Are Fanvids Art?

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to say right up front: I'm not the academic half of this publishing team.  I'm a media professional and video editor and I have no background in "media studies" or "fan studies" beyond what was covered in my undergraduate courses at Fairfield.  That said, this here is a quality bit of editing.  Some people roll their eyes when the topic of fanvidding or "transformative works" comes up, but here's an opinion from someone who edits every day and gets paid to do so: This is awesome.  Not only is it awesome, but it's totally legitimate.  That's my "professional opinion."

David can probably get into all the theory and such behind vids (he's done lectures on this sort of thing; I've just assembled DVD compilations of them for said lectures), but I can give a quick techie commentary.  What we're looking at is a 3 minute video cut from 968 minutes of source footage (assuming 44 minutes per episode over the entirety of Season 5 of BtVS).  That's more than just commitment -- that's a labor of love.  The editor of this trailer culled the perfect shots out of 968 minutes and pieced them into a tight, concise 3 minute sequence that effectively promotes Season 5 as something that I would be eager to watch.  I've seen Season 5.  I didn't even like Season 5 all that much.  That's a testament to how well crafted it is.


Some fanvids are slapped together.  A great many of them, however, are as artfully made as this example.  And this is an example of a very traditional video.  It doesn't stray from a standard, modern trailer format: prologue, logos, body, climax, title, denouement, tag.  This fits what it's trying to do and that's fine.  It embraces as well as parodies.  Isn't that what Joss Whedon does so often when he explores genre?  He may embrace and embody, but he rarely loses his sense of humor.  For examples of less traditionally formatted fanvids, I recommend taking a gander at Luminosity's work.  She's actually given me edit-envy.