Seeking Ferret

I've been thinking that maybe rather than talking about specific panels at 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.

Vividcon in general was an amazing time. Highlights were pretty much as predicted- I had a lot of fun doing my jazz panel, which I've separately written up. Premieres was full of beautiful and smart vids. Club Vivid was wonderful, and dancing to my vid was a high I may never come down from. My Shabbos dinner was terrific, with the lovely company of kass, roga, bironic, and ride_4ever. Playing a half-orc bard in jetpack_monkey's D&D game was a blast. And hanging out with so many awesome fans and talking about vids and fandoms all weekend was wonderful. I'm really going to miss Vividcon after next year.


Favorite Vids from the con (but there were so many others beyond these that I liked)

-gwyn's Star Wars vid Battleflag, which jumps from era to era beautifully telling a story of fighting for what you believe in against great odds.

-cherry's Thor vid Monsters of the Cosmos, which okay, I HATE the Symphony of Science because I think it fetishizes science, stripping away all the hard work and controversy and pretends like science is something inherently and unambiguously beautiful, emerging from these lone genius scientists for whom the beauty of the cosmos just magically unfolds.

And I'm frustrated with Thor because of its science-as-magic ethos, which only rarely the movie lets Jane Foster do battle with.

So the idea that I love Monsters of the Cosmos astounds me, but it's such a brilliant mashup of different kinds of fake science, and the way it centers Jane's journey is wonderful. Like, in Thor I, Jane is searching for evidence of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a theoretical mathematical model of the interaction of exotic particles and relativity. In finding that it's real, she instead of getting entangled in the physics finds herself entangled with the literal monsters of the cosmos. It's like she gets swallowed up by something that should have just been a metaphor, while the song is elliding the fact that the idea of monsters is just a metaphor. The song says "Truth is stranger than scifi," and this is the kind of line that in my opinion has no place in a serious conversation about science, but it's the world Jane inhabits!

It's such a brilliant combination and the timing and arrangement of the visuals is stunning.

-dar_vidder's Harry Potter vid "The Tale of the Three Brothers", part of a yet further extended set of Harry Potter vids to Fantasia that I have not had a chance to fully watch yet. But this piece is gorgeous and grounds the whole Harry Potter series in a saga that goes back much farther and reaches much deeper than Harry's experiences, centering Dumbledore as the man who digs up ancient and powerful magicks that end up exacting a heavy toll on the lost boys around him.

-pipsqueaky's Keanu Reeves multivid Incredible Thoughts, about all the deep thoughts that much be going on behind Keanu Reeves's blank face. Brilliantly hilarious.

-sisabet's New Girl vid Wake Me Up Before You Go Go because it lets Schmidt be a total douchebag and Cece be a total bitch and still takes them seriously and celebrates their undying love for each other.

-anoel's Star Wars vid Carry that Weight even though I'm not capable of coming up with the words to explain how amazing it is, how it celebrates Leia and Rey, and Carrie Fisher and Daisy Ridley, and appreciates how significant they are as focal points of female pride, and yet they also reflect a fundamental failure to center women's stories in the SF we consume. I love how the end of the vid widens the scope.

-sweetestdrain's Harry Potter vid Blackbird, which overlaps significantly with chaila's amazing "I am the one who will remember everything" in terms of source footage used, but which by moving more linearly presents the clear and stunning image of McGonagall as a woman on a mission.

-grammarwoman's Star Wars vid "That's What's the Matter" (not yet online that I can see), which uses a Union song from the US Civil War to snark at the Imperials so cleverly.

-bessyboo's Ghostbuster's vid Light 'Em Up from Club Vivid, for so much exciting Ghostbusting action.

-sisabet and trelkez's Thor vid "Tubthumping" (Not yet online that I can see), so delightfully over the top.

-jetpack_monkey's Wuxia multifandom vid Uptown Funk, capturing the tropes and the balletic joy of the genre.

-pi's multifandom older women vid Worth It, proving that writing this post in one sitting has exhausted me because I have lots of feels about this vid but nothing to say except Watch it.




Now I am in Helsinki for Worldcon. Worldcon is more of a mixed bag, but mostly I'm having a great time in Helsinki.

Title: Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing
Responsible for the lack of consistent title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Vidder: seekingferret
Song: "Et Rekod" by Yakov Shwekey
Fandom: Um... all of them? Or at least 104 of them.
Content Notes: Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing
Length: 4:16
Summary: All the Jews! All the Feelz!. The Jewish dance vid of my heart.
Premiered at: Club Vivid 2017
Thanks to: Oh, man, the list. First and foremost, thanks to sanguinity and ghost_lingering for so much support and helpful feedback. Thanks to kass for positive feedback when it was desperately needed. Thanks to J,L,L,T, and B for giving me the opportunity to watch people respond to the vid in person and see what was landing. Thanks to a different J and L for offering a round of specifically Jewish feedback. Thanks to thirdblindmouse for canon suggestions and source provision. Thanks to anyone who has listened to me babble about Jewish movies in the past year, which is most of the people I know, even if they didn't necessarily know the reason I was watching a particular movie or show.




(Download available through the Critical Commons website. Note that you have to get a free account.)

(also posted to youtube)




I have so much to say about the making of this vid and my feelings about all the characters and fandoms in it that it's honestly a little paralyzing. I've written thousands of words of reveal notes and I still have thousands of words to go, but here is the vid! I worked on this vid from October to May and I poured all my heart and all my soul and all my might into this vid. It feels so amazing to finally share it with the world. It was so amazing to dance to it at Vividcon, wearing my Soulless Golem T-shirt.


( Song lyrics )

( List of all fandoms, not quite in order )

I submitted my vid for Club Vivid last night!!!

Looking through emails, I conceived the idea for this vid at the start of October, started collecting clips on 10/15, had the first draft on 11/28. I have put so much work into this vid over what is for me a very long time to work on a fanwork. I definitely think this is the fannish project I've put the most of myself into.

It feels very funny to be done with this thing that's consumed so much of my attention for months. I celebrated the completion by doing a shot of slivovitz, as felt appropriate. I subsequently felt a little dizzy, but I'm not sure if that's because of the liquor or the feeling of loss.

August seems a long way away. Funny to have to sit on a fanwork for so long before sharing it. I'm used to the instant gratification of finishing something, posting it, and getting comments more or less right away. I widened the circle of people I asked to beta in the last week, so I did get to see some new people reacting to seeing it for the first time, including the first set of people I actually literally was in the same room with and watched them react to it. They responded as I'd hoped and it was awesome.

I can't wait to dance to my vid at Vividcon.

Title: Circles (Ma'agalim)
Vidder: seekingferret
Fandom: The West Wing
Song: "Ma'agalim (Circles)" by Idan Raichel
Content Notes: Club Vivid Premiere 2016. The posted vid is ripped from the con DVD because I seem to have already lost the original file. Will try to find that.
Length: 3:18
Responsible for the lack of consistent title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Summary Remix of LauraShapiro's West Wing fanvid "Circles", focusing on Toby Ziegler
Acknowledgements Thanks to ghost_lingering for betaing, the tech glitches are not her fault. Thanks for laurashapiro for inspiration.



Lyrics

( lyrics )


As often happens when Idan Raichel releases a new album, I listened to "At the Edge of the Beginning" an awful lot when it first came out in January. The album's standout is "Ma'agalim (Circles)", a really great dance tune with thoughtful lyrics. I wanted to vid it before I knew what to vid it to.

The song is also a designed pun: As a song called "Circles", it is intended to be danced as an Israeli circle dance. There's something awfully attractive to me about pun songs. As I listened to the song on repeat, I thought about what I could vid it to, and the punnishness of the title called to me to respond with my own pun. In viddish circles, "Circles" is the name of a well-known West Wing vid premiered about ten years ago at Vividcon by laurashapiro. It tells the story of the West Wing crew bobbing and weaving through the White House to Tommy Schlamme's lyrical camera movement,, the famous 'walk-and-talks' sending the whole West Wing spinning in literal circles as Jed and Leo and Josh and CJ and Toby struggle with the various scandals of the Bartlett administration. It's one of my favorite vids, because it captures characters I love so much, so well. And it's a quintessential vid, one that takes the visual elements of a show and reuses them in a way that completely reinterprets them. So I started to get stuck on the idea of somehow mashing up "Circles" the West Wing vid and "Circles" the Israeli dance song. Especially as a Club Vivid vid it seemed to work- dancing along to this song seems essential to what it says as a vid.

Because "Ma'agalim" is Hebrew and Idan Raichel as a poet and musician often draws inspiration from his Judaism, Toby Ziegler was the natural focal point for this vid, as the locus of Jewish identity on the West Wing. Also because I have ridiculous amounts of Toby Feelz. All the feelz. I don't think this vid says anything really specific about Toby, it just testifies to the way he keeps cycling again and again through the vicissitudes of life, always rolling with the punches, the way he suffers and loses and just carries it inside him and works as hard as he can to serve others, because he believes in America's promise. And how in spite of his surliness he builds family and love all around him, love he's uncertain if he deserves but which ultimately carries him when he needs to be carried. This was for me an intricate vid, with some faster cuts than I typically use, and a quite long list of episode sources, but it also sort of straightforwardly followed from its premise. I knew what images needed to be where with very little rethinking required. I feel like I know Toby very well.

Sadly my laptop broke shortly after submitting this vid, and recovering files from it is a little hit or miss. So I ripped the vid from the con DVD set in order to get it posted quickly. I will try to dig up the cleaner better prettier version of this vid and post that when I can figure out how.

Hahahaha life sucks right now.

I was supposed to be at Vividcon ten hours ago. My flight was supposed to leave Newark at 9:29PM Eastern and be in Chicago by 10:50PM Central. My new apartment is walking distance to a Northeast Corridor train station and so I walked to the train and took the train to the airport and skated through security in a couple minutes and thought I was so damned clever for getting to the airport so easily. Instead there was lightning and problems with getting the crew in place and a hell of a lot of getting jerked around by the skeleton crew United Airlines had in place, who kept popping up every half hour or so to delay the flight by another half hour. At 1:30AM they finally cancelled the flight leaving us to scramble to find new plans.

I thought outside the box a little and was able to get booked on a flight out of Philadelphia that leaves at 11AM Eastern today, while a lot of my flightmates were settling for flights out of Newark that didn't leave until Saturday, which was obviously a no-go for me. Of course the problem with booking a flight out of Philadelphia was, you know, getting to Philadelphia. By the time I had my new flight booked the train station at Newark was closed for the night, so I had to wait until 4:30AM in the baggage claim at Newark Terminal C, then take the NJ Transit to Trenton, transfer to SEPTA, take SEPTA regional rail to 30th Street Station in Central Philadelphia, transfer to the SEPTA regional out to the Airport, then go through security for my second time in twelve hours, and here I am... running on the hour of sleep I got on the train to Trenton.

In about five hours I will be at Vividcon and hopefully things will stop going wrong and everything will be great for the rest of the weekend. But life sucks a bit right now.