Fan film
Encyclopedia
A fan film is a film
or video
inspired by a film
, television program
, comic book
or a similar source, created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan filmmakers have traditionally been amateur
s, but some of the more notable films have actually been produced by professional filmmakers as film school class projects or as demonstration reels. Fan films vary tremendously in quality, as well as in length, from short faux-teaser trailers for non-existent motion pictures to full-length motion pictures.
According to media scholar, Henry Jenkins
, fan films discussed represent a potentially important third space between the two. Shaped by the intersection between contemporary trends toward media convergence and participatory culture
, these fan films are hybrid by nature—neither fully commercial nor fully alternative.
film series; the only known copy resides in the University of South Carolina's Newsfilm Library. Various amateur filmmakers created their own fan films throughout the ensuing decades, including a teenaged Hugh Hefner
, but the technology required to make fan films was a limiting factor until relatively recently. In the 1960s UCLA film student Don Glut
filmed a series of short black and white "underground films", based on adventure and comic book characters from 1940s and 1950s motion picture serials. Around the same time, artist Andy Warhol
produced a film called Batman Dracula
which could be described as a fan film. But it wasn't until the 1970s that the popularization of science fiction convention
s allowed fans to show their films to the wider fan community.
Most of the more prominent science fiction films and television shows are represented in fan films; these include Star Wars
(see :Category:Star Wars fan films), Star Trek
(see Star Trek fan productions), Doctor Who
(see Doctor Who spin-offs), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see Unofficial Buffy the Vampire Slayer productions). Because fan films generally utilize characters and storylines copyright
ed and trademark
ed by the original filmmakers, they are rarely distributed commercially for legal reasons. They are exhibited by various other methods, including showings at comic book
and science fiction conventions, and distribution as homemade videos, ranging from VHS
videocassettes to CD-ROM
s and DVD
s.
Due to the rise of the Internet
, more and more fan films are being made available online. FanFilms.net provides a general overview, whereas many examples of fan films can be found on dedicated websites such as TheForce.net, which hosts many Star Wars
fan films, as well as BatmanFanFilms.com which hosts dozens of Batman
related fan films, trailers, teasers and screenplays. Many comic book or "super-hero" related fan films are also listed by such sites as Comics2Film.com, and iFilm. There are also many James Bond fan films scattered around Commanderbond.net, MI6.co.uk
, Youtube
and others.
Some fan film productions achieve significant quantity and or quality. For instance, the series Star Trek: Hidden Frontier
produced 50 episodes over seven seasons - compared to only 34 episodes for the 1970s sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica
and Galactica 1980
combined.
Star Trek: New Voyages
started as a fan production, but has since attracted support from several crew and cast members from the different Star Trek series, as well as a wide audience.
Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
, a Finnish feature-length spoof of both Star Trek and Babylon 5, attracted over 4 million downloads and has been released on DVD in several countries, making it possibly the most successful Finnish movie-production to date.
The Lord of the Rings fan film The Hunt for Gollum
debuted at the Sci-Fi-London
film festival in May 2009 and was released on the internet.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
features a small nod to the fan film Return of the Ghostbusters by way of a drawing posted on the wall in the Ghostbusters firehouse headquarters. The child's drawing of a Ghostbuster is signed by a fictional character created in the fan film.
On September 27, 2009, Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy
was released over the internet, a 10,000 Euro production based on Hideo Kojima
's Metal Gear Solid
video game series.
The highest profile of these programs has been Lucasfilm
's Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards
, which used to permit only documentary
, mockumentary
, and parody
entries, while prohibiting serious fan fiction
. However, this restriction was lifted for the 2007 awards. Lucasfilm's limited support and sanction of fan creations is a marked contrast to the attitudes of many other copyright holders, such as Fox Studios, which used a cease and desist letter to close a Max Payne
short that was in production , and MGM, which has been known to force internet-distributed James Bond
fan films offline, too.
Nonetheless, some copyright holders have been known to change their positions concerning fan films. Paramount Pictures
actively pursued legal action against Star Trek
fan films in the 1980s, such as the animated film series Star Trix, and a never completed fan episode spinoff tentatively titled Yorktown2: A Time to Heal starring George Takei
and James Shigeta
. DC Comics
was known to actively discourage the creation of fan movies in the 1990s. In 2008, however, DC Comics changed its tune when its president, Paul Levitz, gave provisional permission to fan filmmakers, stating definitively, "We’re against anything that monetizes our assets and our copyrights without our permission. We are not against things where people use our assets if they don’t do anything monetarily with them." Similarly, Paramount took a more welcoming stance towards fan filmmakers in the 2000s.
Unlike many American TV shows, the British series Doctor Who
allowed its writers to retain the rights to characters and plot elements that they created - most famously with Terry Nation
's Dalek
s. While the BBC has never licensed the character of the Doctor
for use in fan films, a number of the writers have consented to allow the monsters and supporting characters they created to be used in direct-to-video productions (see Doctor Who spin-offs).
The creators of Red Dwarf
sponsored a fan film contest of their own in 2005, inspired by an earlier fan film production in 2001 called Red Dwarf - The Other Movie, with a fairly wide remit ranging from fictional stories set in the Red Dwarf universe to documentaries about the show and its fandom. The two winning shorts were featured in their entirety as bonus features on the Series VIII DVD release, along with a montage of clips from the runner-up entries and a short intro clip from Red Dwarf - The Other Movie. This made them among the first fan films to be commercially released by a property's original creators.
Fan films made without official authorization exist in a legal grey area.
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
or video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
inspired by a film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, television program
Television program
A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...
, comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
or a similar source, created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan filmmakers have traditionally been amateur
Amateur
An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training....
s, but some of the more notable films have actually been produced by professional filmmakers as film school class projects or as demonstration reels. Fan films vary tremendously in quality, as well as in length, from short faux-teaser trailers for non-existent motion pictures to full-length motion pictures.
According to media scholar, Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts...
, fan films discussed represent a potentially important third space between the two. Shaped by the intersection between contemporary trends toward media convergence and participatory culture
Participatory culture
Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers . The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published...
, these fan films are hybrid by nature—neither fully commercial nor fully alternative.
History
The earliest known fan film is Anderson 'Our Gang. which was produced in 1926 by a pair of itinerant filmmakers. Shot in Anderson, South Carolina, the short is based on the Our GangOur Gang
Our Gang, also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals, was a series of American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood children and the adventures they had together. Created by comedy producer Hal Roach, the series is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively...
film series; the only known copy resides in the University of South Carolina's Newsfilm Library. Various amateur filmmakers created their own fan films throughout the ensuing decades, including a teenaged Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner
Hugh Marston "Hef" Hefner is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.-Early life:...
, but the technology required to make fan films was a limiting factor until relatively recently. In the 1960s UCLA film student Don Glut
Donald F. Glut
Donald F. Glut is an American writer, motion picture director, screenwriter, amateur paleontologist, musician and actor....
filmed a series of short black and white "underground films", based on adventure and comic book characters from 1940s and 1950s motion picture serials. Around the same time, artist Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
produced a film called Batman Dracula
Batman Dracula
Batman Dracula is a American film that was produced and directed by Andy Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics.-Production background:The film was screened only at his art exhibits...
which could be described as a fan film. But it wasn't until the 1970s that the popularization of science fiction convention
Science fiction convention
Science fiction conventions are gatherings of fans of various forms of speculative fiction including science fiction and fantasy. Historically, science fiction conventions had focused primarily on literature, but the purview of many extends to such other avenues of expression as movies and...
s allowed fans to show their films to the wider fan community.
Most of the more prominent science fiction films and television shows are represented in fan films; these include Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
(see :Category:Star Wars fan films), Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
(see Star Trek fan productions), Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
(see Doctor Who spin-offs), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see Unofficial Buffy the Vampire Slayer productions). Because fan films generally utilize characters and storylines copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
ed and trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
ed by the original filmmakers, they are rarely distributed commercially for legal reasons. They are exhibited by various other methods, including showings at comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
and science fiction conventions, and distribution as homemade videos, ranging from VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
videocassettes to CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
s and DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s.
Due to the rise of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, more and more fan films are being made available online. FanFilms.net provides a general overview, whereas many examples of fan films can be found on dedicated websites such as TheForce.net, which hosts many Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
fan films, as well as BatmanFanFilms.com which hosts dozens of Batman
Batman
Batman is a fictional character created by the artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. A comic book superhero, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 , and since then has appeared primarily in publications by DC Comics...
related fan films, trailers, teasers and screenplays. Many comic book or "super-hero" related fan films are also listed by such sites as Comics2Film.com, and iFilm. There are also many James Bond fan films scattered around Commanderbond.net, MI6.co.uk
MI6.co.uk
MI6-HQ.com is a media-website dedicated to the people, places and world of James Bond, providing daily updates on the subject.- About :MI6-HQ.com publishes original, in-depth articles and intercepts a comprehensive collection of news headlines involving all aspects of the world of James Bond,...
, Youtube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
and others.
Some fan film productions achieve significant quantity and or quality. For instance, the series Star Trek: Hidden Frontier
Star Trek: Hidden Frontier
Star Trek: Hidden Frontier was a Star Trek fan film project. Produced on digital video, the show's sets are almost completely virtual, using a green-screen chroma keyed process to place performers into virtual settings....
produced 50 episodes over seven seasons - compared to only 34 episodes for the 1970s sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica (1978 TV series)
Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction television series, created by Glen A. Larson. It starred Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict and ran for one season in 1978–79. After cancellation, its story was continued in 1980 as Galactica 1980 with Adama, Lieutenant Boomer and...
and Galactica 1980
Galactica 1980
Galactica 1980 is a science fiction television series, and a spin-off from the 1978–1979 series Battlestar Galactica. It was first broadcast on the ABC network in the United States from January 27 to May 4, 1980.-Development:...
combined.
Star Trek: New Voyages
Star Trek: New Voyages
Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II is a fan-created science fiction series set in the Star Trek universe. The series was created by James Cawley and Jack Marshall in April 2003...
started as a fan production, but has since attracted support from several crew and cast members from the different Star Trek series, as well as a wide audience.
Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is a 2005 motion picture produced by five friends in a two-room flat with a small budget and the support of a few hundred fans and dozens of acquaintances. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is the seventh production in the Star Wreck movie series, the first of professional...
, a Finnish feature-length spoof of both Star Trek and Babylon 5, attracted over 4 million downloads and has been released on DVD in several countries, making it possibly the most successful Finnish movie-production to date.
The Lord of the Rings fan film The Hunt for Gollum
The Hunt for Gollum
The Hunt for Gollum is a 2009 British fantasy fan film directed by Chris Bouchard and based on the appendices of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The plot of the film is set in Middle-earth, when the wizard Gandalf the Grey fears that Gollum may reveal information about the One Ring to...
debuted at the Sci-Fi-London
Sci-Fi-London
SCI-FI-LONDON , is a UK based film festival, dedicated to the science fiction and fantasy genres, which began in 2002.-About the Festival:...
film festival in May 2009 and was released on the internet.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a 2009 cross-platform action game based on the Ghostbusters film franchise. Terminal Reality developed the Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 versions, while Red Fly Studio developed the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and Wii versions, and Zen Studios...
features a small nod to the fan film Return of the Ghostbusters by way of a drawing posted on the wall in the Ghostbusters firehouse headquarters. The child's drawing of a Ghostbuster is signed by a fictional character created in the fan film.
On September 27, 2009, Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy
Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy
Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy is a 2009 non-profit fan made movie series created by , a team of Italian students and filmmakers. It is a film based on the highly successful Metal Gear video game series...
was released over the internet, a 10,000 Euro production based on Hideo Kojima
Hideo Kojima
is a Japanese game director originally employed at Konami. He is currently the director of Kojima Productions and was promoted to Vice President of Konami Digital Entertainment in early 2011...
's Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid
is a videogame by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and first published by Konami in 1998 for the PlayStation video game console. It is the sequel to Kojimas early MSX2 computer games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake...
video game series.
Authorized fan films
Until relatively recently, fan films operated under the radar of the commercial operations, but the explosion of fan productions brought about by affordable consumer equipment and animation programs, along with the ease of distribution created by the Internet has prompted several studios to create official policies and programs regarding their existence.The highest profile of these programs has been Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
's Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards
The Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards
The Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards is an annual contest put forth by Lucasfilm and AtomFilms to showcase and acknowledge the growing genre of fan films made by, for, and about fans of the Star Wars saga. The inaugural contest in 2002 was the first time Lucasfilm had officially sanctioned the...
, which used to permit only documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
, mockumentary
Mockumentary
A mockumentary , is a type of film or television show in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format. These productions are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues by using a fictitious setting, or to parody the documentary form itself...
, and parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
entries, while prohibiting serious fan fiction
Fan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
. However, this restriction was lifted for the 2007 awards. Lucasfilm's limited support and sanction of fan creations is a marked contrast to the attitudes of many other copyright holders, such as Fox Studios, which used a cease and desist letter to close a Max Payne
Max Payne
Max Payne is a BAFTA Award–winning third-person shooter video game developed by Finnish developers Remedy Entertainment and published by Gathering of Developers in July 2001 for Microsoft Windows. Ports created later in the year for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and the GameBoy Advance were published by...
short that was in production , and MGM, which has been known to force internet-distributed James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
fan films offline, too.
Nonetheless, some copyright holders have been known to change their positions concerning fan films. Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
actively pursued legal action against Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
fan films in the 1980s, such as the animated film series Star Trix, and a never completed fan episode spinoff tentatively titled Yorktown2: A Time to Heal starring George Takei
George Takei
George Hosato Takei Altman is an American actor, author, social activist and former civil politician. He is best known for his role in the television series Star Trek and its film spinoffs, in which he played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the...
and James Shigeta
James Shigeta
James Shigeta is an American film and television actor. He is also a standards singer, musical theatre and nightclub performer, and recording artist. He is a Nisei or second-generation American of Japanese ancestry.-Early life:...
. DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
was known to actively discourage the creation of fan movies in the 1990s. In 2008, however, DC Comics changed its tune when its president, Paul Levitz, gave provisional permission to fan filmmakers, stating definitively, "We’re against anything that monetizes our assets and our copyrights without our permission. We are not against things where people use our assets if they don’t do anything monetarily with them." Similarly, Paramount took a more welcoming stance towards fan filmmakers in the 2000s.
Unlike many American TV shows, the British series Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
allowed its writers to retain the rights to characters and plot elements that they created - most famously with Terry Nation
Terry Nation
Terry Nation was a Welsh screenwriter and novelist.He is probably best known for creating the villainous Daleks in the long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who...
's Dalek
Dalek
The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Within the series, Daleks are cyborgs from the planet Skaro, created by the scientist Davros during the final years of a thousand-year war against the Thals...
s. While the BBC has never licensed the character of the Doctor
Doctor (Doctor Who)
The Doctor is the central character in the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who, and has also featured in two cinema feature films, a vast range of spin-off novels, audio dramas and comic strips connected to the series....
for use in fan films, a number of the writers have consented to allow the monsters and supporting characters they created to be used in direct-to-video productions (see Doctor Who spin-offs).
The creators of Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf is a British comedy franchise which primarily comprises eight series of a television science fiction sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999 and Dave from 2009–present. It gained cult following. It was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, who also wrote the first six series...
sponsored a fan film contest of their own in 2005, inspired by an earlier fan film production in 2001 called Red Dwarf - The Other Movie, with a fairly wide remit ranging from fictional stories set in the Red Dwarf universe to documentaries about the show and its fandom. The two winning shorts were featured in their entirety as bonus features on the Series VIII DVD release, along with a montage of clips from the runner-up entries and a short intro clip from Red Dwarf - The Other Movie. This made them among the first fan films to be commercially released by a property's original creators.
Fan films made without official authorization exist in a legal grey area.