Shadows and gigabytes: a taxonomy of fan edits of Hollywood films

With free access video sites like YouTube and Vimeo making anyone's professional level edits of studio film releases freely accessible by millions, the line defining the original director's intent becomes muddled. With a coming age of these fan edits being many people's introduction to classic film characters and series, there is a new level of discourse about the fidelity of the films as they had been originally released in theatres.

Though many directors have released their own differing cuts of their same films, notably Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone and George Lucas, it is new territory to have critics' cuts, or as many different cuts of a film as fan communities desire to propagate. The film experience is now more malleable to suit the unique tastes of the audience participants as the fan edit grows steadily as its own genre. <br><br>Whilst forging a method of approach to establishing an overview of this new fan cultural practice, I have developed a taxonomy by which these varied films can be aggregated, examining what is gained or lost for traditional film presentation.