I wish Gerrold well. I own the complete Star Wolf book in one volume and it is an interesting story. I highly recommend reading it, if you can find it.

I think Gerrold is shoring up his base and trying to be more expansive in his vision.
Or maybe he is just testing the waters.

It still looks like a 'fan project', I mean I'm not convinced the execution (acting especially) will be any different or better than the dozens of other low budget sci-fi shows we've seen which have been made for far, far less.  Despite all the money, it won't have the quality look of Firefly or anything we see on proper TV, it'll probably look like ARK (and yet cost a magnitude more) or feel like LOTR: Born of Hope (where acting/directing is cheap).

The Early CGI shots they show on the video are atrocious, to the extent that I'm wondering whether they are making an animated show? No matter how early, I can't imagine anyone thinking that those shots are acceptable for a live action show, when they don't even look good enough for an old computer game.

Oh, and much of the saving of B5 at the time was that they were set in one place (fewer sets) and used CGI rather than models.

Last edited by redxavier (2013-05-07 13:16:57)

Well, if nothing else it serves as the counter-argument for "why don't they just do a Firefly kickstarter?"   

I'm not seeing a lot of promotion of this thing - which is critical to a successful KS - and their pitch doesn't  sell the idea the way it needs to be sold.  And sadly, even the guy who wrote The Trouble With Tribbles doesn't have the star power to pull in the kind of numbers they need by himself.   They should have gotten Takei, then they might have had a chance.

Yes, a Firefly KS would get more love than Star Wolf is getting, and would probably get to 650K (and more) without too much trouble.    Except 650K isn't enough to make an episode of Firefly - it'd have to be several million at least.  And even if they made that much (and probably could) that's still just ONE episode. 

TV shows work as a pipeline, one team is writing, another is shooting, another is doing the post in an assembly-line process, until they've ground out the 10 or 13 or 22 episodes in the season.  Funding one episode at a time, then starting all over again from scratch to make a second "episode" just isn't a viable process.   At the very least, you're looking at re-staffing every phase of the production with every episode, since there'll be months of downtime between each.

So even IF everybody wanted to come back and do Firefly and even IF Fox would let them try crowdfunding it, they'd need to pull together maybe 50 million or more to fund a 13-episode production run.  And I don't think even the mighty Firefly could pull in that much via Kickstarter.

At least Star Wolf didn't go for too low a number - 650K is a workable price to make an hour of something, if you're very careful and cut every corner you can find. It doesn't seem likely to happen, they're already pretty much dead in the water.   But that's probably better than asking for too small a number, hitting it, and then having to deliver on it.

Back in the start of home video era, Japanese anime companies came up with a rather intriguing format, the "Original Animated Video". As first practiced, they'd release a standalone episode of a potential series, see how it sold, then do another with the money coming in funding it. You could see the increase in budgets as they went (or decrease, as the case may be). That worked because, one, the Japanese were willing to pay $60 for a thirty minute laserdisc, and two, because the studio had other projects. They would just switch their people between them as needed.

I honestly think Gerrold came out of his experience with Star Trek Phase II thinking, "Hey, it's not that hard!"

Nope. Any good?

I've downloaded it 

well they made $88,746 which is about 600,000 short of their goal.

I wonder what they will do now?
I seriously am curious now, and even though I support Gerrold in his endevour, I think it wasn't the best way to go about it.

Anyway, anyone else, besides Faldor, pick up one of the books?