The three most common forms of fan-created video can be distinguished as fan movies, fan edits, and fanvids.
Fan movies (or fan films) are videos in which fans recreate scenes from movies they are fans of, whether in live action, animation, or stop-motion animation (sometimes using franchise toys). Fan movies/films should not be confused with fan edits and fanvids.
Fan edits (or fanedits) are generally full-length versions of films that have been re-edited by fans to create a new viewing experience (variation on plot or style, focus on specific character, removal of scenes or characters, re-framing of shots, changes to soundtrack, etc). These are done using computer video editing technology and commerical dvds.
Fanvids (or fan vids) are part of the vidding subculture. This tradition was started by women using slideshows and then VHS recorders in the 1970s. A fanvid re-edits video footage from one or more movies and sets the footage to a song or piece of music, basically creating an unofficial music video that generally explores characters, plot ideas, etc that do not appear in the original film or are submerged in the original. For instance, when Luminosity re-edits footage from the film 300 and creates a choreographed montage bristling with homoerotism as a video for Madonna’s (LGBTQ+) club anthem “Vogue,” she is creating a fanvid, or she is vidding.
Fan movies, on the other hand, are re-performed and filmed or animated, not created through digital editing of the original movie.
The first full-length shot-for-shot fan movie remake seems to have been Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (1989). The film was made over seven years by three boys who were 11 years old when they began working on it.
An intriguing form of fan movie involves multiple fans re-creating individual scenes to produce the entire movie in a series of discreet stylistic fragments. Perhaps the first and certainly the most famous example is Star Wars Uncut. The original Star Wars movie was divided into 473 fifteen-second segments and various fans claimed segments. Casey Pugh, the producer, then spliced them all together to create the full-length feature. Other examples include Shrek Retold (200 unique contributors) and Our Robocop Remake (about 50 contributors).