Well, so much for me taping the remastered classic Star Trek episodes every week. With the end of their UPN affiliation, the station that used to be this area’s UPN station has folded like a deck of cards since the arrival of the WB. I take this kinda personally, because this is a station that (A) I helped to build in its early days, and (2) I promoted Star Trek aggressively on in its early days. Now KFDF is just one of the many low-power translators rebroadcasting KPBI’s My Network TV signal. (As I discovered from observation this weekend, My Network is a new upstart created by Fox, so they have a place to show the second-string material that’s actually – get this – too cheap, cheesy and tawdry to show on Fox itself. Can you even imagine such depths?) So Star Trek’s remastered episodes have vanished from the Fort Smith/Fayetteville market, along with Smallville strip syndication reruns and a bunch of other stuff. 😡 You know, I know it’s all going to wind up on DVD inside of a year or so, but I’d just like to see the damn things on-air because I really have no intention of buying yet another iteration of the series on DVD. Again. Speaking of remastering episodes, it’s something that’s very much on my mind of late. With the recent discovery of a large cardboard box marked “JCC”, containing at least a dozen tapes in very sturdy VHS tape storage boxes labeled as “RAW FOOTAGE”, the first project for the new editing equipment may already be taking shape. I’ve talked to Robert at length about it, and one thing we’ve both ached to do for years, as jaw-droppingly silly as the whole thing has always been, is to put Jump Cut City on the web. There’s just one problem – it was our own silly little project, aired in the wee wee hours of the morning (when everyone gets up to go to the bathroom) on cable access. We used other people’s FX shots. We used other people’s music. I wouldn’t do that quite so casually now, and I don’t think anyone could get away with it to the degree that we used to at 2:05am on Saturday mornings. But now we have the means to rebuild each episode from the ground up, from the original footage, replacing those elements that we can’t get away with using today. There exists quite a library of original (and quite stunningly bad) Jump Cut City music from before the cable access “heyday” of JCC. And I also recently found a VHS tape containing several (also snicker-inducingly not-ready-for-prime-time) space animation scenes I rendered on a Video Toaster with Lightwave circa 1996. That discovery is almost like a divine message that JCC must live again. Some of the CG stuff is actually fairly specific to the episodes we had already done, while other clips were clearly for stuff we intended to shoot in the future. That’s perfect – these crappy effects, which still use Lightwave models of Star Trek ships, but such primitive models that they look for the most part like giant polygonal tub toys, are more contemporary with the original JCC than anything I could cook up today. The scenes are designed and rendered in such a clunky, still-learning-how-to-do-Lightwave way that they’ll fit perfectly.
The episodes will probably be carved up into short webisodes, and we’ll be redoing the original JCC section as a JCC blog where we can show them and offer up commentaries of a sort. And when we’ve finished carving up those four cable episodes we’re still so fond of? The box of raw tapes contains stuff we shot for episodes we never finished, as well as raw footage – not sure why we kept it – of certain favorite pre-cable episodes, where every single stinking thing you saw or heard was purely improvisational. Those could be rebuilt.
It’s all early days yet, but that’s a project we’re talking about, if only because we’d like you to see how fantastically stupid we were both capable of acting when we were in our early 20s. 😆 The real killer is that it’ll take a hellaciously long time to do. These episodes – averaging out to about 30 minutes a piece (and not just that, but 30 minutes of cutting back and forth for Witty Dialogue and even a few brief interludes of something roughly approximating Exciting Action) – took a long time to put together the first time. Now we’re talking about going in, trying to re-edit it almost exactly the way it was before, and even fixing stuff. Oy.
But it sure sounds like a fun idea.
Well, so much for me taping the remastered classic Star Trek episodes every week. With the end of their UPN affiliation, the station that used to be this area’s UPN station has folded like a deck of cards since the arrival of the WB. I take this kinda personally, because this is a station that (A) I helped to build in its early days, and (2) I promoted Star Trek aggressively on in its early days. Now KFDF is just one of the many low-power translators rebroadcasting KPBI’s My Network TV signal. (As I discovered from observation this weekend, My Network is a new upstart created by Fox, so they have a place to show the second-string material that’s actually – get this – too cheap, cheesy and tawdry to show on Fox itself. Can you even imagine such depths?) So Star Trek’s remastered episodes have vanished from the Fort Smith/Fayetteville market, along with Smallville strip syndication reruns and a bunch of other stuff. 😡 You know, I know it’s all going to wind up on DVD inside of a year or so, but I’d just like to see the damn things on-air because I really have no intention of buying yet another iteration of the series on DVD. Again. 
Speaking of remastering episodes, it’s something that’s very much on my mind of late. With the recent discovery of a large cardboard box marked “JCC”, containing at least a dozen tapes in very sturdy VHS tape storage boxes labeled as “RAW FOOTAGE”, the first project for the new editing equipment may already be taking shape. I’ve talked to Robert at length about it, and one thing we’ve both ached to do for years, as jaw-droppingly silly as the whole thing has always been, is to put Jump Cut City on the web. There’s just one problem – it was our own silly little project, aired in the wee wee hours of the morning (when everyone gets up to go to the bathroom) on cable access. We used other people’s FX shots. We used other people’s music. I wouldn’t do that quite so casually now, and I don’t think anyone could get away with it to the degree that we used to at 2:05am on Saturday mornings. But now we have the means to rebuild each episode from the ground up, from the original footage, replacing those elements that we can’t get away with using today. There exists quite a library of original (and quite stunningly bad) Jump Cut City music from before the cable access “heyday” of JCC. And I also recently found a VHS tape containing several (also snicker-inducingly not-ready-for-prime-time) space animation scenes I rendered on a Video Toaster with Lightwave circa 1996. That discovery is almost like a divine message that JCC must live again. Some of the CG stuff is actually fairly specific to the episodes we had already done, while other clips were clearly for stuff we intended to shoot in the future. That’s perfect – these crappy effects, which still use Lightwave models of Star Trek ships, but such primitive models that they look for the most part like giant polygonal tub toys, are more contemporary with the original JCC than anything I could cook up today. The scenes are designed and rendered in such a clunky, still-learning-how-to-do-Lightwave way that they’ll fit perfectly.
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