It has been almost a week since The 2026 Trekzone Fan Film Awards were held, enough time to sit back and think about how things came to be and the results of it.

The 2026 Awards was almost scrapped, Matt has been busy working making sure that people get to watch good quality Victorian Football League coverage, I like the league even if teams from Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland are in it though it looks like the St. Kilda Saints won’t make the VFL finals (or the AFL finals).

I was feeling pretty glum about fan films, the continued war between Axanar and CBS has been depressing, the biggest worry is that if the bear is poked enough times, it will eat the poker (Axanar) and those standing around (other fan films), it doesn’t matter if it gets a case of indigestion, it will live on.

At least the Axanar journey is almost over, there is just over a week to go and unless there are some serious legal issues with Episode IV, it should sail through YouTube just fine.

Things improved when messages were getting received about the awards and the more that the awards were talked about in conversation, the better things got, confidence is a great thing and when people have confidence in you, you want to meet expectations.

In the end, The 2026 Trekzone Fan Film Awards outperformed the 2025 awards in terms of reads, everybody likes going in the forward direction and not backwards, we were fortunate that having no video show (maybe for now) did not impact reads.

The format for the awards seemed to have worked really well, the use of a collage program to stick the nominees together was a good idea otherwise it would have been boring text with some YouTube links, sometimes good decisions do come from worrying too much.

The pleasing thing about fan films is that people are making them with variation, there is a nice mix of stories and that is what keeps fan films fresh, from the introduction of a race of Vampires to crossovers with Planet of the Apes to the use of Frontier Day and the Iconians and lastly in these examples Klingons being the stars of a film.

It is also pleasing that people don’t all go for the franchise ships and do adventures with their own ships, the franchise ships or their class is great, but it is ok to take a change on a hardly mentioned class or take a big risk and do a design of your own.

The quality of fan films is steadily rising again though fan film creators have to restrain themselves from the temptation to seek out professionals and to start selling merchandise to offset costs, it must be a great temptation because if you got something that’s hot, you want to milk it for all its worth but fan films is like grassroots motorsports, you’re going to spend a lot of money doing what you enjoy and while you get trophies, you’re not going to get any money (you shouldn’t be getting money for fan films outside a fundraiser).

While we are enjoying the success of the 2026 awards, there are currently no plans for 2027, that decision won’t come until May 10, 2027, whether it will be the Trekzone Fan Film Awards or the MTM Fan Film Awards or no awards at all, all we can do is catalogue fan films and when the time comes, it will either be go or no go.

But we do have Star Trek Day – Fan Film Style coming up on September 8 and that is steadily growing in popularity followed by The Best of 2026 List on December 31, which is just as successful as the awards, so there is no laziness coming up for us.

That’s it for this one, now to get ready to restart doing MTM Wrap.

Until next time, be good to each other.