What about Yorktown?

August 5 2021

The last couple of days has seen an exchange of messages between Axanar and Flan Film Factor on Twitter.

Two of the exchanges mention Yorktown: A Time to Heal and the time it has taken to be completed.

“Wasn’t trying to make an excuse, just wanted to clarify that we’re making two 15-minute episodes and not the full-length movie. We were getting ready to finish filming and then the pandemic shut everything down. Yorktown: A Time to Heal has been more than 30 years in the making.“

“Just because nothing has been released since 2015 does not mean that no frames have been produced since 2015. If you want to talk facts, it’s important to get them right.”

“By your definition, Yorktown: A Time to Heal has produced zero frames of completed fan film since 1985. Should that not be of much bigger concern to you? Or do you only complain about Axanar because you dislike Alec Peters?“

In the past Axanar has reported that 40-50% of Axanar was filmed in 2019, they had also reported before that time that they will reshoot everything and recently they said they were only going to reshoot parts of it.

So depending on what story you hear about the status of Axanar, Axanar has completed anywhere from 0% to 40-50% of live action footage for their 30 minute film.

Who knows if Axanar would of been finished in 2020 if covid didn’t happen, for all we know the eventual collision between Alec and Paul Jenkins could of still happened and if it didn’t would the footage now considered bad would of be now passed as good had they got on with it?

But why mention Yorktown: A Time to Heal? The set of circumstances between Axanar and Yorktown being delayed are completely different.

Yorktown has completed 100% of its footage and they are currently working on the sound which you got to remember was partially recorded between 1985 and 1987 as well as the early 1990’s and the quality must match the 2010’s material.

Jonathan Lane wrote a multi part story on Yorktown that tells the complete story of how it began, why it stopped in 1987, the high quality film footage disappeared, they resumed audio work in the 90’s using lower quality footage as a guide, they found the film footage again and then they reworked and expanded the story in the 2010’s.

It is important to point out that Yorktown stopped in 1987 because Stan Woo was told by cast members to focus on his grades and who knows maybe it would of been completed in a shorter form in the 1980’s or maybe the then young man would of run out of money and the production stalled anyway, we just don’t know.

Imagine the challenge that the Yorktown team have had in getting 1980’s Super 8 footage to go with modern filming technology for example making sure it doesn’t look like a film made across two different centuries and I say centuries because it started in the 20th century and will end in the 21st century.

Then they got to work on getting the sound from back then (1985-87 and 1990’s) equal to today’s sound quality so you don’t have sound that goes up and down like a yo-yo.

Around $6,000 was donated to the Yorktown team across two Kickstarters and the film makers have spent about $20,000 (Woo and Atkin eras combined) of their own money since circa 1985, that is less than the amount Axanar has spent post 2017 around $100,000 and Interlude had spent around $30,000.

Yorktown doesn’t have a studio or have a merchandise store and they have not run numerous kickstarters every year for “swag” and they are not run by somebody with tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand, you can only build with what you’ve got at hand.

Maybe the Yorktown team isn’t comfortable with the idea of continuously taking money from fans to get things done, maybe they feel comfortable with having as little fan financial input as possible.

Also those who are working on Yorktown probably can’t work on it all the time because they have jobs to go and do so they work on it when they can, the true definition of fan films.

People aren’t too concerned about Yorktown because they know the technical challenges that Yorktown has faced, they know the Yorktown cast and crew have lost friends and family members over the last year and time was taken to grieve (as they should), they know the creative team did not screw around with the money as everything was shot so it is all down to clearing technical hurdles otherwise people will complain about bad sound.

Axanar pointing at Yorktown as an example of a production having delays is just unusual and all it is has done is confuse people and maybe even turn some people off from Axanar.

Until next time, be good to each other.