After a decades long odyssey that included events like stopping production in the 1980’s, losing the tapes, finding the tapes, expanding on the story, enduring personal tragedy and then taking on great technical challenges like mixing together decades of film technology progression and add in being picked on by Axanar for its delays, Yorktown: A Time To Heal is now available to watch.

This fan film stars the late James Shigeta and also stars George Takei and this may be the second last completed Star Trek fan film to have a big name actor (or actors) playing a role in a production with only J.G. Hertzler in Axanar (at the moment) to come.

Filming started in the 1980’s with Stan Woo and was completed in the 21st century with the help of John Atkin and his team with Stan Woo as continuing on as Producer.

The team worked hard to mix the 21st century film footage with the original footage that was shot in the 1980’s to come up with a complete story and you can’t do that at the snap of the fingers as there is colour and and lighting and sound and much more to contend with.

A lot of people worked on this fan film and pretty much every name below would be recognizable to those who have kept an eye on what has been going on in the fan film world.

Film Crew
Produced by Stan Woo
Original music by Chris Barr
Original song by Rayna
VFX Supervisor: Samuel Cockings
VFX by Samuel Cockings, Henry Gibbens, Roland Baron, and Tobias Richter
Executive Producer: Jem Ong Woo
Executive Producers: John Atkin, Glen Wolfe and Kasey Shafsky

Cast members include James Shigeta, George Takei, Stan Woo, John Atkin, Victoria Fox Joseph Kerezman and Samuel Cockings who had appeared as a transporter technician.

There’s action, there’s urgency, there is a good storyline that is connected all the way through and that makes it interesting.

You got Klingons in the mix, you’ve got Starfleet doing shady things and throw in a group who are willing to cause war and you’ve got Yorktown: A Time To Heal.

The mixed footage worked out well, they put a lot of effort into aging the modern footage and they could not have done any better, we’ve come a long way since the 80’s especially with High Definition cameras etc. so to make it all fit in is spectacular.

The only downside regarding Yorktown was the short running time, it would have been nice for a few more minutes but when half your film was made decades earlier than the other half it is difficult to achieve that wish.

Rating: 4.75 out of 5