The next Star Trek film is coming sooner than you think. It's scheduled to wrap production in the fall, at which point it will be edited into a 90-minute feature starring well-known actors and boasting a deep bench of design and production talent.

But this one won't be co-starring Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana.

The latest from J.J. Abrams' high-octane movie reboot franchise is still slated for a painfully distant 2016 release. In the meantime, though, Trek fans have written, produced, and directed their own—funded via Kickstarter.

Star Trek: Axanar will tell the story of the final battle in the war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation—set roughly twenty years before Captain Kirk takes command of the Enterprise, the film pits a new Klingon character, Commander Kharn (not Khan), against the leading Federation commander, Garth of Izar.

The final film is set to be released next year, but Prelude to Axanar—a History Channel-style documentary that features Commander Kharn and Captain Garth of Izar looking back at the epic battle—will premiere Saturday in San Diego during Comic-Con International, screened as part of a Q&A with stars Richard Hatch and Gary Graham as well as producer/creator Alec Peters and director Christian Gossett.

"We're in a time period where there isn't any Star Trek on TV, and people are looking for opportunities," says Peters, who also plays Garth of Izar in the movie. While the current blockbuster films have introduced the characters and Star Trek universe to a new audience, purists are still waiting for hardcore Trek content. "For a lot of Star Trek fans, the J.J. Abrams films are not the Star Trek they grew up with," says Peters.

Axanar, which Peters began writing in 2010, is just the latest in a long line of Star Trek fan productions. Paramount, which owns the franchise, has traditionally allowed these fan-made projects to move forward, as long as they agree not to sell anything—including tickets, merchandise, or copies of the finished film or series. With sales prohibited, funding had always been a limitation for movies like Axanar, but Kickstarter offered a new way to raise a sizable budget. Axanar met its funding goal ten times over, raising more than $100,000—more than enough for Peters to make a studio-quality sizzle reel. Peters hopes Prelude to Axanar will fuel the next round of funding, helping the production reach its target budget of $250,000 for the full feature.

Peters has taken an unlikely path toward producing what he calls this "independent Star Trek film." A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law school grad who passed the North Carolina bar, "film producer" is his fourth or fifth career: he's also coached volleyball at the University of Southern California, started multiple tech companies, and in 2008 created Propworx—a company that acquires and sells items used in major studio productions.

Through Propworx and attending sci-fi and comic conventions, Peters, long a part of Star Trek's passionate fanbase, connected with people who were producing some of the fan films and series. In Axanar, he will be reprising the role of Garth of Izar, having previously played the character in the fan series Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II.

Peters also found an ideal collaborator in director Gossett, who had worked on films ranging from romantic comedies to zombie flicks. "It began when I was seventeen or so doing any old art department work around Los Angeles," says Gossett. "Crazy stuff—lots of studios just making movies in the middle of the night. Very, very unregulated, very non-union little shoots."

In the 1990s, Gossett was hired by Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Licensing to design art for stories set in the Star Wars universe. The Star Wars prequels were in development, and George Lucas "didn't want new stories that would tie his hands. So he said, 'Any new stuff, I want it 4,000 years before Luke Skywalker.' That was deemed safe."

The gig gave Gossett reason to set about learning how Lucas had put together the Star Wars universe, and he jumped at the chance to do similar work in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek world.

The challenge was to "work backward from an alternate future," Gossett says. "If Star Trek was 1966's view of the future, what does 1946's view of the future look like?"

Set in the Star Trek World

Although set before the Captain Kirk era, there will be many familiar elements of Roddenberry's world in Axanar. Garth of Izar, for example, will be familiar to fans of the original Star Trek series as the center of a standout Season 3 episode titled "Whom Gods Destroy." The episode encapsulates the mix of elements that made Star Trek such a beloved and influential show. Kirk, working at his wily best, struggles to get himself and his crew out of a sticky situation. He encounters a green-skinned spacewoman who attempts to seduce him, and the situation is resolved through a combination of wits, battle, and the professionalism of his crew.

In the background of this matinee-worthy story are heavy subjects and themes like mental illness, the lasting scars of war, and the impossibility—even centuries in the future—of creating a perfect society. And along the way, audiences encounter some lines from Shakespeare, while the title of the episode itself references a Longfellow poem.

It's the same balance of weighty subject matter and entertainment that the Axanar team wants to deliver with their film. According to Richard Hatch, who plays Commander Kharn in the movie (and whom audiences are most likely to know from his turn as Tom Zarek on Battlestar Galactica), it's what makes fans so committed to their favorite franchises. Audiences want "fun and humor, but love to have shows that honestly explore those powerful questions most people will ask at some point," Hatch says. "Nothing does that better than great science fiction and fantasy."

Hatch makes a distinction between "true sci-fi" and productions that offer only a "sci-fi veneer." "You don't really bond fans to something superficial or trivial," he says. He was drawn to the production on the strength of a script he believes continues in the tradition of complex characters and moral situations established by series like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. He's not alone. Hatch is joined in the Axanar cast by fellow BSG star Kate Vernon. Also on board is Tony Todd, veteran of three different Star Trek series and dozens of sci-fi productions. And, ultimately, their work—Star Trek: Axanar included—is part of a long tradition.

"The story structure of sci-fi touches people on a deep level," Hatch says. "It's a genre that deals with theoretical possibilities that many of us are facing today and in the future. It's concerned with where we came from, where we're going."