film

film - Fan film

Photograph by negotiable_meon Flickr.

The child s drawing of a Ghostbuster is signed by a fictional character created in the fan film. On September 27, film Fan film 2009, Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy was released over the internet, a 10,000 Euro production based on Hideo Kojima s Metal film Gear Solid video game series. 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 film Film preservation the Internet has prompted several studios to create official policies and programs regarding their existence. 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. Fan filmmakers have traditionally been amateurs, but some of the more notable films have actually been produced by professional filmmakers as film school class projects or as demonstration reels.

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-ROMs and DVDs. Due to the rise of the Internet, more and more fan films are being made available online. The filmmakers label it as authorized because a Capcom representative supposedly oversaw production of the film and got the official okay for the film s production by the company s higher-ups. Fan films made without official authorization exist in a legal grey area. Cracking  · Scene  · Demos (Demoscene) .

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. The earliest known fan film is Anderson Our Gang. , but the technology required to make fan films was a limiting factor until relatively recently. 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.

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. However, this restriction was lifted for the 2007 awards.

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. 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.

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 Nonetheless, some copyright holders have been known to change their positions concerning fan films. This made them among the first fan films to be commercially released by a property s original creators. Currently, an authorized fan film based on the Mega Man franchise is in production, helmed by independent director Eddie Lebron.

But it wasn t until the 1970s that the popularization of science fiction conventions 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). 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.

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. Because fan films generally utilize characters and storylines copyrighted and trademarked by the original filmmakers, they are rarely distributed commercially for legal reasons.

Around the same time, artist Andy Warhol produced a film called Batman Dracula which could be described as a fan film. Paramount Pictures actively pursued legal action against Star Trek fan films in the 1980s, 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 Daleks.

Many comic book or super-hero related fan films are also listed by such sites as Comics2Film.com, and iFilm. It is non-profit and is being released to DVD and download from the film s website.

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.