Ask the Vidder: obsessive24

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Vidder: obsessive24
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	obsessive24
Date(s):	November 24, 2009
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	vidding, Supernatural
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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obsessive24 was interviewed in 2009 for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

I started vidding in early 2005, focussing on the Whedonverse. I've since become more of a [multi-fandom whore and tend to run around sticking my finger in every pie once. To be honest, I haven't done much in the way of SPN vidding because there is such a huge and beautiful body of work out in the fandom already that I'm never sure if I could add anything meaningful to the mix. Although recent seasons have given rise to a couple of SPN crack vid ideas that I hope to tackle in the next year.

I think my starting point is 50/50 song first vs idea first. Using my SPN vids as an example, Fall of Man was idea first. I knew I wanted to vid Castiel's character and his context within religion and god and concepts of love, and I spent a long time digging through my music stash trying to find an adequate song. (Some other choices that the vidsong could have been, for example, was Vast's Touched and Daughtry's Crashed, incidentally both of which have since been vidded by other people for this character/pairing. ;)) On the other hand, I was just walking down the street listening to Radiohead's Climbing up the Walls thinking how awesome the song is and how much I wanted a vid to come out of it. And then the idea for the vid just crept up - a meta vid commenting on fandom's interaction with incest. I don't personally believe in lightning strikes of inspiration; I think inspiration is a natural product of having processed some stuff both consciously and subconsciously. So vid ideas often sort of just drop out from random thoughts about th concepts in general, which is then instantiated into a specific fandom and a specific vid idea depending on how the song could apply.

Interestingly, when I used to write fic (bad, bad fic, to which we will not go), I usually found that I was a lot more grounded in the fandom and started with a character/scenario/plot basis rather than a concept basis. A lot of the time with vids I start with a very broad idea and then narrow it down to specifics, but with fics I tend to find that I work outwards from a specific who-what-when-where-why. Which I think differs from person to person, but I do find it interesting that I personally approach these endeavours in opposite ways. I wonder if a lot of that comes down to the fact that vidding is derivative of source, in the sense that I physically can't vid what hasn't been filmed (in the original source or external source). Whereas with fic, you start with blank paper and can go anywhere with it. Admittedly in order to be good fic you'd have to keep it within certain boundaries so it's not wildly OOC and such, but the nature of writing is that you create something from nothing, whereas the same can't be said for vidding.