Lucas Restricts Fan-Made Films To Documentaries, Parodies

garagekubrick writes: "A great piece at the Houston Chronicle discusses how the community of fan made Star Wars films received a boon in December when Lucasfilm loaned their sponsorship to the event, and George Lucas himself would be a judge. Unfortunately, they've limited the contest to parodies and documentaries, thereby shutting out hundreds of entries. As a Lucas rep says, 'if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.' Pretty rich coming from the filmmaker who constantly cites greed as being the root of the dark side, and who keeps discussing the liberating values of digital filmmaking. Guess as long as it doesn't hurt his Empire..."

Comments

is a phantom edit post offtopic here?

[msouth]

This isn't the same as people making a "Leia does Tatooine" film on their own, but I really like th idea of the Phantom Edit and I am wondering how hard it would be do thusly--

suppose you don't release the film, just the instructions for making it. So, you say, ok, take this clip from time x to time y, replace the sound from time z to time aa with this sound, etc. It seems like

a) this is technically doable*
b) there wouldn't be much anyone could do about it, as you aren't distributing anyone else's IP.

I think Lucas should fund the development of such a system. Then he oculd even see the Phantom Edit! I'm sure he still wants to. :)

PS: Patent pending

* (by "technically doable" I mean that I think it is possible for this to be done in a way such that viewing it could be done automatically [*waves hand*] somehow. It's obvious that the phantom edit could be done in the way I describe, but it probably wouldn't be watched if all there was was a text file description and some sound clips.