Fan Video and Multimedia

Fans create a wide variety of multimedia works, including fan art, vids, edits, anime music videos, political remixes, fan films, fan trailers, machinima, podfic and audiobooks, and others. The OTW is committed to providing access to and preserving the history of these works, and previously created a Fan Video and Multimedia committee to provide information and resources to the larger fan video community, helping explain and contextualize these works to the larger world.

To learn more about different types of multimedia fanworks, refer to the Fanlore pages on: Anime Music Videos, Fan Film, Fic Trailer, Machinima, Podfic, Vidding, and Video Edits.

Originally founded as the Vidding Workgroup in 2008, this workgroup was converted into the Fan Video and Multimedia committee in March 2013. After three years of work, the Fan Video and Multimedia committee was closed in December 2016; however, their research and work can still be found on the following and other linked pages. You can find the retired roadmap of the Fan Video and Multimedia committee on the Fan Video Roadmap page.

While Fan Video and Multimedia was closed, the OTW remains committed to advocating for the legal rights and protections of vidders; you can learn more about the OTW’s Vidding advocacy work as part of our Legal Advocacy Project.

Vidding History

Vids are fan-made music videos that involve the re-cutting and remixing of footage from television shows or films. The history of vidding dates back to the 1970s and is one of the many arts to have emerged from Star Trek and subsequent media fandoms. Many elements of vidding can be seen in other fandom trends and genres, such as gifsets, edits, AMVs, and more. While many of these have limited ties to members of the vidding community, the same legal protections that the OTW fights for with regards to vidding also help protect other fannish pursuits as well.

In pursuit of documenting this history, Francesca Coppa, an OTW founder and member of the former Fan Video and Multimedia committee, authored Vidding: A History which outlines the history of vidding as it evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids. This book was published by the University of Michigan Press, and the OTW received a dedicated donation which helped offset the cost to the University of Michigan Press for Open Access to the text and videos. Reader royalties for this book go to the OTW.

Also in support of documenting the history of Fan Video and Multimedia, Transformative Works and Cultures published a special issue on Fan/Remix Video (2012). This journal issue also features articles on non-Vidding forms of Fan Media in articles such as Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990–2001 and A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups made between World War II and 2005.

Resources for Fan Video Creators and Scholars

The following pages feature information we hope will be useful to fan video creators and scholars. These pages are not maintained and may not be fully up to date.

Press & Presentations

For work and informative research done by other scholars in the field on these topics, the following pages may be of interest: