Star Trek: Excelsior - James Heaney

Posted by Steve on 9 July 2010 | 2 Comments

Tell us about your show.

Star Trek: Excelsior is a full-cast audio drama set in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe. That's the official description, at least, and as far as it goes it's not a bad summary of the show. Personally, though, I prefer Commander Alcar Dovan's opening narration: Space... The final frontier. These are the voyages of the-- Oh, who am I kidding? This is the Starship Excelsior. We use an ancient Gateway to explore the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Our assignment is to find out what we can and come back alive. The rest is rhetoric.

And, indeed, the rest is rhetoric. I might add that we release episodes roughly every two months, that our stories are long and complicated (but do find definite endings at each season finale), or I could start rambling about the persistent character conflicts that drive our stories... but it really boils down to a bunch of people exploring the galaxy and trying not to get killed on the way. So instead I'll just plug the site, which is www.starshipexcelsior.com.

Where did the idea/concept for your series come from?

Funny story, actually. I had recently gotten into audio drama - especially Darker Projects' The Section 31 Files, Alive Inside, and anything else I could find with Mark Kalita and/or Karl Puder in it. At the same time, I had just (unwillingly) inherited command of a play-by-forum roleplaying game set on the U.S.S. Excelsior-C. The RPG was very low on membership at the time, and one night Alex and I were brainstorming new recruitment strategies. I said something like, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made a show about Excelsior? We don't have the budget for film, but how about audio? We thought it would be the greatest recruitment tool ever in the history of roleplaying, and ST:E sort of snowballed from there.

Three years later, the audio drama has had tens and tens of thousands of downloads - and has led to the recruitment of exactly two members. It's been a success in every other way, the fans love it, and I love it, but as an RPG recruitment tool Star Trek: Excelsior was a total failure.

Name some of your sci-fi influences. Any favorite movies, TV shows, novels?

Wow. I could easily write on this question all day. But that would be intensely boring, so I'll limit myself. Obviously, the biggest inspiration comes from Star Trek, a universe whose minutiae I know to such an unhealthy extent that I use expressions like cold as a Breen winter in conversation with normal people. The other audio dramas in my life definitely have an influence - Star Trek: Outpost and The Leviathan Chronicles in particular - although I've gotten behind on them thanks to Excelsior.

Excelsior also owes a lot to Lost - I like to complain that Damon Lindelof must have listened to the first season of Excelsior before he wrote The Constant (note: as far as I know, he didn't). Like on Lost, Excelsior throws a lot of hapless people into an incredibly dangerous situation with enormous dimensions and history, and then lets them (and the audience) discover what's going on over a long period of time. With Lost, it was the Island. With Excelsior, it's the Sword of Damocles.

I owe quite a bit to Walker Percy's science fiction (Love in the Ruins, Lost in the Cosmos). Percy did a marvelous job revealing his characters without ever coming out and just saying anything in dialogue. And he had one of the best noses for juxtaposition in American literature, period.

I am also a huge fan of Doctor Who and Firefly and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but who isn't? So that's boring. Plus, I'm not nearly a good a writer as Moffat, Whedon, or Adams, so comparing Excelsior to them only makes me look bad.

Oh, and Death Note. The vendetta between Light and L is the ideal which all subsequent fictional vendettas can only emulate.

Tell us about the technical production of your show. What camera & equipment did you use? Editing software & hardware? For visual effects, etc?

Excelsior is totally decentralized. We have cast and crew in five or six countries (at last count) and at least nine states. Actors and actresses record their lines in isolation or (occasionally) in simultaneous recording sessions with other cast members, using Skype. Those recordings end up on our online server. Then our heroically committed four-man post-production team divvys up the scenes, splices the lines together in Adobe Audition, adds a few jillion sound effects plus a musical track, and, finally, after peer review, the final drafts are polished one more time and assembled into the final episode you hear on release day.

Everyone is using different equipment, different software, and often have access to different sound effects libraries. The fact that the team is able to cope with the enormous logistic problems and frequent technical failures that arise from so much diversity is really a testament to them. The fact that they are able to fix all these problems without ever meeting each other in the real world is a downright miracle. We have a fantastic team.

Can you tell us any interesting facts or trivia about your show? Any funny stories?

Last year, we did a musical episode. Fifty minutes, serious drama, high-quality Star Trek, just like normal... but with the added complication of having eight original songs! On a deadline! At one point, we had four people writing lyrics, six people doing orchestration, three people doing transcriptions, and the cast working ‘round the clock to keep up, and the crew mailing me at all hours saying how am I supposed to make two people recording on different sides of the world sound like they're singing a duet? On virtual instruments? It was totally mad. Missed the deadline by a long way. The episode was great, though. It's called "The Line," and it's still on the website.

Star Trek: Excelsior can be found online, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

Star Trek: Excelsior - SciFinal Page