I’m a fan of films. And a fan of fan films. Now I have had some chats with some friends who are against the idea of fan films and tinkering around with other people’s ideas. But I think, like fanfiction they are a great way to pay homage to an idea a character that you have a great affinity for. It’s good fun, that can even help a person cut their teeth on filmmaking, be it in front of the camera or behind the camera, you can learn what to do, what not to do, you can make contacts with people for projects down the line. Basically everything I did when I made my BioMan fan film earlier this year.

My only gripe I will admit with fan films is when people go the crowdfunding route to make the stuff. I may be wrong in this but I feel if you’re doing a fanfilm you need to pay for it. *shrugs* I dunno. That’s just me.

I got on to a fan film kick over the weekend as I have been known to do and checked out some of them that have been uploaded to the ol youtube.

One was a Killzone fanfilm which was pretty damn good. Made me almost want to play the game again on my PS3, if only pick up games didn’t suck.

The first of which was Batgirl The Web Series.

I have been seeing a ton of stuff mentioned about this series on Facebook and was curious to see what the end result would be. There are umpteen Bat-films out there on the interwebs, some of them really good, (World’s Finest, Grayson, Batman: Dead End) and some not so good (Death of Batman). Of course who am I to crap on the vision of another filmmaker, I respect them for making their vision come to light, that short film just did not go over well with me. But hey, it happens.

But I digress, I jumped at the chance to finally check out Batgirl. It centers on Stephanie Brown, the third Batgirl. Now I am not all that familiar with this character as I dropped out of regular reading of comic books years ago and have yet to really jump back in full tilt with the constant massive world changing events and reboots and such going on seemingly all the time. I just don’t bother. So this is new to me.

The actress playing Batgirl is good. Spunky, upbeat personality, but kicks ass when she needs to and takes a good beating when she needs to as well. Oracle was done well also. The whole episode was shot and edited well and left a nice cliffhanger at the end. My only gripe, which I commented on the video about, was the sound effects for the fight scenes. I am an action guy, so maybe I am biased in this regard, but I want bone-crunching sounds. I want to really hear every hit taken in my headphones. It sounded so muffled in that episode. Here’s hoping they fix it going forward. I will be sure to watch the second episode to find out.

The muffled fight sounds reminded me of Red Rising, a Power Rangers short film that had the same issue.

Good choreography but muffled sound.

The related video links led me to Batman: Puppet Master, a short that is new to me, but has quickly become a favorite of mine as it uses Scarface as a character (who does that? No one. That’s why it’s awesome) great cinematography (dying to know what they shot/edited with) and a fun little story. Would be curious to see any more work from director Bryan West, fan or otherwise.

Good stuff. Should check it out.

In the meantime we’re still working on Insourcing, Dial-A-Ranger, the super secret graphic novel project with Annie Cruz and Party Girl.

Yeah, we’re busy.