Vidders - Understanding Both Halves of Your Audience
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vidders - Understanding Both Halves of Your Audience |
| Creator: | Morgan Dawn |
| Date(s): | February 4, 2008 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | vidding |
| External Links: | Vidders - Understanding Both Halves of Your Audience., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Vidders - Understanding Both Halves of Your Audience is a 2008 essay by Morgan Dawn.
The Post
Because yesterday I wandered over to winterevanesce's journal and then meta-ed all over her,* I thought I'd repost my ramblings here.
*and even then she was amazingly polite and did not call for an aisle clean-up.
I have this idea for a panel...Vidders: Understanding Both Halves of Your Audience.
And it would be a vastly over-simplified panel dividing the vidding audience into two "vastly oversimplified and somewhat random but let's just play along" groups: Kinetic Viewers and Narrative Viewers.
"Narrative Viewers are viewers who absorb visual information through lyrics or, absent lyrics, a narrative/story-telling framework. Clips are used to evoke an emotional reaction in the viewers based on their fannish understanding/love of the show. This reaction is often apart from the visual information actually contained in the clip (ex. using a clip where Buffy smiles at Spike may have different meaning/emotional reactions depending on where and when the smiling is taking place in the Buffy-Spike storyline). Narrative Viewers look for edits to take place on the lyrics and are not as focused on the beats or the energy and pacing of the song. Some people claim that Narrative Viewers are a function of the past - before MTV taught us to absorb the world in 5 second sound bites, but that would actually be inaccurate. There are many people who still respond to this style of editing and there will continue to be because how we absorb visual information is quite complex. It does not only depend on how much MTV we may have watched. :-)
Kinetic Viewers are more focused on sound and movement. To them a static clip on a dramatic musical section is just as bad as a fast edit would be on a slow solemn swell of notes. Movement needs to match the tonal sound and beat as well. Lyrics are added on as an additional layer, but are not the key for this audience. They absorb their 'narrative' through the combination of sound and movement and do not rely on the lyrics as their main source of story-telling. And while context-dependent images (a static shot of a face or a talky face) are not a total turn-off to the Kinetic Viewer, they must be used sparingly and need to match up to the song's sound/beat to be effective (if at all). The Kinetic Viewers main emotional connection is not to the underlying source as much as it is to the structure of the vid and how it offers up the source."
Then I’d ramble about how when I started making and watching vids in the 1990s I was a Narrative Viewer and slowly grew into a Kinetic Viewer. But when I started programming for a local vid show, I had to relearn how to view vids through the eyes of the Narrative audience in order to better position vids that appealed to both groups. And now, I can literally turn off the one and become the other - and this means I now understand and appreciate more types of vids than I ever did before. It also means that I can be found weeping in horror and cheering with glee at a vid simultaneously which can be somewhat disturbing if you're sitting next to me in a darkened convention hall. But don't be afraid - this is *creative* schizophrenia.
I'd also have short clips of vids to illustrate my (did I mention they were vastly over-simplified???) points. And then maybe I’d serve cookies and tea.
That is, if I could still physically lead panels.
Excerpts from Comments
[deathisyourart]: The Kinetic Viewers main emotional connection is not to the underlying source as much as it is to the structure of the vid and how it offers up the source.
Yep, that is me!
You should definitely do this panel, and FILM it, and post it on the web, and offer notes. And anything the requires you to do more work and me to benefit from it. :D
[sue chose this]: Very interesting for a panel this.
I think I started making narrative vids - that seems quite common amongst vidders - but I'm trying to get more kinetic content in now. I think I end up with a strange hybrid at the moment. Aiming more for skilled and accomplished hybrid but not quite there yet lol!
[crickets]:
Huh. Reading this, I think I'm kind of a combination of both types. This would make for a neat panel!
[isiscolo]:
Yeah, me too. I pretty much require a narrative, but it can (should) be established through the clips rather than dependent on the lyrics. In fact the first vid I ever made was to an instrumental, but there is a clear and obvious narrative.
[thirdblindmouse]:
Vast oversimplification FTW! (I feel like my territory is being encroached upon.) In terms of lyrics, I know what you mean. I used to be completely lyrics driven in both watching and editing. Now I find myself working to remember to pay attention to the actual lyrics while vidding, because I've take an initial feel for the lyrics, then gone by visual/thematic association from there. I think Laura Shapiro and her l33t use of instrumental pieces have been a bad influence on me. First I play with a bridge here, then ignore a lyric there, and next thing you know I'm mugging little old ladies!
[sherrold]: Fabulous definitions, girlie! I think most of us are more narrative in "our" fandoms, and more kinetic in unknown fandoms, but hell, maybe it's the other way around -- we just enjoy the pretty pictures in the fandoms we already know, but we're desperately trying to decode strange fandoms.
Cool idea, and yeah, it would make a cool panel. I know you worry about your energy level at cons, but think about whether you could team-teach with someone else?