretty good, althought sounds awfully windy in space lol, was that station in Space, it was a bit too dark to make out...

Also not sure about showing off the glowing read eyes, was a bit of a dead giveaway to anyone who has seen spectre

Your Romlan looked cool though, is there anyway to tweak his forhead to bring the ridges out a little more?

lennier1

Interesting.
The station also doesn't follow the whole "green" theme the Romulans have going on. Is that intentional or just a result of the star that's lighting the station.

colbmista

you need more voice actors... sounds dumb with one voice playin all the characters....

tnpir4002

@Dr-Timelord: my answer to that is that this is an alternate timeline Thus any discrepancies with other timelines can be explained by having ten years of alternate history. (It's fridge logic of the worst kind, but there you have it)

As far as the station goes, that's actually a Star Wars model that I co-opted for use as Drakus' base of operations. The textures you see are all image maps, and they don't adapt well to being color-changed. That's part of the reason why it's so dark. Likewise for the interior, which is actually a recolored Mustafar Board Control Room. (The lit strips have been recolored and the ambient lighting is dark with a hint of green for flavor.)

tnpir4002

@Colbmista: if you're saying that now I shudder to think what you'd have been saying during the production of the movie before this There's method to my madness, even though it may be a little off-putting to hear one voice (especially a male voice) for all the speaking roles, this allows me maximum flexibility in case I want to change dialogue.

colbmista

nah sounds to me your to lazy to ask friends if they could read out a script for you and have it recored it sounds very amatureistic having one voice for all characters least you can do if ur doing roles of female is change your voice a bit using a modulater in some kinda program or even jsut changing ur vocal patterns while your recording your voice cuz if i were to watch a full episode with one voice actor it would honestly turn me away from the whole series u may think it give u more freedom to change your script to what you like but in that case you wont get any where with it.

tnpir4002

@colbmista: Spoken like someone who has no idea what he's talking about. Believe that if you want, but I've got an entire thread of replies that proves you wrong.

oldmangreg

Interesting. I actually have been trying to catch up on the first one. When is the last part of Spector going up?

tnpir4002

@oldmangreg: Vimeo only allows me to upload 500MB per week, which equals about an hour, and I used that today on the second segment. The third and final piece will go up in seven days.

Buckaroohawk

colbmista wrote: »

nah sounds to me your to lazy to ask friends if they could read out a script for you and have it recored it sounds very amatureistic having one voice for all characters least you can do if ur doing roles of female is change your voice a bit using a modulater in some kinda program or even jsut changing ur vocal patterns while your recording your voice cuz if i were to watch a full episode with one voice actor it would honestly turn me away from the whole series u may think it give u more freedom to change your script to what you like but in that case you wont get any where with it.

I can assure you it isn't laziness; it's about time and resources. Try rounding up a bunch of friends all at the same time to read and record a feature-length script and see how far you get. Even with some taking multiple roles it would be an arduous, and ultimately futile, undertaking. By doing all the initial readings himself, tnpir can get the animations rendered and the characters lip-synced with the vocals all by himself on his own time. He can then watch this "first draft" to determine whatever changes need to be made. After he has the story and animations nailed down to his liking he'll put out a casting call for voice actors to fill the roles. He used this process with "Spectre" and it worked extremely well. He got all the hard tasks out of the way first so he could focus entirely on the voice actors without having to render scenes over and over again. Tnpir's work is by no means an example of laziness, but you know what is: A 116 word run-on sentence with no proper capitalized letters, at least 13 misspellings, and just one single punctuation mark at the end. If you practiced what you preach I'd be much more inclined to give your critique more value.

barry1

tnpir4002, your work is as always fantastic and i love the first to scenes and the fact that you used new communicators, but i do think that they are to big. maybe you should make them smaller, if it's possible of course.

today

tnpir4002 wrote: »

@oldmangreg: Vimeo only allows me to upload 500MB per week, which equals about an hour, and I used that today on the second segment. The third and final piece will go up in seven days.

Their upload cap resets on Sundays at midnight:thumb:

tnpir4002

@barry: I tried my best to size them the same as the VOY communicators in Specter, but now that I do a side-by-side I think you're right, they do look a little too large.

@today: it had just reset from last week when I uploaded Part II So we gots to wait a week before I can do it again!

count23

You should check out La Forge's uniform in "Timeless", that's the uniform that he's trying to replicate here, but the badge is too large though, considering what it should look like on the FC uniforms. (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Geordi_La_Forge,_Timeless.jpg). Although since it's an alternate timeline to the countdown books and whatnot, I suppose that's a good thing. Data's 25th century uniform was just terrible... TERRIBLE I SAY!

EDIT: On a side note, the "human commanding the romulan fleet" thing has been done, once... badly. Please don't do it again I sincerly doubt that in less then 10 years the Romulans haven't learnt from their mistakes.

tnpir4002

Preview clip #3 is up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZJ7XIj63A

Discuss!

Jenny

You might try casting a girl to do a female voice.

tnpir4002

@Walkyrje: I appreciate your sentiment, but I'm going to put a stop to remarks like that here and now.

I'm going to say this once and once only: until a full cut of Retribution is finished and I'm sure I'm happy with the script, no voices other than mine will be heard. Buckaroohawk already explained why I take this approach, so I'm not going to rehash that here. If the sum total of your remarks is about diversifying my voice cast, until it's finished those remarks WILL fall on deaf ears. From this point forward I'll probably also Ignore anyone who makes a remark like that. It's nothing personal, but for right now the only thing I'm concerned with is the substance of the story.

Jenny

My comment was mostly made to provide you with the link.

IRML

this is probably going to sound stupid, but have you considered machinima for this? game engines are getting pretty advanced these days and they can do good approximations of all the big aspects of cg, and much faster too

tnpir4002

@Walkyrje: like I said, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but when I was working on the film before this I got buried under a deluge of remarks about the voices about halfway through, and it created a host of problems I don't want to get into. I don't want people to even think about voice casting for now. The remainder of that post was not directed at you, I assure you. (I do appreciate the link!)

@IRML: doesn't sound stupid at all! To be honest, people likened Specter to Machinima but I don't know much about what it actually is. I know I like the concept of doing things faster though--tell me more.

tnpir4002

Nadesico wrote: »

EDIT: On a side note, the "human commanding the romulan fleet" thing has been done, once... badly. Please don't do it again I sincerly doubt that in less then 10 years the Romulans haven't learnt from their mistakes.

You're the forty-third person (no joke) to make this remark to me. Please, folks, have just a little patience. I didn't steer you wrong with Specter, did I? To quote Picard from First Contact, "I know what I am doing."

IRML

it's basically using a game engine to render instead of a graphics program, which I guess can give you realtime or near realtime rendering depending on how it's set up

you don't have to record yourself playing a game, you can use the game editors to import animations and stuff, then render them to frames

the crysis game engine is probably one of the best for this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4No43o7zkDQ

probably the biggest difficulty would be getting models and animations into the game, which might make it unfeasable for you, but you can see from that video how advanced some of the effects are, so it might be worth considering it

tnpir4002

@IRML: having seen that, all I can say is WOW. This bears looking into for sure.

homerpalooza67

tnpir4002 wrote: »

@IRML: having seen that, all I can say is WOW. This bears looking into for sure.

seconded!

count23

Red VS blue is also machinima, they used the various halo engines for theirs and eventually moved to a combination machinima AND CG composite to get some very nice results. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke9wtbzGjCI

I did look into this myself a while back for another machinima project, the Source engine is very versatile and can take in most animations from 3d studio max once converted to OBJ, it also supports good particle generation and HDR lighting. Polycount is a pain though. The Cry engine is a good one for importing too, but that's up to you.

Personally, I'm looking to make a short film in Maya at some stage, but the amount of effort behind making all the assets (as opposed to just ripping them out of games, which is very tempting) makes the task seem far too daunting for someone like me who has practically no free time.

There's also "Star Trek: Borg War", which in my personal opinion is generally terrible, but does show that the Elite Force 2/Quake 3 engine can be used for making machinima fairly effectively too.

oldmangreg

They got Mounty Oum, the creator of the Dead Fantasy series, to help with some of their later animations.

tnpir4002

Also, in case anyone hasn't seen it, I put up an early draft of the first three scenes plus the title sequence, edited together basically as I expect they will in the final draft. This clip is worth checking out because it adds some cohesion to this narrative, and gives you a better idea how things are paced so far. Check that out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA699-O5KOg

Discuss!

bryguy78

I am a fan of your work on Specter, and I am loving what you are doing here. The scene flying though spacedock never does get old, and the music choice is just perfect. Please keep up the good work. You have fan here.

Capt Dave

While its clear I'm not going to convince you to cast me a voice actor :devil: (I couldn't resist the jab), I might suggest the Unreal engine for machinima production. UDK (Unreal Developers Kit) is on version three, and its free for noncommercial use. So it might be the engine your looking for.