Chapter 2
Moving Images:
Fan Filmmakers and Vidders
Since the invention of motion picture cameras in the 1890s, creators have been fascinated with capturing stories on film. The tools needed to do so have steadily gotten smaller, cheaper, and easier to use: a new filmmaker can get started with nothing more than a smartphone and an Internet connection. And many, many people do participate in video making (although not all of them are fans). About 65 percent of youth have uploaded a video online, according to Google. About 25 percent do so regularly. Fan video makers, or vidders, produce many types of video arts, whether original work or a remix of work that already exists.
The most popular and common fanvids are fan music videos, or song vids: clips of film footage from a TV show or movie edited and set to a song. For example, anime music videos are clips from Japanese animation set to music. Fanvids may also be meta, including reviews and commentary on how mass media handles social issues.
Vidders make anime music videos, or AMVs, by fitting clips from a show or shows to the lyrics and music of a song. AMVs might remix sources, mash them up, or just celebrate a favorite fandom.
Other fan filmmakers re-create their favorite media. These may be as simple as kids acting out Star Wars in their backyard or as complex as fan productions with professional-quality sets, costumes, and actors. As filmmaking tools have become smaller and easier to use, fans have moved in two directions, some making short and quick-to-make vids, such as microvids only seconds in length, and others making longer productions, including full-length films. Fan editors work with the original media to change, restore, or add material.
Early Fan Films
Self-taught artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) created the first-known fanvid––or, as film historians call it, a repurposed, remixed work of avant-garde cinema. Cornell was a film fan, going to the movies almost daily near his home in Queens, New York, and making sophisticated collages of his favorite actresses from photos in movie magazines. He also collected early films and bought discarded film footage from junk dealers who sold it for its silver content. In 1936 Cornell made his first reedited film, Rose Hobart, by cutting up film from the low-budget adventure movie East of Borneo (1931) and rearranging its seventy-seven minutes of footage into seventeen minutes featuring its star, Rose Hobart. He first showed his film at an art gallery, projecting it through a blue filter at a slow speed, which gave it a dreamy quality. He accompanied it with up-tempo music from a record called Holiday in Brazil. Cornell went on to make about thirty short films of collaged clips from old Hollywood movies and found film footage. His film, paper, and sculptural collages had more effect on the art world than on pop culture, however.
The Birth of a Fan Art Form
Filmmaker Allan Kohl made Stinko: The Sewage Eating Monster and other films with his 8mm film camera. He went on to become an art librarian and historian.
Amateur filmmakers invented the idea of tribute movies, in which they remake a film in their own, usually low-budget, way. For about eighty years, until the invention of home video players, the only way to see movies on demand after their theater run was to rent the heavy, fragile film reels from studios. Allan Kohl, who was a teenager in the early 1960s, joined other students in his high school’s Cinema Appreciation Club in raising money to rent movies and show them using their school’s projector. Then, with money from babysitting and yard work, he and a few friends bought an 8mm film camera to make their own versions of films they liked.
Inspired by movies about radiation-spawned monsters, such as Godzilla, the Japanese King of the Monsters, Kohl set out to make his own live-action movie: Stinko: The Sewage Eating Monster. “We made Stinko’s head out of papier-mâché over chicken wire,” Kohl said, “with Ping-Pong balls for eyes.” Filmmaking was expensive and time consuming. “You couldn’t see what you were filming,” Kohl said. “You sent the film off to the developers and waited ten days to see if it worked.”
If it worked, the long strips of film had to be cut apart and the different shots pieced together into one movie. Kohl recalls, “I cut the film with a pair of scissors and then pasted the ends together with film cement. I had to hold down each splice on the editing block for two or three minutes to let it dry. Stinko was approximately forty-five minutes long, more or less. Each showing might take longer because the film often broke at the splices.” Kohl showed the film several times to friends and family. Without any way to distribute it further, he retired it to the basement.
Star Trek, with its large, diverse, and networked fan base, was responsible for another burst of fanvid production. In 1975, thirty years before YouTube, Star Trek fan Kandy Fong created what many consider the first fan music vid. She did not have the equipment to make a moving-picture film. Video cassette recorders (VCRs) were newly available for home use at the time but were still a costly luxury. She made her fanvid with slides of still images instead.
Fong had met her future husband, John Fong, at a newly formed Star Trek fan club in 1974. Among his prized Trek memorabilia were shoeboxes full of clipped and discarded film from Star Trek’s editing room. Fong recalled, “We really needed something different to show at a club meeting. There was a popular filk [fan folk] song ‘What do you do with a Drunken Vulcan,’ and I suggested that we pick out pieces of film that seemed to go with the song. Several of the club members and I used a cassette to record the song. John made the film pieces into slides so we could show it at a club meeting. I would follow the words along in a script and ‘click’ the single projector at certain words. It was very popular.” Fong went on to show this and other fanvids she made at dozens of Trek cons. Her work inspired other fans to make and show their own vids.
The VCR Era
As VCRs became more affordable in the 1980s, vidders taught one another how to edit TV shows and movies into vids. Then they shared their work for free among their friends, at conventions, and even by mail. Like fic, fanvids make transformative, fair use of copyrighted material. Even without the legal restriction on making a profit from copyrighted material, fan culture has always been what anthropologists (people who study human beings) call a gift culture. Participants freely share their knowledge and creations without expecting anything in return.
Vid making with VCRs was laborious. In 1990 three female fans from the vidding group the California Crew filmed the actual process, creating a metavid (a vid that comments on fandom) about meeting in a member’s home to make a vid one weekend before a con. First, they browse a pile of videotaped episodes of the TV show Quantum Leap (1989–1993). The hero of this time-travel show could appear as people of different ages, genders, and races, making it perfect for fanworks.
Then the crew members carefully choose scenes, noting the location and length of each on paper. One of the vidders has lugged her 40-pound (18 kg) VCR with her and plugged it into her friend’s VCR. After they choose all the scenes and calculate the times with a stopwatch, the crew plays each scene on one VCR and records it on the other. Since there’s no way to edit the final vid, they must play the clips in the order they will appear. The audio track—the song “Pressure,” by Billy Joel—is laid down last, a stopwatch ensuring that the song and video sync up. The vidders take a humorous view, showing themselves falling asleep at the worktable, empty soda cans piled nearby.
The early vidding community was close-knit and made up of mostly women and girls. A fan had to hunt around to figure out how to get involved. Vidders met and kept in touch by mail. They showed their fanvids and shared vid-making techniques at small, fan-run cons. When Internet access became widely available in the 1990s, communication moved to e-mail, forums, and mailing lists. However, there was still no good way to share video online. Vids were still shared at cons, person to person, and in the mail. A British fan who goes by daisiestdaisy recalled how much fans depended on one another, “pre-YouTube, pre-Google, pre-broadband, pre-DVDs even.” As a fan of the 1970s US buddy-cop show Starsky & Hutch, long popular with slash fans, she said, “I only got to see the show at all because someone I knew from a fandom mailing list copied six of her favorite episodes onto a VHS tape and mailed them to me from the US, which still amazes me with how generous that was.”
Not long before the launch of YouTube in 2005, nineteen-year-old Gary Brolsma made the first video that went viral online. He filmed himself dancing in his desk chair, lip-synching to a peppy Romanian pop song. Brolsma posted his video, “Numa Numa Dance,” to Newgrounds, a site that mostly hosted Flash animation. “The video was originally intended to make a few friends laugh by just goofing off,” he recalled. “I decided to throw it up on Newgrounds just for the heck of it, thinking it would be ‘blammed’ (automatically deleted for a low scoring video). Little did I know it would wind up featured on their homepage and explode in views.”
The New York Times marveled at the vid’s two million views, unheard of at the time for an online video. (Eventually it reached more than seven hundred million views.) TV news vans turned up outside Brolsma’s house. Journalist Diane Sawyer commented on her TV program Good Morning America, “Who knows where this will lead?”
The ability to share videos online led to a global wave of innovation and connectivity, much of it hosted on YouTube. One of the earliest viral hits on YouTube was Potter Puppet Pals (PPP), a series of vids featuring simple puppets of Harry Potter characters, manipulated by teenager Neil Cicierega and friends in an old-fashioned puppet show. Their most popular appearance is in the two-minute video “The Mysterious Ticking Noise” (2007). In it, Professor Snape hears a ticking noise and soon finds himself chanting his name in time to the rhythm. Other characters join in for a catchy name rap. One decade and 173 million views later, the Potter Puppet Pals continue to draw Harry Potter fans. In 2016, after the death of Alan Rickman—the actor who played Snape in the blockbuster film adaptations of the books—more than one hundred commenters on “Ticking Noise” said they’d rewatched it upon hearing the news. Commenter Bella Montoya wrote, “The fact that we all came here [to the vid] makes me not feel so alone.”
As It Should Be
Three years after YouTube went live, anthropologist Michael Wesch presented a talk to the Library of Congress about the video-sharing platform. Its participatory culture, he said, led to “new forms of expression and new forms of community and new forms of identity emerging.” As an example, he played one of the first multifandom vids, “Us,” a mashup of clips from more than thirty media sources, from Angel to X-Men, by a vidder who goes by lim. A tribute to the fandom community—that is, “us”—it included fan-specific references such as images of piles of books about fandom topics. Lim edited the clips heavily, sometimes adding special effects frame by frame. “‘Us’ is one of the most poetic statements,” Wesch said, about how “we can remix this culture that is being thrown at us. We can take it [make it their own], and throw it back.”
In her notes on the making of “Us,” lim commented on the criticism that like many vids, hers features mostly male characters. This reflects how few good female roles exist in films and TV, lim pointed out, explaining, “I wanted to say how unhappy I am, in general, with representations of women in media, and how little I identify with most of them.” She made vids featuring Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, she said, not because she wanted to marry him but because she wanted to play an active role in the universe, as he does.
A thread running through fandom has long been the desire to re-present a source “as it should have been”—whether that’s a personal vision of how a story or relationship should have gone or a broader vision of what a story world would look like without social inequalities. Jonathan McIntosh made his humorous 2009 vid “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed” as a feminist critique of the Twilight series. His six-minute vid builds a new story out of two different vampire series, the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Twilight movies. Buffy is a human high school student who kills vampires. Edward from the Twilight series is a sulky vampire who attends high school. In canon, Edward treats his girlfriend Bella in a way the author intends to be romantic. But McIntosh replaces Bella’s smitten responses with reaction cuts of Buffy’s sensible ones, showing Edward’s actions as just plain creepy. In one scene, Edward follows someone down a dark street; reaction cut to Buffy on a dark street, saying that being stalked doesn’t turn girls on. Later, Edward breaks into Bella’s bedroom and watches her sleep; Buffy wakes up and pushes him out the window. Finally, Buffy settles the matter with a stake. The video received millions of views and a nomination for a Webby Award, which honors excellence on the Internet.
Shipping is as popular with vidders as it is with fic writers. It offers another way fans can re-present relationships as they might work without social obstacles. “I make vids from a place of longing,” said twenty-four-year-old Milkweedy. Her OTP (one true pairing) is the two male cops from the 1970s’ Starsky & Hutch, which still has small but loyal fandom. She said, “I feel that the way I see them is the reality, and the show itself is sketches.” On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a fundamental right, recognizing the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. When she heard the news, Milkweedy said, “I really felt, Oh, great, now Starsky and Hutch can get married! I stayed up all night making a vid.” The vid she posted two days later, “Starsky & Hutch: The Wedding,” tells a new story by remixing clips from the show of the two men choosing a ring, trying on tuxedos, greeting family members at the airport, opening presents at what appears to be a wedding shower, and even doing a practice walk down the aisle. Set to the song “When We Get Married” by Larry Graham, the edit makes it appear the men are marrying each other.
Athena, a fan of the gory TV series The Walking Dead, created what fans call a shipping manifesto. In her vid, “101 Reasons to Ship Carol + Daryl (The Walking Dead),” she lays out the reasons they ship characters by remixing clips of the two characters and sets them to a song (“Shallows,” by Daughter), and then she spells it out in subtitles, from “1. They’ve both suffered,” to “101” the way Daryl hugs Carol “like he’ll never let her go.” More than three hundred commenters agreed, with many adding more reasons. In the video’s comment section, Lilly Wayne jumped ahead to “Reason 112 They stay forever together.”
Film-It-Yourself
Fans not only remix footage of media sources, they also create their own. Dancer, director, choreographer, and YouTuber Todrick Hall creates innovative musical videos, using pop music medleys to retell familiar tales. “Britney and the Beast” retells the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” with Britney Spears lyrics, and “Taylor in Wonderland” sets Alice in Wonderland to Taylor Swift tunes. One of his most viewed videos is “Cinderoncé,” with black performers dancing the story of Cinderella as told through Beyoncé’s music. Ladies in ball gowns dance to a song about wanting a wedding ring, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” at the ball where Cinderoncé meets Prince Charming. They fall in love dancing to the romantic song “1+1.” The video has more than five million views.
As digital use moved from desktop and laptop computers to mobile devices such as smartphones, vid making shifted to forms that are easier to make and faster to view. Bite-sized videos of ten seconds or less are popular on sites such as Instagram. The 2016 song “Store,” by Carly Rae Jepsen, became the soundtrack to a burst of these supershort videos. The song is about ending a relationship by saying you’re going to the store. Vidders dubbed the chorus over shots of people strutting down the street to a store, dancing in grocery carts, and so forth. Jepsen herself reposted a mini-fanvid that set her song to a clip from the 1987 romantic comedy film Mannequin.
Fast and easy to make, microvideos can react almost instantly to the media of the moment. Fans apply the form to old-school media too. For instance, Colleen Evanson is a longtime fan of The X-Files, a sci-fi TV series about two paranormal investigators, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, that ran from 1993 to 2002 and was revived in 2016. Evanson made 236 micromovies based on the original series and shared each six-second-long “X-Files Abridged” post on Instagram. She describes a typical installment as “a ridiculously brief recap of every episode as told by Mulder & Scully action figures.”
Vidders can film, edit, and share vids on a smartphone, using a variety of apps ranging from freeware to professional tools.
Fan Edits
Alongside fans who create song vids, parodies, narratives, and commentaries by editing and remixing film footage, some fans reedit entire films. One example comes from Star Wars fan-edit culture. Twenty years after George Lucas made his first Star Wars film in 1977, he reedited and rereleased his first three films as Special Editions. Disappointed fans had harsh words for the director’s tinkering, saying it did more harm than good. The original versions of Star Wars became hard to find, however. Lucas said that in time these versions would disappear. So a fan who goes by Adywan joined others in laboriously reediting the Special Editions to return them to their original form.
The Star Wars Revisited site offers the new edit free of charge to people who already own the official releases. Adywan clearly states the project is not for profit, which would be illegal. “It is not for sale, and no one can ever make money on it,” the site’s sidebar says. “It is done by a fan, for the fans. We ask that you own a copy of the official DVDs before downloading. . . . All rights and respect to George Lucas, who made this universe for us to play in.”
Fanedit.org calls itself the home of the fan edits. It links to fan edits and hosts related information, such as rules and guidelines for respecting the original creators and avoiding copyright infringement. Many fan edits aim to show how the original material could be improved. For example, the site links to Hunger Games: Mockingjay: The Hanging Tree, a fan edit of the two films made from the final book of the Hunger Games series. Fan editor Jerick cut 88 minutes from the original films’ total running time of 259 minutes to make a single, more streamlined film. Jerick described his edit as an “improved narrative” with a “powerful and exciting new beginning and more emotional thought provoking ending.”
Where No One Has Gone Before
In the tradition of amateur filmmakers of the past, vidders still make their own versions of Hollywood-style films and TV. Star Trek alone has spawned dozens of fan-produced films and series since its initial release. Some vids are filmed in garages with sets made of cardboard and duct tape. But with the cost of high-quality video recording and editing tech dropping, others aim to make vids as good as professional productions—and that creates new problems.
In 2014 Alec Peters, a Star Trek fan since childhood, turned to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for support to make Axanar, a film about an obscure character mentioned in a 1969 episode. More than fourteen thousand fans donated a total of more than $1 million to help make a ninety-minute Star Trek movie of professional quality in 2016. To meet copyright restrictions, the film would be free to view.
Then Star Trek copyright holders Paramount Pictures and CBS sued Axanar Productions for copyright infringement. Peters was surprised because CBS had ignored noncommercial fan productions for decades. “There’s never really been a trial over fan fiction before,” said lawyer David Kluft, who has written about Star Trek litigation. (Legally, fan-made films and video count as “fan fiction.”) But Peters’s ability to gain financial backing for the project was a new twist. Kluft said CBS sued because Peters was “too good.”
In response, Paramount and CBS set forth Guidelines for Fan Films. The rules limited fan filmmakers to telling stories that were no longer than thirty minutes in total, in segments no longer than fifteen minutes each. Rather than face an expensive court battle, Peters agreed to abide by the guidelines. After the settlement, Paramount and CBS said they “want amateur fan filmmakers to showcase their passion for Star Trek,” and they will “not object to, or take legal action against, Star Trek fan productions that are non-professional and amateur, and meet the . . . guidelines.”
Two generations of fans have grown up since Star Trek first aired in 1966, each with access to new tools for expressing and sharing their love for that series and many other stories. As advances in technology make it easier to produce and share videos, more and more fans are editing, mixing, and creating new visions. Professional-quality tools can yield stunning expressions of fan enthusiasm but also push the boundaries between amateur and pro creations. Vidders and fan-film makers are not likely to stop exploring the brave new worlds of their imagination anytime soon.