Fan films are becoming more popular, intricate and inventive, as I discovered recently when the small team at German studio Loreley Productions shared how they used Unreal Engine and an iPhone-powered virtual production workflow to make a trilogy of Star Trek fan films.
But behind the fun on-screen, there’s a workload equal to that of a modern production, where simply surviving the day can be a challenge, especially when Loreley’s recent YouTube film, Erstkontakt, featured around 300 VFX shots, all handled by two people – director Benjamin Schulz and director of photography Heiko Thies – in post-production. “We are only two people in post production,” they say. “So yes, you have to be borderline crazy.”
The films are set in the Star Trek universe, feature an Einstein-class USS starship, and follow the adventures of Loreley’s own fictional Captain Jason McClane in the 23rd century. That alone is ambitious, but the interesting part isn't really the workload, but how little of it gets repeated. Heiko Thies reveals how everything runs through DaVinci Resolve and Blackmagic Fusion, but there's almost a stubborn refusal from the team to overcomplicate things. "We don't use any special naming conventions," explains Thies. "Just the file names of the original Sony material."
It sounds almost too simple, but that’s the point, and that’s how a small team can achieve big results. Every shot follows the same path, every render keeps the same identity, and nobody is wasting time trying to keep an elaborate asset management system alive. Fusion handles most of the compositing, because once a comp exists, it rarely needs to be rebuilt. "The advantage of the node-based workflow," Thies says, "is we can just copy the complete node tree from one shot to the next, just switch out the loader and saver nodes, tweak a few nodes […] and be done with the general compositing."
The same thinking runs through the rest of the pipeline. Shots are duplicated inside Resolve, converted into Fusion Connect clips, composited in Fusion Studio, then dropped straight back into the edit. "When a shot is done, it gets rendered out from there and is automatically refreshed in Resolve," Thies explains. "This makes working on the timeline a breeze, as we do not have any render times within Resolve, so watching the current cut of the movie with already done VFX is always possible."
Nothing really exists in isolation either, as Thies shares how Unreal Engine renders linear EXR sequences that feed back into Fusion, lighting setups stay deliberately consistent from one shoot day to the next, and because everything sticks with the original filenames created in the Sony A7 IV camera, every part of the pipeline already knows where it's supposed to be. In a small studio like Loreley, managing a heavy workload is less about building a sophisticated VFX pipeline or replicating how a large movie team would work, and more about making sure every piece fits together without anyone having to think about it twice.
I find the biggest surprise for Loreley’s pipeline is when post-production actually begins. "We always begin with a rough cut of the movie," Thies says. "We're already starting while we are still shooting the movie." Every shoot day ends the same way: footage and Jetset tracking data are imported that night, rough cuts are assembled almost immediately, and the edit gradually fills out as production progresses. If something's missing, if continuity slips, if a camera move doesn't work, they find out while everyone's still on set rather than six weeks later.
"If there are any problems," he adds, "we can immediately do another take to make sure we get it right, so there are no bad surprises later on in post."
That's what I see as really holding the whole thing together, across the four fan film productions, but notably the two recent movies – Part II: Monster (2024) and Part III (2025) – is that Loreley isn't trying to recreate a sprawling studio pipeline, but one that's been stripped back until almost nothing is wasted. Every shot starts from something that's already been solved, which leaves two people free to spend their time making 300 VFX shots look better instead of figuring out how to build them all over again.
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