Neologism: "fanmade", "fanvideo", etc.

I became addicted to fanvideos about a year ago. It was a dreary Milwaukee winter and Harry Potter - gateway drug to all that is good in the world of fantasy and geekery - led me to Youtube. You see, I was searching for trailers for the then-upcoming "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

While the true trailer was not yet available, I did stumble upon a slew of so-called "fanvideos." Numerous and varied, these videos all involve four common elements: fanart, movie footage or stills, pop music, and desired projections of the plot. Of course, there are variations. Some feature fanart exclusively and foregot he clips. Others may use photoshopped images featuring the faces of characters overlaid onto the bodies of other celebrities - a typical method when spinning a romance that doesn't or hasn't yet happened in a film (Ron and Hermione are classic examples of this technique).

The preferred combination for viewers, based on the comments left by other YouTube addicts, seems to be impressive fanart + ludicrously bad photoshopping. At the same time, the driving force behind the creators appears to be a desire to "set things right" with the story - a sort of self-administered catharthis if you will. An example of which you'll find at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhfqICsZRhU

Beware, the fan's projections do divulge info from the last book, so if you're not that far into the series I wouldn't watch it.

If the creators are careful, they remember to state that they do not have rights to the footage or music and that the video is simply "fanmade." This disclaimer implies that the fan's love of the material absolves him or her from copyright claims.

In the case of "fanmade", "fanvideo", and "fanart, these closed-form compound words turn "fan" from a noun into an adjective, as in the case of "fanmail." These terms are by no means the result of the Harry Potter phenomenon, although I suspect that the mass Potter-love and agony betwixt film and book releases have helped feed the plethora of Potter fanart. It may be interesting to not that the Twilight series also has a large quantity of fanart and fanvideos on the web. And I suspect for much the same reason.

Given that so much of the fanart is in Anime style, I'm willing to suppose that the fanvideo's origins are tied up in the fanart that sprang from Anime. But I am by no means knowledgable on that front. At the same time fanfiction has been around for hundreds of years and still going strong in Jane Austen Societies across the world. So we coulds suppose that fanvideos are just another manifestation of fanfiction - one that has been enabled by modern technology and the beginning of self-broadcast at venues like YouTube.