Fan labor

Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works (fiction, fan fiction and review literature), visual or computer-assisted art, films and videos, animations, games, music, or applied arts and costuming.

In the fandom subgroups science fiction fandom and media fandom, fan labor activities may be termed fanac (from "fannish activities"), a term that also includes non-creative activities such as managing traditional science fiction fanzines (i.e., not primarily devoted to fan fiction), and the organization and maintenance of science fiction conventions and science fiction clubs.

A more general and internet focused form of "fan work" is user-generated content, which became popular with the Web 2.0, often also a form of virtual volunteering.

Categories of activities

Literary arts

Fan fiction has existed since the 17th century. They are literary works produced by fans of a given media property, rather than the original creator. They may expand on an original story line, character relationship, or situations and entities that were originally mentioned in the original author's work. Works of fan fiction are usually unauthorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher.[citation needed]

Fandom analytics is a practice that is focused on the analysis of fan works in order to discuss and forecast trends and variations within and across fandoms.[better source needed]

Traditional visual arts

Fan art is artwork based on a character, costume, item, or story that was created by someone other than the artist. Usually, it refers to fan labor artworks by amateur and unpaid artists. In addition to traditional paintings and drawings, fan artists may also create web banners, avatars, or web-based animations, as well as photo collages, posters, and artistic representation of movie/show/book quotes.[citation needed]

Computer-aided visual arts

A booth screening a Star Wars fan film at a convention

A fan film is a film or video inspired by a media source, created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan films vary may vary in length.[citation needed]

Fanvids are music videos made by remixing existing media from TV shows or movies.[citation needed]

Fangames are video games that are made based on existing video games from video game publishers by its fans.[citation needed]

Fans of video games have been creating machinima since 1996. Machinima creators use computer game engines to create "actors" and create scenarios for them to perform in, using the physics and character generation tools of the game. The scripts, as performed by the computer-generated characters, are recorded and distributed to viewers online.

Reanimated collaborations involve each fan animating a shot of an existing film in their own unique style. The clips are then stitched together to produce a collaborative tribute, sometimes with over 500 animators on a single film. Reanimated projects have been produced in honor of Looney Tunes, SpongeBob, The Simpsons, Kirby, and Zelda CDi, among others. Participants generally expect little or no profit.

Fan labor in the software domain, especially for video games, exists also in the form of fan patches, fan translations, mods, fan-made remakes, server emulators and source ports.

Musical arts

Some fandoms are known to produce music as a form of fan labor that is usually classified as filk. Filking is often done in small groups at conventions, often late at night after other official convention programming has ended for the day[citation needed]; additionally, there are now dedicated filk conventions in Canada, England, Germany, and the United States.[citation needed] The brony fandom has developed a vast musical subculture, often referred to as brony music.

Most fan labor products are derivative works, meaning they are creative additions or modifications to an existing copyrighted work, or they are original creations which are inspired by a specific copyrighted work [citation needed]. Some or all of these works may fall into the legal category of transformative works (such as a parody of the original), which are protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Futures of Entertainment 2 – Fan Labor". MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS). 2007-12-07.
  2. ↑ Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Free Fan Labor. The annual meeting of the International Communication Association. New York, NY. 2008-10-10.
  3. ↑ "Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2008-04-24.
  4. ↑ Constant, Paul. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Newsweek Web Exclusive May 5, 2009
  5. ↑ Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (15 July 2013). "Unpacking the unofficial fanfiction census". dailydot.com. The Daily Dot. Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  6. ↑ Lowood 2006, 32
  7. ↑ Robert Jones (2007-06-06). "Robert Jones writes on 'Pink vs. Blue: The Emergence of Women in Machinima'". transform. Louisa Ellen Stein. Archived from the original on 2019-12-09.
  8. ↑ Steamed Hams but There's a Different Animator Every 13 Seconds, retrieved 2022-08-24
  9. ↑ "Zelda CD-i Reanimated brings together over 200 animators to celebrate the worst-ever Zelda cutscenes". Nintendo Wire. 2020-09-07. Retrieved 2022-08-24.
  10. ↑ The Zelda CDi Reanimated Collab!, retrieved 2022-08-24
  11. ↑ Muñoz, José David (2020-09-08). "Los Zelda CD-i se han reanimado de una manera gloriosa gracias a los esfuerzos de varios fans". Hobbyconsolas (in Spanish). Retrieved 2022-08-24.
  12. ↑ The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Rehydrated!, retrieved 2022-08-24
  13. ↑ Kirby Reanimated Collab, retrieved 2022-08-24
  14. ↑ Jaworski, Michelle (2022-05-02). "'It was a love letter to the franchise and what did Paramount do? They blocked it': Outrage as 'SpongeBob' fan film removed on YouTube". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 2022-08-24.
  15. ↑ Pitman, Robert (2022-05-03). "#JusticeForSpongebob: What Is Spongebob Movie Rehydrated?". ScreenRant. Retrieved 2022-08-24.
  16. ↑ You're in charge! – From vital patches to game cancellations, players are often intimately involved. by Christian Donlan on Eurogamer "Supreme Commander fans released Forged Alliance Forever and gave the game the online client it could otherwise only dream of. I haven't played it much, but I still got a tear in my eye when I read about the extents these coders had gone to. There's nothing quite so wonderful to witness as love, and this is surely love of the very purest order. [...] SupCom guys resurrect a series whose publisher had just gone under." (2013-11-02)
  17. ↑ Rutherford, Kevin (2012-04-20). "Behind the Music of Pop Culture Smash 'My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2012-04-20.
  18. ↑ Lauren Rae Orsini (3 September 2012). "Behind the wonderful and weird soundtrack to Homestuck". The Daily Dot. Retrieved September 13, 2012.

Works cited