The Vidder: Luminosity upgrades fan video

News Media Commentary
Title:	The Vidder: Luminosity upgrades fan video
Commentator:	Logan Hill
Date(s):	November 12, 2007
Venue:	New York magazine
Fandom:	Vidding
External Links:	the article and interview is here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2007, Luminosity was interviewed for New York magazine.

Some Excerpts

Vidding started in 1975 with Kandy Fong, a Star Trek fan, who made the first ever vid, at a convention, by setting a slideshow to music. Almost as soon as VCRs became available, fans started using them to make vids, which were shown mainly at fan conventions or passed around on tape by mail. Computers and the Internet have made it a lot easier both to make vids and to share them—now everyone wants to make things like vids. Vidding is not a static art form. It is subject to waves and schools, just like any other art. It may have started with parody, but now it has progressed, I think, into modern and postmodern interpretations of the source.

I've been "Luminosity" since Fidonet and Echonet back in the eighties, and pseudonyms are very common on the Internet; but yes, there is some concern about copyright issues. But when I make a Buffy vid, no one is going to mistake me for Joss Whedon. If anything, vids provide free advertising. I wish the industry would join us in the 21st century. As we speak, a group of fans are putting together a new nonprofit, the Organization for Transformative Works, which will be working to help protect the fair-use rights of fan creators to make vids and fanfic.

I saw a vid for the first time in 1996, I hit critical mass in 2000, bought the hardware and software, found a couple of generous and talented vidders to point me in the right direction, and I was off and running. The first show that inspired me to vid was Highlander: The Series. I was emotionally invested in the fandom and the show, it had viable canonical continuity, and it was beautifully filmed. Not everyone vids for the same reasons that I vid. I vid for the Big Emotion.

Women's Work is a critique of the eroticization of the violence done to women in all media, not just Supernatural. Women are sexually assaulted, murdered, and then laid out in artistic tableaux, chopped into pretty, bloody pieces. They usually further the plot, but they’re hardly ever a part of the plot. We wanted to point out that in order for us to love a TV show—and we do—we have to set this horrible part of it aside. A lot. Often. Sisabet [the co-vidder of the project] and I believe that we could have made this vid using almost any show, from Heroes to CSI, but we are fans of Supernatural. We care so much about a show that we want share it, make an argument, highlight a character or situation, lampoon something, evoke a mood. I’ve also made four other Supernatural vids that celebrate the show, the arc, the relationship between the brothers and the genre itself.