Fan Edits Are the Backbone of the Entertainment Industry
The fan edit to film school pipeline is very much a real phenomenon.
Somewhere out there on the world wide web is an old five-year-old Vine account of mine that contains about a dozen or so edits of various fictional characters. I have the link bookmarked in my Safari so as to not forget my humble beginnings, but I would never show another soul that website.
I spent most of summer 2016 trying to figure out how to get Sony Vegas Pro for free and then trying to figure out how to work Sony Vegas Pro. The computer I worked on was a 15” Lenovo laptop that probably would have combusted had my methods of getting various editing programs resulted in a virus. It would freeze and overheat and burn the top of my thighs whenever I did heavy editing—and anything past simple trimming and rearranging was considered “heavy” by that computer.
I’ve since upgraded my laptop and hopefully, from an objective standpoint, my skills as well. I’ve even enrolled myself into film school. This pipeline isn’t really all that surprising—a few of my friends and classmates followed the same route. A friend of mine used to make Teen Wolf and The Vampire Diaries edits and now works as a freelance video editor and assistant director. Contrastingly, another friend followed the Barbie Furniture and ToonTown tutorials to film school pipeline. But even in college, fan edits don’t stop. I once watched my friend’s roommate make an edit of The 100 and it was entertaining, nostalgic, and familiar.
Film school application rates aren’t the only things benefitting from fan edits though. The Entertainment Industry themselves benefit greatly from these edits. The #FanEdit tag on Instagram proclaims 1.5 million posts and on TikTok, boasts a whopping 4.7 billion views. Fan edits are almost an industry in itself. When an edit gains a little traction, the comments blow up asking what television show, what movie, what artist, what celebrity is currently being edited to a trending song or groovy beat. I once binge-watched a forty-minute-per-episode, fifty-episode Chinese historical drama because someone on TikTok edited the main characters to an instrumental version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”. The thousands of other comments parroting each other asking what show it was seemed to have the same idea as me.
Even blockbusters like the Harry Potter series, whose edit hashtag garners over 1.8 billion views, benefit from being kept alive by fan edits. If you were on TikTok during 2020, you have probably seen the abundance of edits as well. At one point, editors started using green screen and editing themselves into Harry Potter scenes. One of the more memorable ones were made by Claudia Alende, a TikToker who color corrects and masks herself so well into the scenes that someone unfamiliar with the franchise wouldn’t know the difference. Her Harry Potter series is thirty videos and one season long, and each video installment gets hundreds of thousands of views. Her main co-star is Draco Malfoy, one of the antagonists of the movie series, and his hashtag alone collects 26.8 billion views.
The international entertainment industry has similarly seen this rise in viewership thanks to fan edits. Girl From Nowhere’s season two released through Netflix and for the entirety of May, I couldn’t go one day on TikTok without seeing Girl From Nowhere edits—which isn’t all that surprising considering #GirlFromNoWhere has racked up 1.4 billion views and the top edits have more than a million likes. Although the series premiered back in 2018, its popularity skyrocketed in 2021 and the show ranked #1 in viewership in Asia during its premiere. The “Nanno Smile Trend” also went around for a period of time with creators trying to recreate the protagonist’s notoriously wicked smirk. No doubt this Halloween we’ll be seeing plenty of people wearing schoolgirl uniforms, donning short black hair with bangs, and a familiar smirk.
Film students, fan editors, and the industry alike have an unexpected connection to the sphere of fan editing. While traditional marketing and promotions are still an integral part of promoting film and television, some budding fan editor out there may have just a bit more influence than the industry thinks.
Cover Photo by Heroes Wiki. Edited by Madison Case.
