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alt title(s): Fan Videos 
The Fan Fic of the new millennium . In a nutshell, the basic concept is to take footage from your favorite TV show, set the scenes to your favorite music, maybe add some Fan Art or fansubbing, put it all together in a digital movie maker on your PC, upload it to a video streaming site online, and wait for the comments to pour in.
It's not the most productive activity in the world, but for the most dedicated, it is one of the most time-consuming. Like Fan Fics and Fan Art, making and watching these videos is another way fans express their obsession over a show.
Well, naturally, companies and network executives should be as thrilled by these as their viewers, right? Fans love the show so much, they're not satisfied merely watching it! Tens of thousands of music videos using their show with hundreds of thousands of hits is a sure sign of its popularity, not to mention free publicity...
Indeed, some do welcome the fan support and publicity, even giving away prizes at competitions. Many just turn a blind eye to them. Others, though, seek to crush these fan vids for copyright infringement.
By definition, Fan Vids consist entirely of copyrighted material. Whether the usage of the clips counts as fair use or not is up for debate, but there's a lack of legal precedent for whether it qualifies as fair use, largely because few makers of one are interested in dragging the case to court when they could just re-upload it under a different user name or a different site. In any case, the proliferation of such videos makes it difficult for any company to gain headway in removing them.
Fan Vids made from anime or cartoon sources are also called Animated or Anime Music Videos, or AMVs, while Japanese fans call theirs Music Anime Doujinshi, or MADs.
Fan Vid artists can also get into trouble for the audio they use. AnimeMusicVideos.org, which catalogs its namesake and hosts over 80,000, had to remove all videos using music by Evanescence in late 2005. Hosted videos now come with the disclaimer, "THIS VIDEO IS PURELY FAN-MADE AND IS IN NO WAY ASSOCIATED WITH THE MUSICAL ARTIST OR ANIME COMPANY IN ANY WAY."
Shipping vids and vids centered around your one favorite character (sometimes called "tributes") seem to be the most prevalent, though Gag Dub parodies have been picking up steam recently.
Just like with Fan Fic, Sturgeons Law applies when it comes to the overall quality of the videos.
A Sister Trope is The Abridged Series.
Popular Combinations
- An Anti Hero tribute with anything by Simple Plan.
- An Action Girl tribute with "That's What Girls Do" or Good Charlotte's "Riot Girl".
- A love triangle with Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi".
- Any Avril Lavigne song, really. "Girlfriend" is getting pretty common, too.
- Die For Our Ship themed vid to Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend.
- Action scenes to a rock or metal band.
- Bonus points for "Linkin Ball Z" (Random Dragonball Z scenes to a Linkin Park song).
- Multiball angst bonus for a montage of a Troubled But Cute or Draco In Leather Pants character to "Crawling" (I'm looking at you, Gaara).
- "Bodies" by Drowning Pool is a particularly prevalent example. So much that its become the Dead Horse of fanvids.
- It seems like it is popular to combine Disturbed music with Bleach action sequences.
- The Japanese version of this uses JAM Project songs — usually "Gong" or "Skill" — in much the same way.
- Cutscenes from Final Fantasy to an Evanescence song.
- "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence with... pick a fandom.
- Various anime attack sequences formatted with text and portraits to resemble an attack cutscene from Super Robot Wars. (Japan mostly)
- "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk with Naruto... or basically almost any shonen fighter anime.
- Not quite as common anymore, but during Dragonball Z's heyday, there were innumerable pairings of that series with tracks by DMX.
- Any slideshow of pairing fanart to "Everytime We Touch" by Cascada. Extremely prominent in the Naruto fandom.
- A Takahashi Couple set to John Mellencamp's Hurts So Good ("Sometimes love don't feel like it should, you make it — oof — hurt so good." Personally I am just surprised I've never seen a Ranma 1/2 video set to this.
- Gender Benders and Wholesome Crossdressers get set to "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" and "Somebody Told Me".
- Any show dealing in anyway with supernatural beings and romance combined with Real Life's Send Me An Angel. (Oh My Goddess is the most common. Often entitled: "Send Me Belldandy")
- I've seen a Chrono Crusade version once- the irony that Chrono is a devil, not an angel...
- Anything to What I've Done or Numb by Linkin Park. No, seriously, anything.
- Especially ones centered on Starscream from Transformers Armada. Interestingly, What I've Done appeared in the 2007 movie, although Starscream didn't do much in that.
- This Troper found one with Kingdom Hearts scenes arranged and set to Numb. It remains one of the best music videos she's ever seen because it was about Roxas's anger at being just a shadow of Sora, so it gained points for making sense in context (the 'someone disappointed in' Sora being Riku).
- One Piece and any song to do with pirates or sailing, Professional Pirate is a popular one. Too bad no-one's done a good one yet..
- Characters who are transsexuals or especially Bishounen to a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- Violent deaths to "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap. This is a Memetic Mutation from The OC and the SNL Digital Short parody of that scene, Dear Sister
- Shippy Tearjerker videos set to Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars."
- Something epic to a DragonForce song. Through The Fire and the Flames is merely the most popular.
- If someone has a Superpowered Evil Side or Unstoppable Rage, expect the songs Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace or Perfect Insanity by Disturbed to be used in the videos about them.
- If a show or game has at least four characters, and one of them is more powerful (or, in a pinch, fatter) than the others, someone has vidded it to "Particle Man."
- Weird Al Yankovic and Lemon Demon seem the go-to artists for high energy, wacky comedy vids. (Some AMV contests have actually banned the use of Weird Al music since it renders making a crowd-pleasing, overwhelmingly popular comedy video far too easy.)
- Salacious scenes from various series set to Avenue Q's "The Internet is For Porn".
- And don't forget any and all male duos and If You Were Gay!
"Ernie" character: Because, well, hey!
"Ernie" character: I'd like you anyway.
"Bert" character: I am trying to read!
- There is a notable amount of AMVs for Elfen Lied set to music by Evanescence.
- Inexplicably, Sailor Moon and Raver's Fantasy by Tune Up.
- Anything overlaid on a Stupid Statement Dance Mix. These usually (but not always) come out of Japan; bonus points accrue if voice clips from the characters are set to the rhythm and/or melody of the song. Some particularly devoted creators will actually cut and paste very short samples of the character's voice so they "sing along" — usually in a very mechanical way — to the song; these are termed "manual Vocaloids" due to the popularity of Hatsune Miku and friends. Like so.
- As with the previous type, another popular technique is to combine a saccharine Dating Sim theme song with a completely unrelated show.
- As a rule, any Hot Blooded show goes well with JAM Project.
- "Getting Away with Murder" for the Magnificent Bastard or Psycho For Hire
- Epic battles to "The End of All Hope" by Nightwish:
- Pretty much anything goes well with clips from the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Band Geeks". (A few examples...)
- Slap Slap Kiss or Foe Yay to “I Hate Everything About You” by Three Days Grace.
- Lorena McKennitt songs for... just about every fandom ever.
- Accidentally in Love by Counting Crows is often used for two mismatched lovers.
- All About Us by t.A.T.u. is sometimes used for star-crossed lovers. All The Things She Said is the yuri song of choice.
- Any time you get a yuri (or non-anime lesbian) couple, expect a lot of t.A.t.U. vids. Uranus and Neptune have almost their entire discography.
- Heavy metal to scenes from 300.
- "I Won't Say (I'm In Love)," from Hercules, for any UST couple. Or a couple where the vid's maker sees the UST, but the showrunners don't.
- Expect to find vids about friendly enemies or brimming with Foe Yay set to "Wonderboy" by TenaciousD.
- "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi for Evil Is Sexy characters.
Other common techniques
- Mixing and matching one show with another's theme song
- Using audio from a movie trailer to make your own show trailer. This may involve original footage (example) or clips from another show (example).
- Conversely, overdubbing an existing trailer with dialogue and music from a different show or movie entirely.
- Fandubs, video clips that have had all of the audio removed and replaced by spoken audio, either from another show or by the fan's own voice acting. These are usually humorous in nature, although some fandub projects crop up by fans who hated the original professional dub of a series (or noticed that there wasn't one) and want to give it a better one.
- As an aside to the copyright infringement issues, humorous fandubs are not considered infringement, at least under US law. Parody and satire are protected free speech under the First Amendment — the decisions in favor of Mad Magazine alone could fill a minor law library.
This is not, of course, to say that all Fan Videos are like this — but an overwhelming majority of them are. Some have even resulted in Memetic Mutations.
Examples
- What may be the very first version of this trope were the 1981 and 1983 creations for DAICON III and IV by the people who would go on to found Studio Gainax. The video can be seen on YouTube, of course.
- Live-action vidding traces its roots back even earlier, to the '70s. Read.
- ADV Films included four fan-made anime music videos on disk 7 of the DVD release of Noir as an Easter Egg. You can find them by going to the moment where Kirika kills Chloe in the arena, and then pressing any of the four direction keys — each one leads to a different video.
- A Fan Vid of a completely different kind — a fan-made "trailer" for the as-yet unbegun Live Action Adaptation of Neon Genesis Evangelion, assembled from bits and pieces of other movies and cut scenes from an Evangelion video game — can currently be found on YouTube.
- A fan-made trailer with instrumental music and clips from the show.
- This trope was popularized by two "professional" music videos by Mathew Sweet: "Girlfriend" and "I've Been Waiting", featuring footage from Space Adventure Cobra and Urusei Yatsura, respectively. Both were seen on MTV in the very early 90s (back when MTV showed videos).
- Another "Professional" video was Ghostface Killah's Daytona 500, which featured footage of Speed Racer
- Bubblegum Crisis had the Hurricane Live OVAs, featuring Fan Vid-style montages from the series set to its Insert Songs.
- Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series is one of the better examples of the humorous type of Fan Vid. (See also Gag Dub.) They also do a version of the another shows theme, by making a Yu-Gi-Oh version of the Neon Genesis Evangelion opener.
- In January 2008, a Firefly/Serenity video set to "Defying Gravity" (from the musical Wicked) garnered the approval and recommendation of no less than Joss Whedon himself.
- In a distant age, a Fan Vid was created. Forged from Azumanga Daioh video and Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trailers' audio, it now passes from master to master throughout You Tube. It is "The Lord of the Yen". It wants to be found.
- "Senshi on Springer", a fan-made music video for "Jerry Springer" by Weird Al Yankovic, featuring clips from Sailor Moon and well, The Jerry Springer Show. It's Made Of Win.
- The AMV Hell series is a compilation of short fan vids (not always AMVs) ranging from the funny to the serious. One of the most famous ones was Osaka from Azumanga Daioh mixed with Ellen Feiss from the Apple commericals, with the video edited so Osaka's eyes are bloodshot like a stoner's. It's like...a bummer.
- The 30 secondLucky Star/Death Note mashup intro was voted as most popular segment from AMV Hell. Which makes me wonder why there is no full-length version made yet.
- Actually there is, I've seen it, but I can't find it for the life of me now. But it's out there!
- It should be noted that, as a whole, the AMV Hell series is something on an inversion and Take That against most other fan-made vids; many normal vids are centered around a specific lyric/scene combination, and the rest of the video is built around that, making many of them 90% longer than they have to be. The AMV Hell clips are short enough to get the joke in and get out of the way for the next clip. And it works beautifully.
- Possibly the ultimate example of effort and attention to detail in an AMV: Woolongs For Nothing by Box of Mystery, which perfectly reproduces Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video with characters from Cowboy Bebop.
- A serious competitor for that title is this EGSMV for Howie Day's "Collide". The creator technically didn't create any images in it, but he somehow managed to transmute Dan Shive's static comics into true animated clips…
- The Princess Tutu AMV "Håll om mig nu (Hold me now)" fits the show itself extremely well.
- Because of this fanvid (Spoilers for Code Geass R2), Coldplay's Viva La Vida has basically become Lelouch's theme song.
- Extremely elaborate anime Opening/Ending parodies, such as this example (which mixes Code Geass and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann), seem to be fairly popular among users of the Japanese video hosting site Nico Nico Douga. English-speaking viewers quickly caught on, and now whole You Tube channels exist that are dedicated to uploading them for all to see.
- Two of the best I've seen deliberately avoided using much in the way of added effects, Instead focusing on proper sequencing, and matching of the song to the subject: She's Just Oblivious (featuring Haruhi Suzumiya) and Ranma's a Beautiful Disaster. The Haruhi one has actually repeatedly broken into the top ten rated music videos (in Canada).
- This Touhou fanvid, ported from Nico Nico Douga, makes the old Backstreet Boys song sound good. They're all so elegant!
- The Nakanai Kimi to Nageki no Sekai/Gensou videos are well known to large numbers of When They Cry fans. Somewhat interesting, as the makers apparently do all the artwork themselves too. Here's a small sampler, but beware of spoilers!
- The End of the World. A Teen Titans video set to "The Scientist" by Coldplay, it focuses on Robin and Raven during "The End". Features clever use of a Talky Bookend at the beginning, and mostly avoids flashy effects.
- One of the bigger earworms to hit Japan in recent times is this Lucky Star video featuring a double remix of a Touhou song.
- Code Geass never looked this good (heh). Video comes courtesy of a certain Wakamura P, who is nearly legendary on some corners of the Internet. These days I hear he's doing mostly Idolmaster MADs.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's has the nice "Lyrical On Fire" video. Warning, extremely high quality.
- Vocaloid videos will always fall into this category due to there not being an actual anime (yet). Example. (warning, sad.) Videos of this type will more often than not have fan-created music as well (since this is what Vocaloid software is for).
- Jihaku. Just...Jihaku.
- Hellsing seems to make a good mix with Disturbed, here's a good example
- Gurren Lagann + Dragon Force =
Epic GODLY
- Any Hare Hare Yukai video. Usually crossed with other anime themes.
- Probably the most popular Fan Vid to use a Western Animation work: Hey Ya! Charlie Brown!
- Ever notice the striking resemblance (setting aside the beard) between Dan Rather and Gendo Ikari? Well, that's part of our world tonight. Time for us to bug out.
- The recent games in the Ace Combat series seem to invariably have their trailers used as grist for the fanvid mill. Observe:
- Heroes character tributes are popular. Like Sylar for instance. Also mixing and matching music or dialogue from other series.
- The video for Wamdue Project's "King of My Castle" (with Ghost In The Shell footage) is the only AMV so far to get to MTV.
- "As the World Crashes Down" (video viewable on YouTube) is a haunting look at this Crapsack World through the lens of anime and the soundtrack of Tesla's "Heaven Nine Eleven".
- Shounen Bushido; 69 animes, near flawless lip syncing, And a song that suits the Shonen theme to a T. Simply epic.
- This one for Full Metal Panic and Holdin Out For a Hero, walks the fine line between parody and straight up awesome.
- Most Triumphant Examples: AMV Hell The Motion Pictures (3 and 4).
- A Doctor Who fan created "The Five Doctors", which is essentially a very high-budget Youtube Poop.
- The Master dancing in the show to part of I Can't Decide by Scissor Sisters also led to the creation of fan vids set to that song which included clips of him dancing to it, creating an interesting recursive effect. Here is one of about 300 of them.
- Here is a Berserk montage that uses Iron Savior's "Never Say Die". Maybe it's a bit heroic for the setting but it works pretty well.
- There's an interesting video called "Three Ways to Die" that reframes Inglourious Basterds as Le Film Artistique.
- This AMV flawlessly sets scenes from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann to "I'll Make A Man Out Of You" from Mulan, complete with syncing up the lyrics to Kamina's mouth movements. It's achieved quite a memetic status in the fandom, and for excellent reason; it's actually chillingly powerful at certain points.
- Several Happy Tree Friends fan AMVs have been favourited by MondoMedia (its creators) on YouTube, such as Giggles Tribute -- What I've Done -- Linkin Park by sandiegoborn32, happy tree friends- flippy music video by oracle56 and Happy Tree Friends -- I Believe In Father Christmas by AnthonyRobertPrice. They also occasionally subscribe to some YouTube users who make Happy Tree Friends fan videos.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team + Nightwish's "Tenth Man Down" = Shellshock (YouTube link), quite possibly the greatest Gundam AMV ever.
- Death Note fits with Sweeney Todd so well it's scary: fake trailer, "Epiphany", "Demon Student of Fleet Street"
- Here are some Kingdom Hearts amvs set to the Goof Troop theme song, the Ducktales theme, the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers theme, and the Gargoyles theme. They are all awesome.
- Here's another one set to Within Temptation's "See Who I Am" and it is pure, unadulterated awesome (and also won Anime Boston's Best of Show).
- Here is a anime mash-up of the story of the Wizard of Oz, starring Osaka as Dorothy (and Kamineko as Toto), Luffy as the Scarecrow, Alphonse Elric as the Tin Man, Kon from Bleach as the Cowardly Lion. With Chicken Run music (strangely fitting).
- "Ordinary Day" by Vanessa Carlton is very popular for Doctor Who vids, like this one.
- Rorasach's Sing Along Journal a strange fusion of Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog and Watchmen.
- One notable video is the impressive Addicted To ''Lost'', whose makers actually tweaked the audio of the original song ("Addicted To Love") so that Robert Palmer appears to be singing the new title line. The kicker? This isn't technically a fanvid. It's an actual promotional video that aired on ABC during the 2005 Super Bowl.
- This video is the most impressive example of it. It features a cross between K-on and Gundam00 in one of the most impressive culmination of it. It features a completely unrelated song to either series but the animation itself is the most powerful where the creator was able to fuse the two series into a completely plausible parallel that was unprecedented. It was so realistic to the point where it was scary that it WASN'T real.
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