German studio Loreley Productions' homemade Star Trek movies started the way many fan projects do, with a simple question: how far can you push this with what you already have?
Around 2020, that meant a small test film, a handful of people, and a lot of improvisation in order to get the first of three Star Trek fan-films off the ground, the latest being Part III: Erstontakt. But even at that stage, the decisions were already leaning toward something more structured than most indie shoots ever get to. “We decided to place our stories in the Kelvin timeline,” explains director of photography and writer Heiko Thies, “because the uniforms and props were much cheaper, but still look pretty screen-accurate.”
That kind of decision-making – not chasing perfect replication, but choosing a visual system that can survive a low-budget reality without falling apart on camera – is key to everything that follows. It's the kind of choice other small film teams and solo filmmakers have had to make; it cropped up when I interviewed a father and son on how they made a Star Wars film in their garage. It turns out both productions relied on new tech, particularly the free app Jetset.
Fast-forward to now, and most of Loreley Productions' work is done with similar tools to Star Wars duo Navaz and Roman Dowling – environments live in Unreal Engine, but they don’t stay locked in post, they’re stripped down, optimised, and pushed through an iPhone running Lightcraft Jetset Cine, which turns a phone into something closer to a live-production lens than a monitor.
iPhone filmmaking
On set, that changes the entire behaviour of filming. “We actually use the iPhone running Jetset as our viewfinder,” Thies says, “as we can see a proxy version of what the shot will look like later on with the virtual environment already in place instead of the green screen.”
So instead of pointing a camera at an empty volume and imagining the world later, the world is already sitting there in a rough, imperfect form. It's enough to block a scene properly, to understand depth, and to stop guessing where “nothing” is supposed to become “something”. That, for Thies and the Loreley Productions team, immediately changes cinematography. “This makes it possible to shoot our scenes just like we were on a real physical set, so the cinematography of much bigger productions can be somewhat imitated and does not feel small and restricted.”
You can feel what Thies means when you look at how he describes blocking using the new technology. "Thanks to Jetset, we can actually see an approximation of what the final shot will look like. This helps us orient ourselves in the virtual world and makes blocking shots much easier," he says, explaining how actors can move through a 'known space'.
"So you don’t run into problems like an actor walking into a wall, or through an obstacle in the scene, or missing a doorway when entering a turbolift,” he says, adding there's a physical hack too, revealing how they rely on traditional grounding like tape marks on the floor – "so they know how and where they can move" – controlled lighting rigs, repeatable setups, but the dominant reference point has shifted, it’s no longer, “we’ll fix this later in post”; it’s “this is already the shot, we’re just capturing it properly”.
Jetset Cine itself has tightened that loop further, bringing closer what used to be a fragmented process between camera, tracking data, and post into something far closer to a unified capture system. “We are now in production of our fourth episode using Jetset Cine,” says Thies, “the Cine version of Jetset takes a lot of these steps and automates them.”
That automation shows up immediately in the way timecode and sync are handled on set. Instead of juggling separate systems, they now run a shared timing structure across devices. “We can now use a Tentacle Sync to record the timecode in both the iPhone in Jetset and on the Sony [A7 IV camera] for the actual footage,” he explains.
The on-set experience has shifted as a result: whereas earlier shoots required constant mental reconciliation between what the main shooting camera saw, the Sony A7 IV, and what the virtual scene was doing, that gap has now been significantly reduced. “Thanks to the Accsoon Seemo 4K, we now have a live preview in Jetset of our Sony, combined with the virtual environment, correctly framed, with the right focal length.”
Solving production problems
That’s a very different proposition from their earlier workflow, which was far more manual and error-prone – almost a calibration exercise before shooting could properly begin. “We had to measure the offset from the sensors of the iPhone and the Sony camera and manually account for that in Unreal Engine,” he says. “And we also had to manually sync the two cameras in post […] a very time-consuming and manual process.”
Now, much of that friction is absorbed by tools like Autoshot, which effectively binds tracked takes and recorded footage together through timecode alignment. “Thanks to Autoshot from Lightcraft, the tracked takes from Jetset and the footage from the Sony are automatically synced up,” they explain. “We can now just select the Sony take in Autoshot […] and Autoshot knows which Jetset take it needs to use.”
In a pipeline like this, that shift is significant: the less time spent reconciling data, the more time there is for compositing, iteration, and creative decision-making, and as that gap closes, “fewer surprises in post” stops being an ideal and becomes a basic requirement for how the system has to work.
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