What are The Trekzone Fan Film Awards?

What are the Trekzone Fan Film Awards? It all began in 2022 when MTM was planning a blog entry only awards, an event done for fun, to see if it can be done, the original plan eventually turned into the ‘Best of 2023 List’.

A chat with Matt Miller of Trekzone about the MTM Awards got his attention and Matt was interested in hosting the visual aspect of the awards and so it was changed to the Trekzone Fan Film Awards, suddenly everything went up in scale from a post with some pictures to video clips, interviews, hosts, camera people and more.

Why is it called the Trekzone Fan Film Awards? The Trekzone and Mentioning Trekkie Mentions Fan Film Awards is quite a mouthful and MTM was only happy for Trekzone to have its name in the title as Matt puts a lot of work into the visual aspect of the awards and MTM likes being in the background.

The 2024 Awards is for fan films between April 10, 2023, and April 10, 2024, there are three main awards with the best production house, the best under ten-minute fan film and the best over ten-minute fan films getting a trophy.

We like to have 15-20 categories in an awards year, it all comes down to fan films, their list of credits and our imaginations.

Lists are written up for each category and then I go through them between April 10 and May 10 to come up with four nominations for each category, they are run through with Matt and about 90-95% of them are given the tick of approval and occasionally there is a request to consider a fan film not in the four.

I try not to leave out any fan films, but some do slip through either by having no knowledge of them or forgetting to write them down, some fan films are left out of consideration due to the owners’ request, personal disagreements, lost faith or trust in each other or moral reasons such as bad behaviour towards women, sponsored by what is considered a sex cult and other things that are distasteful.

Fan films that contain members of anybody who falls into the above categories are accepted as long as those people are not the creators of the film, a director of the fan film or are a producer/executive producer of them, any other role is accepted.

The nominated fan films are contacted to get their approval for nomination, we don’t want any nasty surprises like somebody not wanting a nomination or an award.

A month is spent then going through the four nominations and deciding on a winner, like the above step the winners list is passed on to Matt who usually gives them all the tick of approval but sometimes does offer a suggestion, there are never any orders given on who to pick, once the finalized list is handed over, Matt takes over as lead.

Matt’s job is to make sure that everybody is happy, order the awards, mail them out and put the awards visual show together, fan films who take home the main awards are contacted for them to do a video chat with Matt as part of the show.

The script is read through, suggestions are given and then providing Matt’s work with media outlets etc. isn’t keeping him busy, the show is fully rehearsed with final tweaks done to the script ready for that week.

Eventually July 10 comes along, and the show is on the air on YouTube, with luck it went smooth as can be and everybody is happy with the presentation.

A few weeks later, awards arrive at winners’ homes, and we get to see what they think about their award and any accompanying treats which is really fun to watch especially those who never have tried Vegemite.

That’s what the Trekzone Fan Film Awards are all about.