I was exploring fan sites on the
internet and came across a new site Fanlore a webpage dedicated to
all kinds of fandom. On that page I found a new word and another fan
culture based around videos, music and images vidding or fan vid.
Fanlore defines vidding “as the act or process of creating a fan-oriented vid or fanvid using live action TV or movie footage set to music”.On
Youtube there is a video by cbcradio3 of Heart of Hearts filmed at
the first concert of Great Big Sea XX on the 4 Novemember 2012 in
Toronto. Sean McCann talks about their new song “Heart of Hearts”
and how they made a new video out of old videos. The video is on
their official video site on Youtube. The main difference between
Great Big Sea’s video Heart of Hearts and that of vidders is they
own the copyright to the old videos and the new music being used in
the new video clip. The Great Big Sea video is a look at the last
twenty years and makes references to the history of Great Big Sea
music videos which fans will know. So what is the difference between bootlegging, vidding and fanvids.
I have found an interesting article
that interviews a well known vidder Luminosity with the New York
Magazine by email who explains the basics of vidding, the legal
issues, the recognition of vidding as an art form, how they became
involved and how the vidding community works from their point of
view. The vidder who gave this interview wished to remain anonymous
because of the threat of legal action against her by the copyright
owners of particular material she uses.
The Vidder Luminosity upgrades
fan video. Published Nov 12, 2007 in the New York Magazine. (no
copyright infringement intended)
Luminosity is the best fan that shows
like Friday Night Lights, Highlander, Farscape, and Buffy ever
had—but she can’t use her real name in this interview for fear
that their producers will sue her. As a vidder—a director of
passionate tributes and critiques of her favorite shows—Luminosity
samples video in order to remix and reinterpret it, bending source
material to her own purposes. “Much of contemporary remix culture
falls back on parody,” explains MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author
of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, “but these
fan videos seek to convey the emotional intensity [that they feel].
They communicate more if you know the shows on which they are based
but they can stand alone as mood poems or character sketches.” We
emailed with Luminosity about her meticulously crafted videos,
including Women’s Work, her loving critique of violence in
Supernatural, and Vogue/300, her hysterical riff on those hunky
Spartans.
I think many of our readers won’t
be familiar with “vidding.” Could you tell me what it is?
The quick and easy description: Vids
are fan-made music videos. We create them using scenes taken from our
favorite TV shows and movies, pairing them with a particular piece of
music and imposing our own video-editing choices and style. The
motivation for a lot of us is to convey something deeply felt about
the show.
Most people became aware of vidding with YouTube, but there’s a longer history to it, right?
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.
Women done more vidding than men
historically.
Yes! Everyone’s always surprised when
I tell them this, but most vidders are women; then again, film
editing was historically a female job. There are maybe five men who
attend the primary annual vidding convention.
TV and film are still dominated by male creators behind the camera. Is this part of what you’re reacting to?
Vidding is one of the central parts of
media fandom, the creative responses of initially mostly female fans
to TV shows and films. So, yes, at its very core, our entire history
is tied into talking back to male creators, teasing out for ourselves
and telling the stories we don’t get otherwise. But when all said
and done, the gender of the creator(s) isn’t that important to me.
What’s important is how I change it.
I don’t know much about you, in
part because you don’t use your real name.
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.
How did you get started?
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.
How do vidders find one another?
I could tell you, but then I’d have
to kill you—no, seriously, this is a highly contested issue within
the vidding community. Even though we believe our work is legitimate
and transformative art, a lot of vidders prefer to stay out of the
spotlight until the legal situation is clearer. More recently,
though, some vidders have decided to go a bit more public, and so you
can find my work and that of some other vidders on video streaming
sites like Imeem or Stage6.
Your biggest work is Scooby Road, which remixes scenes from Buffy and scores them to the entire Beatles Abbey Road LP.
Before Scooby Road, it was as if we
vidders were making “singles.” No one had made an album-length
“concept vid” yet. I love the Beatles, and I felt that making
every song in an album relate in some way to Buffy was a challenge I
could meet.
What filmmakers and TV directors do
you most admire?
My favorites were the film noir
directors of the forties and fifties— Orson Welles, Jacques
Tourneur. On TV, I admire David Nutter, Kim and Kelly Manners, and
Joss Whedon. While I admire directors from afar, I study
cinematographers and film editors up close. I have a black-and-white
vid in the works because I want to learn to “see” in black and
white, the way those cinematographers like John Seitz and Stanley
Cortez did in the forties.
We’re featuring Vogue/300. There have been many riffs on the film 300—one set to “It’s Raining Men”—and lots of parodies. But yours is on a whole other level.
It was my chance to do a bait and
switch, and turn the “male gaze” back onto itself. I wanted to
allude to the graphic novel, so I split the screens and tinted them
with flat color. The movie was visually stunning as well, and it’s
always fun to work with pretty source.
We’re also featuring Women’s Work,
which seems like a fairly severe critique of the treatment of women
on Supernatural. But its beauty also seems to complicate the
critique. You told me your heart “belongs to Dean and Sam.”
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.
