Fan Video and Multimedia

Fans create a wide variety of multimedia works, including fan art, vids, 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 our Fan Video and Multimedia projects are intended both to provide information and resources to the larger fan video community and to help explain and contextualize these works to the larger world.

Fan Video Roadmap

The Fan Video Roadmap is a guide to the OTW’s planned video-related features and services, including our plan to fully incorporate video into the Archive of Our Own.

Resources for Fan Video creators

The following pages feature information we hope will be useful to fan video creators; if you have a suggestion for a page to be hosted here, or new suggestions or corrections to existing pages, please contact us.

Resources for Fan Video Scholars

  • Bibliography of Fan Video: maintained on Zotero and updated twice a year. Last Export: August 17, 2011.
  • Fan Works Style Guide: how to cite fan vids (and other scholarly works) in academic contexts.
  • Vidding (2008), a documentary produced by the OTW for MIT’s New Media Literacy project.
  • Vidding Documentary (2011), by Abigail Christensen
  • Scholarly Archive of Multimedia Works (coming soon): A library of fan videos discussed in scholarly articles: we will also provide a point of contact for scholars who plan to publish so that future articles and books have stable references and footnotes.

Vidding History Projects

The OTW currently has particular legal and scholarly expertise in live-action media fan vidding; our Vidding History projects aim to provide services to the vidding community and explain and contextualize vidding to the larger world. Current projects include: the Vidding Oral History Project, the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids, and Vidding (2008), a documentary produced by the OTW for MIT’s New Media Literacy project. Much of the OTW’s legal work has been vidding-related as well; you can find out more about that at our legal advocacy page.

The Dark Archive

The goal of the dark archive will be to store and protect vids; this archive will not be online or generally accessible. See the Fan Video Roadmap for more information.

Torrent of Our Own

The Torrent of Our Own will be a private tracker for fair-use transformative fanworks, including: vids, fic trailers, fan art, zine pdfs, AMVs, political remix, machinima, and other transformative digital fanworks. See the Fan Video Roadmap for more information.