This Final Fantasy 7 Fan Film Really Looks the Part

Somewhere sits an old Star Trek fan who watched the original series when it first aired, and is saying something like:

"When I was your age, we didn't have fan films! We had fanzines, and you had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to xerox 'em!"

Okay, grandpa, point taken. Contemporary fandom not only has it pretty sweet what with the Internet connecting fans all around the globe and the lowered cost of production tools making it so virtually anyone can create, exhibit, and in some cases make a career out of fanwork, it's also turned a phenomenon like the fan film –formerly the hallmark of scarily-devoted god-tier fandoms and appreciated more for the effort involved than the resulting production values– into a ginormous virtual film library bursting at the seams with talent and polished to a high gleam.

That's why you should a) be pretty jazzed about the above teaser and b) hope that it earns Square Enix's blessing. As Kotaku's Jason Schreier relates:

"Aren't you worried about Square Enix's lawyers asking you to stop?" I asked him in an e-mail. Square shut down a fanmade Chrono Trigger project back in 2010.

"I know," [filmmaker Gionata Medeot] said, "but my lady Tifa knows Hironobu Sakaguchi and when we finish the teaser we'll send it to him and we hope to be blessed; if not we'll put it on YouTube equally and fingers crossed."

Here's my fingers crossed too, Gionata! With the ascendency of tools like Halo 3's theater mode and Steam's Source Filmmaker openly encouraging fan remixes, I'd like to believe we're seeing a trend toward publishers smiling on and even actively encouraging their fans' creativity.

Via Kotaku.