About FanFilms and crowd sourcing

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

Since its birth in the early 20th century, cinema has probably caused a more visibly active reaction from audiences than any other form of art (fan conventions, discussions, reviews, seminars, remakes, parodies…). This bounty of responses is most likely due to cinema’s proximity to popular culture (its far-reaching stretch across a vast and diverse public), and its socializing character. Like many other media, participation in the creation, or more accurately re-creation, of content has increased drastically in the last few years; growth doubtlessly due to the omnipresent Web 2.0, cloud culture, internet society, or any other aspect of the phenomenon infiltrating the developed world today with smartphones, laptops, tablets and millions of users attached to them 24/7 creating and uploading content, often in collaborative or crowd-sourced ways.

If we look at fan films, a practice consisting of shooting your own version of a movie, TV show, or book etc., (with different productions having varying grades of fidelity in comparison to the original), we realize that they have in fact existed for many years. The first fan film, according to Wikipedia, dates back to 1926, even when recording technologies were far from accessible to the public at large. That being said, it seems natural that in this current moment, when internet trends continuously tell us that we’re somehow back in the era of craftsmanship, when everybody can be a photographer, a writer or a cinematographer, we are taking this trend seriously, and remaking and versioning the most significant pieces of modern culture in very personal ways.

Fan film initiatives illustrate the creative power of the millions of users connected to the internet every minute of every day, with the good news being that crowd-sourcing initiatives are growing up, maturing, and getting ready to leave the nest of the minority of intensive users to reach a larger public. There are more and more examples that prove that collaborative practices are not just an idea born as a logical consequence of this technological and cultural momentum, but a reality that is already making an impact in popular culture.

It’s significant that two really closed environments like TV and the Hollywood industries are now recognizing the value and interest of these initiatives. By the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarding a crowd-sourced and code-directed Star Wars fan film mash up project with an Emmy, and LucasArts (the copyright holders to Star Wars) supportively getting in contact with the “Star Wars Uncut” initiators, shows that these kinds of practices are here to stay. Interestingly, similar to cinema, there are both different genres, styles and breeds of crowd-sourced fan film video projects, as we find projects like the mentioned award winning “Star Wars Uncut” which draws from popular culture, but also others related to a more classical cinema sphere, like Perry Bard’s “Man with a Movie Camera”, a global remake of Vertov’s 1929 film.

Read the original article from the New York Times about the Emmy winning project to learn more about this Star Wars based project that opened industry doors to this new collaborative practices: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/arts/television/28uncut.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=an%20emmy%20for%20rebuilding%20a%20galaxy&st=cse