Fan Film Follies – A Short History




Welcome to the fourth incarnation of my virtual magazine I call the Fan Film Follies.  My name is Christopher Moshier and I’ll be your host.

It was time.  Yes.  It surely was time to host my own website dealing with everything within the realm of the subject of Fan Films.  Let me bore you giving you a quick history of where I started to how this very site you are reading this on came to be.  I’m thinking back really hard here.  I think it may have been 2002 when I contacted a site called Cool Collecting run by Mr. Tim Priebe in the interest of writing a column about this great new genre I’d started to fall in love with.  It was around the same time I discovered this equally cool tool called broadband which magically opened up a new source of entertainment made very frustrating by AOL dialup.  With the ability to download these films in a “flash” and with the thumbs up for joining the staff of writers over at Cool Collecting I went to work on my very own section of the super information highway which I called Fan Film Follies.  It’s a peculiar name, but a name that remains just the same and a name I obviously still use today.

coolcollectingI stayed with Cool Collecting for a couple years until Tim decided to focus his energies on his career in web design, which is thriving today may I add.  It was fun contacting all these great creators via email, but as Tim decided to call in quits I was also getting a bit burnt out over the subject matter.  The decision was made to focus more on writing my own creative projects leaving fan films for my casual viewing.  I also bug Tim from time to time over at that social networking powerhouse FaceBook.

BUT!  The itch returned.  I don’t know how it happened – I would imagine the help of that unknown (at the time) search engine Google had something to do with it – but when I was exploring around the internet for fan films one day in the year 2005 I came upon the website Fanboy Theatre.  Interested in writing about fan films after a couple year hiatus I contacted Fanboy William McKenzie, curator of that fine site, to see if he was interested in having someone submit content for it.  He was happy to do so.  This lasted about two months.  Fanboy Will disappeared.  No answer to emails.  No new posts of articles.  So that was that.  I returned my full focus to my writing projects leaving it at that.  As a side note Fanboy Will eventually magically resurfaced as mysteriously as he disappeared.

In the summer of 2006 I decided to search for an adequate website in order to get back into covering my fan film addiction.  The Comic Book Bin is the website I discovered.  It was a good looking site with modest content.  With the whole fan film package I brought to the table I really thought I could help this website grow in readership.  I contacted the owner of the site, Hervé St-Louis, who graciously invited me into the fold.  Even better was the fact that I had control for the first time ever posting my own content.  There was no more waiting on someone else to get my articles up on a site.  For a couple years I was pretty content with the Bin.  The fan film section was showing up as a top link on a lot of the major search engines.  The fan film section also became one of the top links at the Comic Book Bin. I had some issues with article choices and behind the scene happenings that I felt I didn’t want to be apart of.  That was one piece of it. The other was I only had so much control on the format for the fan film section. I felt it could go farther. This past summer, after thinking about it on and off for probably a year or so, I decided it was time to leave.  I decided it was time to make my own site on fan films, a thought that had been in my head for a year’s time.  It was time to really open the genre to see if I could build a comprehensive site on the subject matter.  A challenge!

podcasticon_001So now I need to back step a bit to the year 2007 while I was still writing for the Comic Book Bin.  William McKenzie (Fanboy Will) – remember him from Fanboy Theater – had returned from the land of the missing as well as returned to posting items on his website which I followed regularly.  It was the end of 2007 where I had the idea of a podcast format that I’d seen so much of around the internet.  I was also weary of email and instant message interviews at this point.  They were not only a lot of work to edit, but impersonal.  I really wanted to talk to these people behind the films rather than email out questions and then they would email back responses.  Little did I know at the time, but editing a podcast was waaaay more work than editing a type written interview.  Anyways – I emailed Fanboy Will with an idea of co-hosting a podcast with me.  He wrote back indicating he was having the same exact idea.  Great geeks think alike!  Coming up with the name was easy.  The Fan Film Podcast of course.  And we continue to this day interviewing the fantastic talents behind these fantastic productions.  Will is definitely the mouth piece of the show.  He’s very good at keeping the conversation going and that immense database of pop trivia knowledge in that head of his is more than impressive.  I’m the organizer.  Book the guests and do all the technical, behind the scenes mumbo jumbo.  Together we make a great team if I do say so myself.  And if you’ve never had the opportunity to listen to the show link on an episode or two found on this very website.  You may get a chuckle or two out of it.

That brings me to this site named after my original Cool Collecting column.  The new Fan Film Follies started in the beginning of the Summer of 2009 and finally completed in November.  There’s still a lot of content to be added and some tweaking to be done, but overall the site is officially christened and open for business.

What you’ll find here will be fan films (that’s a given), interviews with the talents behind these awesome entertainments, news, my opinions (doesn’t everyone have one?), our Fan Film Podcast and also adding a brand new element – fan produced audio.  I’ll also be adding some classic audio of stuff that you may not even know is out there.

Thanks for coming to the site.  Thanks for taking the time to read through my genesis of my fan film career.  I’ll try to update the site as much as possible.  With work, family, and my own comic book and screenwriting ambitions it won’t always be easy, but I can never dream of a time where I wouldn’t be covering this subject matter.  It’s just to damn fun.

PEACE!


Share:

1 thought on “Fan Film Follies – A Short History

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.