RIP Fancams

As a teenager, after seeing a movie where I was struck by an actor’s performance, the flex of his forearm, or a sidelong stare at his costar I would log on to Tumblr.com and name search him. I knew my fellow freaks would have already scoured the internet memorializing his best moments into gif sets. To obsessively reblog these looping videos both satiated my desire and claimed ownership. 

Now looking back on my defunct Tumblr you can tell my Teen Wolf years from my Skins years and the exact date I watched Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging for the first time. There are gifs of Dylan O’Brien I could draw from memory. 

Tumblr died a slow death. Timothée Chalamet was the last actor that received the Tumblr treatment from me. But what came next wasn’t so bad. As video-first social media dominated, so did my new favorite way to engage in celebrity: fancams. 

Technically speaking, fancams are videos that slice together one celebrity or public figure, while vids use footage from a movie or television show. A ton of effort goes into making these videos. When I reported on how Challengers edits got made so quickly, I stumbled upon an underground world. Before a film is released on streaming and fans get access to “HD quality” clips, “scene pack makers” act as the middleman between a pirated (“cam quality”) film and fancam makers. These middlemen download the pirated film and make “scene packs” of each character, a process that takes anywhere from four hours to an entire day. Then a fancam maker pulls directly from a scene pack to create their work of art. 

Read about Challengers fancams here.

Fancams became a special interest of mine and were the backbone of a lot of my stories at Mashable like the way editors molded Succession’s Kendall Roy into a teenage girl through the use of songs by Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift.

Read about Kendall Roy here.

Fancam makers understand and convey things the director never could. Sometimes a fancam pays homage to the themes of a work of art by pairing it with a pertinent song, other times it’s a complete rethinking and reinvention of a character, celebrity, or film. But the best is when you see a creator spotlight a moment that stuck out to you and think, oh you get it, too. 

And then you click into their page and they edit some really out of pocket stuff — like Interview with the Vampire, it’s always IWTV — and you think, what a beautiful mind.

My two favorite genres of fancam are middle-aged actors set to cunty hyper-pop — last awards season between Cillian Murphy and the hot lawyer from Anatomy of the Fall we were in the prime of these — and devastating edits to Mitski. 

I fear with TikTok’s removal from the App Store and the right wing collapse of social media more broadly, fancams are at risk of going by the wayside. In anticipation of the short-lived ban, I scrolled through my favorites on the app and downloaded those I couldn’t live without. In honor of fancams, here’s a preemptive in memoriam with contributions from the Altar Boys extended universe about their all-time favorites. 

He looks like he works with his hands and smells like Marlboro Reds…

by Elena Cavender

@uncleianedits

need him #harrisdickinson #billfarrah #amurderattheendoftheworld #harrisdickinsonedit

Pre-Babygirl fame, I was hopelessly in love with Harris Dickinson and brought him up at every opportunity. Met with blank stares, I would pull out my phone and open my camera roll to this edit. If this work of art couldn’t convince the viewer of Harris’ beauty and importance, I didn’t know what would.

@uncleianedits slices together all the best moments of Harris’ portrayal of Bill, a hacker / politically provocative artist known as FANGS (?) with a MULLET and A FACE TAT, in Murder at the End of the World. There’s his perfect face in side profile, the parting of his lips to reveal a reluctant and endearing smile, and him smoking a cigarette wearing stupid wraparound sunglasses.

Soundtracked by Ethel Cain’s gritty “Crush” her crooning emphasizes the juxtaposition between Harris’ edgy exterior and his kind eyes and gentle nature. Her longing for the bad boy of “Crush” morphs into our own longing for Harris’ attempt at embodying a bad boy, who isn’t so bad at all. 

It’s a Fascinating Story…

By Chloe Lelchuk

@thedeathlyharry

he just hung up on US 💜 #mattdamon #benaffleck #goodwillhunting #whichcouldmeannothing #bostonyaoi #edit #edits #dogma #thelastduel #brat ... See more

… says a perturbed Matt Damon in response to Today Show host Savannah Guthrie asking him his thoughts on Bennifer 2.0’s 2021 reunion, right before hanging up by cunningly adjusting his AirPod, so the FaceTime feed disconnects before he has a catastrophic mental breakdown in a pub in Australia. 

Fittingly, “it’s a fascinating story” is also how I, and presumably the creator of this edit, would describe Matt and Ben’s relationship: one of “The Greatest Love Stories Never Told” (not to be confused with J.Lo’s 2024 Amazon Prime documentary of the same name). 

When Matt hangs up, the FaceTime feed glitches, his frozen face flipping back and forth repeatedly as Charli xcx’s “Talk talk featuring troye sivan” swells into earshot. The song’s pleading lyrics serve as a mirror to the subtext of the clips that follow: footage of Mattfleck from the ‘90s through present-day featuring longing glances, earnest compliments, ijbols, and even a brief kiss on the lips. The edit’s finale, featuring a clip of a young Matt exclaiming “Welcome to our coming out party!” beside his coy but compliant “partner” followed by the infamous 2023 paparazzi video of an exasperated Ben slamming the passenger car door on his again-ex wife is no accident. In the edit’s final frame, they double down on their thesis of the duo’s decades of suppressed affection — even in the face of the Bennifer of it all — by spelling out the lyrics “Shall we go back to my place?” in the Brat album’s signature Arial font. To me and in the context of this edit, this plea comes from Matt’s POV, which, as we all now know, could mean nothing… 

ELENA’S NOTE: @thedeathlyharry’s bio reads,“i bring a sort of tumblr vibe to tiktok that the u.s. government doesn't like.” Relevant!

So there’s this dirty archaeologist…

By Chase DiBenedetto

In La Chimera, a shockingly under-lauded 2023 film starring the-only-man-in-Hollywood-with-a-pure-soul Josh O’Connor, main character Arthur is an offensively bedraggled, canonically foul-smelling man who quite literally lives in a hovel. But he finds beauty in the things missed by others around him: The curve of a woman’s nose, the senility of an aging artist, the mundane items left behind in people’s graves. Arthur is in love with a dead woman, a red string trails him through life and drags him into the underworld to follow, like Orpheus, his missing love. He is wandering, and he is seeking, and his life is killing him, and what, really, is worth sacrificing in order to get what you want?

Who better to encapsulate those feelings in music and lyric than Mitski? What better a song than one about a woman unraveling from the inside out as she performs, unceasingly, for her partner? When Mitski performs Be The Cowboy’s “Washing Machine Heart” live, as the innermost desires of a woman who can’t allow her true self to be seen, the artist moves her body through a series of fervent, but rehearsed, dance steps. Her hair twirls around and obscures her face, her arms move up and down her body repeatedly as if possessed. Arthur, the archaeologist, is more reserved. He gently moves the thrown light of a match across a statue’s marble features, and casts furtive glances from the corners of every room he’s in, looking for a way out.

“I know who you pretend I am... Why not me?” Mitski sings. “Why not me?” wonders Arthur. 

That slutty little man…

By Jennimai Nguyen'

@e.lciqse

he could unbutton my buttons ANYDAY (audio on @e.lciqseaudios) #tomblyth #tomblythedit #tbosas #theballadofsongbirdsandsnakes #billythekid... See more

I have 39 TikTok folders with hundreds of videos saved to each, ranging from cooking videos to vacation ideas to wedding planning tips (I am not engaged, simply prepared). I also have one folder with just one video saved, entitled “hehehehhee.”

In it lies my prized possession: a fancam of Tom Blyth, showing off that slutty little man with various levels of unbuttoned shirts and that one tank top red carpet look that is seared into my brain. I do have a weird affinity for British men named Tom, but I also truly think this fancam is the perfect little vignette of what fancams should be: short, sweet, cutely introduced by Rachel Zegler, and featuring a man that everyone hasn’t quite latched onto yet. A delicious little treat, just for me, even if 1.3 million people have seen it, too.

Politicians as hopeless little girls…

By Allie Coon

@hobamafanpage

Obama is Joshua, Harry is sabrina and Michelle is Olivia #driverslicense #oliviarodrigo #sabrinacarpenter #love #devestated #fyppp #lovest... See more

I deleted TikTok recently in an attempt to reverse the degradation of my personality. Where has this left me? On Bart at rush hour, scouring Instagram for Hobama edits and trying to block innocent bystanders from the sight of Michelle Obama lobbing dodgeballs at Harry Styles’ crotch. Degradation is inescapable, apparently. I had to go on Laptop TikTok to find this gem.

To me, Hobama epitomizes the beauty of what it was to be a One Direction fan, which was an experience at once all-consuming and totally vacuous. One Direction wasn’t really anywhere but inside our heads, and we mostly knew that, and that was mostly fine, because the inside of our heads was so, so funny. Real life and One Direction life got mixed up and broken apart and braided back together and you ended up with something like Hobama, the height of all that absurdity. 

I don’t know why fictionalized plot lines involving political figures get me so much. I want an edit of Herbert Hoover dropping quiet tears onto a heart-shaped frame of Harry’s face while the dust bowl hollows out the better part of Kansas. I want the Berlin Wall crumbling and the aides beating down the door while Kruschev twirls the phone cord over a sketch of Harry laughing from the passenger seat of his brand-new, crystal-blue Trabant. I guess I want these guys to be stripped of the theatrics and just be normal, petty, hopeless little girls like the rest of us.

I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship…

By Chase DiBenedetto

The list of accolades awarded to Christopher Nolan includes two Oscars and a British knighthood, but in the world of fan edits, the stereotypical “Bro Director” is also the King of Slash Fic. In Neil and the Protagonist — the captivatingly non romantic and yet pitifully pining duo that helm 2020’s Tenet — Nolan and his fans (read: women drawn to his inability to write two men as if they haven’t been in love for decades) strike edit gold. The timelooping narrative, confusing only to those who don’t realize this film is a romance, sees the two characters coexisting at two different parts of the same, decade-long partnership simultaneously. The Protagonist, unbeknownst to him, has been roped into a physics-defying plot of intrigue by his future partner (lover?) because, get this, his future self asked him to. Neil, fully aware of what’s going on and from the future, is coaxing the Protagonist through the initial events that will lead to their inevitable meeting. They must save their world as their entire relationship comes to an end…. And also it's beginning? “You’ve known me for years?!” cries the protagonist in the movie’s penultimate scene. Baby, he’s known your mind, body, and soul in cosmic proportions of time.

Combine this salivating, star-crossed plot with an iconic dom-sub scene in which Neil orders a Diet Coke in a way that a soda has never been ordered before, and add Lorde’s seminal 2017 hit "Supercut" (yeah, they went there), and you’ve got a fancam hall of famer. 

Thank you to Chloe, Chase (x2!), Jennimai, and Allie for their contributions! And thank you for reading. Please don’t hesitate to send me your favorite fancams.

Elena