July 27 2021
Axanar last weekend released an update on YouTube where Alec Peters talked about his plans for Axanar and then the video quickly disappeared.
Alec Peters gave viewers an update and it wasn’t very complimentary of Paul Jenkins, the man he is in a court battle with at this present time, Paul was the director of Axanar until being fired last year for being unprofessional.
But it never used to be like that, though to tell the story we must go back to October 2019, a time when everything was of peace and harmony in the Axanar world as Axanar was underway at last and Team Axanar were letting the world know about it.
On the production front everything appeared to be filmed to satisfaction as you’ll see in the quotes below.
“I’ve seen some of the shots we’re getting and they’re amazing so yeah it’s going fantastic” – Alec Peters on October 4 2019.
“Paul did an amazing job today” – Alec Peters on October 6 2019
“There’s Chris and there’s Scott our producers right our producers who just did an amazing job” – Alec Peters on October 6 2019.
Axanar Shoot at Ares Studios a Huge Success! – Alec Peters blog entry headline November 2019.
“Shooting was fun and the footage AMAZING” – Alec Peters blog entry November 2019
“it looks better than Prelude!” – Alec Peters blog entry November 2019
“Great producers and a ridiculously well organized shoot” Alec Peters blog entry November 2019
A second shoot in December 2019 was also labelled a success and you see the likes of Josh Irwin and Geoff Fagien there.
But then came March 2021 when Axanar went to do green screen shoots
fast forward to July 2021 and according to Alec Peters “half the footage is unusable” now rewind a little bit to the Axanar Update in March 2021 because he referred to the 2019 shoot and said “now that got us about 40-50% of all the live action we needed for Axanar“.
A little bit further back to Axanar After Dark #113 Alec says after Jonathan Lane reviewed the footage and gave a recommendation, Alec said “as we’re going to do that we should reshoot everything“.
Now we come to Alec’s thoughts about Paul after firing him.
“There are professionals and then there are amateurs and professionals know how to leave a project amateurs don’t right every director I’ve had who’s left has been an amateur you know and and and they’ve you know they’ve been assholes afterwards and okay all you’re doing is proving you’re an amateur not a pro” – Alec Peters on Trek After Dark #93 on August 6 2020
“Paul’s not a professional director” – Alec Peters on Axanar After Dark #97 (10:23) August 11 2020.
“Paul was off screwing around at that time shooting something he had no authorization to shoot” – Alec Peters on July 24 2021.
“The Direction was the problem” – Alec Peters on July 24 2021.
“The previous director and his producer because that’s a strong word for that guy lost half the footage of three different characters” – Alec Peters on October 1 2021.
“the kind of uh debacle of the last shoot with the last director” – Alec Peters on October 1 2021.
“The former guy (Paul Jenkins) wasn’t looking through the camera and looking through the monitors to see what was the camera was actually getting he was too busy talking to the actors constantly” – Alec Peters on October 4 2021.
“they lost half the footage of uh of Robert April um another problem we had the with the former guys they lost footage and uh and kind of hid it and then blamed it on other people – Alec Peters on October 4 2021.
“Unlike our previous director Paul Jenkins, who didn’t like Prelude and thought he knew better (and clearly did not)” – Alec Peters on November 23 2021
Here is another example of how the perception of someone’s efforts changes when a relationship of any kind goes from strong to breaking down and the couple do not like each other any more.
“Every time someone came off set, someone was like Holy Sh*t, you should of seen x, y, z’s performance” – Alec Peters on October 6 2019.
“Our two most experienced actors, one of whom won an Emmy award had bad performances” – Alec Peters on July 24 2021.
“the two best actors we had had the worst performances” – Alec Peters on October 1 2021
As you just saw for yourselves, the mood changed from praise of actor performances when Paul directed in 2019 to criticism after he was fired in 2020.
So now we have talk about the budget of the October 2019 shoot and Alec speaks about that on July 24 2021.
“2019, granted three day shoot and granted a lot of volunteers who we had to feed, $65,000, now the budget was 50 and Paul went over fifteen thousand dollars roughly went way over budget because the money wasn’t spent well, we had things we didn’t really need and we had people we didn’t need“
“Previously the director had a lot of power and that led to all the mistakes our amateur director made in 2019 and we’re not going to allow that to happen again“
A few days earlier, Paul talked about Axanar with Matt Miller (from 18:34) on Trekzone and he had quite a lot to say about events, sorry for the lack of paragraphs but there is hardly an opportunity to make a paragraph as Paul had a lot to say without pause.
“When we brought a budget in and we said you know this is quite a budget and his response really in the in the room was to raise the budget by about 12 grand we kept saying look you know as we it seems irresponsible right you know like you want an a Efrosian character because you want an a Efrosian character in the in the foreground but but you’re talking about prosthetics and time and expense and here’s another thing here’s another thing you want like these these don’t see you know and so you know
With my company I brought in a bunch of big green screens and we bought some stuff and we helped out a lot you know we we did help the production itself save a bit of money but the you know there was I think you know 50 to 70 people around on the set because he had a like a convention there on the same day so we’re trying to shoot a film and he’s got like a bunch of fans and so on that he’s brought up and that that made it challenging because there was no working toilet and so there’s a the the thing that’s very confusing but you know somewhat kind of indicative here is he never seemed to understand like the toilet was always a bone of contention with him why did we pay you know 450 for a toilet and the answer is because there were 75 people there you know that’s why this is what these things cost“
“that hindsight he said I told you that budget was too high and you know the three of us kind of sat in the room was with experience sort of said listen man you know you’re not fooling anybody there were four of us in that room and three of us were there as well we told you you know you kept adding to the budget and his contention was no I didn’t you did and that just you know that gets weird right? that gets like look buddy you know it’s like being in an elevator with four people and having one of them pull a gun and then tell the other three I didn’t pull a gun and you go like look all of us were there we know what happened and so that was a real indication to us that something was was not right and we went through the beginning of the covet area era and you know he did a particular thing he wanted to shoot in la but he sort of circumvented the producer and he made arrangements for stuff to happen and he kept doing things because of a lack of understanding like for example he decided to hire a different person as a DP but we had a DP so what you know the question is did you fire our DP like what are you doing do you know do you i don’t think he understood what DP was i think he thinks a DP is someone who operates a camera and that’s what it seemed to be and so the potential issue there was that you know people were getting fired without him even realizing he’d fired someone and we said like you can’t keep doing stuff like this um and you certainly can’t circumvent the producer about going to LA”
So as you can see both Alec and Paul have different thoughts about how events played out after Paul was fired.
Nothing further was said until June 16 2022 when Axanar posted “Why Axanar sued Paul Jenkins of Meta X Studios for Copyright Fraud and Defamation” this blog entry received no response either from Paul or AxaMonitor.
Until next time, be good to each other
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