Vidding
| Synonyms: | fanvid, songvid, songtape, | |
| See also: | contape, tape collection, vidshows, vid awards, vid contests | |
| Click here for articles related to this term on Fanlore. | ||
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Using video, and usually music, to highlight one reading, sometimes subversive, of a video or visual canon.
Vidding is the act or process of creating a fan-oriented vid or fanvid using live action TV or movie footage set to music. The first fanvids were made in 1975 by Kandy Fong using a slide projector and a cassette tape player. These were played at cons and were very popular. One of them, Both Sides Now (~1980), was videotaped for Gene Roddenberry, so it is easily watched today.[1]
The VCR Era
Very few fans had access to film clips, slides and other materials from shows. Vidding didn't really open up until the invention and commercial availability of the VCR, which gave fans a way to copy their source material off of TV, and a way for them to linearly edit their source to create music videos. That said, the technology was expensive, and as a result it became common for groups of fans to share technology and access to source materials (in particular, hard-to-find TV shows). Vidding was occasionally done at conventions as fun group behavior, as a way to teach new vidders, and probably a bit as a way to show off.
Vidders had a difficult time communicating with each other. In the early 1990s, Tashery Shannon started a letterzine for vidders named Rainbow Noise, but the difficulty of explaining in text issues that were happening on video may have doomed it. Even after web pages and email made stories easier to pass back and forth, vids were still very rare on the web. It would take digitizing vids in the early 2000s before putting them up on web pages became at all common.
Early Songvids
The first songvids were very simple. There's an early (maybe the earliest) Starsky & Hutch vid by Kendra H and Diana B that is nothing more than a still frame of Hutch's face behind an entire song. Many others were only two or three clips set to music. (This isn't to say they were necessarily easy to make. It meant finding a clip that was emotionally correct for the point you were trying to make, that also had movements and actions on all of the important beats of a minute-long piece of music, and then inserting the clip at exactly the place in that music to make those actions and beats line up.) As the quality of commercial VCRs improved, so did the complexity of fan vids. By the end of the VCR era, most of the vidding vocabulary we use today had already been explored. Vidders such as Tashery Shannon (known for her use of unconventional music and command of the color palette) Deejay (known for her cutting precision, and willingness to step outside the clips available in a show to make a point) and many others were turning out amazingly tight and complex vids back in the early '90s.
Vids were watched either at convention vidshows or bought/traded on tape collections (which were often contapes, collections of vids shown at a specific convention). In the VCR era, clips were dubbed down sometimes four or five times from the original videotaped episode until the time it was copied to a contape master, and then to each person's individual purchased copy. Even with the best original-quality source, songtapes from this era were always a little fuzzy.
Digital Vidding
The first digital or computer video was a Star Trek/Blake's 7 vid set to In the Air Tonight by T'Rhys and shown at Virgule convention (2?) in 1994?. Considering the technical limitations, it was amazingly ambitious, including matte work that made it look like the Enterprise crew could see the Liberator (the space ship in Blake's 7) on their view screen.
The ability to do non-linear editing and the end of dubbing quality loss were powerful incentives to go digital. With the bundling of basic video editing software such as Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and iMovie on new computers, the trickle of computer vidders became a torrent. In 2002, a computer vidder submitting to Escapade or Vividcon would have copied her vid from digital to a VHS or Beta tape to submit it to the convention. Then the convention transferred the tape back to the convention master DVD to show at the vid show. Then they would have made VHS copies of the show to sell to the congoers. Only in 2003 did broadband become common enough for vidders to start to upload digital copies of their vids directly to conventions.
Digital Vid Aesthetics: Feral Vidders, Vividcon and AMV
With vidding software easily available and source video now coming out in droves on near-flawless commercial DVDs, vidding changed again. Since a fan no longer needed to be taught how to vid by other fans, new vidders (sometimes called feral vidders with more or less affection by some vidders who came through the old network described in Rachael Sabotini's The Genealogy of Vidding) were as likely to be influenced by movie trailers, MTV, or indie films as they were by previous songvids. As web hosting space became cheap enough to make it possible to post vids to the web, media vidders and AMV vidders (who don't call themselves vidders, natch) have had a chance to see and be influenced by each others' work. Vidding was growing exponentially, while editing cohesion and stylistic norms seemed to be disappearing. Into this potential chaos came Vividcon, a convention just for vidders and fans of vids, held in Chicago each year.
Visibility Beyond Fandom
Traditionally, because of fears of copyright infringement for both our music and video, most vidders have preferred to stay out of the press or Hollywood eye, but this has begun to shift with the recognition that the sheer numbers of fanvids and the cultural shift to remixing or re-appropriating and transforming popular culture has made vidding more visible and more socially acceptable. Recently, vidder Luminosity's vids were showcased in New York Magazine[2], and Reason Magazine published an article on vidding as well[3].
In early November 2008, the OTW released[4] a series of short documentaries on vidding for MIT's New Media Literacy project[5]. Made by Francesca Coppa and Laura Shapiro, the videos feature interviews with many prominent vidders on subjects ranging from their personal motivation to vid, to the hardware and software they use, to the vidding communities they belong to. Excerpts from several well-known vids are also included.
Song Re-use
Song re-use has been an extremely contentious discussion during the VCR vidding era, as common wisdom was that the first vid a viewer sees for a particular song is often the one that sticks in their mind, no matter how powerful a second vid to that song is. A corollary to this was that to remake a song--to produce a new vid using the same song as someone else--was to imply that there was something wrong with the original vid, and it had to be remade 'right'. For these and other reasons, songs were jealously guarded, and it was considered 'bad form' to remake a song that someone had already done.[6]
However with popular songs, that sort of guarding behavior wasn't really possible. These frequently top 40 type songs played on a lot of different radio stations, and received a lot of airplay; many vidders could come in contact with the song independent of the vidding community, and thus not know that other vids had already been made, or simply didn't care. These songs also tended to be fairly generic, and were easily adapted to many fandoms, being 'just perfect' for each fandom they were used in; this led to many variations on a theme, with the same song reused by many different vidders, becoming a vidding trope. As access to vidding equipment became cheaper and more easily accessible, and as the centralized vidding community splintered apart with the sheer volume of new members and new communities being formed--many of them with a monofannish as opposed to a multifannish focus--there was no real way to maintain the old 'one song/one vid' adage.
Examples of this type of vidding trope in the '70s-'80s:
In the late '80s -'90s:
Post 2000:
Occasionally, two or more vidders will choose the same song for a premiere vid at the same vid show, which leads to a lot of anxiety on everyone's part. At Escapade in 2001, Lynn C. and Killa both created vids for "In Your Eyes" by Oyster Band, with Lynn choosing Stargate SG-1 Jack/Daniel as her focus, which meant that the stars were literal and the idea of forever was metaphorical in her vid, while Killa chose Highlander's Duncan/Methos, which gave a literal quality to forever and a metaphorical one for stars, though both vids had at their core the same theme. Both vids were made on computers, but as extra bonus tension, Lynn was a longstanding member of the VCR vidding community, and Killa was one of the vidders of the WOAD society, which promoted computer vidding. This perfect storm of culture clash over fandom, lyric interpretation, and vidding community base, led to one of the more contentious vid review panels in Escapade's history.
At VVC 2008, deejay and Seah & Margie both chose the same song for their premiere vids, Handlebars by Flobots, with deejay using Iron Man footage and Seah & Margie using Doctor Who, but without the technology and culture clash issues, it didn't result in the same sort of controversy as In Your Eyes had.
That said, some songs/artists find themselves being used over and over in a single fandom, resulting in a vidding trope for that fandom, such as the extensive usage of Sarah Mclachlan in Due South.
References
- ↑ Many of Kandy Fong's other slide shows remain boxed up: slides and audio cassette.
- ↑ New York Magazine
- ↑ Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the vidding underground. Reason Magazine, August/September 2008
- ↑ Organisation for Transformative Works, November 2008 Newsletter, vol. 21
- ↑ OTW videos at MIT TechTV
- ↑ vidder email list, somewhere
- ↑ Email from Melina to vidder Yahoo!Groups list dated Sep 24, 2003. Accessed November 18, 2008.
- ↑ vidder email list, somewhere
