There were a lot of things about Jenkins' article "Star Trek" Rerun, Reread, Rewritten that I found not only fascinating, but true from an inside-the-fandom perspective. (Not Star Trek fandom, per se, but a number of others.) My biggest qualm with the piece is that it's a work of history itself, having been written nearly 25 years ago. With the advent of the internet, fandom and fanfic have exploded so far beyond what existed in 1988 that, while the basic ideas hold true, there's so much more out there to be explored.
One of those things is the realm of fanvids.
In a lot of ways, fanvids are quite similar to fanfic. They take the source material and create something new out of it, a transformative work that is generally in the form of a music video. Often the idea is to highlight or celebrate a show, movie, or fandom that the video creator (vidder) loves. The vidder does this by setting visuals from the work to a song that fulfills a theme related to the media:
(Warning: violent content and very very brief nudity)
In some cases the vidders create something like a trailer:
In other cases, they may even pick one particular storyline to deconstruct and provide a clearer or differing point of view:
(Warning: boys kissing. Each other.)
The source material can even be manipulated in such a way to create new or different storylines altogether, in effect working as a sort of video fanfiction:
(Warning: more boys kissing. People are gay. Get over it.)
(shared with permission from Amilee123, the vid's creator)
Fanvids are only the tip of the iceberg as far as the myriad of fanworks available out there. The exceptional thing about fanvids is how they are targeted for copyright infringement concerns such as those discussed by Jenkins, particularly in this day and age of easy internet piracy. It's gotten so bad that there's even a non-profit organization, the Organization for Transformative Works, which exists solely to promote fair use rights among fanworks creators.
Note: I'm considering this topic as a subject for a paper. Any thoughts or guidance on this would be appreciated.
Further note: with the exception of the last video, I created all of these myself. Yes, I'm a vidder.
