Johnson's first film shoot ever was the August '96 Star Trek convention in Minneapolis; it was a trial by fire. "The Krasnagorsk only takes 100' spools, so I could only shoot for three minutes before having to reload, which was a real pain," he says. Nevertheless, the cameraman had a radical idea when Nygard asked him to shoot the Vulcan Festival in Vulcan, Canada, two months later. "I thought, 'Why not shoot sound, too?'" Johnson recalls. "So I borrowed a portable DAT recorder, brought my Electro-Voice 635-A omni-directional microphone, and gave it a try."
While interviewing a man who showed off his naturally Vulcan-shaped ears, Johnson perfected his ability to record sound while rolling a noisy, wind-up camera. "The Krasnagorsk makes a very loud, clicking noise, so I would have to shoot in a noisy environment, such as a chatty room, to mask the sound," he says. Johnson also placed the camera up to 10' away from the subject so the microphone wouldn't pick up camera noise. Because the wind-up spring motor only allowed for about 20 seconds of interview time, he rehearsed his interviews ahead of time to avoid wasting film.
Back home in Minneapolis, Johnson interviewed a man who travels around in a homemade "Captain Pike chair." For those not in the know, Captain Pike was a quadriplegic character (played by actor Jeffrey Hunter) who appeared in "The Menagerie," a two-part episode of the original Star Trek series. On the show, Pike travels around in a special life-support system, which looks like a futuristic cross between an iron lung and a wheelchair. In real life, Johnson and his Krasnagorsk trudged after the Trekkie in the Pike chair as he rolled down the street in the snow.
In the end, Nygard used some 11 minutes of Johnson's Krasnagorsk footage in Trekkies, including several brief interviews. The director didn't mind that he had to laboriously sync up the sound while editing on Neo's Avid Film Composer 8000. "Tim's DAT was not time-coded, so all of the sound bites in the Vulcan segment were shot on the Krasnagorsk with wild sync," Nygard says. "When I was in the editing room, it all would go out of sync after probably three or four seconds, and I would have to take out a frame or two to get it back into sync. It was very rough sync, but it worked fine for just a couple of sound bites."
The rawness of some of the production adds to the campy fun of Trekkies, however. For Nygard, the documentary answers the question of why Star Trek is so popular. "A lot of science fiction tends to paint the future as a decrepit, decaying downer — a Blade Runner-type of world where things are going to get worse," he explains. "Star Trek is the exception. It shows a future where things have improved — human beings get along better, male/female and racial relationships are on an equal basis, and people rise because of merit. Star Trek is an ideal world, a utopia that the masses could grasp through a weekly pulp TV show."
Today, Nygard is editing and producing another sci-fi-themed documentary, Six Days in Roswell, which Johnson is directing. What's his lingering memory of Trekkies? "Denise, Harris, Keith and I were like the four-headed monster," he says. "We were unstoppable."
