Inspired by Star Wars, Trailer Park Boys, and the Christopher Guest movie series, “Fan Film The Series” is a 6 part mockumentary web series chronicling the efforts or an ambitious amateur film maker who’s convinced his friends (against their better judgement) to help him out in realizing his dream.

The project itself isn’t too far from that story.

In July of 2007, “Fan Film” writer Matt Hunsworth, drafted a 6 webisode series for NeoZAZ.com entitled “Fan Film: The Series”. From July of 2007 until April of 2008 events including his lead actor getting married and disappearing, the primary location of the series burning down, and his production partner moving to Illinois, “Fan Film” appeared to be a dead project.

In a seemingly, at the time, unrelated event Matt was able to book a flight to his hometown of Quakertown Pennsylvania for a weekend to meet up with his long time creative partner David Smith for less than the price of 3 weeks of gas (thanks to the airfare wars of the summer of ’08)
On a whim, Matt contacted some of his friends and family in Quakertown to see if anyone at all was interested in filming this “Fan Film Mockumentary” idea he’s been kicking around for over a year now.

To his surprise, everyone he asked (and more) were eager to help. With that, Matt began to re-write the “Fan Film: The Series” drafts with the new characters and locations into one script – “Fan Film The Movie”. When all was said and done, the script still manage to hold 6 separate storylines enabling the production of both “Fan Film The Movie” and the original incarnation, “Fan Film The Series”. During all this, Matt somehow convinced his wife Khrysti to start putting costumes together for some scenes Matt has in his head to intertwine into the film. Though the costumes would be seen only seconds in the movie, Khrysti paid close attention to putting them together and gave extraordinary effort in completing them given the every increasingly limited budget for the project.

Meanwhile, Matt was able to convince his Orlando Florida production/creative partner Gregg Hansen to join him in PA before Gregg moved to Illinois.

On August 22nd 2008,  Matt and Gregg landed in Philadelphia PA, then headed right for Quakertown.
By 3:00 PM that day, Matt and Gregg were joined by Dave Fox – long time family Friend of Matt and extended Family, Chris Irons – Another long time friend and Lead Actor of NeoZAZ’s “Die Hard with Butter Flavoring”, Karen Hunsworth – long time sibling of Matt, and David Smith – Longest time friend and Matt’s creative partner for over 16 years.

Filming began.

The crew welcomed Sunday and John Coulter to the production on Saturday. Incidentally John had co-starred in Matt and David’s very first film “How to be a Parton” in 1992. Matt’s sister Karen recruited John and Sunday to the production herself. It wasn’t until about a week or 2 into the re-write that Matt learned this was the same John Coulter he worked with in 1992.

By 4:00 PM Sunday August 24th 2008 (That’s right, only 49 hours to film the whole movie, not mention eat and sleep) It was a wrap.

The rest, with any luck, is history.

Fan Film The Movie represents one long and hard worked weekend of good friends having fun and working together. That was the most important part of the project, and I think we accomplished that beyond anyone’s expectations.