Vidder Profile Spotlight: Fabella

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Vidder Profile Spotlight: Fabella
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	Fabella
Date(s):	September 17, 2010
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	vidding
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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Fabella was interviewed in 2010 for Vidder Profile.

Some Excerpts

I started completely independent of vidding fandom. I'm positive that I've told this story a hundred times, but long before I even knew what a vid was or had ventured onto the internet, I started to vid in a somewhat unique and difficult method. My tools were videotapes, a camcorder, a television, a tripod, and a cdplayer to create vids. I think I was, oh, maybe nine years old. It required a lot of running back and forth. I would know what scene I wanted for each second, and have found it on the video tape, have the camcorder set up and focused on the television, play a clip with the music in the background while recording with the camcorder. And then, after all of the running around, stopping, playing, pausing, etc, I would re-record onto a different VHS tape the whole video segment, to the song, without the jerky pauses. It was... an imperfect system, admittedly, but I toiled away a lot of homework time that way. I made mostly X-Files vids to Sarah McLachlan songs. When I discovered vidding online, I knew I had to figure out how it had been done.

Each time, I'm triggered by a feeling. I know that sounds so deliberately obscure, but I can narrow it down to a *denied* feeling, something I need to express that I feel I haven't seen before, or seen enough of, to feed my own desire. Whether that be in the show, in the fandom, or another form, what I vid somehow was not there for me. Supernatural may have thousands of vids at this point, but there are still hungers left for me, and that is why it remains viddable to me.

It's wonderful to hear that I'm notable for this, because I feel like I have to amp it up during RPS videos, and I think the challenge is what draws me to the source. I feel like it's almost an entirely different medium of visuals to work with, despite being video. I'm drawn, also, by the lack of conventional vidding boundaries. RPS vids require their own set of rules to be solid videos, such as extreme focus on creating context, and it's like learning a new language to discover what those rules are going to be. The difference between RPS vidding and fictional source is largely the type of source you, as an artist, are going to be working with. There is less dynamic footage in much of RPS vids (though sometimes the footage can be amazing! Music Video footage for band/muscian rps vids can be tremendously appealing) which means the vidder has to try really hard to avoid being static and bland. In some ways, I think there is a lot more freedom in vidding RPS, because as much as it's based on real people, it's more fictional than fictional sources, which have context, and characters with known backgrounds and seasonal arcs. Much of RPS is based off of interviews, and the audience is mostly unlikely to be familiar with every interview ever or the same interviews as the vidder. It's vidding a narrative from scratch. My favorite RPS pairing to vid for was definitely Justin & JC of *Nsync. There was a ridiculous amount of source, much of it containing exciting motion and bright colors, and it basically hadn't been explored before, so there weren't tired clips that I had to force myself not to use. I could basically do what I want. Plus! I got to appropriately vid *Nsync songs, which just doesn't work in most other circumstances, I'm sorry to say.