Fan Cinema Today

This is one of those ‘you gotta see it to believe it’ situations. The German Star Wars fan film, Tydirium, has been in on-again / off-again production for years, keeping such a low profile that most fan film fans thought the project had been abandoned. Nope—instead, the filmmakers were building a massive set: the interior of a Star Destroyer. The results are nothing short of phenomenal. Read the rest of this entry »

American mass-entertainment has a stranglehold on fan films. I mean, amateur tribute flicks are made all over the world, as noted just the other day when I wrote about the Australian fan flick Suburban Knights, but generally, if a franchise is getting a homemade rendition from a fan, odds are that it’s an American franchise…unless you’re talking about Doctor Who.

While the long-running BBC show has a presence in the U.S. on SciFi Channel and has a legion of followers in this country, Doctor Who is an undeniably English creation, and simply doesn’t have the following in the U.S. that, say, Battlestar Galactica does (or even my late, lamented pet series, Journeyman). It’s ironic then, that due to that gap of awareness, most U.S. fan film followers don’t realize that Dr. Who is the subject of more fan films than any other franchise except for Star Wars. So then—where to enter the world of the legendary show’s fan films? Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I mentioned The Hunt For Gollum, a slick, 30-minute Lord of the Rings fan film that’s being shot in the U.K. The folks behind it have been working away on the project for ages, and now the end is  in sight; the film will hit the internet in December, 2008, and in preparation, they released a new trailer for the flick. It looks lovely—how cool must it have been to wander around in some of those places? Read the rest of this entry »

Homemade Hollywood---Advanced Reader Copy

My book about fan films doesn’t come out until September, but the “Advance Reader Copies” of Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera went out last week to critics and writers in mainstream media around the country. I’ve been working on it on and off for 10 years, and the other day, my ARC arrived in the mail. It was a happy time.

ARCs are made from the uncorrected proofs, so this version contains mistakes, writing I later touched up and a few items that I ultimately cut for various reasons. It’s kind of like screening your rough edit for the critics of the world instead of getting to show them the final cut with the completed soundtrack, final effects and so forth. As a result, I’m a little frustrated that I can’t put my best foot forward, but uncorrected proofs are standard practice in the publishing business. It doesn’t matter anyway—if people don’t like it based on what’s in the book now, they ain’t never gonna like it, even when the spit-polished version hits Amazon and a bookstore near you in a few weeks. In the meantime—yay! A book!

In the wake of San Diego Comic Con, I put FCT on a week-long moratorium when it came to anything related to Star Wars, The Dark Knight or the SDCC; needed to cleanse the palate a bit, ’cause eating too much hype ain’t good for you. Now we’re going to re-introduce those topics to our fan film diet; first up, a wild wonder from Down Under.

What is it with fan films from the Southern Hemisphere? You don’t see a lot of them, but when they turn up, they’re always—and I mean always—impressive. New Zealand coughed up the ultimate Matrix fan film, The Fanimatrix, and even tiny New Caldonia can say it is the home to the popular Iron Man fan film that came out early this year. Now, in addition to the Firefly flick, Waiting for Serenity, and the classic Star Wars shorts, The Dark Redemption and Bounty Trail, Australia can add the foul-mouthed, funny Suburban Knights to its collection of homegrown fan films. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s say you’re making a parody fan film and you decide to produce it in a way that would let you legally release and distribute it so that you could make some money from your hard work. The key would be to make sure you don’t violate anyone else’s copyrights.

You change the characters’ names just so, and come up with a script that gently comments on your intended target, thus making your flick a ‘transformative work’ that would pass a ‘fair use’ test.
Read the rest of this entry »

Zach Smith of Pinback

Few franchises would appear rail harder against the values of early Punk than Star Trek, and not just ’cause Spock gave the mohawk dude a Vulcan neck pinch in Star Trek 4 (the one where they save the whales in 1980s San Francisco). There’s a basic disconnect all along the line: Order (military life in a Federation Starship) vs. Disorder (tour life in a crappy van); Aliens (hot chicks with green skin) vs. Groupies (hot chicks with green hair); Spock’s high-class harp vs. a decal-emblazoned Fender Squier electric; and so forth.

At the end of the day though, you like what you like and cretinous scenemakers be damned—which (conjecturing here) may be why Zach Smith, bassist for Touch & Go label stalwarts Pinback, loves Star Trek, so much so that he once even made a fan film, as revealed in an article, “Let Your Geek Flags Fly,” that ran in the San Diego CityBeat paper last week. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all seen fan films that simply don’t do justice to a popular movie franchise, but there’s also been plenty of feature films that revitalized some terrible movie series too. So here’s the $1.98 Question: Can a fan film revive a franchise that’s been almost unanimously hated from the start? Alex Popov is hoping the answer is “Yes” as he works steadily on Aliens Vs. Predator: Redemption.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some small fan film-related items today:

STAR TREK FAN FILM ZINE
Don’t know how I never heard of this before, but you might want to take a look at Trekkie Central, a downloadable zine in .PDF format for Trek fan film fans. Its website is a bit of a mess, but clearly this is someone’s labor of love. The current issue focuses solely on the late fan series, Hidden Frontier, and the next one, issue 7 (shown in the photo), is due out soon.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this is a new wrinkle. There’s fan films, and then there’s fan fiction (fanfic), and never the twain shall meet right? Usually, but not this time. Turns out there’s a new fan film being made, James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing, and it’s based on a Harry Potter fanfic novel.
Read the rest of this entry »