Getting the whole thing on-average is a bit tricky, since every episode has been different thus far. SO LET ME BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU:

We’ve got a writers’ room pool of four, three of us who break apart and write the individual episodes. For each episode, we’ve had about two or three writers’ room meetings over Skype, each lasting about two hours each, half of which was spent debating future episodes we weren’t even writing yet (since minor things crop up to cause us to shuffle things around for continuity’s sake). Since I had written up an outline for Season One already - a fanfic story I had originally written for my fiancée’s birthday - and had written a couple basic chapters, the first three episodes were rough adaptations from prose to script. As such, the writing didn’t take all that long, maybe about two hours with frequent sanity breaks? Episodes Four and Five weren’t adapted from chapters, so it took longer. Mine was about three solid hours of writing and rewriting and tweaking after the writers’ room meetings and revisions, and I don’t know how long Noel’s took.

From there, the scripts went to casting. New roles are posted, and the auditions are shared between the four of us for a decision, which usually doesn’t take all that long.

After that, scripts are sent out to the actors, who don’t tell me how long they practice their lines before recording, so I have to estimate them taking anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours per episode, depending on the number of lines they have and how many takes they want to do.

The real length of time comes from the editing.

To make editing faster, I have folders of pre-saved soundclips and background music, which I usually pull from first before seeking out (or making myself) individual sounds. This saves time from internet searches; especially since as a free fan-project I can use the media from Star Trek directly.

Editing itself is slow. There are multiple methods for editing, including putting the lines together first and adding sound effects and music afterwards, but I like to do it all in one pass. It makes it a longer process for me, but it gives me an idea of how things will sound together, instead of tweaking after the fact. I usually spend a couple hours a day for a week putting together the final episode, and listening through a couple times before final posting. Since I have zero control over the actor’s recording conditions, most of the time is spent balancing audio and cleaning up background noise, though Audacity has built-in tools and downloadable plugins with macros to speed this along.

Episode Five will be edited starting this week, and I’ll be documenting the process even further.