For several months I haven’t thought very deeply about film – not as deeply as I used to, anyway. Yet today, all of a sudden, something clicked back into place. I was casually browsing the internet when I thought I’d check for news about Star trek: I came across reference to Star trek Renegades, an online production directed by Tim Russ, staring some of the original cast. It occurred to me that there now exist three types of Trek the tv series, the filmic extensions, and now the semi-official online incarnations. Questions arose on my mind: what delineates all three? what precisely are their aesthetic differences? are they merging? Just as francesco cassetti points out that ‘filmic experience’ is expanding or changing to embrace new forms of film consumption, is film itself changing to embrace new media? Just as the viewer is becoming active and participatory, are we, in effect seeing narratives go beyond their traditional boarders? Look at the recent ‘marvel’ comic phenomena, where the production company is releasing multiple interwoven narratives on all three platforms. Might this be a response to the rise of the fan-filmmaker, taking existing narrative as the basis for their own work? Indeed, inasmuch as Renegades is not canonically accurate, it could be seen as a type of textual play, as Henry Jenkins describes. As I wrote here a few months ago, it seems like the line between fandom and the mainstream is blurring; this effect is deepened by the growth of semi-official, made for internet films, as well as websites like netflix which make their own programmes. The question is how might we account for this? Today I set about trying to establish the aesthetic difference between the three media: how, precisely, do they differ in terms if the image? There is the size, of course, and the quality; but what about the mise-en-scene and the type of shot used? Is there a difference in terms of shooting style? of course there is a big difference between cinematic and televisual aesthetics, but is there a third, concrete, online aesthetic emerging, mirroring – or perhaps even as a result of – the emergence of what I call the hybrid of the discourses fandom and cinephilia?

That is the question I set myself today. What I need to do now is get two similar shots, one from a star trek tv series and one from a star trek film, in order to compare the two. That way I can illustrate how they differ stylistically, before going on to examine how they both differ from the online incarnation. At first glance there is a vast difference: the online version was made on a far, far tighter budget, but could such aesthetic differences be a result of directorial choice as well as economics? Frankly I find it fascinating to examine how this new hybrid might manifest itself.