At the beginning of the month, 455 films launched a crowdfunding campaign for an untitled documentary all about Star Trek: Voyager. The campaign has been a huge success and is still ongoing—and now they are ready to reveal the name of the doc, giving an exclusive first reveal to TrekMovie.
And the name is…
Tomorrow the team behind the Voyager documentary will be sending out an update revealing the chosen name. That title is…
To The Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager
UPDATE: Title treatment
The team has sent over some key art with the title.
In addition to being evocative of the show’s premise of a ship lost in the Delta Quadrant, the name comes from the series finale. “To the journey” was the toast given by Reginald Barclay (in the original timeline) at a reunion party for the crew back home on Earth (see clip below). This naming follows a similar convention to how 455 films named their Deep Space Nine documentary What We Left Behind, evocative of the DS9 series finale “What You Leave Behind.”
Close to HD stretch goal
Last week we reported that the Voyager doc had announced new stretch goals with the intent to remaster footage from Voyager used in the doc into high definition. Since that time they have already passed the goal to remaster “some” of the footage and are on their way to the $900,000 goal to remaster all the footage used for the doc. The current fundraising total is over $850,000 with nine days to go.
VOY Doc Director on TrekMovie podcast Friday
To the Journey producer and co-director, David Zappone will be the guest on this week’s TrekMovie.com podcast All Access Star Trek. That episode will be available on this site and wherever you get your podcasts on Friday morning.
If you have suggestions for questions to ask David Zappone, you can submit them below before 11 am on Wednesday.
To support the doc visit the Indigogo page.
Visit the official site at voyagerdocumentary.com, or follow VOY Documentary on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Great news
To the journey. And thanks for the memory jog, it’ll be Captain Kim if he turns up on Picard…
Or… still an Ensign?!?
An Garret Wang will be late to his documentary interview, and then will complain that he’s only getting 5 min of screen time, right? ;-)
To the journey!
Absolutely makes sense as a title for sure, I think that’s probably the phrase that is most tied to Voyager by its fans anyhow.
Kinda made me think of the name of the pilot episode of Blake’s 7, “The Way Back”.
Perfect title
I suppose a fine title for hardcore Voyager fans, but awkward to anyone else.
I think for anyone who even knows the basic premise of the show it will seem appropriate. And if you don’t, it probably comes across as a toast to the journey of making the show for 7 seasons.
Also, if people don’t even know about the premise of the show they are probably not the target audience for this documentary ;-)
“What We Left Behind” was a fine title for hardcore DS9 fans, but awkward to anyone else.
This Documentary isn’t for non fans. Title is fine.
Yeah, I mean who is watching a documentary about a 25 year old show they never seen lol.
The title is fine.
Perfect title!
That title brought me right back to the 90s. It’s perfect.
To the Journey indeed!
SUPER excited for this!
I’ll watch it.
I was hoping for “There’s Coffee in that Nebula” but this will do.
people really want these series in HD and will spend money just for glimpse, I dont see how it doesnt make sense to spend the money to remaster these and release them week by week to keep people subscribed to Paramount+ and when each season is done, dump it onto bluray to get another dip into the well.
Surely it would cost less than pouring that money into just one of their new shows
I think it makes sense to do it that way, for sure. I hate thinking like an executive knowing how much Paramount/CBS/Viacom has milked the fans with all the releases and rereleases of films and TV shows on VHS and DVD and then blu ray, on top of paying for the movies in theaters, seeking the show out in syndication and their new network and now their streaming service, and of course all the licensed merch on top of that.
But… releasing DS9 and Voyager in 4K or at least 2K, perhaps a season every month, and then leaving them as Paramount+ exclusives for a time until releasing blu ray sets with extras? That’s surely got to be worth the $80 million or so it would cost to do traditionally, to say nothing if they did an AI up-res. All the fans not dumping the service between new series? The fans who don’t like the new shows but would just like to see the shows in HD? Even if there are only 2 million such fans, just a year of keeping them subscribed pays for the lot and then some. And then after the blu rays they can license them to competitors or cable outlets if they like.
The “C Suite” folks and studio accountants have their own calculus on what is worth spending money on. It’s amusing that these studios take awful risks (even without 20/20 hindsight) on a bunch of films and TV shows every year that fail to make a solid return, but they aren’t willing to pour a few million (which is a small number when you look at their operating costs) into franchises that are a guaranteed money maker.
I sadly suspect they know that DS9 and VOY will continue to make them a ton of money as-is and that the idea of “future proofing” the show in high definition is a foreign concept to them. I’d say they are being “Penny Wise, Pound Foolish.” Existing fans will continue to watch these shows, but as the years roll on, I suspect viewership will dwindle (faster) without proper HD mastering.
I know people like bringing up that the TNG Blu-rays didn’t sell well, but while it’s often repeated, I have not been able to track down any proper sources for that speculation. Opinion pieces, forum posts from anonymous users, and even speculation from people remotely associated with Trek, but that aren’t privy to those kinds of numbers. Back in 2012, TrekCore reported on initial Season 1 sales being pretty good. In fact, based on what I’ve read, estimates the *first* week of sales alone recouped over half of the remastering investment for Season 1. In one week! No numbers one way or the other ever have been reported on as far as I have been able to find.
I’m not sure if his numbers are accurate, but Robert Meyer Burnett claimed on Twitter that it cost about $70,000 to remaster each TNG episode in HD. This would be $12.5M for the whole show. Let’s say that DS9 and Voyager would be more in the ballpark of $20 million each, just to be generous with these estimates. To put this amount of money in perspective, a single episode of Discovery is reported to cost between $8 and $8.5 M.
For the cost of 2.5 Discovery episodes, they could remaster DS9 and VOY in 4k/8k.
Heck, I’d go as far to say that it’s also time for Paramount/CBS to take the mid-00 TOS Remaster assets and do a new remaster of it in 4k, especially as Strange New Worlds is coming out soon. While they’re at it, fix up the items they wanted to get to, but were unable to due to time constraints. I know it’s like the 12 time they’d have dipped into TOS, but let’s just go ahead and do it again, especially if it would be a selling point for getting a Paramount+ subscription.
Blu-Ray sales may be smaller than they once were, but those disc sales, future syndication deals (BBC America, Heros & Icons, SyFy, etc) and immediate Paramount+ subscriptions would recoup the remastering cost. Maybe not as fast as the accountants would like, but the end result leaves the franchse with “future-proofed” series that will continue to hold up to the evolving/advancing television market and additional revenue from a franchise that continues to make them money.
8k? Isn’t that overkill? I don’t understand the need to go higher with the resolution
when I believe he human eye can’t even properly see 4k. Or is their more to it that I’m not aware?
Michael from the youtube-channel “V-sauce” made a good video explaining the “resolution” of the human eye.
Thanks, will check that out.
Yes, it’s overkill. All you will get is more noise, not more detail. Technically, you may be able to scan film at 4k or 8k, but 1) they probably didn’t use the best film stock on the show, and 2) they probably didn’t use the best lenses on the show. This was never intended to be watched at such a high resolution so they probably used equipment/supplies that were appropriate for TV.
Wouldn’t Paramount/CBS have to redo the CGI shots from DS9 and VOY since they don’t have the assets anymore and TNG was shot on film. Redoing those shots would drive up costs dramatically which is why this documentary has a higher budget.
Yeah, but 8k or even 4k might reveal too much. At the end you could get so much details that the sets just look like sets and that you have the impression standing in a set where the show was shot instead of standing in the bridge.
in TOS remastered you could also notice a lot of details which was fine. But if you go higher?
“Heck, I’d go as far to say that it’s also time for Paramount/CBS to take the mid-00 TOS Remaster assets and do a new remaster of it in 4k, especially as Strange New Worlds is coming out soon. “
If they had started that project a decade later, the CGI-Enterprise could have looked way better. The quality varies in different episodes. In some the Enterprise looks great, but in some she looks like out of a video game.
That’s exactly what I had in mind with TOS. Some episodes were amazing. Some had a plastic or waxy look to the models. Provided those remastered assets still exist, I’d like to see another pass done on them from start to finish to give the Enterprise, in particular, a consistent look across the episodes.
You’ll have a great job like in “All Our Yesterdays” with the supernova/planet destruction at the end of the episode:
https://trekmovie.com/2007/04/21/all-our-yesterdays-screenshots-and-video/
Or “I, Mudd” with subtle fixes to technology:
https://trekmovie.com/2006/10/15/i-mudd-screenshots-and-audio-clip/
A mixed bag in something like “The Doomsday Machine” where the Constellation looks great, but the Doomsday Machine is waxy and plastic looking:
https://trekmovie.com/2007/02/10/the-doomsday-machine-screenshots/
There’s also some instances where they tweaked some visuals really well but then would leave other items completely untouched ( tried finding some examples, but I simply don’t have that amount of free time!).
They probably wouldn’t need to do much if they still have all the assets. Just a new render of everything at like 2k (instead of just 1080 or 720) and hopefully TOS was already scanned at 2k. Then they just need to go and make the few adjustments not done for time back in 2006/2007.
It seems kind of a no-brainer with an Enterprise-1701 series coming out to either attract/retain more people to their streaming service.
The VOY documentary asked for $150,000 to remaster clips for the documentary. The documentary will probably end up featuring far less than a full episode worth of footage. That would suggest a much higher cost than the $70,000 to remaster each TNG episode.
Of course, there’s probably some bulk discount when you remaster full seasons as opposed to small excerpts from different seasons. On the other hand, VOY and DS9 have a lot more VFX shots that will need to be recreated from scratch.
The biggest problem is: People can watch DS9 and VOY now on a number of platforms and TV channels. So I really don’t know how big the audience is who would be willing to pay extra to see the shows in HD. If you poll people on this website I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the majority. However, this website is by no means representative of the wider public.
I’m only going off what someone involved in the process gave as the number.
That stretch goal of $150k doesn’t necessarily mean that it costs that much money to actually remaster the clips. Just looking at some of the other stretch goals seems to support this. $75k for additional graphics and animation. $100k for 30 minutes of additional footage. 100k for an original score. $100k for “follow up interviews.” However, with how music rights are, I actually wouldn’t be surprised by the $75k for licensing the Voyager theme, but that even sounds a bit much. These are incentives to reach these goals, with some of that money going towards whatever goal they’re looking for.
I suspect the $70k estimate for remastering is probably a bit of a low-ball, but I’d point out that for the VOY documentary, they are a small independent team, not associated with the studio. They would need to gain access, dig through the material, scan, process, etc. all this footage on their own dime. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also have to pay CBS/Paramount a ton of money just for the access, and/or foot the bill on handling and insurance they have to take out to even handle these masters.
One thing that does support the “low” figure of $70, is that with many things when production is scaled up, efficiencies can usually be found. This would drive down the cost, perhaps significantly. Doing the entire series (or even just a season) would likely drive down the costs significantly. Doing it in-house, or by a dedicated team, is probably cheaper. Scanning all the cans and editing everything at once may be significantly cheaper on average over the span of the project than if independent folks have to dig through those same cans and do the same work on just a few clips.
One other thing that does support that lower figure is an article from JMS’s B5books blog about 4 years ago regarding remastering a different Sci-fi property, Babylon 5. The article goes in depth and is very honest about the remastering process and how much money it would cost. It is titled “Why Babylon 5 on Blu-ray will Probably Never Happen.” Based on that article’s estimates, a single B5 episode would cost an estimated “$105,319” to remaster in HD. This is a show that didn’t use any practical effects (something DS9 did through most of it’s run), so every single effects shot would need to be recreated from scratch. Most of DS9’s effects still exist in some form, at least for all but the last 2 or so seasons and it’s not entirely clear if the assets exist or not, if they already exist, it may require some reskinning of assets and then just reprocessing in a much higher resolution. Recent HBOMax release a 4:3 version of the show with HD film footage and upscaled graphics is a huge improvement over the terrible DVD releases. it’s not clear how expensive that project was, but HBOMax has said it was a “labor of love” which seems to indicate they put the most minimal amount of effort into the process.
I’m not sure if I remember correctly, but I think I read an interview about the DS9 documentary where they said that they basically hired the same people to search for, scan and remaster the original DS9 film stock who would also do it if CBS decided to remaster the show. My guess is they would do the same for the VOY documentary. So it’s not like this is some independent team going into the CBS archives and borrowing some cans of film.
But yes, they will have to pay the people doing the remastering, and they will probably have to pay a license fee to CBS for any footage they use from the show (but that would be true also for non-remastered footage).
Boring Dogshit Overanalyzed
I was hoping it’d be called ‘There and back again, a starships (or humans?) tale by Kathryn Janeway’
It they don’t hit a million by months end, it’ll be very close….
They’ve blown past $900k. Very impressive.
Wow, what a creative name. I never would have saw that coming
$1M passed (around 28.03 17:45 CEST)
They hit 1MM, with a couple of days to spare…