A History of Vidding (essay)
| Meta | |
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| Title: | A History of Vidding |
| Creator: | Morgan Dawn |
| Date(s): | 2017 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Vidding |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | A History of Vidding, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
"A History of Vidding" is an interactive essay written by Morgan Dawn that touches on the tools, techniques and events surrounding VCR era fanvid editing in the live action (TV and movie) community. It covers the "analog" or videotape era of 1970s through the 2000s and features text, images, slideshows, interviews, and video. It also draws from previously inaccessible fandom sources such as letterzines and newsletters thanks to Morgan Dawn's fanzine scanning efforts It was published in 2017 as part of lim's vidding ezine: Videlicit.
The essay is intended to "a" history based on Morgan Dawn's personal experience and recollections. It is not intended to a comprehensive or objective history.
Introduction
Fan Vidding… In the beginning…Fan vidding draws some of its origins from folk music which itself utilizes pre-existing and well-loved stories and myths and resets them to music. Until the invention of the moving picture, these re-imaginings remained aural, not visual. What makes fan vidding unique is the 20th century technology. This allowed ordinary consumers access both to the visual media (TV and media) as well as the audio and the ability to edit and reshape those sources. The introduction of that new and more accessible technology inspired multiple communities across the world to interact with moving images and sound in their own way.
Discover what the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” has to do with the birth of modern media vidding?
While there are robust vidding histories in anime and gaming fandoms, my “History of Vidding” focuses on a small slice of time and space: the community of women who were fans of TV and movies popular in the Western world and their contributions to vidding in the 1970s through the 1990s. As with most “history of” essays, it is prone to subjective memory, information available, and personal perspectives.
- Hear how one fan’s “dowry” consisted of three boxes of Star Trek film clips.
- What DO you do with a drunken Vulcan?
- Be amazed that a vidding fan in 1980 would have had to shell out (in today’s US dollars) nearly $6000 to simply begin.
- Shiver at the terribleness of 5th and 6th gen.
- Behold the power of the stopwatch.
- Enjoy the antics of two 1977 role-playing Betamax salesmen.
- Keep an eye on the challenges of rainbow noise, flying erase heads, jog shuttles, and dirty frames.
- Curse when a major vidding collective was driven even further underground by the actions of a well known professionally run convention.
- Boo and hiss at the word “Macrovision.”
- Also: the costs and challenges to early vidders, how technology shaped the storytelling, the power of feedback, language, and vocabulary, learning to structure a vidshow, thwarting the powers that be, and most importantly, the indispensability of mentors and community.
Chapters
- What Do You Do With A Drunken Vulcan? An Early Media Fanvid
- The Introduction of Consumer VCRs
- Moving Pictures - Now With Sound! (Insert Audio Editing)
- VCR->VCR Process Flow
- Editing Challenges Part 1: The Fragile Towers of Videotapes and the Rollback Dilemma
- Editing Challenges Part 2: Analog Video &Linear Editing: Two-Dimensional Living
- Editing Challenges Part 3: Show Me The Good Stuff: Video Tape Quality
- Editing Challenges Part 4: Macrovision Was A Dirty Word
- Editing Challenges Part 5: Rainbow Noise, Flying Erase Heads, Jog Shuttles and Dirty Frames
- Editing Challenges Part 6: Just The Straight Cuts Ma’am, Nothing Fancy
- Editing Challenges Part 7: Audio Editing, What’s That?
- The Rise of Convention Vidshows - Part 1: Let’s All Go To The Movies
- Convention Vidshows - Part 2: Let’s All Do The Timeshift Again: The Sony Supreme Court Case
- Convention Vidshows - Part 3: Structuring A Vidshow
- Convention Vidshows - Part 4: The Life Of A Lonely Vidder
- Cutting Women - Vidding Collaboration And The Tapestry of Women
- Putting It All Together: Bearskins and Stone Knives
Note: a few of the embedded videos have been removed from Youtube or blocked in some countries. Should the embedded or linked content no longer be available, please check the link via the Wayback Machine. For example: the video illustrating videocassette tape quality loss after copying is now hosted at Critical Commons: https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=yhqtJYaUj and at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/VHS-copying-generation-loss