Fan Film, Fan Films

Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge Winners To Air This Week On Comedy Central

3 | October 6th, 2008 | Posted in Books, Contest, Fan Film, Filmmaking, George Lucas, History, Homemade Hollywood, Mainstream Media, News, Pink Five, Public Screening, Star Wars

It’s one of those Good News, Bad News situations. As part of the annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge held last July at San Diego Comic Con, Lucasfilm and Atom Films promised that the winning entries would be shown on Spike TV. In the meantime, however, Atom Films has been bought by Comedy Central, so it should come as no surprise that the winners will instead be screened on the network that brought you The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and, um, Straight Plan for the Gay Man. So the good news is, the winning fan films are airing this week! The bad news is, if you don’t have a DVR or VCR, you probably won’t see them. Read More »

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Fan Film Book Review: 15 Minutes of Fame

0 | October 3rd, 2008 | Posted in Amazon, Analysis, Author, Books, Education, Fan Film, Filmmaking, History, Homemade Hollywood, Mainstream Media, News, Publishing, Review, Writing,

A few weeks ago, Chad Hurley, one of the co-founders of YouTube, posted his musings on the future of web video—and naturally, he felt his lil’ company would be the cornerstone of it. You can read his short posting here, but the main thing I walked away with was that 13 hours of video are posted to YouTube every minute. How the hell can you compete with that? By default, everyone who posts instantly becomes the smallest fish in the biggest pond ever. Perhaps then, you need to take a look at 15 Minutes of Fame: Becoming A Star in the YouTube Revolution, by Frederick Levy, (Alpha Books, $15.56 on ). Read More »

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Silver Surfer Fan Film—Substance or Flash?

0 | October 2nd, 2008 | Posted in Analysis, Comic Books, Education, Fan Film, Filmmaking, History, Review, Superheroes, marvel comics

UPDATED WITH INTERVIEW!
There’s a five-minute short that’s been floating around the internet for ages, featuring the Marvel Comics fan favorite, . Watch the credits, and it appears to be a USC student film, made in 1994 by Steve Robiner, Erik Fleming and R.L. Once it was completed and screened around Hollywood, it looked like the team behind it was headed to big things—but they never quite hit the big time. Why? Read More »

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Who Killed Star Wars: The Dark Redemption?

0 | October 1st, 2008 | Posted in Analysis, Contest, Copyright, Fan Film, Filmmaking, George Lucas, History, Homemade Hollywood, Public Screening, Star Wars

The Dark Redemption was one of the first mega-fan films to be produced in the late 1990s—a half-hour flick with relatively high production values, and even a “real” Star Wars actor, Peter Sumner, reprising his role as Imperial Officer Lt. Pol Triedum, a minor character from the original 1977 feature film.

While it had much to offer, however, today The Dark Redemption is mainly remembered as the only fan film Lucasfilm ever threatened legal action against, effectively forcing its producers to shut down the distribution of the film or face the legal consequences. What would make a wildly successful production company get so red in the face about a homegrown project made by enthusiastic fans? Find out after the jump. Read More »

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Can You Dig Even More Warriors Fan Films?

0 | September 30th, 2008 | Posted in Analysis, Contest, Fan Film, Filmmaking, History, Review

The hits (and punches and baseball bats) just keep on coming! As I explained yesterday, back in 2007, I had to help judge a fan film contest of flicks based on the 1979 cult classic, The Warriors. I shared my comments on the first three movies in the contest yesterday, and now here’s my take on the remaining three movies. Watch ‘em all, give each a rank to see which you like best, and then at the end of this post, you can see if you chose the fan film that won the contest. Read More »

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Fan Cinema Today On The Road at AES

0 | September 29th, 2008 | Posted in Fan Film

Hey, Clive here. I’ll be at the Audio Engineering Society Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from Friday through Sunday. If you’re attending the show and want to talk fan films for a few minutes, drop me an email [FanCinemaToday -A-T- aol.com] and we’ll meet up for coffee on the showfloor.

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The Warriors Fan Films: Can You Dig It?

0 | September 29th, 2008 | Posted in Analysis, Contest, Fan Film, Filmmaking, History, Review

In the spring of 2007, the late, great fan film fanzine, Fan Films Quarterly, asked me to help judge a contest for the best fan flick based on Walter Hill’s 1979 feature film, The Warriors. Back in the day, the movie, about a New York City street gang that has to get to its home turf before the cops and rival gangs kill them, was incredibly controversial for its violence and gritty depiction of the Big Rotting Apple of the 1970s. Today, though, it looks pretty campy, and is less violent than a typical episode of The Sopranos.

In the intervening years, the flick has become a cult favorite, gaining fans all over the world—and plenty of them have made their own tribute movies to The Warriors. As a result, when FFQ held its contest, six movies were entered. The judges were asked to watch the movies and rank them from 1 to 6, with 1 being the best and 6 being the least favorite.

When I sent FFQ my rankings, I wrote comments about each one, which were never used in the zine, so here for the first time anywhere are some of the mini-reviews I wrote up; I’ll run the last three tomorrow. I’ll wait until the end of tomorrow’s blog post to reveal the rankings I gave—and who actually won the contest. Watch the batch of them and see if you can pick who won! Read More »

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Star Wars Fan Film Imperial Chopper Rides Again

0 | September 26th, 2008 | Posted in Fan Film, Filmmaking, George Lucas, Star Wars, TV

There’s a fine line between the pursuit of perfection and ruining a perfectly good thing. Ask George Lucas, and he’ll probably tell you that the former is a filmmaker’s right, nay, duty—as evidenced by his continual reworking of the original Star Wars trilogy, forever to be tinkered with like a hot rod from American Graffiti. Ask a fan, however, and he/she/it is likely to blast off on a rabid rant about how an American classic has been defiled, etc. Yawn.

That said, there are times when such complete dedication to a movie is a good thing. Take fan films, for instance. Once a fan production gets released, usually it’s abandoned as the filmmakers collapse in an exhausted heap, eventually stirring only to move on to a new project, like an original film, or perhaps reintroduce themselves to their family and whatever friends they have left. Once the dust has cleared from the euphoria of releasing a fan project, however, the film’s flaws become increasingly apparent—an issue that most fan directors handle with a simple “Eff it.”

Not so, however, with Cristofer Adrian, the writer/director/producer behind Imperial Chopper. Read More »

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Dark Knight Returns to Fan Films

0 | September 25th, 2008 | Posted in Batman, Comic Books, DC Comics, Fan Film, Filmmaking, Superheroes

Dark Knight mania may have ebbed in the few months since the blockbuster feature film’s release, but that just means people are biding their time until the DVD comes out, just in time for the holiday buying season.

Until then, there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy the resulting wave of fan films inspired by Batman that have been released online in recent times. Take, for instance, Batman: Dark Tomorrow and , now online—or you can go see one in person this weekend. Read More »

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Hey, Lego My Movie! Brickfilms Invade Fan Films

1 | September 24th, 2008 | Posted in Author, Books, Fan Film, Filmmaking, Harry Potter, History, Homemade Hollywood, Indiana Jones, Mainstream Media, News, Publishing, Star Wars

When I was a kid, Legos were good for three things—building towers; making a red, yellow and blue gun for playing Cops and Robbers if you weren’t allowed to have toy guns; and throwing at one’s irritating siblings. Times have changed (my brother turned out to be a nice guy, despite the fact that I threw toys at him; who woulda thunk it?). In the meantime, Legos have morphed into something of an avant-garde artform for the masses.

Case in point? Stop-motion animated Lego flicks are wildly popular all over the internet; they’re called Brickfilms (and that’s also the name of the top website for these plastic mini-epics) or, occasionally, “Bricksploitation” movies—a term I have incredible love for. Anyway, with all the specialized Lego sets made over the years—everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Indiana Jones to you-name-it—it was inevitable that there’d be Lego fan films. See for yourself after the jump! Read More »

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