18
05/09
19:38
Star Wars fan videos
HI,
one part of my recent thesis discusses fan and amateur video productions in the context of machinima and DIY media. Star Wars holds a large fan community all around the word, only comparable to trekkies, that has made it to achieve its status as cult film. These are very active communities whose members usually get involved in organising festivals and conventions, and in publishing fanzines and other forms of DIY media.
Fans, independent of the cult media, appropriate the original media content to extend its diegetic world. These activities can be read as either participatory or resistant towards the media. The story lines, characters, and aesthetics of the media cult are unfolded in order to fill gaps, or to accommodate them to personal, political, and social issues. In all cases, fan’s productions are deviations of the cult media (film, TV series, video game, and pop bands) that the producers do not support officially, but that in many cases they encourage as long as these productions increase the popularity of their cultural text.
The access to nearly inexpensive tools for media production has brought a proliferation of these fan’s (di,-sub-, and per-) versions with a decent and even high quality. Fanzines, fanart, music videos, mash-ups, disguises, parallel narrations, mods, machinimas, and online forums are part of a huge realm in media production that currently is garnering as much attention as the original productions in the Internet.
Recently, I found via Wired the following videos by Mike Horn, an enthusiast of Star Wars. His DIY productions combine the amateurish style of camcorder video with CG animations. He places the universe of Star Wars in contact with San Francisco and in one of the videos in narrative collision with Star Trek.