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Anybody like fan films? The increasing distribution of cheap video cameras and the availability of digital production techniques has created a renaissance in the number and quality of fan-films. And video sites like Youtube have allowed producers to share their work with an audience vastly larger than their predecessors would have dared to dream of. Personally I think that fan films work best when they’re short – the longer a film, any film, is the more likely it is to show its budgetary and technical constraints. This is why some of the most eye-catching and well received fan films of recent years have been in the format of shorts or extended-trailers.
There is, however, another phenomena that has appeared – the fan trailer. This is distinct from a true fan-film or a fan-film made to look like a trailer, as a fan-trailer doesn’t usually contain any new footage. It’s creator takes existing footage from a TV show, movie or cartoon and re-edits it to create their own brand new cinema-style trailer for that show. Sometimes fans will even take footage from multiple movies and blend them together with their own captions to create a fantasy trailer for a project that never actually existed. These are 5 of my favourites.
1. Justice League
Youtube user facoloco11 put together a fan trailer for a Justice League trailer for a course in Entertainment Marketing that he was taking at university. He and his class took the characters outlined for the George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal film, recast them, and then used clips from a range of different movies to create a trailer for a story where 7 retired heroes reunite to save from the world from a robot invasion. What interested me was the use of Common as Green Lantern, he had been cast in that role in Miller’s film and this trailer shows how good he could have been. The Superman Return and Batman Begins shots are easily enough to spot and I believe the robots are from I Robot.
2. & 3. Green Lantern
We all know that there is a Green Lantern film in production, but that hasn’t stopped Mike Afford putting a considerable amount of effort into creating his own trailer. This one should probably be called a full fan-film because of the amount of original cgi.
3D modelling in Cinema 4D, some artworking in Photoshop, post production in After Effects CS3, grading with Magic Bullet ‘Looks’ which I do rate very highly. Movie uploaded as 320×240 FLV (25fps, 350kbps, audio 192kbps stereo – but it still gets re-compressed right – is there any way of avoiding this I wonder??)
I love all the other Lanterns and the sense of scale he creates.
The second Green Lantern trailer I like actually features a lot of Mike’s work. Jason Pitts created his own Green Lantern trailer by using a large range of film clips (everything from Firefly to Iron Man) and some stuff from Mike’s trailer. It’s not quite as cool as Mike’s trailer, but I think it does a better job at suggesting a possible storyline.
4. Superman Vs. Superman
This trailer by Youtube user Silver Lightsaber asks the question:
Who is the true Man of Steel? As good of a job Brandon Routh did in Superman Returns, many fans revere Christopher Reeve as the true Superman. When these two collide in one place, who will come out as the victor? It’s the ultimate showdown of Reeve vs Routh.
It works surprisingly well – I particularly like the banter back and forth between the two Lex Luthors.
5. Batman: The Dark Knight (1966)
What would the Dark Knight have been like if it had been made in 1966 with Adam West and Cesar Romero. This clever edit takes the sound track of the 2008 movie and syncs it with footage from the 1966 Batman movie.
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