Week 5 Reading

The chapter Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars is all about fan participation in an active franchise and how it is a complex love hate relationship with extremes on both ends of the spectrum.

On the one hand, it is the active fan participation that keeps a franchise as large and successful as Star Wars going. Fans want to add to the universe that George Lucas has created because they see it is such 3-dimesional way. The world inspires them to create their own stories with the universe as the starting point.

On the other the production company can see this creation of fan fiction and movies as a violation of their intellectually property. Production companies throughout the past few years have had to find the right type of balance between the two extremes. The question now becomes: “How much is too much?” Where do production companies draw the line from fans actively participating in the franchise, and copyright infringement? This balance is greatly needed because both the consumer and the producer rely on each other to get what they want. The problem starts when the consumers start to become and active producers of the same type of content without the production company’s consent. This in a certain sense devalues the original content because the market is now being flooded with other forms and imitations that, now thanks to modern digital technology, look really well done.

George Lucas has struck a good balance with the fans of Star Wars. He has designated a sight Atom Films to be the official host of all amateur film content and even has yearly competitions where he judges the best of the best. At the same time he has created boundaries that people must obey if they want their work to be shown. Some of that includes the not allowing any sort of explicit or sexual content or fan fiction.

The ban on fan fiction I believe is somewhat extreme. While the Star Wars universe is large and expansive with books filled with information about every planetary system and alien race. It is my opinion that there can always be room for more. This puts a creative limit on many of the fans, especially women, who only want to share their vision with other hard core Star Wars fans. But because of this ban on fan fiction the distribution of such works is not as main stream as one would hope.

All in all the boundaries for production companies and consumers, and what is considered copyright infringement is still being defined. Companies are now acknowledging that fact that they rely on fans for their revenue, and that trying to completely control the content will do nothing more than simply alienating them.

Form my production team we have decided to create an application called “101 Things To Do When You Turn 21.” We came up with a great number of ideas such as having the 101 things to be a check list of sorts with information on each activity. We will be having pages devoted to mixology as well as safety procedures if a person has too much to drink. My job right now is to think of about 20 things one can do at a house party. Once we have all our content in place we will begin to develop a user interface for the application.