Understanding the Borderlands The Fallen Fan Animation
The Borderlands universe spawned an enormous amount of fan content after the first game released in 2009. Among the more notable entries from that early period is a fan-made animated short called The Fallen, created by an animator known as Shirley John around 2011. The project gained a small but dedicated following on YouTube and a few gaming forums before largely fading into the background of Borderlands fan history. I ran across this again recently while researching early Borderlands fan productions. What I found was a low-budget but surprisingly well-executed animation that captures the tone of the game better than some official tie-in content did. It's roughly ten minutes long, animated in a cel-shaded style that mirrors the game's art direction. The story follows a generic Vault Hunter dealing with the aftermath of a failed raid on a bandit stronghold. Nothing groundbreaking narrative-wise, but the pacing is tight and the voice work is passable for a fan project.
Borderlands The Fallen By Shirley John 2011
Locating this content today requires a bit of digging. The original upload on YouTube has since been taken down or made private, likely due to Gearbox's copyright enforcement actions that intensified around 2012-2013. You can still find archived copies scattered across Vimeo, Dailymotion, and a handful of Borderlands fan archives. The most reliable copy I found was hosted on an independent animation archive site that mirrors community content before it disappears. Searching for the exact title along with the creator's name usually surfaces at least one working link within the first few results. There is no official download available, and I wouldn't recommend using torrent sites for this. The quality on those tends to be compressed to hell. The Vimeo mirror preserves the original 720p export, which is close enough to the source. What makes The Fallen worth watching isn't the story. It's the attention to detail in the animation itself. Shirley John clearly played the game extensively. The weapon models, the environment geometry, even the HUD elements are recreated accurately. I noticed the skill trees were wrong in one scene - the character pulls off a tech ability that doesn't exist in their supposedly selected tree - but that's a minor nitpick. The movement animations match the game's actual ragdoll physics, which took me by surprise given the production value.
One thing people often ask about is whether this counts as canonical in any way. It doesn't. Gearbox has never acknowledged it, and Shirley John has not pursued any official involvement with the franchise since. The creator's later work shifted toward original content unrelated to Borderlands, and there haven't been new updates to the channel in several years. If you're looking for current information about the creator, there probably isn't any active anymore. The production used standard tools for the time - mostly Maya for 3D modeling and animation, with After Effects handling compositing. There's no breakdown available from the creator, but examining the final output closely reveals some shortcuts that were common in indie animation pipelines back then. Several background characters are repeated models with flipped textures. The fire effects are standard particle presets rather than custom simulations. These choices kept the project manageable on what was likely a personal computer without a rendering farm. If you're interested in similar Borderlands fan works from that era, the landscape includes a few other notable projects. There's a fan comic series called Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel That Never Was that ran on DeviantArt around the same period. A few machinima productions used in-game engines to create short stories. None of them achieved the same level of polish as The Fallen, but together they paint a picture of what the community was doing while waiting for Borderlands 2, which didn't arrive until 2012.
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I should mention that the audio quality on the original is rough. The music track loops noticeably during longer scenes, and some of the dialogue recording has background noise that suggests it was captured on a consumer-grade microphone. I found an unofficial remaster on a fan forum where someone replaced the audio entirely, but the remaster has its own issues with lip-sync timing. The original audio at least matches the character movements well enough. Your call on which version to watch. There's also a small community that keeps discussing this project occasionally. The r/Borderlands subreddit brings it up roughly once a year when people feel nostalgic about pre-Borderlands 2 content. The comments sections on any remaining mirrors tend to have the same arguments about whether fan animation should receive more recognition from the developers. Those debates go nowhere and repeat the same points every time. The technical limitations of the project are worth noting if you're studying it from a production standpoint. The frame rate hovers around 24fps for most of the runtime but drops to something closer to 15fps during action sequences where there are too many animated elements on screen. Lighting is baked rather than dynamic, which explains why certain scenes look flat compared to the game's actual visuals. Character faces use simple vertex morphing instead of full facial rigs, which is why the emotional expressions read as somewhat stiff during dialogue-heavy moments.
None of these limitations make the project unwatchable. They make it a product of its constraints, which is probably the most accurate way to describe any fan animation from that period. The Borderlands community in 2011 had access to very different tools and resources than what's available now. What Shirley John produced with whatever was available at the time shows a genuine understanding of what made the game visually distinctive and an effort to replicate that in animation form. If you want to watch it, search for the title and creator name on video hosting sites. Check multiple sources since availability changes without warning. The archived copies are the safest bet. There's no merchandise, no expanded content, and no sequel. It exists as a standalone piece of fan work from a specific moment in the Borderlands community's history.
