How many Star Wars films were released this year? If you think Revenge of the Sith was the only one, then you can’t be a true fan. Since that film came out in May three million people have watched another episode, Star Wars: Revelations. The response has verged on the ecstatic.

But Star Wars: Revelations is not a LucasFilm production. This film was made by a dedicated fan, Shane Felux, who spent three years and $20,000 shooting around his home in Virginia, using a script written by his wife, friends to play the lead roles, and home-made storm trooper uniforms. The result is the latest and most successful example of a burgeoning genre: the fan film.

Revelations (www.panicstruckpro.com) is an original 40-minute story, with action sequences featuring hundreds of troopers and, crucially, special effects that are almost indistinguishable from those of the professionals.

Cannes held a screening of 12 Star Wars fan films this year, and fans from New Zealand to Germany are harnessing newly affordable technology to make ever more impressive versions of The Matrix, Batman and Ghostbusters. The geeks, it seems, are striking back.

Production of Revelations began with the purchase of a Canon XL1S camcorder on eBay for $4,500. “We built sets and brought in a storm trooper re-enaction club for extras,” Felux says. “All that was missing was Uncle George himself.”

Day jobs meant that cast and crew could shoot on only two weekends a month. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is the way Felux orchestrated the CGI work. Artists from around the world contributed on the internet without ever meeting each other, and for free. They used cutting-edge software packages such as Maya and Cinema 4D to create results that were once the preserve of the big studios. “We’ve shown that you don’t need a studio to make a professional-looking movie, ” Felux says proudly.

The fan film might be growing, but it is hardly new. Clive Young ran the first online directory of Star Wars fan films in the late 1990s and traces their history back to a 1977 pastiche called Hardware Wars, which featured a flying toaster and waffle iron.

Another DIY labour of love, a scene-by-scene remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, has become the stuff of pop-culture legend.

Historically, studios have turned a blind eye to copyright infringement on the strict understanding that filmmakers would not seek to make a profit. But now that high production values and global distribution are available to all, might that change? “I know one guy tried to make a Superman fan film, and was hit with a cease-and-desist from DC Comics,” Young says. “But studios must know that to fight fan films won’t work. I think instead we’ll see them trying to co-opt the phenomenon.”

That has already started. Star Wars fan films can receive the equivalent of the papal kiss at the Star Wars Fan Film Awards, at which George Lucas himself judges a special category prize. The scheme ensures that Lucas keeps some control over film content while encouraging a free and usually reverent form of publicity that can only help sales of all those Darth Vader figurines.

But fan films are also becoming an ever more popular way for disillusioned fans to hit back. Young cites the wave of Batman films, including Batman: Dead End (www.collorastudios.com) that came in the wake of the poorly regarded studio attempts of the 1990s. These amateur directors are in pursuit of more than just fun: they want to change the movie business, and Hank Braxtan is one of the best-known among them.

The director of the seminal Freddy vs Ghostbusters (www.braxtanfilm.com), Braxtan is planning the first feature-length fan film, to be called Return of the Ghostbusters. But his real aim, he says, runs far beyond that: “The guys who run studios can’t relate to fans. My dream would be if the studio made a third Ghostbusters, and got me in to help.”

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