On being new to vidding and/or vidding community

[elipie]

I started vidding last year when laura47 convinced me to sign up for Festivids, and I just sort of jumped right in without really thinking about it. I only started getting intimidated after reveals when I realized that the best vids I'd ever seen were by the same people involved in Festivids. Then I took a fandom class in college where we spent a week focusing on the history of vidding, which introduced me to even more vidders, and then I went to Vividcon and felt like I was in a room full of celebrities. I went to VVC with that "what if everyone thinks I suck" mindset, and went home thinking it was the best weekend of my life. The fact that everyone was so welcoming and more than willing to talk to me was the best feeling in the world as a newbie, and I think that's a lot easier for people to do in person (especially at VVC, because everyone is so excited to be there) than online. I really wish VVC was an option for everyone, because even though I'm still pretty new, I feel like I really became a part of the community after going.

That said, I think it's amazing how quickly this board took off, so I hope this will be another way for newbies to feel more welcome.

[obsessive24]

Littleheaven - it was you who drove me away, clearly.

Nov 21, 2011 19:59:21 GMT -5 elipie said:

Then I took a fandom class in college where we spent a week focusing on the history of vidding

Oh wow! Who was that run by? Anyone we know from fandom, or an outside academic?

I totally agree that meeting people in RL is a much easier way than trying to "meet" them online. I'm really glad you got to go

[voodoochild]

I took a fandom class in college where we spent a week focusing on the history of vidding

Oh, awesome! I also took a fandom class in college (it's taught by my thesis prof, who lets me lecture sometimes in his career class), but we didn't talk about vidding at all. Fic was touched on, but mostly in a Henry Jenkins/transformative work/female-centric view. What was the vidding part of the class like?

[franzeska]

I used Foolish Passion too. I'm not shy, but what I really wanted was a you are dumb, here is a screenshot with a big red arrow tutorial. I don't have trouble approaching people: I didn't want a mentor. I wanted to do it myself, and I already had very definite aesthetic preferences. Plus the first law of the internet is Lurk First.

I also felt like a lot of the meta I ran across was... You know, I don't think it was even snobby or elitist or exclusionary. I think it was written before everyone realized that the average laptop owned by the average college freshman had finally caught up and the floodgates were opening. The same people writing similar opinions about similar topics today would put things differently. But it's still hard for a newbie to find relevant things to read while they lurk and decide whether to contact anyone directly. I think a forum is the perfect format.

Here are the two pieces of advice I give other newbies and that I wish more people would give:

1. "Do you see a program called WMM/iMovie? Click on it."
2. "What do you mean you don't know anything? How many thousands of trailers, previews, ads, music videos, mashups, and funny cat videos have you watched in your lifetime so far?"

[franzeska]

Nov 13, 2011 11:44:07 GMT -5 eunice said:

New kids on the block have just as much to teach me as I have to teach them, and I think we forget that too easily.

D'aww!

Oh, look, I am incurably TL;DR, so I have yet more to say:

The big thing that strikes me about masses of vidding meta is that it all tends to reinforce the newbie idea that magical perfect edited video comes from the ether and that arcane arts are required to understand it. If you come to vidding as an insecure, unintellectual pre-teen maybe this view has some validity. Maybe.

But it seems to me like most vidding meta conflates three things that are not at all the same.

1. film editing
2. amateur remix video editing
3. vidding as a community with particular aesthetics and styles of editing and a shared history

I don't want to knock oldschool vidding here. Newbies absolutely have plenty to learn about that if they're interested. But film editing? Please. Any university library has a billion books on that, and you encounter it any time you watch a movie or a tv show. By the time most people get near vidding, they have accumulated years of experience with what they like even if they don't always have the words to express themselves. And if they're the right kind of nerd, they may have read a million biographies and interviews where some fanboy drools all over Coppola about how such and such a shot in the Godfather had such and such an effect, so they might even know the vocabulary. Coppola, Scorsese, Tarantino, Kubrick--there are a lot of directors whose average joe, non-film student fanbases tend towards nerdy analysis of that sort. I could study film editing for a hundred years and still not know much, but this isn't an arcane practice one must find a vidding mentor to learn. (Was this just me? Seriously, every annoying dude in my entire high school spent all of his time going on and freakin' on about John Woo's influence on Tarantino. And it sure wasn't the quality of the acting performances they were excited about. They all loved Blade Runner too; I can't tell you how many discussions of editing choices I've sat through with Blade Runner fans.)

On the pro side, you have music videos, trailers, previews, and ads, all of which have a lot more in common with vids in terms of length and relevant editing styles. On the amateur side, you have all of the other fan video things like AMVs and parody trailers. A new vidder can spot a bad movie trailer in ten seconds just like any other member of the public can. Vidding meta tends to focus on how we're not taught to analyze film in school. It's true that we're not taught how to write a paper about what makes a bad trailer suck so hard; we're still an extraordinarily visually sophisticated audience long before we touch editing tools.

Of course one has to watch vids--vids qua vids--to figure out what the vidding community cares about. Vidding history is interesting. Vidding, in the narrow sense, is different from AMV editing and professional music video-making and any other video/film editing. And if newbies want a mentor to help them find the community and learn about it, that's wonderful.

I think it's often more empowering to show newbies where to find basic technical information and to tell them they're already capable and educated and have valid tastes, though. And that's an idea I find markedly lacking in older vidding meta.

[valika]

I think it's often more empowering to show newbies where to find basic technical information and to tell them they're already capable and educated and have valid tastes, though.

SO true. But I think it's also helpful when you have someone or a place with many more experienced vidder to ask technical help and/or betaing - when needed.

[obsessive24]

Well said, franzeska. One thing that persistently came out at me while watching the vidder profiles is how many people already had a very firm idea of what they wanted to do long before they discovered vidding was an actual practice, and I think that's quite likely to have come from watching all the things you noted, even if they/we didn't consciously realise it at the time.

[elipie]

Who was that run by? Anyone we know from fandom, or an outside academic?

It was run by David Kociemba, an outside academic. He runs a Whedon Studies website (blog.watcherjunior.tv/), and he actually suggested VividCon to me after he saw how excited I was about vidding week (of course, I told him I already signed up!).

I also took a fandom class in college (it's taught by my thesis prof, who lets me lecture sometimes in his career class), but we didn't talk about vidding at all. Fic was touched on, but mostly in a Henry Jenkins/transformative work/female-centric view. What was the vidding part of the class like?

That's awesome, too! Most of our class focused on that as well-- we read a TON of Jenkins and Coppa, and spent a great deal focusing on fic, fanart, and other parts of fandom that we might not necessarily think of when we think of the word "fandom" (Elvis impersonators, LARPing, Barbies, Sports, etc). My favorite day of vidding week was when we spent the entire class period watching vids. In the discussion periods, we talked about the history of vidding, reasons why people vid, and why transformative work is so important to fans (vidding week was right after two weeks discussing fanfic). It was such a great class.

[rokikurama]

elipie and voodoochild
It makes me *so* happy to know that this stuff is being taught somewhere!

[obsessive24]

Getting credits to sit around and watch vids? Sweeeet.

[xitsmymindx]

I am not new per say, I haven't done a lot of vidding the past few years coz of personal things. I love vidding but is hard to find places to hang out with other vidders who are serious, I see so many like "here's a song, here's a show I like, here's some random clips"

[icepixie]

First of all, thanks for starting this forum! I liked reading vidding talk before I started vidding myself, but since I started, it seems to have largely dried up on LJ.

I started vidding about two years ago, so I'm a relative newbie. I've never felt particularly welcome or unwelcome in the larger vidding community, but I think that's more because I've never really attempted to enter it. (I saw a link to this forum on the "vidding" community at LJ, and watching that is basically the only connection I have to other vidders.) There are a few reasons for this:

1. I am a CHAMPION lurker. I lurk well past the "take some time to learn the rules and etiquette of a community" stage.

2. I'm not interested in cons, and it seems like a lot of the vidding community--on LJ, anyway--is built around VividCon.

3. I'm not really a vidding fan so much as a fan of various canons who happens to sometimes express my appreciation for said canons in the form of vids. From reading posts linked to, say, metafandom or the community-called-vidding (really wishing for the little LJ userheads right now), I got the impression this is...unusual. For example, I almost never watch vids for fandoms I don't know (and I'm not in many big fandoms so this happens a lot), I find it difficult to finish watching a vid if I don't like the music at least a bit, I generally don't watch vids for pairings I don't ship. In my own vidding, I don't have a particular aesthetic; I just kind of find myself listening to a song, thinking, "Hey, that would make a great [x] vid!" or "These moments from [canon x] would look great with that guitar riff!" and then poking at it in iMovie.

4. A lot of vidding meta that I read seemed to focus on narrative and structure, which is all very interesting and I honestly do enjoy reading it and get a lot out of it, but it's...not entirely relevant to what I'm doing? I mean, in most of my vids I do attempt to have a theme, at least, and often a basic narrative, but what I really, really like about vidding is the kinetic aspect of timing movement to music. I used to do a lot of dance, and now that I don't, vidding kind of substitutes for dancing and choreographing. So while ideally I can do both, I'm way more interested in getting the timing right on this clip of someone running or jumping that I've paired with this particular musical phrase than I am in telling a story.

(I think, though, that the emphasis in on narrative/structure in meta might be more due to the fact that it's easier to talk about that than it is to say "time your cuts to the music!" over and over [only in more specific musical terminology, which I definitely don't have], because lots of vids are cut beautifully. And I do want to get better at structuring my vids so that they have a more coherent throughline in addition to the kinetic aspects, so I'm glad the narrative-type meta is around for me to learn from.)

5. I use a Mac, and I vid with iMovie 'cause I'm cheap and it came for free with my laptop. Few people who I've seen talk about vidding seem to use iMovie, so most people's technical talk goes right over my head. iMovie, being the simple program it is, allows for less cool technical wizardry than something like Premiere, but because of its simplicity, it's also less prone to error. When I was brand new to vidding, I usually would google my question and find the answer on an iMovie or Mac forum, and I think on the technical side, I have more in common with people who are cutting together home movies to send to grandma than I do with vidding as it is practiced in LJ-based fandom.

I don't think I'm really answering the questions you posed in the OP, obsessive24, but since I'm feeling less lurk-y than usual today I thought I'd chime in with my experiences.

[astarte]

3. Most vids I watch for fandoms I don't know are by vidders I do know. Chances are that if their vids impressed me in the past, I'll get something out of a unknown fandom one too.

4. I find it really cool that you come from a dance background, it seems such an obvious connection to music, but I never heard that mentioned before by anyone. So of course your perspective is influenced by your experience with music and to translate that to vids is awesome.

[obsessive24]

Not at all, icepixie! Glad to have you de-lurk and touch on so many interesting aspects.

I've been talking to someone else about this perceived "right way to vid" in the LJ community as well. She also felt that there was this idea, this "mainstream approach" shall we call it, that's VVC-focused and structure/narrative/"need to have a point"-focused, and she also felt that it was limiting and didn't feel as though one had room to express oneself beyond that. I may be putting words in her mouth a bit now, but I think her reaction was that she wishes there were more validation or acceptance of the kind of "minority" experimental type vidding that she naturally gravitates toward.

Personally, I don't really feel the community as primarily condoning a perceived "right way" any more than something that isn't VVC-focused and isn't narrative-focused, because I know quite a few vidders who are in this community to varying degrees who are at the same time primarily dealing in the things you noted - musicality and motion and mood above narrative/theme/point, fandom above vidding-qua-vidding, not interested in VVC, etc - but I'm aware I'm speaking from the perspective of being rather on the inside looking out and that it's easy for me to say those things without fully appreciating what it looks like from the outside.

I just really get the feeling that, if you're a newbie poking your way into the LJ vidding community (both the actual Vidding comm and the associated vidders' LJs and other comms), it can be quite easy to get the sense that everyone here is presenting some hundred-strong solid wall of what they collectively think vidding should be and how to go about it. And it can be easy to think that VVC is sort of the personalisation (or event-alisation) of that idea. I know I certainly did when I first stumbled upon the LJ vidding community and VVC. I think it takes time - and quite a lot of poking around and talking to individual vidders - to see that people's styles and approaches vary. A lot. And just because they don't necessarily make public posts about it doesn't mean they don't think it and, more importantly, practice it.

I hope this isn't coming off as preachy or offensive in any way. I'm just really interested by this picture of what the LJ vidding community is presenting itself as - not to everyone, I'm sure, but to enough people that your reaction is certainly not a one-off. And I do wonder what it is, like what specific meta you read or comments from specific people, that gives rise to your thinking that the community as a whole values certain aspects so much more than other aspects?

(I think, though, that the emphasis in on narrative/structure in meta might be more due to the fact that it's easier to talk about that than it is to say "time your cuts to the music!" over and over [only in more specific musical terminology, which I definitely don't have], because lots of vids are cut beautifully. And I do want to get better at structuring my vids so that they have a more coherent throughline in addition to the kinetic aspects, so I'm glad the narrative-type meta is around for me to learn from.)

From personal experience (and the experience of certain friends), for me it's a matter of having reached a certain level of working with musicality/motion, and then thinking "what else is there?" and wanting something more in my vids as well as the vids that I watch. Personally, I think the holy grail is something that integrates both. These two aspects don't have to be either/or, and I've seen people come at it both ways - they start by focussing on the themes and narrative and pay attention to the editing much later in their development, or they start by focussing on the editing and only much later get into the themes and narrative and whatnot (me included). And of course there are the freak geniuses who come to us fully formed and wonderful on both right off the bat, but we hate those people because they make the rest of us look bad.

[legoline]

Nov 28, 2011 16:16:26 GMT -5 icepixie said:

but what I really, really like about vidding is the kinetic aspect of timing movement to music. I used to do a lot of dance, and now that I don't, vidding kind of substitutes for dancing and choreographing. So while ideally I can do both, I'm way more interested in getting the timing right on this clip of someone running or jumping that I've paired with this particular musical phrase than I am in telling a story.

I used to do a lot of ballet as a kid and then modern dance a few years ago and I wonder, now that you've mentioned it, if that may be the reason why I'm, a lot like you, more interested in the aesthetics and "choreographing" of a vid rather than its narrative. I've never looked at it that way but I guess it makes sense. Those moments in fanvids where the movment on the clip seems to mirror the movements in the song--I can get completely giddy over that.