wickedwords

This is the vid I was so agog about last year from Sakura-con. There are maybe 400 layers in this, as he put the 'mobile infantry' helmet on each and every anime character he used, including pikachu. The work in this is fabulous, and I am sorry it took me so long to find a link. It's up at animemusicvideos.org, so you may need to create an account to download it:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=169572

Second thing was: I read his bio. He started vidding in 1988, making Dr. Who vids, and branched out into anime in 1993/1994. I'd love to get a history of anime vidding sometime, find out what was happening in their world and correlate it to what was happening in ours. Could be fascinating--or extremely dull.

Oh yes! The you tube version for those that don't want to download.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dqAnap6CUg

I loved the suggestions I got from people, and sent several off to my vidder with a one sentence concept of what I'd like the vids to be about. There was an amazing variety in what was suggested: folk, rock, pop, femslash, slash, team, and character study. I'm interested in seeing what pings for her (if anything), and what she makes of it. It's really kinda cool.

I received some lovely snowflake cookies for my LJ profile. Thanks go to Anonymous, trelkez, geeklite, and trobadora for the surprise gifts. Really, guys, no one ever gives me this sort of stuff, and it made me really happy to get them.

Also of the cool surprises, sherrold put our names in the fanvid meme that sdwolfpup has been hosting. Our thread is here, and it has been neat to see what everyone had said about our vids.

And speaking of vids, we got the award banners for the 2008 SGA and SG1 music vid awards:



Plus I finished off Mininannowrimo by writing every day for the entire month. So I now have a rough draft of my yuletide story, which is a yay! My 3ships story, however, still has a lot of work to go.

Vid: Our Lips are Sealed
Vidded by: Clucking Belles, aka sherrold and wickedwords for Vividcon 2009, Club Vivid
Summary: Abby, Kate, Tony and Gibbs are a very close team, or two very close couples.
Fandom NCIS
Format: XVid

Also available from our download site here


Sorry I am so late announcing this! The vid is now up on our BAM site, and embedded under the cut. Hopefully, I've done the embedding right, otherwise it is at the above link on BAM ( here )

You can download a few other old MC vids as well as the clucking belles vids via Sandy and my Clucking Belles Vid Site.

Feedback of any sort is always appreciated. Recs, reviews, and concrit welcome.

chaeche is coming to vividcon for the first time, and she’s been asking me questions about the vid shows, the vid selection process, and just some general opinion stuff. Well, one of the questions she asked was about the definition of a modern meta vid, and really, there was no way I could resist going on at length.

To me, a meta vid is one that not only reacts to the vid source, but it also reacts to the fandom around in. It’s geared to us and our in-jokes, to our celebration and to our criticisms of who we are as fans. Modern vids tend to be very explicit about the fans-and-fandom connection, whereas older meta vids had to imply it via a theme or structure that brought the fannish consciousness to the forefront. To my mind, there are three fairly common formats with a meta vid, and while I am going to lean heavily on my own vids, they aren’t the only examples.


1) Vids as Celebration and/or Criticism of a Fannish Subgroup meta

a. Both ‘Hair’ and ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’ fall into this category, as does Lum’s “I’m not a Virgin Anymore” for Highlander. Some context is required to see why Hair is a meta vid, but at the time it came out, there was a lot of hubbub in fandom because of the rumor of Blair Sandberg from The Sentinel cutting his hair, and that was a follow on from Felicity cutting her hair, and the great ratings crash after that. The importance of hair to fandom was not to be understated, and the vid was a celebration of the fans who really liked good hair. It’s a meta fandom in that it crosses fandom lines, and is one of those bulletproof kinks for some. It was an acknowledgement that hair (or lack of it) is an important part of the attraction that some fans feel for a fandom.

b. Lum’s “I’m not a Virgin Anymore” for Highlander was a rebuttal of the people in fandom who claimed that Duncan MacLeod was a stick-in-the-mud. The vid uses canon to illustrate that hello, Duncan slept with a lot of people, and he was a debauched, drunken lecher at times too. Given the source that was put together in the vid, it was clear that Duncan was a sensualist, and the prude label really…didn’t fit. It was a fabulous visuals response and rebuttal, and a distinct part of the meta conversation about who Duncan MacLeod was.

c. Some people include Vids as Critique of the show within their meta category, but I'm a little old fashioned. So for some "How Much is that Geisha in the Window" is a meta vid, but for me it's a normal fan activity, criticizing the fandom source in a visual form.

2) Vids as Fannish Folk Tale meta

There are some stories that we tell ourselves over and over again, that exist external to and outside of any specific fandom. When canon serves the component pieces of these up to us, who can resist putting one together? The meta component is that it’s a pan-fandom story, occurring in many fandoms, and the visual format is just one more form of the stories we tell each other. Such stories include:

a. A man falls for a woman who is exactly like his partner (Similar Features,for the Sentinel, where we played up the visual similarity between Cassie—the supposed love object—and Blair)

b. Greensilver and Eunice’s torchwood MPreg vid, Papa Don't Preach. Which, really, needs no further explaination.

c. Jealousy and hurt abound when my partner gets into a long term relationship with a woman (Something ‘s Goin’ Wrong Around Here, for SGA)

3) Vids as Self-Insertion meta

a. Probably “Kissed a Girl” by Smutcutter is one of the earlier ones of these that really stands out for me. VCR vidders were shy about photographing themselves or including themselves in some manner within the vid’s context, but smutcutter had no qualms about it and set the vid up with a frame of ‘evil darth fangirl’ reaching into the vid and using the force to twist the traditional slash story from ‘boy-meets-boy, boy-kisses-boy’ to ‘slash object kissed a GIRL!’ Oh, the horror that was shown through the reaction shots; you could mentally hear the evil fangirl laughter in the background as the characters on-screen reacted to having the story wrenched away from them like that.

b. “I put you in there” is probably the most literal of the genre, in that the lyrics are incredibly clear and the visuals underscore how fandom creates its own icons out of canon, and that no matter what we are given, we are the ones who can transform it and make it into something else.

Vid: Math Prof Rock Star
Vidded by: sherrold and wickedwords for Escapade 2008
Summary: Charlie' s not just a prodigy and a genius -- he's a Math Prof Rock Star!
Fandom Numb3rs
Format: WMV

We started this vid back before Sandy started chemo and I started cycling; even though it's a very short vid, neither of us had the energy to finish it at the time. It was great to be able to pick it back up and get it done for Escapade, and we had a lot of fun getting back into the swing of vidding together. Tons of thanks to rosawestphalen for pointing out the song.

This vid is up on our imeem account if you want to stream it.
( embedded video behind tag )

Well, here we are at the last week of the month, and it looks like we have some bandwidth left. So I've uploaded the next of the HL vids that Killa remastered for us, Suite.

Vid: Suite
Vidded by: Media Cannibals, the HL collective and then some. gattagrigia,sherrold, feochadn, merryish, alexfandra, and mockerbee Oh! And me.
Remastered by: killabeez
Summary: This vid is all about the parallel attitudes of Duncan and Methos, how both are obstinate and strong will, yet choose to stay with each other despite (or perhaps in part because of) their personality conflicts.
Fandom Highlander
Format: DIVX

Huge thanks to killabeez who remastered the vid. She is awesome, yes?

This vid is also up on our imeem account if you want to stream it.


You can download a few other old MC vids using Sandy and my Clucking Belles Vid Site.

Feedback of any sort is always appreciated. Recs, reviews, and concrit welcome.

So, for several years now I've been using this metaphor to describe viding in the late eighties and nineties, that of the 'greater' and 'lesser' houses of viding, and toward the end of the timeperiod, the houses being 'beseiged' by either 'barbarians at the gate' or 'feral vidders'. Obviously, I have read far too much political-based Fantasy and SF in my life, but the metaphor felt like it fit to me.

Well, this year I got to do a whole presentation on my theory and how it all worked; unfortunately, it was scheduled against "Scooby Road." I got really good attendance, but man, I didn't get to see Lum's masterpiece, and so was incredibly bummed about that. But as there is never a good time to for anything to be scheduled.

Because I am lazy, all you get is the notes from the panel, but I hope you can see where we were going. There really wasn't time for enough discussion, and I only made it up to the creation of the west coast asthetic via vidding interaction at Escapade, so some year, there will need to be a part two.

Please note: All the asthetics have their strengths. I am coming out of the west coast asthetic, so my preferences are based on that, but everyone has their own preferences. I also need to mention that there's a difference between specifics and generalizations: while each person chooses for themselves what they will do, once you generalize, the individual choices get washed out. Each person within an asthetic chooses to follow some, all, or none of the values that they have been exposed to, yet the trend among all the vidders in that asthetic still holds.

( genealogy notes )

One final note: even though I set the timeframe for this as the late 80s through the 90s, the asthetics and vidding guidelines they imply are still going strong. In this year's VVC premiere's show, I'd say 'Joker' was a great example of the mediawest asthetic, showcasing accessiblity to a crowd; Morgan Dawn's Dr. Who vid was an excellent example of the use of color in a vid, something prized by the San Fransicso asthetic; and Crush Story (our 'The Tick' vid) was out-and-out pure West Coast asthetic.

melina123 is the person who originally brought this up, and it made sense to me, so I'm gonna put out a half-baked version of the concept so it can be discussed and refined a bit. Several years ago, the Highlander Media Cannibals created a vid to "Hear that Voice Again." It was a pretty complicated vid, attempting to show how guilt and Duncan's past history and insecurities have fucked up his life. The first person we showed it to, who was a Methos fan without any real interest in Duncan, was very confused by it. "What is this, a graduate exam?"

At that point, all the energy went out of us. If you didn't have a strong background in the character and his history, you couldn't get the vid. It was a confusion of images and sounds that just didn't make sense. The vid seemed to work fine for those who knew Duncan's history and his character, but as that was only about a third of the Highlander slashers at the time, it was a little disheartening. It meant that the audience for the vid would never be that big, as it required too much detailed knowledge of characters and canon to be truly accessible.

So, when Melina made a statement about how sherrold's and my Smallville vid "So Damn Hot" was at her 'reading level' in the fandom, it made a ton of sense to me. You don't have to know a lot about the fandom to access the vid, but you have to know some to get the biggest joke.

And that seemed to be about the level of most of the Escapade audience: a passing familiarity with a lot of fandoms, but wide-spread, detailed knowledge of only a few. Graduate level vids are gonna be a hard sell in that environment, for more than a handful of fans with the specialized education required, and if there's a mismatch between what a first grade/literal interpretation of a scene would be in comparison to a graduate level/metaphorical interpretation -- well, the audience is likely to react to it en masse at grade level one. I think that graduate level vids can and should be shown at cons, but if you want to prevent misunderstood viewings, they should be reviewed by a fan who is somewhat unfamiliar with the fandom prior to the showing to make sure that there's no grade one level joke or perception that would interfere with the more "educated" reading.

An example of this: we used the occasional shot of fire or heat vision on some of our lyric lines, so the grade one read has the audience going "Oh! Fire. Hot. I get it." If you're saying anything more complicated along with that, it may be completely missed. The literal interpretation is the grade one interpretation, and if there is nothing else that the grade one reader can tie into, then they will spend the whole vid reacting to that.

For us, it worked great. For someone else trying to say something complex about the fandom or the relationship or character, it might not.

So beware the cheese.

I should have been in bed a while ago, but I thought I'd finish this first.

( I got to VJ the show )