Peters Admits He’s More Than 75 Percent Certain Patreon Effort Alone Won’t Save Current Warehouse

Barred by his copyright lawsuit settlement with CBS and Paramount from public fundraising for Axanar, Peters has grown and diversified the revenue streams he expects will pay for the long-promised short films.

After raising $1.7 million for the feature-length version of Axanar — the majority of that from donors on Kickstarter and Indiegogo — Peters has to appeal to Star Trek fans yet again for more than $250,000 to pay for the production of two 15-minute short films. Some, dissatisfied with the direction taken by Star Trek: Discovery, are lulled by the Trek they saw evinced in Prelude to Axanar. They want to give Peters yet another chance to deliver. Others remain skeptical whether it’s worth throwing good money after bad.

Patterned on Prelude‘s format and cost, Peters said producing the two Axanar shorts could cost $200,000, shot in rented greenscreen studios over about four days in Los Angeles and Atlanta. He has previously estimated that additional shooting on the bridge set in his Lawrenceville, Ga., warehouse could cost another $40,000.

Rent to keep that warehouse — technically a separate legal entity from Axanar Productions — open could range from as little as $24,000 to as much as $48,000 a year. If, as Peters admitted on YouTube, he’s forced to move to a smaller facility,²⁾ the rent would bring Axanar‘s total cost to $264,000.

Go Deeper » Challenges — (2 mins. reading time)

Challenges
Lane confided he himself is skeptical about Axanar’s prospects to raise anywhere near a quarter-million dollars without public crowdfunding. “It’s gonna be tough,” he said. “I don’t think you can raise $250,000 for Axanar.”

For his part, Peters remained confident he’ll eventually raise the money. “There’s no stopwatch. This year, next year…” he said, imagining aloud it could take two years to raise even $200,000.

Produce in Pieces
Challenged by Lane to take out another mortgage on his house, Peters refused, saying, “I’ve spent enough money on Axanar.” He went on to speculate he might instead seek to produce the two short films in pieces, $50,000 at a time.

Milestones
Peters had previously laid out a list of milestones he must meet before Axanar could be produced:

See also: Axanar Film Must Wait for Patches' Delivery to Donors

1. Launching Ares Digital 3.0 Peters already missed this February 1 milestone, explaining the troubled proprietary software platform is “in beta.” Ares Digital must serve double duty, managing fulfillment of perks still owed to donors from previous crowdfunding campaigns, and handling future transactions from donors he’s counting on to pay for the shorts.
2. Delivering Patches Peters didn’t want to start another fundraising effort for Axanar before he delivered long-delayed patches to its Indiegogo contributors. However, delivering those patches depends on past donors signing onto Ares Digital when it goes live to update their shipping and contact information.
3. Private Fundraiser Each previous milestone must be passed before Peters can even begin raising money. He provided no timeline for how long that could take.

Watch

AXANAR CONFIDENTIAL In a two-hour YouTube livestream, Fan Film Factor’s Jonathan Lane (right) joined producer Alec Peters to discuss why the blogger has stood by the beleaguered Axanar production.

While Peters’ increased YouTube presence in recent weeks was specifically calculated to earn additional revenue, Lane took him to task for not sufficiently flogging what Lane admitted was a flagging Patreon campaign. They discovered that denouncing those whom Lane calls “detractors” resulted in a five-fold increase in donations in a single night.

Peters’ Patreon effort challenged Axanar supporters to help him keep the 6,000 square foot warehouse he calls Ares Studios after his sponsor, Other World Computing, withdrew its support. His goal is $4,000 a month by the spring, when he must choose whether he can afford to stay or must move to a nearby facility half the size. Without any change in donation patterns since he began, the Patreon campaign was projected to fall well short of that goal.

UPTICK After a downward trend in the number of new donations and patrons, pledges spike during and just after Alec Peters’ February 4 Axanar: Confidential livestream. Click graph to view full size.

Not Like Terrorists, but Like Terrorists After stating he was not comparing his detractors to Muslim terrorists, Lane immediately proceeded to compare them to Muslim terrorists. “Deep down, [Muslim terrorists] like to blow things up,” he said. ”[They] are people who are dicks. … For the detractors, they are inherently dicks.“

Losing Erections Lane’s appearance included jokes aimed at Axanar critics, including one where he gleefully exclaimed at the number of Patreon donors added during the livestream: “Every time somebody donates to the Patreon, a detractor loses an erection!”

Irrelevant Detractors Both Lane and Peters regularly dismiss their critics as “assholes,” “pathological stalkers,” “irrelevant” and small in number (Lane insists no more than 80 despite 915 members in AxaMonitor's Facebook group). Even so, bashing their critics, combined with direct appeals to sign up for Patreon, appeared to provide a jolt to the moribund funding effort, which Lane admitted, “yeah, it slowed dramatically.” He said he preferred to interpret the data as “a glass half full, I think 75 percent full.”

Go Deeper » Paying the Rent — (2 mins. reading time)

FALLING SHORT Despite upward trends in earnings and patrons, the two aren’t projected to amount to enough to meet Alec Peters’ $4,000 goal. Click image to view full size.

Projections A regression analysis of Patreon trends pegs Peters’ monthly donations by April 1 at about $2,500 from about 275 patrons. Peters admitted on Axanar: Confidential that despite his pitch that fans save the larger warehouse, he expected he’d have to move. “The chances I’m staying in the bigger facility are small,” he said, “less than 25 percent.”³⁾

Covering Costs, Missing Features Given the strong possibility he will move into the smaller facility, his projected earnings should cover rent, utilities and insurance, among other minor costs. However, at less than 3,000 square feet, the warehouse won’t hold much more than Axanar’s U.S.S. Ares bridge set. Like the current warehouse, the new facility lacks the features of a real soundstage (e.g., soundproofing, upgraded electrical to accommodate stage lighting, greenscreen, lighting grid).

YouTube Two weeks before, Peters said he was earning $600 a month from Axanar’s monetized YouTube account. With his expanded number of live chats, he has also been earning hundreds of dollars directly from supportive viewers through YouTube’s superchat feature. By this episode of Axanar: Confidential, Peters said he was earning $1,200 from YouTube, though he provided no documentation for that amount. Added to the Patreon pledges as of this post, that would total $2,606.⁴⁾

During the two-hour livestream, Peters and Lane covered a variety of other important topics, including:

Go Deeper » (3 mins. reading time)

Resignations
Lane and Peters went on at length (see the clip, Disloyalty) condemning “key people” who had resigned from Axanar then became critics, including:

• Prelude to Axanar director Christian Gossett, who resigned from the Axanar feature in May 2015.
• Axanar director Robert Meyer Burnett, who departed in November 2017.
• Axanar chief technologist Terry McIntosh, who left in May 2016.

PR Director Mike Bawden
Unmentioned, however, was the departure weeks before by longtime public relations director and advisor Mike Bawden, citing turmoil over a public dispute between Peters and Burnett in which Peters threatened to sue Burnett while ruining his career. Lane later tried on Facebook to explain away Bawden’s resignation as him simply being too busy: “He’s got his own growing business and he’s mayor of Riverdale, Iowa. The man is busy! It’s not like he stormed off and joined [AxaMonitor’s] Facebook group.”⁵⁾

Bawden, however, left right after Peters refused to follow his advice to resolve his dispute with Burnett privately or through the legal system instead of through Facebook accusations and insinuations.

Trek.fm offers its Patreon supporters 28 Star Trek-related podcasts. It used to host Axanar’s podcast. Image/Trek.fm

Trek.fm
As Ares Studios moved past Trek.fm’s monthly patrons and earnings, Peters crowed that his Patreon was now the highest earning Star Trek-related creator on the platform. Trek.fm offers far more professionally produced content than Peters does.

More Dicks
Lane commended CBS: ” Hats off … for not being dicks this time“ by allowing the recently released fan film, Temporal Anomaly some dispensation from the fan film guidelines, with a runtime of 51 minutes; the guidelines advise no more than 30 minutes total runtime spread over two episodes.

More Jokes
Lane shared one more joke to cajole potential donors to sign up on Patreon: Q. How many Axanar detractors does it take to change a light bulb? A. It doesn’t matter because they’ll never see the light.

MISSING INFORMATION What you see when you follow Alec Peters’ advice to visit the Axanar website to learn how he spent $1.7 million (most of it from donor fans). Luckily, AxaMonitor offers an archived copy for download. Image/Axanar Productions

Don’t Believe Everything You Read on the Internet

Peters told viewers they shouldn’t gullibly accept what other write about him and Axanar on the Internet. people for believing what’s said about him and Axanar on the Internet instead of getting their information directly from him.

For example, he pointed to Axanar’s website: “All the information is there” about Axanar’s financials.” Except it’s not. The avowed “independent” financial report was surreptitiously removed from the site, reportedly at the demand of the chairman of the review committee, who never actually signed off on it.

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