Today there are so many movies, games, books, videos, drawings and shows available to the public to watch and/or listen to.
When it comes to making your own work though, it is always nice to find your own inspiration to help and guide you into making your very own masterpiece.
With so many ideas out in the open today it is so easy to find possible inspiration for your own story. At the same time though it can lead to some similarities between your own ideas and those that already exist and probably came from your source of inspiration. Though this may sound like a bad thing, it typically is not. Having references or similarities to other media is typically something to be slightly expected.
There are so many ideas that have been used already that anything you make is bound to have some sort of similarity to another. However, there is a point that this reference or similarity could go way past the line of just being nothing more than an example of possible inspiration. When it gets to this point it starts to become a crime by the name of plagiarism.
Now as for where this line between inspiration and plagiarism starts to get drawn is what I would like to discuss for today.
To start off I think it would make the most sense to discuss one of the most drastic and noticeable types of examples of being on this line of being inspired by something or plagiarism.
These being the knock off movies trying to cash in on something famous. We’ve all heard of these types of knock-off movies before.
Typically these types of movies don’t even bother to hide it half the time either. They are usually immediately recognizable as knockoffs the moment you see them. Stuff like “Tappy Toes” (“Happy Feet”), “Atlantic Rim” (“Pacific Rim”), “Frozen Land” (“Frozen”) and “The Little Panda Fighter” (“Kung Fu Panda”). Personally, I cannot describe any of these movies and what happens in them as for the sake of my own sanity I would rather not watch them.
However, their covers, I feel, already tell enough of a story. These types of movie covers typically are a direct copy of the associated movie they are copying, whether it be similar poses and characters with their own lazily drawn versions of the characters or the practically carbon copy of the title’s art style.
They immediately show they are nothing more than horribly lazy and rushed movies made to cash off the success of newly famous movies.
Another really good example of a piece of media falling on this line would be fan projects. More specifically fan games of Five Nights At Freddy’s. There are so many fan projects based on this series that I can’t even begin to count the number of fan projects that exist. Between games, songs and horror animations all inspired by the franchise, there are probably at least more than 100 total fan projects inspired by the series out there today.
Though there are many fan projects, I would say most of them are a good example of someone or a group of people being inspired by a franchise. When it comes to fan games typically they to some degree have a similar story or characters, but they will usually include several new mechanics adding on to what the original games had as well as including either their own characters or already existing characters with a new art style or look to them.
Sure there are some that are just shameless rip offs with little to no effort put into them, but there are so many really good ones at the same time. Even ones including the same characters from the original franchise have their own sense of uniqueness to them as well. These ones will typically give the same old story from the original game with the creator’s own spin to it, all the while accompanied by really cool redesigns for the original characters.
Then you have fan projects like The Walten Files which takes from the original idea of people stuffed inside animatronics and possessing them, but instead of making it the typical, “Bad owner person is killing and putting them into suits,’’ situation, it instead has its own story. The series is not complete and there are still many mysteries left to be uncovered, but it is obvious that this is very much its own thing with its own original story.
When looking for an example of inspiration done right, I feel Five Nights at Freddy’s fan projects are a perfect example of this. They show a level of love for the original series that can’t be described as well as a level of unique creativity between each individual project.
In my personal opinion, I think one of the defining factors on whether or not something falls on the side of plagiarism or inspiration in the end all falls onto effort.
When enough effort is put into something it gives it its own individuality and comes across less as a shameless copy of an already existing story and instead more like a love letter to the idea in which the thing being created is based on.