Many of you have wondered where all of this started and how I still have the inspiration to make these movies. Seeing Star Trek II was an unbeliaveble experience for an 11 year old kid. Star Trek III was very hard to get in Finland at that time, because of the strange "trek-hate" amongst the Finnish TV channels, so I just kept dreaming what would happen in Star Trek III. I was even ready to pay a large sum of money in order to see the movie.

After a couple of years I got lucky and finally rented Star Trek III from a local video store. In fact the tape has probably been there for some time. Well, the movie experience wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but it gave me something special; the passion to make my own Trek- movies. I had just gotten my hands on the Deluxe Animator -program so I decided to do my own version of Star Trek III. And the name of my first Star Trek animation was "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" (1992). Before that I had done a few small slideshow "movies", but this was the first "real" animation.

In Star Trek III I was fascinated by those awesome space battles that I had watched too many times. So I decided to do my next animation, Star Trek I: The Neutral Zone (1992). You cannot have part 3 without parts 1 and 2 :-). The story was simple, but there was battle. And the Enterprise was full of scorch marks in the end of the animation...

In these and latter Star Trek animations the "stories" were just excuses to make space battles. The plots didn't change much, but every new sequel brought some new graphical enchancements. I have drawn the Enterprise from almost every perspective in Deluxe Paint quite many times. Usually each new animation came with a new camera view of the Enterprise or all views redrawn from scratch. There were even scenes on planet surfaces in the last Star Trek animations. The last Star Trek animation was Star Trek XI (1993), which was already the second one that used 3d rendered graphics. Star Trek X (1993) was truly a "next generation" animation then, because it was just so good looking at those days. Some of the effects, mainly explosions, I had to borrow from games, for example from X-Wing and Privateer.

The Star Trek animation series is missing parts 4, 7 and 8. They were destroyed thanks to the quality of my home-made HD diskettes (from old DD-discs). In a matter of fact part 8 was never finished before it was destroyed. It caused "some" yelling & aggression in our family in those days...

The graphics were getting better, but the stories didn't. This began to dawn on me by the time of Star Trek XI (1994) Before that I had begun another series, Star Wreck, back in 1993. The first in the series was inspired by one of the smash hit computer games of the time, Star Control 2. In 1994 I managed to create a sequel to Star Wreck, called Star Wreck 2: The Old Shit. Our current scriptwriter, Rudi Airisto, also participated in this project, which somewhat improved the quality of the story. I still wanted to keep doing the old Star Trek series and later that year made my first TNG animation, which was graphically slightly better than Star Wreck 2. This TNG animation "Challenging Yesterday" (1994) was still trying to be serious Trek without humour and was to be the last in the series.

Fortunately, I and Rudi decided to bury the old Trek animations and just keep doing the Wrecks. In 1995 we begun making Star Wreck III. I thought of what I'd like to have seen in Star Trek: a huge space battle. As the real Trek were still using models at the time (way before Babylon and computer graphics), I knew they'd never do it, so I thought I might myself. After a hell of a lot of work we finished SW3 in 1996. Many have thought it to be the funniest part of the series, although the swearing (which we slightly watered down in the English subtitling) might prove a bit excessive for some people.


Star Wreck III was supposed to be the last one, but when I got new software enabling me to do even cooler graphics, I decided to go for another one. Star Wreck IV was the first animation to be edited using a Windows-based videoeditor - the earlier parts were run using SBPro's Mmplay scripts and would hence require the computer running them to have exactly the same soundcard installed.

With SW4, we wanted to give Pirk's opponents a bit more depth and character, create a more complex plot and have a less cumbersome final battle. We didn't want to redo SW3 but instead tried a bit less slapstick kind of humour and a non-Trek ending. I think we succeeded pretty well, and many have thought of part 4 as the best one in the series.

Having once again decided never to do this again and then deciding against it again... well, we decided the next episode would be based on the latest Star Trek movie in the making. Being a little bit tired of our cartoon characters, we thought of acting it out ourselves just for fun. We tried a very low budget improvised BlueScreen technique, and were surprised at how well it worked. We were actually fully prepared to try and stage some kind of bridge for the Kickstart, but since the screen worked, the result was probably a _lot_ better.

Once we saw First Contact, we started working on our own script. We may have kept the beginning slightly too similar to the original, but once the action takes to the Earth, our plot fortunately deviates a lot. We actually had to rewrite the latter half of Lost Contact a few times, because some scenes were simply impossible or too expensive to film on our gear and budget. And then there was the fact that having started the shooting during the summer, we just couldn't go back and do outdoors scenes with half a meter of snow suddenly appearing from nowhere. Praised be the Finnish climate... The pressure to finish the movie was beginning to mount after filming for almost a year, and the on-location shootings were actually beginning to feel like like work at times. Some of the action scenes in particular took a lot of time to shoot. Also, the acting tends to vary in quality a lot - bear in mind that most of the people involved weren't trained actors but simply people we knew and were enthusiastic about either Star Trek or film-making. We were also slowed down a lot by not getting everybody to show up on location at the same time..!

The movie was finally finished on 30. December 1997, the editing being finished about 15 minutes before our scheduled premiere, which was held in a local school auditorium, attended by most of the people involved in the movie.

The movie, compressed in Motion JPEG format, eats up 3.2 Gigabytes of disc space, although we actually needed about 12 Gigs in the editing phase... Back in 1997, that was quite a lot and involved borrowing hard drives from friends etc. I also got a FAST FPS60 videocard just for these movie, among other things - this also cost quite a lot at the time.