Star Trek fan productions

Star Trek fan-made productions are productions made by fans using elements of the Star Trek franchise. Paramount Pictures, CBS, and their licensees are the only organizations legally allowed to create commercial products with the Star Trek name and trademark. The fan film community has received some coverage from the mainstream media.

Star Trek fan films have been made since the 1960s by individuals and various fan groups but, before the advent of inexpensive digital cameras, editing and effects in the 1990s, most were on a simple home movie level. An early effort to achieve something more was John Cosentino's Paragon's Paragon, which was an unofficial adaption of James's Blish's "Spock Must Die," an early Star Trek spinoff novel. The film ran for an hour and was shot on 16mm film using a full-size recreation of the Bridge set. It also used a wide variety of film special effects techniques on a budget of over $2,000-- equivalent to $10,000 in today's dollars-- and received considerable coverage in Don Dohler's Cinemagic magazine for low budget filmmakers. Dohler subsequently used its crew to make his first feature film, The Alien Factor.

In 2014, fans and former cast members organized a fan-made short film called Prelude to Axanar, setting up a Kickstarter project with a target of $10,000, but which raised well over $100,000 instead. This short film is planned to be followed by a full-length feature film called Star Trek: Axanar, funded by a much larger Kickstarter project. These films star Richard Hatch, J.G. Hertzler, Kate Vernon, Gary Graham, Michael Hogan, and Tony Todd, all mainstream actors who are veterans of Paramount's Star Trek franchise and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.Prelude to Axanar features both new and familiar characters from the Star Trek universe:

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