Joe Fordham (born January 1964; age 60) is a Burbank, California, USA-based filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist who authored the reference books Star Trek: First Contact - The Making of the Classic Film and Star Trek: Picard - The Art and Making of the Series.
A prolific writer on the subjects of film-making, animation, and visual effects (VFX), he has contributed articles on an initially free-lance basis to such magazines as American Cinematographer, The Hollywood Reporter, Cinefantastique, and Cinefex. It was for the latter that Fordham had already written three Star Trek specific VFX articles, before he embarked on the Star Trek reference books.
Career[]
Hailing from South-East England, Fordham received his formal education from Jesuits (which he had in common with his idol Alfred Hitchcock), before starting his career as a filmmaker in 1980 with a Super 8 camera. His first Super 8 productions introduced him to a group of amateur independent film makers, who nonetheless managed to earn several awards with their shorts. Switching over to 16mm film, Fordham subsequently produced several shorts for UK mainstream broadcasters BBC and Channel Four. [2]
In 1993 Fordham relocated to Los Angeles, USA and started working as a Hollywood special effects staffer in the employ of Steve Johnson's XFX, Inc. As such he has contributed to genre films like Night of the Demons (1994), Species (1995), Bad Moon (1996), and Species II (1998). This he did for about a decade before turning fulltime to writing which he had taken up as freelancer in 1998. In 2001 he became tenured for the next two decades at Cinefex as an associate editor, for whom he submitted a plethora of VFX articles, which included the three Star Trek-themed ones, until the demise of the magazine in 2021 as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. He already had a major reference book on a genre film production published before the Star Trek titles, the 2014 title Planet of the Apes: The Evolution of the Legend (ISBN 1783291982), he had co-written with Jeff Bond, another Star Trek reference work author. [3]
Fordham has not given up film making entirely, as he continues to produce shorts through his own Flashfilms company, such as the The Twilight Zone-inspired, multi-award winning 2008 short film The Glitch. [4]
Star Trek bibliography[]
- Cinefex
- "A New Enterprise" (on the 2009 Star Trek film), issue 118, pp. 40-71
- "Dark Side of the Earth" (on Star Trek Into Darkness), issue 134, pp. 70-91
- "One Eye on the Stars", (on Star Trek: Picard's first season), issue 171, pp. 14-28
- Star Trek: First Contact - The Making of the Classic Film, October 2022
- Star Trek: Picard - The Art and Making of the Series, February 2024
External links[]
- Flashfilms – official website
- Joe Fordham at the Internet Movie Database
- Joe Fordham at X (formerly Twitter)
- Joe Fordham at LinkedIn.com