While reading for class about remixes this week, I thought about the millions of fan-made trailers I’ve come across on YouTube. The most common movies that are the subject of these trailers are highly anticipated ones like The Hunger Games, which opened last weekend with a staggering $152.5 million dollars in sales making it the third largest opening weekend for a movie after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and The Dark Knight.
After searching on YouTube for fan-made trailers for The Hunger Games, I found some that were created all long as three years ago, showing the devotion and frenzy this book trilogy by Suzanne Collins has caused. Here’s the original trailer, which was officially released on November 14, 2011, four months prior to the film’s scheduled release date.
What’s the most interesting, and consequently the most frustrating to avid fans, is that the trailer shows none of the actual Games. People who have not read the books are treated to some back story and introductions to the cast of characters, but the trailer cuts off just as the Games are about to begin.
Some of the fan-made trailers don’t keep viewers in such a state of suspense. This fan-made trailer uses clips from other fan-made movies and trailers, such as MainStay Pro’s Hunger Games: The Second Quarter Quell. This Trailer explains more of the back story and gives a glimpse of the brutality and deaths these children must face in every Hunger Games.
As mentioned before, this trailer uses clips from another fan’s video. MainStay Pro has 41 videos on the channel and this particular clip has close to 2.7 million hits. It’s a long clip that delves into the back story of the second Quarter Quell (in which Haymitch competed and won) revealed in the second novel in Collins’s trilogy, Catching Fire.
Although these fans aren’t remixing videos in the same capacity that we will be in the coming weeks, the do mash together several clips from a variety of sources to try to steam their excitement and anticipation for The Hunger Games’ release.
Let's Get Visual Visual 
I think some of the fan made videos were actually shot and edited. They did not mash clips up.
Yeah, definitely. The clips MainStay Pro are scripted and shot by them, but other people are taking MainStay Pro’s clips and mashing them together with other clips they’ve found, which is what the second trailer does.
hunger games is amazing!!! i watched it at watchthehungergames-online.com 🙂
I can’t believe the quality of these for fan made work. Just goes to show you that high-quality video equipment is becoming more and more accessible to a variety of people, which is probably the reason we have remix and mashup to begin with. The acting, on the other hand…that could use some improvement lol. I’ll stick with Jennifer Lawrence!