Panel Report: What Do We Want From Vids Now?

[thuviaptarth]

Note: I take notes at the con, then clean them up afterwards. The clean-up process involves a lot of memory and reconstruction, so even things that are in the first-person aren't guaranteed to be exact quotes, just my reconstruction. Please let me know of any corrections. Notes in {} are me adding my opinion after the fact.

Moderated by cesperanza and counteragent. Accompanied the Vids That Push the Envelope show veejayed by cesperanza, counteragent, and laurashapiro.
The purpose of this panel is to discuss current motivations and practices of vidding. Do we make vids for the same reasons we've always made them? What are vids doing now that is new, or is there nothing new under the sun? Are there trends in vidding, or are these just evolutions of older forms? How far can we push the envelope and still consider our creations fan vids?

cesperanza: The two questions that shape the panel are: (1) have the motivations for making vids changed? (2) has what we watch vids for changed? So, are the vids really pushing the envelope? Or are these seventeen normal vids now? This year's experimental vids are next year's yawn.

slasher69: What really struck me was "Piece of Me"-- I don't care a bit about Britney Spears, but that vid makes me empathize with her. What I want from vids in general is the same as I've always wanted: I want to watch something pretty, I want to laugh, I want to learn something new.

the_shoshanna: It worked for me as a piece of meta: the singer is very angry, but she's built a career out of selling herself. In the Ronon/Rodney vid, the vid takes joy in calling attention to itself, its own artifice.

{thuvia: Yeah, I pretty thoroughly disagree with harriet_spy here: what makes "Piece of Me" a fannish vid for me is not any connection to RPF, but that it's a vid made by a fan, and also that it's about how media, um, mediates our identities, especially women's identities: how Spears is sold off, sells herself, how we buy her. Of the vids in the show, I group it with "Women's Work," "Origin Stories," and "The Future Stops Here," as a political critique of media representations, and perhaps with "Lost in an Anime Dream" as a meditation on identity-building through fantasy and narrative. I think I may have said some of this during the panel, but I never take notes on what I say myself and I'm never sure how coherent I am to other people anyway.}

cesperanza: How many people weren't sure why we put the Ronon/Rodney vid in?

[Lots of raised hands, including mine.]

laurashapiro: I was with you guys. When Cesca sent it to me, I said, "Why is this here? So there's a manipped kiss, people manip kisses all the time now."

cesperanza: It's not just the kiss, the entire dream sequence is manufactured footage. None of it exists. All of it has Rodney replacing John next Ronon [or Ronon replacing John next to Rodney? not sure].

jackiekjono: What I look for in vids is either validation or challenge. I see "Walk to Line" as a meta vid about Vividcon, about the joy of what we do here.

cesperanza: Margie has this theory about the difference between MTV music videos and our music videos. In MTV videos, the video sells the song, but in ours the song tells the story. In "Walk the Line," the music tells the story. Now the penguins have a narrative arc. There's also renenet's associative analysis from last year: vids are analytical, they force the viewer to make connections that aren't always apparent in or emphasized by the source text.

destina: I want the vid to make me feel something. ”The Tree” and ”Mission Report” I appreciate, but they don't move me.

Aud.: "The Tree" and some newer vids are taking the source and saying new things about it; they don't seem to be what vids have traditionally been, although they definitely fall in line with other fannish creative efforts, fanfiction and fanart. And they themselves seem to be using more outside source or other fannish source, fanfiction and fanart, special effects. It's very pretty, but it's not always vidding.

anoel: I disagree with the opposition between "the pretty" and "the moving". Sometimes the aesthetics are the effect. The pretty makes you feel.

heresluck: Maybe we need a new category: even if they're not vids, "The Tree" and "Mission Report" are definitely fannish endeavors. Multimedia fanart?

katallison: I feel like vidding can now do what fanfiction's been doing forever. Vidders are no longer limited! We have slipped the surly bonds of source.

heresluck: Yeah, for me the problem is there's so little source I can't actually tell what's going on. The images take up very little space and then are covered by the drawings.

{I think somewhere in here I said that "The Tree" was a gorgeous aesthetic construct, but it didn't do what I usually look to fan work to do, which is to comment on the source text. And this seems to me to connect to a bunch of other newer work, especially but not exclusively in SGA, but also constructed-reality and AU vids like "Impulse" from the show, where the point isn't to comment on the source but to create a new narrative. The source is raw material, not a text for exegesis. In some ways it reminds me more of RPF than fictional-person fanfiction. Where "The Tree" fails for me is that, though it's a gorgeous elaboration of the song's metaphor, MTV-style, I have no idea what it has to do with these two guys. Why does Rodney squinting make him a tree?}

cmshaw: The shoebox vid, which uses entirely created source, fan drawings, feels like it's more based in canon than the SPN vid, which uses show footage.

Aud: But "Impulse" works as an outsider POV of the Winchesters.

untrue_accounts: I'm not so sure about that. I was really struck by the choice of "Impulse," rather than something that's more clearly AU, like hay1ock's Shove the Sun Aside, or more clearly constructed reality, like a vid I can't find right now about Sam as Jo's abusive boyfriend, because it seems to me that "Impulse" is in this intriguing middle ground: You could read it as an outsider POV of the Winchesters, as an entirely constructed reality, or as a commentary on the violence against women implicit in the text and some of Dean's actions -- the violence against women and the violence implicit in incest that we tend to cover up in fanwork.

counteragent: [Looks betrayed. Faintly:] I just thought it was constructed reality.

morgandawn: To some extent, every single slash vid is constructed reality. [Someone in the audience: Oh, not that again.] We are allowing more additional source, more excisions.

Someone: Is vidding defined by the technology or by the community?

heresluck: I think there's another axis along which to place vidders, and it's whether you see the vidder as the editor or the vidder as the director. I've talked about this a lot with obsessive24, who sees herself as the director, with the source serving her vision, whereas I tend to see myself as an editor, bringing out the story already present in the source.

Someone: What about fannish activity that takes place in a community, but not our community? YouTube vidders? Trailers and credit sequences, like Brokeback to the Future and The Shining as a comedy? {{Personally, my favorite is Scary Mary.}}

laurashapiro: As a vidder, my reasons for vidding have changed. They've become more intellectual--hey, can I do this?-- and come less from a place of emotional squee. And I know I've lost viewers because of it.

{I think Cesca and I had an exchange about the necessity of formulating new narratives, and what constituted newness, intervention, and the female gaze, at the end of the panel, but I didn't write anything down. Also, there was a bit somewhere in there where someone said "Women's Work" was too analytical, pulled too far back, to be fannish for that viewer, unlike "Origin Stories," which remained in the universe of the show, which I found hysterically funny for personal reasons. Anyway, since LJs are for self-indulgence, I will be self-indulgent to say that "Origin Stories" probably wouldn't exist without "Women's Work," because I found the example of explicit political intervention in fandom/show commentary in vid form incredibly inspiring [Me, during the panel: Yesterday I hugged Sisabet and said, "Thank you so much for making 'Women's Work', it makes me so happy," and she said, 'That's not a response I've gotten before.'], but also, you know, expansion rather replacement! "Women's Work" is an essay in format, a narrative essay because there's a progression of argument, but an essay. "Origin Stories" is a story, so it has to make its argument the way fiction makes its arguments. I'm really happy with it, but I also think that it has a more limited audience; the audience needs to have a pretty high reading level in Buffy and also either in the narrative conventions of vidding or in race theory or the experience of racial discrimination -- I was really surprised when a non-media-fannish audience picked it up and responded to it. Whereas I've shown and recommended "Women's Work" to a non-media-fannish audience because it is just that clear what it's saying. And maybe the difference is the skill level of the vidders rather than the format of the vid, but -- seriously, there is room for more than one vid in the world.}

Somewhere in there, heresluck and seperis had an important point about expansion rather than opposition: Maybe some of us want more or different things than we personally used to want in vids, or than the vidding community in general wanted, but the point is not that what we want now replaces what we used to want, but that it supplements it. The point is expansion. More options for more people, both viewers and vidders.