Voyage Trekkers is great to talk about for so many reasons. Not only is it a great show but it is the type of show that makes it look easy.
Trekkers follows Captain Sunstrike, and his cohorts Doctor Rena, Commander Powell and Lt. Jayda – representatives of the Galactic Union. The group traverses the universe meeting new cultures, battling enemies, and romancing princesses. It’s classic television, planet of the week scifi but with a constant wink towards the audience at every cliché. The series reminded me of “Wormhole Extreme” the campy ‘real world’ show based on the Stargate program from the 100th episode of ‘SG-1’. Fans of scifi and viewers of the show will notice a lot of similarities to other classic shows as well.
Successful web series are all about efficiency. Doing things well, quickly, and cheaply. That might sound like a cliché at this point but think about it this way. You go into planning a series and at your disposal you have a budget, your time, and your ability to convince others to contribute their time. Those are extremely finite resources, and for most web series I cover on this site they are fairly similar. Your ability to best manage those resources is what will determine the ultimate success of your series.The efficiency of Voyage Trekkers was born out of the initial goal of simply filming as many episodes as they could in a single weekend. The answer ended up being six, and they worked out so well that the crew decided to get back together to film an additional four episodes.
Let’s look at the ways in which the creators of Voyage Trekkers managed their available resources well. When making your own shows you should try and come up with a similar list.
- Commander Powell and Lt. Jayda are played by creator Nathan Blackwell’s two brothers, Logan and Brian (In an alien suit).
- Every episode is single scene, single location and about three minutes long.
- The awesome cave in episode seven, as well as episode four, were filmed at the local Arizona zoo – former employers of Nathan Blackwell.
- Every episode is written essentially around one joke.
- Most of the episodes take place out in the desert, a location fairly easy to find and shoot in out in Arizona.
- Their VFX supervisor David Stipes (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rodgers) is the father of production designer Nathan Stipes, who met Blackwell in college.
- The amazing costumes were made by the mother of lead actress Gabrielle Van Buren.
- Episode 9 was shot completely on a green screen.
- None of the episodes were actually filmed in space.
Trekkers even breaks a little new ground with a choose-your-own-adventure season finale, that includes four different endings. The only thing the show seemed to be missing was one of those cool bridge sets featured in virtually every classic scifi series – so they went and built one for season two.
Voyage Trekkers feels so tightly executed, so ripe for discovery that I’m shocked that it has yet to really gather a strong following online. The show is in the same vein as ‘The Common Cult’ in that after watching you wonder how it could go so long without just naturally being put on television.
I wonder if so much of the time and effort that went into making Voyage Trekkers a near perfect web series took away from the time and effort required to get a series out to people. I say that because this feels like a show that could really catch on when enough people find it.
So do yourself a favor and check out Voyage Trekkers at their site http://voyagetrekkers.com – and be sure to check out the trailer for the new season embedded below. I opted to embed the trailer because you gotta check out the amazing new production values that are being put into the second series!