Picard Hosts the Worst Meeting in Starfleet History (Zoom Call #2)

Following the disastrous first attempt at remote working aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-D, Captain Jean-Luc Picard insisted on scheduling a follow-up Zoom meeting shortly after an epic battle with The Borg.

This time, he arrived with an honorable agenda and, thanks to Geordi, stable wifi. Unfortunately the meeting still unravelled and quickly descended into:
✅ Casual Friday compliance disputes
✅ Borg-related banter at the Captain's expense, and
✅ Questionable uniform standards (mostly below the waist)

Starfleet Command has since resigned itself to the reality that these meetings will continue to surface — an ongoing chronicle of the Federation’s least effective experiment in remote work.

Zoom Call 1 ⭐    • Captain Picard and His Crew Try to Work Fr...  
Worf on Casual Friday ⭐    • Worf on Casual Friday  

#parody #startrek

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For avoidance of any doubt, AI was obviously used in the making of this video (and I'm not referring to Data). Original Star Trek content is property of Paramount.

I described the process of making this video in Part 1 so I won't repeat that all here. But I did want to share a few more behind-the-scenes details for the creatively curious.

Script writing is always the most time-consuming from a duration of time perspective. I spent the past three weeks mulling over every line of dialogue, pacing around my house reciting lines out loud to my family's amusement.

I tried to improve voice quality this time around (played with a lot of de-noising effects in Audacity) and I tried a different voice model for Data which I think is better.

On the video generation, as I've mentioned before I use open-source offline tools such as Wan. But what I haven't mentioned is how long these take to make. I leave my PC running overnight for anywhere between 4-8 hours to generate 10-20 clips that are between 5-10 seconds long each. And I repeated that process for 7 days to generate all the clips for this video. That might sound like a lot, but anyone who's tried this will know that many of the clips are unusable because the AI doesn't always get it right. Without a much more powerful PC (or the luxury of doing this full-time) there's just no way I can churn these out faster, for now.

Lastly, a special call out to commenter @MariusMooore who gave me the inspiration for the Riker pants bit. Thanks to you I now have to explain to my wife why I have dozens of AI-generated videos of Riker in his underpants. And also shout-out to commenters @onmyworkbench7000 and @Thursdayschildfar2go who seemingly, independently, also arrived at the conclusion that Riker doesn't wear pants on these calls. Well done.

Hope you all enjoy and LLAP 🖖