Old Amateur Works

On my website I posted an article on my website on old bad amateur fan films. I would like readers to check it out and come back here.

Of the whole, I found these posts on some of these films:
https://boards.theforce.net/threads/middle-ground.14112843/
https://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-rendarian-backlash-official-release-thread.8484749/

Any thoughts?

 

I understand where you're coming from, but also think it might be a bit harsh. I learned long ago that some "bad" films can still have something to offer. An interesting plot point, etc. But too many people, especially back in the day, who just wanted to try to tell a story of some kind, somehow. Sometimes for basically $0

 

The irony of this is that i stumbled onto fan films around 15 years ago, and was blown away by some of them. But, they could be hard to really track down. I put together a web site using a free service, and a member here on these boards was generous in setting up a repository to upload and link to films to archive them. Which is the phispace library. So, you're able to dig into these because the entire effort was to preserve as many films as i could get my hands on. And one of the people that offered phispace (a film maker) correctly predicted that the future of it all would be in streaming services

 

There is nothing wrong with poking a little fun at some of the amateur attempts at star wars fanfilms, and the ones from 20 years ago do make an easy target. However I didn't really find this article in good taste, and the tone and attitude comes off rather poorly. But more than that, I'm not sure you understand just what it was like trying to do a fanfilm 20 years ago and how hard it was to get something that met the bare definition of a little Star Wars film, let alone something good looking. It really was a small miracle if the fates aligned enough that a good looking film with solid effects and good acting came out. I apologize in advance because I'm about to go way way WAY overboard here, but I want to try to explain what I mean.

Let's look at the fanfilm world in the early 2000s. Sure you had a few standout films (Reign of the Fallen, which you positively cited in your article is actually my favorite Star Wars fanfilm) ones that not infrequently had at least some professionals involved or at least some resources available that most fanfilms lacked. And of course The Iron Fist of the Obsidian Sith remains a classic that has rarely been surpassed, yet most fanfilms were little more than some guys with a real passion for Star Wars and a small DV camcorder(with a pathetically low ISO range, hence why so many fanfilms have blown out skies and didn't do night scenes). And of course importing DV footage usually meant it was coming from a DV tape, which was real time data transfer which meant that getting that two hours of raw footage you shot in the forest onto your iMac required spending....two hours letting the camcorder playback the footage as iMovie captured it. As for writing/editing/acting etc, think about how different it was back then trying to learn this stuff. YouTube isn't around so you don't have easy access to a massive amount of tutorials on every aspect of movie making. Buying books and asking questions on forums was probably the most common way. You don't have Facebook(2004) or MySpace(2003) to reach out to people in your area for actors and just general networking.

Your cast is going to probably be your closest friends from school, your costumes are going to be from the Halloween store (or eBay), your lightsabre props are going to be cheap kid's lightsabres from Walmart, probably with the plastic blades yanked out, and a painted dowel inserted into a pipe concealed into the hilt(which is what I did). Your script is going to be written around a few cool scenes, because really what you want is to see yourself swinging a lightsabre, and maybe throwing some Sith lightning. You have no idea how to even start writing a script but that's okay, most other fans working on a fanfilm are starting from scratch and figuring it out as they go as well. You have almost no examples of indie filmmaking to reference, let alone indie FANFILM making as your local Blockbuster doesn't exactly carry a lot of indie films and certainly doesn't carry Star Wars fanfilms. Any fanfilm you do download is probably going to be carefully selected to be worth the hours of tying up the phone lines as the 'ole 56k modem struggles to pull everything down (I remember spending 6 hours downloading Duality...it was awesome and so worth it. And then I had to re-download it every time i wanted to watch it again until I figured out how to use Quicktime to save it).

For software you are going to maybe have something like After Effects 5.0, Photoshop 7, and for 3D something like a (probably hacked lets be honest) version of 3DS Max. If they were really lucky(or "creatively acquired" it), you might have the pro version of After Effects which had two major features the standard version lacked, Keylight and Advanced Lightning.

Why does this matter?

Well for starters, you needed something like Keylight(or DV Garage's DV Matte Pro) to have even a prayer of trying to key crappy DV footage. And even then, results were hit or miss at best (I believe Broken Allegiance wound up hand rotoscoping most of their green screen shots, although I'm not sure if the version of AE they were using even had Keylight). If you are a fanfilm maker who doesn't have AE Pro, then you either are going to have really sucky green screen comps (which aren't going to look great no matter what because DV footage sucks) using only the color key, or you get to hand roto everything yourself (Fun!), or you just give up and avoid using green screens at all. If you still tried to do keying well...this is why so many fanfilms have a flickering white fuzzy outline around any keyed character. Just find yourself a forest and set everything there. This tended to be the default option of most fanfilms, at least most of the ones I remember. Just have a few fully CG scenes using some models from scifi3d.com to establish things, and then transition to the forest and only worry about lightsabres going forward. Oh and since only the Pro version of After Effects had a motion tracker (and I think it was 2D only?) AND tracking stuff off of fuzzy DV footage is...fun, any comps you do are probably going to be static shots with no camera moves.

The two key parts of a fanfilm are lightsabres and Force Lightning, which is where the second AE Advanced plugin came in. The Advanced Lightning plugin made it much easier to have your bad guy throwing Emperor Palpatine level lightning everywhere. The standard version of AE had a lightning plugin as well, but it was pretty basic and I honestly don't remember anything about it since all the tutorials I (vaguely) remember used the Advanced Lightning plugin. Some fanfilms used Photoshop to hand animate lightning frame-by-frame and I have always been impressed that Broken Allegiance actually filmed real lightning arcing between two poles in a laboratory and then comped it into their footage. You had to be creative and work within the limitations of your software, your footage, and of course your (lack of) budget.

And speaking of budget, what if you had under 100 dollars and that was it? Which was probably the case for the fanfilms you were looking at btw. Well, AlamDV was a popular choice, it's an old program that I think was about 50 dollars brand new. The company that made it is still around, but they are under the name FXHome and they make the amazing HitFilm, which is an incredible tool for a low budget filmmaker today. Anyhow, AlamDV gave you the ability to add really crappy lightsabres, muzzle flashes, blaster bolts, etc to your footage. It may have been crappy, but it was affordable and lots of creators used it (Art of the Sabre is one such film and I highly recommend it, its one of the best choreographed lightsabre fights in a fanfilm). If you needed some 3D you could get something like Bryce for 40-50 dollars which could import .3ds models from scifi3d.com and do basic animations. or you could try out Blender, just keep in mind that Blender in the early 2000s seemed deliberately designed to be painful to use, impossible to learn, and finicky. Then you use iMovie (or Windows Movie Maker lolololololol) to edit your footage and voila, you made your star wars movie with under 100 bucks of software.

Of course then you have to upload it. And with codecs available in the early 2000s....plus just how horrible DV footage looks generally...plus the biggie, no YouTube....it was probably going to look horrible. Without YouTube, unless someplace like TheForce.net picked up your fanfilm and hosted it (very few films were good enough for this), you were going to need to compress the ever-living daylights out of your film to squeeze it into some ISP's really, really expensive hosting space. This is the biggest reason why so many of these films look so bad visually, you are taking a 10-20 minute (or longer) video and compressing it down to like 10 megabytes. And compression codecs back then were, I'm not joking, absolutely horrible. We are so spoiled by YouTube today (grunts in old person get-off-my-porch).

But you know what? For most of these filmmakers, these early, awkward attempts at putting themselves in the Star Wars universe may be painful to watch today, but they represent a lot of work, and sweat, and possibly tears of frustration (ahhhh hard drive crashes, an entire day's filming useless because the autofocus messed up, etc) by people who usually had no idea what they were doing, but were determined to complete a project. And it was exciting back then to realize that that was YOU up there with a lightsabre blade! Just like in the real movies! There is a naivety about it back then that we have lost today, when it seems that the bar for amateur filmmaking just keeps getting raised higher and higher because there are so many amazing productions out there. People were putting themselves and their fanfilm labor of love out there for the whole world to see, which takes guts (I know I'm thankful that no footage of my early Star Wars efforts exists on the Internet because it was truly awful).

But in order to get to where we are today, it had to start somewhere. And for many, it started with a crappy camera, a forest location, a couple of cheap lightsabre props, and a dream. And sure, I can think of a couple candidates from that era whose dreams were...quite ambitious (sw--------91 comes to mind), but honestly looking back...I miss the days when everything was new and exciting and it seemed like the fanfilms forum was always buzzing with new film ideas and new effects tests and script reveals, and feedback requests and people dreaming big, and not just dreaming big, dreaming big publicly and putting themselves out there.

And I think we should respect the effort and the courage that took, and the filmmakers who dared to put themselves and their first fumbling efforts out there for everyone to see.

 

That was a long read, and so worth it.... and what brought me to the dance was the best of the best that were on TFN, yet had been horribly hamstrung by dial-up. Dark Redemption had to be downloaded in five pieces, and when it was played you were looking at a tiny little window. And that was the top-shelf experience. I quickly discovered how gracious people could be, and was able to get higher quality versions that could be offered. Mind you, this meant someone in Australia, or France burning files onto a DVD and then going to the post office to mail them to me in America. The guy that made Versus had to go to another town nearby to even do that....

 

Sorry it took so long to respond.

Yeesh! And you said I was harsh?! I did say I was probably too harsh; that was not the topic. The topic was if you find these laughable or not. And I of course know that 2000s downloads were blurry. I was merely stating that watching them were hard because of the compression.

 

Oh. My. Gosh! It was your site that I discovered these! I love your site, man! But I agree with you somewhat.

If it is alright with you, I would like to ask you to advertise my fan film restoration project, Project Rya Kirsch, on your site. I have yours on mine, so it's only fair!

https://jedisabacc.blogspot.com/p/project-rya-kirsch_21.html

 

Wow. Your response was long, but you make a good point. However, I think using "love and devotion" as a defense doesn't work. There are many things that made no money and with love that people (mainly scifi fans) make fun of. Plan 9 from Outer Space and Teenagers from Outer Space, for example. How about The Eye of Argon; that was fanfic! Bad is bad, regardless of love.

 

Btw let me preface this by saying that I do like what you are trying to do on your website and I enjoyed reading some of the other articles there on various fanfilms. The period from 2000-2008ish was a very unique time for fanfilms and I think we have lost a lot of the wonder and excitement of that era (just look at how sadly dead these forums are now).

Now then to my main point. I think where we disagree is on whether fanfilms should be evaluated in light of when they came out, versus evaluated by modern standards. You mention two notoriously bad examples of filmmaking and probably the most famous example of bad fanfic out there. But its important to remember that these were seen as awful when they were released, they were bad by the standards of the times even then.

To take another example, I enjoyed reading the Tom Corbett books when I was a kid, and I know a bit about the TV show from the 50s. In common with most shows of that era, it was filmed live and some of the cheesiest effects you could possibly imagine, just because that was the best they could do back then. Would it be fair to criticize it as bad and unfavorably compare it to a modern sci-fi show like The Expanse? I know this isn't an example of a fanfilm, but its still an example of something that is pretty hard to watch nowadays for most people just because of how cheap and poor quality it is.

If you want to look at a fanfilm specifically, let's look at the earliest Star Wars fanfilm out there, 1977's Hardware Wars. Now its got pretty dated effects and hammy acting, but they work well enough and its an entertaining watch. Audiences loved it back in the day (I think it even got a re-release with updated effects) in the late 90s.

I stand by my contention that fanfilms should be evaluated by the standards of when they were released. If it was a bad film, it was probably seen as a bad film back then too.

Just my continued 0.02 cents

 

Well Hardware Wars was a comedy. It was supposed to suck.

As an addendum, I have posted the final work on bad fan films, which mentions you, users on here, and some Wookieepedians and their reactions to BFFs: https://jedisabacc.blogspot.com/2022/05/bad-star-wars-fan-films-episode-iii.html

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