Vividcon 2010 Premieres

Summer really is convention season for me, I went to two in August and I'm currently madly prepping for Dragon*Con which is this coming weekend. I thought I'd be done after this, but I just found out that there's a new con, New England Comic Con, in Boston October 15-17, so I'll probably be at that.

As some of you may recall, I left this year's Vividcon early to be in a wedding party, and I missed the Saturday night Premieres event, "the Oscars of vidding" (though it's premieres and not an awards show, so really sundance or cannes would be a better analogy, I think). This weekend I finally sat down with a friend and watched all of the Premieres vid show in one go. These forty vids were all brand new, finished weeks or months early but not shown or distributed publicly until this event. It's really quite neat to be at the world premiere of anything, in my opinion, and I loved Premieres last year. There's two main ways to watch premieres at Vividcon, you can watch in the utterly silent (except laughter) formal viewing room, where people are only allowed to enter or leave between vids except in an emergency, or you can watch in the overflow room, where talking is allowed. I was right up front in the formal room last year, my first time at Vividcon. I mostly had a great time, but it might be a bit more intense than I want next year, I'm not sure what I'll do. I watched this year's premieres in my living room with a friend, and we were pretty quiet during serious vids that we liked, and laughed heartily during funny vids, and were vocal about our confusion during the strange ones.

So, about those vids! I didn't have my program near me this time, and while I had read through what was listed at the con, I had forgotten most details. Normally when I watch a vid I have to actively seek it out, so I know exactly what I am getting. At the con, I constantly check my program. This time, I just put the DVD in, and sometimes the vid began by telling me what the source was, and sometimes it didn't! It was very different. I think in the future I would like to have the program available for when I am confused and would like to know the source, but I'd also like to make myself stop obsessively checking it, because being surprised can be nice.

Here are some links to some of the vids. Starting with the more humorous ones and moving into more serious vids. Enjoy! If you like the vids, leave a comment! Livejournal takes open id.

• "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", Stark Trek
  http://lcsbanana.livejournal.com/1990920.html
  
  I've seen a lot of vids to songs from "The Lion King", and this one still made me laugh. Oh, Kirk. :-)
  



• "Because I'm Awesome", Glee
  http://anoel.livejournal.com/117488.html
  
  I love Glee, and I love Kurt, and this vid is a quick, fun romp through the life of everyone's favorite gay teenager in Ohio show choir. :-)
  



• "When I'm up I can't get down again", Takin' Over the Asylum
  http://deejay.livejournal.com/188291.html
  
  This is the one vid I saw before Vividcon, which made me feel special of course. :-) (Vidders are always allowed and encouraged to get feedback on their vids before they release them). Do you love David Tennant, lately of Doctor Who? Then watch him in his first major role, from all the way back in 1994, as a young bipolar man in a Scottish mental institution. I plan to watch the whole miniseries eventually.



• "I like you so much better when you're naked", Smallville
  http://sisabet.livejournal.com/400373.html
  
  So, I've never watched any Smallville (outside of vids), though I think the Vividcon DVDs and my friends might be conspiring to change that. (I hear season nine is really good?) I know hardly anything about the show outside of the standard Superman canon, and that Lex and Clark are ridiculously slashy, at least in the early seasons. (And on that topic, one of the vidders of this premiered another vid at Club Vivid, Clark/Lex and "Bad Romance", primarily Smallville but drawing from lots of other Superman properties. It's fabulous, and I am reminded how compelling villians are for me... )This vid is totally fun and had me bouncing, and just seeing the title again put the song back in my head, which hasn't happened with anything else from premieres. And I've only heard the song once, ever!



• "CITIHALL*", Futurama
  http://bradcpu.livejournal.com/123653.html
  
  Wow. Brad took a long song, that is mostly spoken word, and really complicated, and he made a vid that matched up to that better than I would have thought possible. I am really impressed. (My other favorite vid to a Tenacious D song is here)
  



• "Ada", Inglorious Basterds
  http://braver-creature.livejournal.com/15702.html
  
  A lot can, and has, been said about the women that Quentin Tarantino creates, how they interact with violence, and with men, lots of really interesting things. Right now, what I have to say is that Shoshana is awesome and I would have gladly watched her story without all that Brad Pitt stuff. Warning, this does spoil almost the entire movie, but it's beautiful.



• "I Can't Hear the Music", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
  http://settiai.livejournal.com/1379002.html
  
  It's been years since I watched DS9, but I loved that show so much. This is a portrait of Kai Winn, her flaws and her desire, her path throughout the whole show. DS9 has had a minor resurgence in my corner of fandom lately, and I really need to rewatch some of it.



• "Becoming Brothers", Friday Night Lights
  http://kassrachel.livejournal.com/834852.html
  
  Do you watch Friday Night Lights? I will have to write a big post on it some day, because it's just fabulous, and I swear on everything, you don't need to like football for this show, and if it's not the kind of show you normally watch, that's a major reason you should watch. Oh, show of my heart! Here is a lovely vid about this amazing show. Watch it, then let's chat. :-)



• "Stay Awake", multiple sources.
  http://laurashapiro.livejournal.com/304845.html
  
  This one is creepy and poignant and I love it. It's about women, and fertility and the womb, and... just watch this one, and tell me (and laurashapiro!) what you think!




• "Bloodbuzz Ohio", Breaking Bad
  http://f1renze.livejournal.com/219264.html
  
  People have been telling me for awhile that I need to see Breaking Bad, and I vaguely intended to do so someday, but this vid just grabbed ahold of me and would not let go. I didn't quite cry, but I am not sure this show will make me cry when I watch it... in the very near future.

There are so many good vids in there, but the hour is late and the laptop power is low, so I shall bid you farewell for now. Watch vids!

20 Days of Vidding

There is a popular style of meme/survey in fandom, where people answer a series of questions about things they like (or don't) like, theoretically answering one question a day. I've seen a lot of these lately, probably due in part to the lack of new television recently. There's 30 days of Doctor Who, with questions about favorite companions and season finales, 30 days about favorite songs, and a number that are just generic questions about one's favorite show, or all time favorites across sources. Last week, jarrow came up with 20 days of vid questions, in preparation for next month's big vidding convention, Vividcon. I am going to attempt to participate, and share the results with y'all. Forgive me for overusing the word "awesome", I am not the best at talking about vids. Just watch them. ;-)

Day 1 - A vid that made you start watching a brand new show

Day 1: Winner: Mad About You by gwyn-r, Mad Men. I first saw this vid at Vividcon Premieres last year, and I knew nothing about these women, but they grabbed me, and I needed to know them, I needed to know their lives. I had been meaning to go back and rewatch this vid for a few days, and then this meme appeared! The streaming video was skipping, so I pulled out my VVC 2009 Premiere DVDs and wound up watching a lot of vids. :-) This was my first time going back to this vid since I started watching "Mad Men", and of course it is just wonderful.

Day 1: Runner up is "Fix You" by sdwolfpup, Battlestar Galactica (which was very hard to find given that I couldn't remember who had made it, and it turns out there are a lot of "Fix You" vids!). In actuality, a lot of vidders made me watch BSG, because I saw all my favorite vidders were vidding BSG and I wanted to know the source so I could watch their vids. It sounds a bit ridiculous and silly now that I admit it. :-) This vid did push me over the edge, I think I saw it at a random little vid show at Wiscon in 2007, and I was intrigued, and started watching.

Then right after Vividcon 2008 I read a whole lot of lj posts about the vids, and This post by bradcpu talked about "Fix You" and I went back, having seen tons of BSG by this point, and I was blown away by the awesome.

Day 2 - A male character study vid you love

"In the mirror" by Here's Luck, due South. The reason I am so impressed by this vid is that I hardly know Ray Kowalski. I watched the first two seasons of due South devotedly, completely unaware of the fandom. After that, it became really hard to find the episodes where I lived, and I only caught a smattering of episodes, and was generally suspicious of this major casting change on my beloved show. Years later, I was startled to discover due South had this huge fandom! I had thought only sff had fandoms.

I found this vid, and I watched it, and I felt like I understood RayK, between the episodes I had seen, and this vid, and all the bits and pieces I picked up from people... it all came together in such a great way. Being able to convey so much to someone who doesn't know all the source? Totally awesome. :-)

Festivids Reveal!

January 2010 has been a wonderful month in the vidding world! First, a few links for those of you who aren't familiar with vidding.

• How To Watch A Fanvid, a blog entry from Henry Jenkins all the way back in 2006, when a certain Star Trek vid to Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" hit it big. Now I've actually met many of the people in this entry or the comments!
• 
  


• New York Magazine: The Vidder, a 2007 profile of Luminosity, one of the best vidders around.


• Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love, another Henry Jenkins blog post from 2008 about videos about fanvidding that were created by vidders (many of whom I have since met) and Project New Media Literacies (which I worked for, but was not involved in this project).


• Organization of Transformative Works page on vidding, with all the vidding NML videos.
  

I love vidding. It's beautiful and fun and transformative. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it turns me on to new music and makes me see things in new lights. I've heard lots of people say they don't watch vids because they "don't get them". Please don't let that keep you away! Lots of vids are just meant to be enjoyed on a relatively shallow level, and even if there are many levels, you don't need to see them all! Don' stress, just watch.

There is a whole lot to be said about vidding. The history of vidding, the copyright aspects, the social aspects, the transition to digital, the rest of the world discovering vidding... but I'm just going to talk about some recent events and my own participation.

This month was Festivids! I mentioned it here: http://lauraboylan.blogspot.com/2010/01/ive-been-considering-just-defaulting.html Festivids is a brand new event where fanvidders come up with a list of movies and TV shows and the like that are rarely vidded and make requests of something they want to see. Everyone also makes a list of what they are willing to make, and it gets put into a database and people are assigned someone to vid for, which the do anonymously. The vids were put up anonymously two weeks ago, and today all the vidders were revealed. While waiting for the reveals, vidders (including myself) have been hanging out on IRC and trying to guess who made what.

I've been aware of fandom for a very long time, and involved in various ways for over a decade. Since I graduated in June, I have made a concerted effort to get involved in fandom, and I am extremely happy with the results. Fandom is full of amazing, clever, creative, talented, kind people. I didn't realize until recently how much giving and gifting there is in fandom, how many exchanges like festivids and Yuletide there are. On some level, all fanworks are for other people to enjoy, but there is something just lovely about crafting something specifically for someone else, who probably isn't even your friend. For me, it was a great kickstart into writing fanfiction and making vids, it provides a deadline (and I work best under deadlines) and it gives me something to work with, which mskes it easier to get started. Also, it gives you a very clear audience, which is one the standard tricks of creative work, knowing your audience. For instance, for my yuletide story I worked in a green energy plotline because I thought my recipient would like it based on what I read in her blog. I think one problem I have with this blog is that I have no idea what audience I am writing for besides "not my usual audience". I assume you don't have the same background as my normal audience to make myself explain things. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone even reads this. I've never told anyone about it, and maybe everyone else in Iron Blogger skips it for not being about version control or AI.

There is tons more to say, but it's gotten late so I'm going to wrap up here and show you the vid I made and the vid I got.

I got "Enchantment", a vid about the Japanese film "Kamikaze Girls", about a lolita girl and a biker girl living in rural Japan. It was fairly obscure among vidders -- my vidder didn't even get matched on it, she picked it out and watched it based on my requests! Many people have said they plan to watch the film because of this vid, and one group already reported in that they loved it! I am very excited for other people to fall in love with this film! Here it is! Watch it!. I don't know this vidder, but we know at least one person in common in real life, and we live in the same state. The vid she got is also awesome, from a Bollywood film about India's first female field hockey team that I just put on my netflix queue. (And the person who made that vid is someone I talk to online, who gave money to Haiti relief for me to make her a rum cake. The circle of fannish giving!)

And now, my own vid! My very first! It is to "The Princess Bride", which means it got a lot of views, being such a well known source.

Hanuman from Laura 47 on Vimeo.