GEOFFREY JAMES
Borg War
Geoffrey James doesn’t think of himself as a Star Trek fan. Rather, he is ‘respectful of the tradition.’ He enjoys watching Star Trek with his friends; and he decided to produce Borg War as a way to provide them with Star Trek related content after the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise. “At first, I just wanted to entertain my friends,” says James, a freelance journalist, editor, and author. “As the project proceeded, I [decided] to prove that a single person, using a simple computer setup, could make a passable movie in a reasonable amount of time.”
Borg War, made entirely in machinima, depicts a conflict between the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and a group of Borg infected with a mind-controlling, flesh-mutating virus. The diseased Borg destroy the Alpha quadrant’s balance of power, prompting Captain Jean Luc Picard to marshal forces to oppose the Borg. The Klingons and Romulans use the turmoil as an excuse for interracial war. Meanwhile, the Borg struggle to defeat the infection, which also consumes them as a food source.
“The story sort of evolved out of a joke fan film I made called Starbase 28,” says James. Starbase 28 features James and friends inserted into battle scenes captured from the computer game Starfleet Command 3. Borg War was made in a similar fashion, using machinima.
According to James, machinima is “the quickest way for an individual to make a reasonably high-quality animated movie.” “Professional animation packages are mostly too complicated for a single individual to use to make something feature-length in a reasonable amount of time.”
Machinima is a form of filmmaking using computer games to generate raw footage. This is done in one of two ways. The first way generates raw footage by recording game-play with live people actually playing the game. Often, the game controls what happens. The second way is to disable the game and use various programming methods to get the game to do exactly what you want it to do. Borg War “falls into the [latter] category and consists of around 35,000 lines of scripted computer code in order to create the various scenes.”
To produce Borg War, James used computers games Starfleet Command 3 and Elite Force 2 for raw footage. He edited and mashed sound files using a freeware program called Audacity. “I captured the raw footage and did the video editing and remixing using Pinnacle Studio 9.” … The voices of Patrick Stewart, Brock Peters, and Tim Russ “were recycled from voiceover clips included with the games.” James adds, “[s]ome of the editing was rather elaborate.”
Click here for a detailed description of the editing process: Editing Details
While making Borg War in machinima reduced production time, according to James, it still took about 18 months to complete. It also required help from others. “I used my three best friends, all of whom are Star Trek fans, as consultants. The four of us appear in the movie several times as our computer-animated avatars. We can be identified by the ‘28’ on our communicator badges. Also, several dozen people worked on the original video games, which were both major productions from major game studios. They created all the basic animation in the two games.”
Production was also costly, running “approximately $160,000 in lost opportunity cost,” James says. “On the other hand, I was probably just spending time I would have otherwise spent playing computer games, so realistically speaking it was probably a wash.” In a way, production also affected his relationship with his wife. “It annoyed [her] until she realized that I was essentially “possessed” by the creative effort…”
In the past, Star Trek fan producers were subjected to copyright infringement claims. Fortunately, James has suffered no legal fallout from his production. “This is a rather complicated [issue],” James says, “because fan productions fall into a kind of legal limbo. …Paramount, which owns the Star Trek intellectual property, is well aware of my efforts and the efforts of other makers of fan films.” He adds, “Game companies actively encourage machinima. The …developers have been very supportive of my efforts, even though the two games that I am using are no longer officially distributed.”
Borg War was recently chosen to screen at the upcoming official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas.
To view Borg War, go to www.BorgWarMovie.org. A BitTorrent version at full DVD resolution may soon become available.
Geoffrey James is the author of several books, including the Tao of Programming. He is currently writing a novel set in Elizabethan England.