Scene from Star Trek (2009) — Rebooted ... but is JJ Abrams's new Star Trek as good as Star Trek: Phase II?

Enterprise reprised

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Why watch Star Trek and The Lord Of The Rings when you can make your own versions? Alex Godfrey meets the heroes of homemade Hollywood busy juggling their day jobs with some increasingly epic productions

JJ Abrams's cinematic reboot of Star Trek, out on Friday, is already earning praise for returning the tired space franchise to its core values and reinstating the characters that made it great in the first place. But a band of amateur film-makers had been doing that already. Even as Enterprise, Star Trek's final TV incarnation, was limping to the end of its final season in 2005, a team of hardcore fans were quietly producing for themselves the kind of Star Trek episodes they really wanted to see.

James Cawley loved the show when he was a kid, and used to run around with his friends pretending to be Captain Kirk. Later, when he managed to get hold of the set blueprints from the original series, he decided to build a full-size replica of the Enterprise's bridge in this garage; firstly so he could, well, have the Enterprise's bridge in his garage, but also because he had a vague plan to produce his own Star Trek film. With help from his carpenter grandfather, and photo references from the show to ensure every detail was perfect, he embarked on the project on weekends. By this point, he had a lucrative career as an Elvis impersonator, which came in handy as, according to internet reports, the set alone cost him $100,000. "It's probably more like $150,000," he admits. "Although we've been doing it over a period of eight to 10 years now." And this is completely funded by Elvis paycheques? "It's pretty crazy. We have people who have donated money and I don't want to diminish their contributions, but for the most part, yeah."

Fans have been producing their own interpretations of their favourite films for decades, but it took 1997's Troops - a witty and hugely popular 10-minute parody which merged Star Wars with Cops - to kick-start a new wave. Since then the net has spewed up thousands of examples of fans playing dress-up on camera, and while 95% of them are truly unwatchable, the good ones have justifiably recevied the attention they deserve (generally, the studios tolerate fan films, as long as they don't make profit or slander the copyrighted properties). So, when a fellow Trek fan saw Cawley's set and suggested they team up and produce an online series, Cawley went for it, with the intention of creating a show honouring the vision and characters of the original Star Trek. And getting a cast and crew together proved surprisingly easy.

Star Trek: Phase II, named after an aborted 1970s Trek show, picks up where the Shatner series left off. It doesn't look like a fan production at all, despite being filmed in a shuttered New York car dealership. In fact, other than the CGI, it feels exactly like the 1960s Star Trek, from the sets to the performances; dialogue, music, costumes, the works. "We wanted you to be mentally transported back to 1969 as if the show had never been cancelled," says Cawley, who cast himself as Kirk. Unfortunately, for the first couple of episodes Captain Kirk had Elvis hair, and was inevitably mocked for it by viewers. "I tried to make everybody aware that I was performing as Elvis four shows a day at an amusement park, then had to drive home, eat, shower, change clothes then film until 4am, and do that every day for a week," says Cawley. "There was just no way I could do anything else. If I had kept my natural [blond] hair there would have been no income to make the show, so it was a trade-off."

The pilot was strong enough to attract support from Star Trek royalty: Eugene Rodenberry Jr, son of the show's creator, embraced it and now serves as "consulting producer", while - by way of a series of encounters and plaudits - actors from the original series have reprised their roles. Walter Koenig, who returned as Chekov, suggested a storyline that would allow him to play an older, and more insightful, version of the character. That episode was so well received, George Takei came on board to reprise an older Sulu, in a story that had already been written for the aborted 1970s series. His episode, World Enough And Time, was a landmark for the show. It was nominated for a Hugo Award (the sci-fi Oscars) alongside Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who and convinced Buffy creator Joss Whedon to migrate to the net ("It was probably the best episode of the original Star Trek I'd ever seen," he said).

Phase II is, to all intents and purposes, a professional production, the only things missing are an official licence and any profits. And at a cost of around $45,000 per episode, Cawley admits it's a constant emptying of his pockets - a familiar complaint among fan film-makers. "We were trying to do everything we could for the cheapest we possibly could," says Shane Felux, a Virginian graphic designer who made the 40-minute mini-epic Star Wars: Revelations primarily so he could live in the Star Wars world for real, and thought he might be able to get some work out of it if it got enough attention. "I would barter a lot with other businesses, saying, 'If you let us use your 30-foot crane I'll build you a website in exchange.' I had to build so many websites!"

With a $20,000 budget, a crew of 200 and a three-year production, Revelations set new standards for fan films. "Our ambition was to do it the best we possibly could, no holds barred," says Felux. Once he'd got the cash (by way of credit cards and a home equity loan) and shot the film with friends, he used the raw footage to pitch his vision to amateur CGI artists worldwide, who jumped at the chance to showcase their work on something so ambitious, even if it was for free. The results were remarkable, with majestic cityscapes and stunning space battles accentuated by a grandiose score. Alas, the plot (something about a couple of warring women) is poor. Basically, it's great except for the bits which involve humans, but it raised the bar for subsequent productions, such as The Hunt For Gollum, a 45-minute opus based on a story found in the Lord Of The Rings appendices. It was shot with a small crew on a budget of £3,000, but looks like it cost a lot more. "The good thing about being a non-profit fan film is that we get everything for free," says the film's British director, 26-year-old Chris Bouchard. "We don't have to pay for people. All the budget went on the shoot, the props and costumes. Gandalf's beard was ridiculously expensive."

Bouchard shot the film's big set-piece in Epping Forest but tested the water with an initial shoot in north Wales, producing trailers with the footage to drum up interest from helpful parties. "Snowdonia was hard," he remembers. "Very wet and windy. We had problems with sheep getting in shot all the time."

For a trend which began as a bit of fun and games, fan film-making has since become a sizable threat to film studios. "Right now the studios are turning a blind eye", says Clive Young, author of the fan-film book Homemade Hollywood. "But I think that's going to have to change, because someone's gonna make something controversial, like a high-end Superman; one where he goes crazy on Kryptonite and starts killing babies."

But for now, fan film-makers are running riot, and the good ones are being rewarded. Troops' Kevin Rubio is now a writer on George Lucas's The Clone Wars. After Disney saw Revelations, they signed Shane Felux up to direct a TV show called Trenches. And James Cawley's been given the green light to produce an official online Buck Rogers. Phase II has had over 30m downloads, and Cawley is justifiably proud of it: "When one of our episodes premiered, it had more viewers than the Enterprise season premiere that year." Not bad for a bunch of amateurs.