Done had some other low-budget tricks up his sleeve as well, especially where lighting was concerned. For the sit-down interviews, he brought along his small personal lighting kit: a few baby 1Ks, a 200-watt pepper and a 300-watt midgit, usually for edging or backlight. He also came up with an innovative way to create a big, flattering, soft key light. "I couldn't use 4' by 4' metal frames of gridcloth, because I didn't have a 40' truck and a bunch of gaffers," he says. "Instead, I'd just take a roll of light gridcloth and hang it off a C-stand arm, like a long roll of paper towels, so it would become like a 6' by 4' hanging strip of diffusion. Then I'd bang a 1K through it to create a large, soft key light. That's what I used for most of the interviews with the original cast members; they're all older now, so it was a very flattering light.
"I'd also bring along a 4' by 4' bounce card and walk it in to bring up as much fill as I needed. When I was done, I would just roll up the gridcloth and put it in a little tube. The concept was primitive but portable." (Done later took this idea one step further when he went to Europe to shoot the Holocaust documentary The Last Days for executive producer Steven Spielberg and October Films. He created 4' x 4' "floppies," rolls of black Duvateen that he hung off of C-stands to control a big, soft key light. "I didn't think to do that for Trekkies," he says, "but I wish I had.")
While doing informal, on-the-spot interviews with Trekkies on the convention floor, Done's lighting philosophy was simpler. "Most hotels and convention halls are lit by overhead fluorescent or sodium-vapor units, which cast unflattering shadows and sometimes very undesireable color temperatures," the director of photography says. "Whenever possible, I had Keith hold a 650-watt tungsten Sungun with a sheet of gridcloth over it, in order to create a nice color temperature and get [some light] into the subject's eyes. I'd try to overpower the ugly overhead lights as much as possible by throwing white tungsten fill light on the interviewees. I chose the tungsten Sungun both for the price and because it runs longer with fewer batteries. The daylight Sunguns are more temperamental, and they go through batteries much faster."
Some of Done's baby 1Ks were also temperamental, as the cinematographer recalls with a groan. "I'd dug them out of the trash at the USC film-school stockroom, and my roommate rebuilt them," says Done, who has since invested in newer units. "They must have been at least 40 years old, so old that even students didn't want to use them. I was constantly rewiring them on Trekkies. But you know what? They were free!"
After the successful L.A. convention shoot, the filmmakers beamed off to a dozen conventions, including events in Las Vegas, Boston and Jacksonville, Florida. They trekked after a man who had legally changed his name to Captain James T. Kirk; an auctioneer who fetched $60 for a half-empty water glass used by actor John de Lancie (who plays the mischievous, omnipotent villain Q); a devotee of Brent Spiner (Data on The Next Generation) who calls herself a "Spiner-femme"; and a Trekkie transvestite, wearing makeup and a giant wig, who burst into song on camera. The filmmakers also visited Daryl Frazetti, a Trekkie studying to be a veterinarian whose cat, Bones, wears a Dr. McCoy outfit when he watches Star Trek with his owner. "We did not want to make fun of the Trekkies," Done insists. "Some individuals seemed a little 'out there,' and it would have been easy, through lighting and camera angles, to make them seem stranger than they were. But we refused to do that.
"Instead, we talked about always trying to give a more contemporary feeling and a lot of energy to the production. Roger loves camera movement, and as an editor, he loves lots of cuts. He likes a lot of pieces, so I always tried to give him interesting angles and close-ups of Trekkie memorabilia. As a cinematographer, I enjoyed creating order and structure out of the chaos that was unfolding in front of me."
Trekkies was a bare-bones shoot in other significant ways. Because Done and all the other crew members were willing to defer payment, the feature-length documentary's hard-cash outlay was only $120,000 (the final budget was approximately $375,000). Nygard recalls that the filmmakers also made frugality a virtue while traveling. "Whenever Denise Crosby was invited to a convention, she would trade in her first-class airfare and we would buy coach tickets for the crew." the director says. "Sometimes she would be able to convince the promoter to throw in an extra hotel room or two, and we'd all cram into the rooms."
When Border couldn't afford to send Done to a particular convention, Minneapolis-based cameraman Timothy B. Johnson sometimes stepped in with his trusty, wind-up Krasnagorsk K3 16mm camera. Johnson, 29, a videographer, had bought the camera for $350 in 1994 to teach himself the basics of shooting with film. "I needed a cheap start," he explains, "and the Krasnagorsk comes with a reflex viewfinder, an internal light meter, and a 17-69mm lens, which is unusual for such an inexpensive camera."
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