(no subject)
Aug. 23rd, 2018 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI've been thinking that maybe rather than talking about specific panels at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
vividcon (I went to a LOT of panels, and also I didn't take notes), I should maybe organize my thoughts around the metathemes that pervaded multiple panels, and general vidder/vidfan discussion throughout the con. It felt a lot of the time like conversations started in panels and then spilled over to the rest of the con, and vice versa. And I would like a lot of these conversations to spill over onto the internet.
-Vidding Community/infrastructure
There's always going to be discussion of fragmentation of fannish community, because it's inevitable and constant not only because of platforms but because people move in and out of being fannish and having time for fandom. But it felt like, with VVC ending, there was a lot more focused conversation than usual on the subject. Tumblr isn't entirely working for us, Youtube isn't entirely working for us, VVC worked but is going away, LJ mostly worked but is basically dead, even the relatively tight-knit VVC community is already fragmented between dreamwidth and twitter and tumblr and Slack and Discord and gafiating right now, where the hell do we go to talk about vids and vidding, where the hell do we go to look for old vids, where the hell do we go to look for new vids?
cesperanza at the vidder town hall framed it as a sort of call to arms: There are community builders in this room, she said during the vidding town hall she hosted, and they should have conversations with each other and figure out what we should do, and then they should send out the bat signal to the rest of us. Sometimes that is how it has worked in the past, and maybe that's really what's needed, but I don't know. Nobody mapped out a plan and put out a call for fandom to go to tumblr, it just happened. My gut says that wherever vidding fandom ends up next, it'll be some combination of intentionality and accident. But Speranza wasn't really talking about community as a whole, she was talking about the functions of community that require unity. Like how at a past VVC Vidder Town Hall, apparently, the call was put out about the threat posed to vidding fandoms by the DMCA and people stepped up and worked with OTW Legal and the EFF to get vidding-related DMCA exemptions from the Library of Congress. You can't do that kind of work if the community is fragmented, so there has to be some way, whether it be online or in person, of getting all sorts of vidders talking together when there's something we need to talk about.
This seems a lot more achievable online than in person, though in person conversation can be invaluable. We were saying that it's pretty damned easy for someone to just put up a post on the DWvidding community every month for people to share their concerns and talk about ideas. Or announce a time for people to show up in a vidder chatroom, whether that be on Discord or Slack or irc or something else. (I suppose I ought to figure out how to get on the Slack. Ask me if you want to get on the Discord.) I plan on giving the vidding post thing a try. If it doesn't work, no great loss.
In parallel, I had some interesting conversations about archiving vida. Because of the ambiguous legality of vidding, there's all sorts of special balancing acts we have to undertake when it comes to preserving vidding history between centralization and decentralization, between visibility and invisibility, between organization and disorganization. This can be really frustrating, and I think it is even more frustrating to non-vidders who don't have all of the experience we have in regularly working around these problems. (Heh, a couple months ago I went looking for a vid whose audio had been stripped by Youtube. I realized I could just add the audio back myself in my video editor and guess at a synch. Most people don't have that option.)absolutedestiny talked about Peertube, apparently a tool designed to allow people to create their own Youtube like system, and other tools that if someone put the work in could potentially be used to create a vidder-oriented, vidder-run webspace. But we've been burned so many fucking times when these systems fail that it's scary to risk another one.
cesperanza was talking during the Town Hall about the AO3 as the solution to some of these problems- she mentioned a 'vidding work form' that is under development that promises to make it easier and more useful to post vid to AO3. But she didn't have time to explain what it will look like and I didn't get a chance to ask her later in the con. Did anybody else? I think vidders are skeptical by now of ever being more than second class citizens on AO3, and we're aware that as long as AO3 is just a place to point links to whatever other hosting solution you're using, it's never really going to be a full answer for us. morgandawn and viddersadmin, meanwhile, were talking about how we can create platform independent tools for connecting vidders and vidfans- a way that a reccer can assemble searchable playlists that pull from both Vimeo and Youtube, for example. To just sort of throw your hands up in the air and say fuck it, we accept that there's not going to be a central place to go for vids that actually works for us, let's figure out how to work smarter in the fractured environment we do live in. I guess kind of the way people eventually dealt with the fracturing of AIM and YM and ICQ and GChat by getting clients that let them log into all of them using the same program. #datingmyself morgandawn is also personally undertaking to be a sort of non-archive central offline repository, asking people with collections of vids to give her a copy, which she is holding onto but not in any way documenting or organizing, so that if better organizing structure and tools emerge for archiving vids, she'll be able to pass her repository to people capable of cataloging it. If you can help her in that regard, please do so.
I also mused aloud that one of my problems with the current usage of youtube and AO3 and other things for vids is that nobody knows the proper way to tag vids. We have few shared conventions that are well understood and well spread. You're lucky if people even tag things on AO3 with the word vid, and AO3 is not particularly friendly to tagging things with the song and other metadata that would be nice to include in a vid posting. So maybe we need to create our own tag conventions and then leverage our networks and try to spread them, so that everyone at least knows a basic minimum of how to tag things on a given platform. There are limits to how much value that has, but it's worth a try.
Some other people were also talking about how younger people are vidding in totally different styles and different communities. There's a sort of frustrating distance to this... on the one hand, VVC's community has been shrinking and aging and that's among the factors leading to the end of the con, but on the other hand more people are making vids than ever, and VVC vidding fandom pretty much doesn't have any ability? or interest? in communicating with the people outside the community. I think it's a combination of ability and interest, really. It's hard to talk to youtube vidders, youtube isn't really set up for it, it's all about transmission and not about two way communication. But also, I'm not on tumblr or instagram or twitter, which are much bigger centers of fandom than dreamwidth is, and so I'm inherently not going to be able to communicate with vidders on those platforms. And the longer I stay off those platforms, the less we speak the same language, both in terms of visual vocabulary and in terms of vidding fannish vocabulary. The instagram editshollywoodgrrl and winterevanesce were talking about are full of acronyms and jargon I at best half-follow, and their edits look very little like the vids I tend to watch.
It's okay if those communities don't overlap with ours, at least to a certain extent. We have different objectives and different context, and we're quite happy over in our fannish corner enjoying art that in my opinion is often quite astonishing in its visual beauty and thematic depth. [One of the central questions ofghost_lingering's "Silent Fandoms" is whether we actually want our fandoms to not be silent.] But to the extent that we have shared needs-attaining protection from legal threats, teaching each other techniques, sharing our work with as many fans as possible, meeting and talking to other people familiar with the technical and artistic challenges of vidding- we should figure out how to bridge these communal gaps, even if it means venturing into unfamiliar spaces. How do we get instagram and youtube vidders interested in coming to Fanworks con? How do we get them interested in talking to us on the various online community platforms we have that are still working? And if they come, how do we react when they enter with alien aesthetic norms? Do we welcome them or do we (intentionally or accidentally) make them feel like we think they're doing vidding wrong?
- Vidding aesthetics
I have complained for years about my inability to comprehend a certain sort of youtube vid, the kind with rapidfire precision cutting, complicated overlays and other effects, and a tendency to mess with my brain when I try to make sense of their clip and effect choices. They are too well made to be dismissed as bad. They took hours and hours of work, and careful thought and design. But they do not read legibly to me in the way that any other sort of vid does. I'm not in AMV fandom, for example, but with the caveat that I can't follow the specific narrative of AMVs well when they depend on knowing the source, I tend to find AMVs generally legible as video constructions in a different vidding vocabulary than mine. But that doesn't happen with these youtube vids. And it's not that I want to say that they're doing vidding wrong. It's just that it drives me crazy that I have been unable to learn how to read and appreciate these well-crafted vids. The con offered two radically different, complementary theories for understanding this sort of youtube vid, both of which finally had me going okay, this sort of explains why.
In the panel on Effects,hollywoodgrrl and winterevanesce offered a largely coherent schematization of vids into three segments, analogized to film production paradigms: 'indie' vids, 'studio' vids, and 'blockbuster' vids. All three styles of vid can be well and thoughtfully constructed. Indie vids are low on production values, focusing on basic cutting techniques to do the work of vidding, whether that be narrative or analytical. 'Studio' vids are high production value in service of vidding, using effects with purpose to comment on characters and narratives. 'Blockbuster' vids are about spectacle, not narrative. The effects are there for their own sake, to visually impress the viewer. In these terms, the 'youtube vid' that baffles me is a blockbuster-style vid that I have mentally been trying to read as a studio-style vid. I haven't had a way to distinguish between one of hollywoodgrrl or lim or whoever's effects-heavy vids and one of the high profile youtubers, but I knew intuitively there was some significant difference.
In the Vidding Town Hall,cesperanza offered a different theory. It's the algorithm, she argued. The youtube algorithm prioritizes vids in its search and sidebar that meet certain aesthetic criteria- vids that draw people in from the first moment, vids that are relentless and never let up for a moment. There is no room in the YT algorithm for vids that have a narrative build, that don't deliver what they're selling immediately. People like the VVC crowd, for whom YT is generally not a primary venue for displaying vids, don't generally play the game of trying to get their vids promoted by the algorithm (in fact, the opposite. One of the draws of premiering vids at vidshows, for me, is knowing that the audience will sit through them to the end. It was particularly important to me that I premiere "The Upload" at a vidshow because I knew that most people watching it online would not sit through it.), but youtube vidders do play the game. And even if they're not consciously thinking "I need to make a vid that meets these specific criteria to game the algorithm," that's ultimately not necessary! All they need to think is "I want to be successful on youtube, so I should make vids like the successful vids I see." Or even "I like the vids I am watching on youtube, so I should make vids like the ones I am watching."
Both of these theories make a lot of sense in explaining why I have not been able to grok these vids. Along the channels in which I ordinarily read vid content, there is no content to read. In other channels I don't normally pay attention to, there is content. The cool thing about vids in general is how many different channels of brain-processing they broadcast on- I always love art that converges on the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk- so it's thought-provoking to think about how to access other channels than the ones I'm used to.
Aside from this specific question about youtube vid aesthetics, there was a lot of conversation about the kinds of vid aesthetic VVC people actually are interested in. The vids I like to watch tend not to be the ones with the most overt, showy effects, but I've come to realize the more I vid how powerful and effective subtler vid effects can be in improving the story you tell. Both the Effects panel and the Motion panel were full of useful ideas for how to make vids that grab a viewer while having the eyegrabbing be in the service of communication- using motion to convey circularity, or to convey narrative motion. Using color effects to tell a story about character emotion, or using overlays to convey perspective or internal feelings. I'm excited to see how that informs future vidding for me.
I thought there was a particularly varied range of styles, both in the music and in the editing, used in the vids we saw at VVC this year, probably because the last year of the con brought back from vidders who haven't shown anything at the con in a few years, and who tended toward older styles, and also the last year of the con brought in first-timers with fresh perspectives who wanted to get to the con before it ended. There were some really well made new vids in the mold of classic slash songvids, andgwyn also put together a fascinating if necessarily scope-limited vidshow of pre-VVC mostly VCR vids. And just as much as the discussion of new vids and new kinds of effects inspired me in vid, some of those old and old-style vids also inspire me. Some of them, given profound technical constraint, are able to convey so much EMOTION, and that's something I'm always thinking about. My art can sometimes be at a little bit of an intellectual remove, or a little bit of an ironic trickster's remove, and I really admire people who are just balls out THIS IS MY FEELS.
killa framed this in some really interesting ways, in her panel on Vidding as Time Capsules. The vids we make at any given moment are driven by the context in which we make them, in all sorts of different ways- the state of fandom, the state of our personal lives, the state of the canons we're working with, the state of the world at large... all of those things dictate how our vids look. And I'll add to that my technical capacity. There are vids that are time capsules of an earlier time, but which I have only recently been able to achieve, and vid ideas that I still don't think I have the chops to pull off, but hope I may someday. And as much as vids encode the present moment, they also encode our past, the vids and ideas and fandoms that taught us and brought us to where we are today.
vividcon (I went to a LOT of panels, and also I didn't take notes), I should maybe organize my thoughts around the metathemes that pervaded multiple panels, and general vidder/vidfan discussion throughout the con. It felt a lot of the time like conversations started in panels and then spilled over to the rest of the con, and vice versa. And I would like a lot of these conversations to spill over onto the internet.-Vidding Community/infrastructure
There's always going to be discussion of fragmentation of fannish community, because it's inevitable and constant not only because of platforms but because people move in and out of being fannish and having time for fandom. But it felt like, with VVC ending, there was a lot more focused conversation than usual on the subject. Tumblr isn't entirely working for us, Youtube isn't entirely working for us, VVC worked but is going away, LJ mostly worked but is basically dead, even the relatively tight-knit VVC community is already fragmented between dreamwidth and twitter and tumblr and Slack and Discord and gafiating right now, where the hell do we go to talk about vids and vidding, where the hell do we go to look for old vids, where the hell do we go to look for new vids?
cesperanza at the vidder town hall framed it as a sort of call to arms: There are community builders in this room, she said during the vidding town hall she hosted, and they should have conversations with each other and figure out what we should do, and then they should send out the bat signal to the rest of us. Sometimes that is how it has worked in the past, and maybe that's really what's needed, but I don't know. Nobody mapped out a plan and put out a call for fandom to go to tumblr, it just happened. My gut says that wherever vidding fandom ends up next, it'll be some combination of intentionality and accident. But Speranza wasn't really talking about community as a whole, she was talking about the functions of community that require unity. Like how at a past VVC Vidder Town Hall, apparently, the call was put out about the threat posed to vidding fandoms by the DMCA and people stepped up and worked with OTW Legal and the EFF to get vidding-related DMCA exemptions from the Library of Congress. You can't do that kind of work if the community is fragmented, so there has to be some way, whether it be online or in person, of getting all sorts of vidders talking together when there's something we need to talk about. This seems a lot more achievable online than in person, though in person conversation can be invaluable. We were saying that it's pretty damned easy for someone to just put up a post on the DW
vidding community every month for people to share their concerns and talk about ideas. Or announce a time for people to show up in a vidder chatroom, whether that be on Discord or Slack or irc or something else. (I suppose I ought to figure out how to get on the Slack. Ask me if you want to get on the Discord.) I plan on giving the vidding post thing a try. If it doesn't work, no great loss.In parallel, I had some interesting conversations about archiving vida. Because of the ambiguous legality of vidding, there's all sorts of special balancing acts we have to undertake when it comes to preserving vidding history between centralization and decentralization, between visibility and invisibility, between organization and disorganization. This can be really frustrating, and I think it is even more frustrating to non-vidders who don't have all of the experience we have in regularly working around these problems. (Heh, a couple months ago I went looking for a vid whose audio had been stripped by Youtube. I realized I could just add the audio back myself in my video editor and guess at a synch. Most people don't have that option.)
absolutedestiny talked about Peertube, apparently a tool designed to allow people to create their own Youtube like system, and other tools that if someone put the work in could potentially be used to create a vidder-oriented, vidder-run webspace. But we've been burned so many fucking times when these systems fail that it's scary to risk another one. cesperanza was talking during the Town Hall about the AO3 as the solution to some of these problems- she mentioned a 'vidding work form' that is under development that promises to make it easier and more useful to post vid to AO3. But she didn't have time to explain what it will look like and I didn't get a chance to ask her later in the con. Did anybody else? I think vidders are skeptical by now of ever being more than second class citizens on AO3, and we're aware that as long as AO3 is just a place to point links to whatever other hosting solution you're using, it's never really going to be a full answer for us. morgandawn and viddersadmin, meanwhile, were talking about how we can create platform independent tools for connecting vidders and vidfans- a way that a reccer can assemble searchable playlists that pull from both Vimeo and Youtube, for example. To just sort of throw your hands up in the air and say fuck it, we accept that there's not going to be a central place to go for vids that actually works for us, let's figure out how to work smarter in the fractured environment we do live in. I guess kind of the way people eventually dealt with the fracturing of AIM and YM and ICQ and GChat by getting clients that let them log into all of them using the same program. #datingmyself morgandawn is also personally undertaking to be a sort of non-archive central offline repository, asking people with collections of vids to give her a copy, which she is holding onto but not in any way documenting or organizing, so that if better organizing structure and tools emerge for archiving vids, she'll be able to pass her repository to people capable of cataloging it. If you can help her in that regard, please do so.I also mused aloud that one of my problems with the current usage of youtube and AO3 and other things for vids is that nobody knows the proper way to tag vids. We have few shared conventions that are well understood and well spread. You're lucky if people even tag things on AO3 with the word vid, and AO3 is not particularly friendly to tagging things with the song and other metadata that would be nice to include in a vid posting. So maybe we need to create our own tag conventions and then leverage our networks and try to spread them, so that everyone at least knows a basic minimum of how to tag things on a given platform. There are limits to how much value that has, but it's worth a try.
Some other people were also talking about how younger people are vidding in totally different styles and different communities. There's a sort of frustrating distance to this... on the one hand, VVC's community has been shrinking and aging and that's among the factors leading to the end of the con, but on the other hand more people are making vids than ever, and VVC vidding fandom pretty much doesn't have any ability? or interest? in communicating with the people outside the community. I think it's a combination of ability and interest, really. It's hard to talk to youtube vidders, youtube isn't really set up for it, it's all about transmission and not about two way communication. But also, I'm not on tumblr or instagram or twitter, which are much bigger centers of fandom than dreamwidth is, and so I'm inherently not going to be able to communicate with vidders on those platforms. And the longer I stay off those platforms, the less we speak the same language, both in terms of visual vocabulary and in terms of vidding fannish vocabulary. The instagram edits
hollywoodgrrl and winterevanesce were talking about are full of acronyms and jargon I at best half-follow, and their edits look very little like the vids I tend to watch.It's okay if those communities don't overlap with ours, at least to a certain extent. We have different objectives and different context, and we're quite happy over in our fannish corner enjoying art that in my opinion is often quite astonishing in its visual beauty and thematic depth. [One of the central questions of
ghost_lingering's "Silent Fandoms" is whether we actually want our fandoms to not be silent.] But to the extent that we have shared needs-attaining protection from legal threats, teaching each other techniques, sharing our work with as many fans as possible, meeting and talking to other people familiar with the technical and artistic challenges of vidding- we should figure out how to bridge these communal gaps, even if it means venturing into unfamiliar spaces. How do we get instagram and youtube vidders interested in coming to Fanworks con? How do we get them interested in talking to us on the various online community platforms we have that are still working? And if they come, how do we react when they enter with alien aesthetic norms? Do we welcome them or do we (intentionally or accidentally) make them feel like we think they're doing vidding wrong?- Vidding aesthetics
I have complained for years about my inability to comprehend a certain sort of youtube vid, the kind with rapidfire precision cutting, complicated overlays and other effects, and a tendency to mess with my brain when I try to make sense of their clip and effect choices. They are too well made to be dismissed as bad. They took hours and hours of work, and careful thought and design. But they do not read legibly to me in the way that any other sort of vid does. I'm not in AMV fandom, for example, but with the caveat that I can't follow the specific narrative of AMVs well when they depend on knowing the source, I tend to find AMVs generally legible as video constructions in a different vidding vocabulary than mine. But that doesn't happen with these youtube vids. And it's not that I want to say that they're doing vidding wrong. It's just that it drives me crazy that I have been unable to learn how to read and appreciate these well-crafted vids. The con offered two radically different, complementary theories for understanding this sort of youtube vid, both of which finally had me going okay, this sort of explains why.
In the panel on Effects,
hollywoodgrrl and winterevanesce offered a largely coherent schematization of vids into three segments, analogized to film production paradigms: 'indie' vids, 'studio' vids, and 'blockbuster' vids. All three styles of vid can be well and thoughtfully constructed. Indie vids are low on production values, focusing on basic cutting techniques to do the work of vidding, whether that be narrative or analytical. 'Studio' vids are high production value in service of vidding, using effects with purpose to comment on characters and narratives. 'Blockbuster' vids are about spectacle, not narrative. The effects are there for their own sake, to visually impress the viewer. In these terms, the 'youtube vid' that baffles me is a blockbuster-style vid that I have mentally been trying to read as a studio-style vid. I haven't had a way to distinguish between one of hollywoodgrrl or lim or whoever's effects-heavy vids and one of the high profile youtubers, but I knew intuitively there was some significant difference.In the Vidding Town Hall,
cesperanza offered a different theory. It's the algorithm, she argued. The youtube algorithm prioritizes vids in its search and sidebar that meet certain aesthetic criteria- vids that draw people in from the first moment, vids that are relentless and never let up for a moment. There is no room in the YT algorithm for vids that have a narrative build, that don't deliver what they're selling immediately. People like the VVC crowd, for whom YT is generally not a primary venue for displaying vids, don't generally play the game of trying to get their vids promoted by the algorithm (in fact, the opposite. One of the draws of premiering vids at vidshows, for me, is knowing that the audience will sit through them to the end. It was particularly important to me that I premiere "The Upload" at a vidshow because I knew that most people watching it online would not sit through it.), but youtube vidders do play the game. And even if they're not consciously thinking "I need to make a vid that meets these specific criteria to game the algorithm," that's ultimately not necessary! All they need to think is "I want to be successful on youtube, so I should make vids like the successful vids I see." Or even "I like the vids I am watching on youtube, so I should make vids like the ones I am watching."Both of these theories make a lot of sense in explaining why I have not been able to grok these vids. Along the channels in which I ordinarily read vid content, there is no content to read. In other channels I don't normally pay attention to, there is content. The cool thing about vids in general is how many different channels of brain-processing they broadcast on- I always love art that converges on the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk- so it's thought-provoking to think about how to access other channels than the ones I'm used to.
Aside from this specific question about youtube vid aesthetics, there was a lot of conversation about the kinds of vid aesthetic VVC people actually are interested in. The vids I like to watch tend not to be the ones with the most overt, showy effects, but I've come to realize the more I vid how powerful and effective subtler vid effects can be in improving the story you tell. Both the Effects panel and the Motion panel were full of useful ideas for how to make vids that grab a viewer while having the eyegrabbing be in the service of communication- using motion to convey circularity, or to convey narrative motion. Using color effects to tell a story about character emotion, or using overlays to convey perspective or internal feelings. I'm excited to see how that informs future vidding for me.
I thought there was a particularly varied range of styles, both in the music and in the editing, used in the vids we saw at VVC this year, probably because the last year of the con brought back from vidders who haven't shown anything at the con in a few years, and who tended toward older styles, and also the last year of the con brought in first-timers with fresh perspectives who wanted to get to the con before it ended. There were some really well made new vids in the mold of classic slash songvids, and
gwyn also put together a fascinating if necessarily scope-limited vidshow of pre-VVC mostly VCR vids. And just as much as the discussion of new vids and new kinds of effects inspired me in vid, some of those old and old-style vids also inspire me. Some of them, given profound technical constraint, are able to convey so much EMOTION, and that's something I'm always thinking about. My art can sometimes be at a little bit of an intellectual remove, or a little bit of an ironic trickster's remove, and I really admire people who are just balls out THIS IS MY FEELS.killa framed this in some really interesting ways, in her panel on Vidding as Time Capsules. The vids we make at any given moment are driven by the context in which we make them, in all sorts of different ways- the state of fandom, the state of our personal lives, the state of the canons we're working with, the state of the world at large... all of those things dictate how our vids look. And I'll add to that my technical capacity. There are vids that are time capsules of an earlier time, but which I have only recently been able to achieve, and vid ideas that I still don't think I have the chops to pull off, but hope I may someday. And as much as vids encode the present moment, they also encode our past, the vids and ideas and fandoms that taught us and brought us to where we are today.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-23 07:05 pm (UTC)And, no shade on Ces, but I am extremely skeptical of the idea of AO3 being any kind of savior too. The idea of hosting a "dark archive" for vids was first proposed nearly a decade ago, and promptly died for the same reasons that there is still no way of hosting vids on the Archive itself: lack of infrastructural support, lack of the money for the same (or more precisely, lack of the will to fundraise the sums that hosting vids would require; I think it's well within the OTW's capacity to double their annual take with more sustained fundraising effort and expertise), concern about increased exposure to lawsuits from rightsholders, and even if all those problems were solved, lack of enough experienced coders to do the work in a timely fashion. The changes to search that were rolled out in June were kicking around in draft since at least 2015, which is when the coding contractor was authorized; the work took approximately 2.75 years. So there may well be a vid posting form on the way, but most likely years from now. Not really feasible.
One thing I've noticed is that the WisCon Vid Party has seemed to have more success drawing in a somewhat broader spectrum of vidders in recent years; it might be interesting to hear what, if anything, they've done to promote that, with an eye to getting people to support FanWorksCon.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-23 08:21 pm (UTC)Deal, I'll send you the invite later today.
One thing I've noticed is that the WisCon Vid Party has seemed to have more success drawing in a somewhat broader spectrum of vidders in recent years; it might be interesting to hear what, if anything, they've done to promote that, with an eye to getting people to support FanWorksCon.
I'm not sure my impression matches yours there. I do think in the sense that Wiscon Vid Party is a place that some of the people alienated by VVC feel comfortable at, it has featured some voices who don't submit to VVC, and also Wiscon Vid Party has inspired several new vidders to try their hand, which is great [and the same is true of VVC, that nonvidders have gone to VVC and gotten inspired to become vidders.]. But I don't think it has drawn vidders from outside the sort of standard contemporary VVC vidder aesthetic, that I've seen, except inasmuch as Wiscon vids tend to default to a slightly more didactic/intellectual/SJy starting place.
More significantly, Wiscon Vid Party had 15 premieres this year; Last year it had 19, and in previous years it didn't exceed ten premieres. VVC had 150 premieres this year, up from a recent typical of about 75 or 80. It's great that Wiscon Vid Party is growing, but in terms of vidding output and vidding community, Wiscon is not a substantial presence still.
And I want to clarify that I'm not specifically talking about how do we get people to go to FanWorks, since I'm not foolish enough to pin my hopes for the future of vidding community on a new convention that isn't even primarily targeting vidders as its audience. When I'm talking about outreach to other vidding communities, I'm talking more generally. As
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-23 08:30 pm (UTC)Both sets of adaptations make sense, but we both have the same fundamental problem, we should be strategizing together!
Very true. I wonder if, as the VVC community does disperse onto platforms like YouTube, some of that conglomerating will occur naturally, but I agree that conscious strategies to drive it happening would be better.
At the same time I wonder about blaming the YouTube algorithm for anything--when I post a Star Wars vid, for example, the recommended videos inevitably include hate screeds about how TLJ and Star Wars Rebels are terrible and Kathleen Kennedy should be tarred and feathered. In the absence of actual insight into its parameters I am skeptical about the idea that the algorithm is actually parsing for anything subtle; afaik it just rewards engagement of whatever kind. So…we should be more popular and then our vids will get bigger? Also not very helpful.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-23 10:25 pm (UTC)But, yeah, I have the same sense as you about the draw of Wiscon for vidders. I do wonder if it will become a more appealing venue for vids now that VVC is shuttered.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-24 04:50 pm (UTC)As someone who is at WisCon nearly every year, I hope so! And I hope that the Member Assistance Fund can be part of how that happens.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-23 10:40 pm (UTC)I've heard Pillowfort.io might be the next fandom thing? Certainly it seems to combine the things I like about Dreamwidth (locking posts and the ability to comment on posts) with the things I like about Tumblr (...wait, I'm sure it will come to me...) (ability to post video/audio/gfx/text easily) and allows you the capacity to block the things I dislike about Tumblr and Twitter (reblogging, difficulty of blocking out content/content creators you don't want to engage with).
I have a mix of thoughts about reaching out to other vidding communities that I am still thinking through. And a mix of thoughts about hosting/posting/streaming/etc. There is a way in which I don't necessarily want the tools to be fandom-only and a way in which I don't want the tools to be centralized. At the same time, I do want there to be hubs of communication and connection. So. *hands*
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-24 12:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-24 02:29 pm (UTC)[I keep meaning to send you a partial draft of my Vid About The Things We Don't Vid, I'd like your feedback and brainstorming help.]
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-24 09:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-24 09:34 pm (UTC)now I’m kinda wondering if that algorithm stuff is partly why one vid of mine has a weirdly high amount of views
Quite possibly! But given a vid that the algorithm likes, you have the choice about whether you want to keep imitating it or not. If you are willing, the algorithm is happy to train you to make more vids it likes.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-25 05:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-26 02:17 am (UTC)