So I wanted to make a post to emphasize a nice comment the blog received the other day. It was from Clive Young, who is the author of “Homemade Hollywood,” a study of fan film productions. In his own words, it “covers the history and future of the form, from the 1920s to today’s backyard efforts.” This is definitely an interesting subject, a practice that appears to be growing, and oddly has gone fairly ignored in critical literature or film histories. He does rightly note that such academics as Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, have positively responded to his work. Jenkins own interview with Young can be found here.
It would seem as if the question of fan films is only the beginning of a discuss of how we turn public media into part of our personal experience. I’ll try to follow up on this post with more thoughts on issues of mimesis, reception studies, and the shift terrain of media distribution. Meanwhile, check out Young’s blog where he keeps up to date with the latest in fan film productions http://fancinematoday.com/.
First you must find your subject, for instance a film, star, or product, then you must find it’s audience or fans. Once you have found these two you need to think about the context around each one. Think of the context as the world around them, their history, and the media in which they appear. In the case of a pop star, the context would be how she or he became a star, their raise to fame, and the place they occupy in media such as television, on-line, and print press. Then think about the same for the audiences or fans, where do they come from, what do they do to express their interest in the star, and do the see themselves?
As to the form of the project, you might first think of it as a long blog post or short article, with images spread through out to illustrate and reference the subjects being talked about. One technique would be to juxtapose the original artist material and fan made material. This could be two youtube clips, one the original video and another a video made by a fan.
Another idea is to show how people have added a favorite star or character to their world. An example would be someone’s car that they have painted in the colors of their favorite cartoon character. This could also include changes to the interior, steering wheel, and seat covers. Along the same lines you could look at the fashion that people wear, how it is themed around their favorite sport’s team or how it mimics the fashion of their favorite star.
And lastly, you could look at fan films which are often short films made as a tribute to a commercial feature film. Sometimes the tribute is clear and other times amateur films try to mimic a popular film without explicitly saying they are a fan film. Here it would be interesting to look at discussion forums and comments on video sites where people discuss and critique each other’s films.
Ok I hope these additional notes are helpful in continuing to work on your final projects.
Fans are people into one thing, person, or hobby. Using our friendly online etymology dictionary we can learn that “fan” most likely comes from fantatic, itself “pertaining to a temple” or “fanum.” So a fan is someone who is dedicated to something in an almost religious sense. In Japanese there is the similar term “Otaku,” which, as wikipedia describes it, “is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games.” This specific emphasis on technology is similar to the slang term, “nerd,” a relatively new word in American English that refers to someone with an obsessive relationship with knowledge or originally a conservative traditionalist.
So fandom always implies two things, the original and the place from which it is appreciated. A fan of the anime from Kyoto is similar to but different from a fan of anime from Orange County California.
Nerd, otaku, and fan are all now positively used. They are a marker of inclusion in a community of interest and a sign that one is passionate about something. The valorization of nerdiness is a trend against the image of cool, e.g. a kind of laid-back disinterest. This can be overstated but it it interesting to think if a larger trend toward nerd or fan culture is a reaction against the individualism of a lone rebel. Surely on some level fan cultures and communities sometimes form tighter bonds than traditional neighborhood and geographic definitions of community.
A few documentaries that deal with Fan Cultures and Nerd or Otaku Culture:
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
Vinyl
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
Michael Lau
Pete Souza’s official portrait of U.S.President Barack Obama on Jan. 13, 2009
Additionally, the shape of reflections in an image is an indicator of the shape and location of light sources. Harder surfaces, e.g. mirrors, windows, and metal objects, all bounce back light with a minimum of distortion. Such, so-called specular reflections bounce back in an equal angel of reflection to the angle of arrival. Surfaces that are porous or rougher, on the other hand, bounce back light in a diffuse manor, sending light this way and that. This results in a no specular reflections. So there aren’t normally specular reflections on a cotton t-shirt or a person’s skin, oily and sweat droplets aside. Interestingly, though our eyes provide specular reflections of the world in front of us. So in any given portrait one can simply look at the eyes and see what are called “catch lights,” so-called because they catch the light arriving to the eye. From these catch lights we can determine the size, shape, and location of the lighting in the scene. This is particularly easy with studio photography as often there are only one or two dominate lights in a scene. In the above example of U.S. president Barrack Obama, as we zoom in one his eyes, we can see that he is being light by an octobox to his right and a bounce board or more likely a softbox to his left. And as we can see in the full portrait, the octobox is stronger than the light to his left, creating a lightly ratio that is not extreme but still is enough to reveal the dimensionality of his face.
Light comes from some place, just like people it arrives to us after a journey spent bouncing along amongst it’s peers and a world of hard and soft surfaces. Of course, much of the light we see comes form the Sun, hurled from on high. This light passes through the sky, the leaves of trees, the particulate matter of pollution, and bounces off beaches and sidewalks eventually finding it’s way to us.
When looking at a photograph or a film we usually don’t see the light source; these sources are kept out of frame to prevent us from being distracted to their intensity. We can still, however, look at the light in the scene and determine how it was lit. The shape of shadows, the ratio of light to dark, and the shape of specular reflections all indicate the way in which light has fallen on the scene and subject at had. The first indicator is the shape of shadows. Shadows fall in an opposite direct to the light source, so if there are prominent shadows in a scene it is a relatively simple task to determine the location of the light source. Of course, there are often a whole variety of shadows that complete or rather complement one other, each one spreading out in a opposite direction from it’s light origin point. The resulting complex of shadows can be harder to read. There is often, however, a dominant light or “key light” in a scene that represents that major source of light and thus casts the most prominent shadows in the scene. continue reading
Nostalgia is a kind of longing for the past. Using our helpful online etymology dictionary we learn that in the 18th century it referred to a “severe homesickness” (considered as a disease),” comprised from the Greek “nostos” meaning “homecoming” and “algos” meaning “pain, grief, distress.” More recently, nostalgia has lost its medical and even psychological implications and has simply been accepted as a natural component of memory.
There is, nonetheless, still often a negative implication with nostalgia, one that suggests an overemphasis on the past. Such nostalgia, when it takes material and/or aesthetic form, is referred to as kitsch. Itself derived from a Yiddish term, kitsch is the artistic manifestation of nostalgia. The rise in kitsch parallels a rise in manufacturing allowing for the production of objects meant for no other purpose than decoration and nostalgia. Here one might think of the porcelain figures that line shelves whose purpose, beyond collecting dust, is turning the past into an aesthetic object.
In order to better understand kitsch we might also look at the evolution of an image. In this case Alberto Korda’s photo of Che Guevara that became a political icon, a pop cultural icon, and eventually a regular part of kitsch commodities.
In writing what he terms “totalitarian kitsch,” in his 1984 novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the czech author Milan Kundera writes “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
Michael Wesch, an anthropology professor at Kansas State University used camstudio and a lit bit of sony vegas editing software to make the above illustration of the ideas behind the web and so-called “web 2.0.” Not only does the clip illustrate the ideas behind such technologies it also shows what they look like. It shows the interface design and look of the web at a certain time, a look that will age and indeed already has. You can read more about his work on what he terms “Digital Ethnography” at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/
