Last night I dreamed a brainstorming session for a "visibility"-themed vidshow, covering invisible characters, queer representation (complete with debates on where subtext ends and text begins), and ending with lim's "Us" as a meditation on "mainstreaming" via its literally effaced footage. (I still don't think this tops my waking idea for a vidshow on cyborgs, which also culminates in vidding self-reflexivity.)

Obviously a sign that I should spend today finally finishing this post.

I rationalized attending vividcon by calculating the time and energy I would save catching up on the deluge of premieres through watching them all in one fell swoop. It certainly lived up to my expectations on that account! I plan for this to be the last recs post for a long while. Keep in mind that my taste in vids is idiosyncratic, and this is intended as an inventory of my subjective favorites, not as an objective hierarchy of craftsmanship.

In this vein, I made an executive decision to exclude stand-alone movie vids from this list of recs. While I saw a number of vids from single-movie source at the con that were individually captivating, I don't find movies very interesting on the whole, and thus I don't find movie vids very interesting as a genre.

Complete playlists for all VVC08 vidshows are helpfully compiled HERE.

My Winner's Circle
For all my disclaimers, I imagine this resembles many con-goers' top three (1 and 2 were the selections for in-depth review). The marked similarities here are telling: in addition to Summer Glau, all these vids feature perverse relationships, cleverly manipulated and/or external footage, and a gradually emerging reveal. The latter strategy has a particular payoff in the reception context of VividCon. Typically, one would click through to a vid motivated at minimum by the framing information in the author's post, and often by the supplementary comments of a reccer as well. A premieres show, by contrast, guarantees a captive audience "unspoiled" by any paratexts, creating different narrative opportunities from the internet's temporal and spatial dispersion. And yes, I am about to spoil you.

vidder(s): sweetestdrain
title: Gloria
music: Patti Smith
fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
focus: Sarah/Cameron
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: People say beware, but I don't care.
comments: The premiere of this vid alone was worth the price of admission: watching surprise lesbian robot porn unfold was an unforgettable encounter. Already thrilled with butch Sarah at the beginning (remember how dualbunny taught us that Starbuck IS Pink? well sweetestdrain makes a convincing case that Sarah Connor IS Patti Smith), I may never recover from how thoroughly I was bowled over by my own kinks as the story developed. jagwriter78 recently coined the term "vidfic" -- I think we have here an exemplar of that mode. I'd venture that this is the greatest femslash vid made to date.

vidder(s): obsessive24
title: Climbing Up the Walls
music: Radiohead
fandom: Supernatural, Heroes, Firefly/Serenity
focus: Sam/Dean Winchester, Nathan/Peter Petrelli, Simon/River Tam
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: Siblings. "I am the pick in the ice."
comments: My lack of patience with either Winchesters or Petrellis had me rolling my eyes when this started. My date whispered, "I don't think this is a vid about 80% boys, I think it's a vid about INCEST." Well THAT I can certainly get behind! As the author notes, this is open to multiple readings (and various commentaries are linked) -- personally I experience it as gleefully cracktastic, but I'm aware that there's a darker morality tale lurking within if one takes it seriously. For the uninitiated: these are three wildly popular pairings in fandom, not simply three random pairs of siblings -- this is a metavid about a topical fannish phenomenon. Here's to the queer frontier.

vidder(s): bradcpu
title: Tear You Apart
music: She Wants Revenge
fandom: Firefly
focus: Simon/Kaylee (River)
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: It feels so right.
comments: This vid is fiendishly disorienting until the POV coalesces. Exquisitely edited, deliciously disturbing, and perfectly River. Smart notes by bradcpu: "I tried to make a vid that would look and feel fractured, but not really tell the viewer why it looks fractured until the final segment of the vid. Hopefully the first 2/3 of the vid looks different on a second viewing. I tried to push the River POV by using lots of jump cuts and medical shots (tons of secondary source); and by connecting sexual desire to violence and Reavers, because I would imagine it would have all looked the same in River's head." It worked.

( top ten lists )

It's important to us that Media Fetish: The Vidshow! be not only a fleeting local event, but a permanent virtual installation that the community can share. To that end, I have much belatedly transcribed excerpts of our remarks on the vids to post here. The full playlist is in the original entry; cut are a handful of vids where our observations are already more or less documented online, as well as familiar background information. Apologies for the abridgements, and for the sustained inelegance that comes of translating our extemporaneous performance to text. We were having a great time!

~ Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa

( on with the show! )

The problem with becoming a vidding fan, as an obsessive person, is that there will always be more to watch. I seriously have a SPREADSHEET of vids to catch up on. Thanks to par_avion, veni_vidi_vids is now compiling recs via delicious, which is invaluable for keeping tabs on the buzz. I also have charmax's A-Z of women-centric vids, geekturnedvamp's girls girls girls playlist, and laurashapiro's IBARW vids of color list queued up to go through. But I'm about to be deluged with vividcon, so this is it for my back-catalogue at the moment. Except I do still have ambitions of making the rounds of Torchwood (as a preview, run don't walk to fan_eunice's Papa Don't Preach for the boys and sapote3's The Test for the girls). NB: fanworksfinder is being buggy, so I haven't ported over any of this recent spate of reviews.

( 3 newish vids )

( 3 oldish vids )

( 3 cyborgean Sarah Connor Chronicles vids )

In a perfect world, I would have had time to write something about all the following vids as well. In this one, I'm just going to rec them and leave it at that.

( other groups of 3 )

BREAKING: I just officially got into VVC!!!!!!!!!!!

In keeping with the networked structure of our collective brain, this post forks off from heyiya's Cylon meta and virtual vidshow (you can read my reviews of the older vids she picked in my previous BSG recs post). It's my rendering of an emergent BSG vidding meme that has been circulating between heyiya, beccatoria, kiki_miserychic and I, building on work already underway in the fandom at large. ( OUR VIDS )

( more techno-futuristic BSG vids )

( BSG female character studies )

The BSG vids I've enjoyed but not reviewed are in this playlist -- let me know if I've missed anything important (that's not hetshippy or boy-focused)?

Remember in April when I announced the first in a series of Battlestar Galactica season 4 crack vidlets? beccatoria and my Plan was to mashup each episode with audio from the Prelinger Archives of mid-century sponsored films, thereby creating our own archive that chronicles the season against the backdrop of our own cultural and technological history. Months later, the project is complete! Part one, at least, with the rest to come when BSG returns in 2009.

Length: 9:20 (10 parts, mostly under 60 seconds each)
Stream: youtube or imeem (embedded under the cut)
Download: 61MB AVI
Links: original posts @ beccatoria or @ thearchive2 / xposted @ vidding + bsg_crack

( watch it now )I'm absurdly proud of how these vids emerged as a collaborative artwork, and I think you can witness our skills improving as the series progresses.

For a more sober portrait of season 4.0 (or as a reference point for anyone who might be arriving at this post without a sense of what a more typical fanvid looks like), let me recommend beccatoria's Tricks (to Bruce Springseen's "Magic"). In addition to its elegant distillation of S4's key moments and themes, this vid is notable for contrasting them with a heartbreaking montage of earlier BSG scenes, and for an ingenious use of the final episode's final shot (interspersed throughout on the refrain). It's also technically dazzling, and could be taken as an exemplar of Windows Movie Maker vidding. WMM offers a very limited palette of capabilities, but Becka pushes them to their limits, perfecting the rhythm with extensive time toggles. I had the pleasure of doing some light beta duty on this.

Finally, one of the perks of selecting concepts for Tomorrow was having an excuse to plumb the depths of the remarkable Prelinger collection. Here's a sampling of the sort of deranged gems found therein. They may be of special interest to media studies professors, as many would make excellent teaching tools. FYI, the archive also includes myriad promotional/educational narrative films and musicals, which I skipped over.

( Top Ten Prelinger )

I face something of a dilemma: it makes me uncomfortable to put myself in the position of speaking about or for vidders as an academic, since I'm decidedly NOT a vidder (an irresistible bunny, however, that someone should really take off my hands: a series of 21 vid-flashes to They Might Be Giants "Fingertips," which are on average 10 seconds long it's been done! by vyra -- thanks heresluck). I've always been a creature of words, not a visual artist, and fanfiction is intimately contiguous with how I work professionally. Visual media is my project, though, and it fits so undeniably for me to explore vidding as my pathway toward the intersection of fan cultures and convergence. The immediate motivation behind this massive remedial education is that this spring has turned into a sort of mini-tour, and I decided I should just follow where my obsessions lead (while, of course, trying to be as informed and respectful as possible):

• this weekend I'm attending 24/7, a DIY Video Summit at USC, and participating in a sekrit film eta: Laura Shapiro has the scoop
• March 4, I am giving a campus talk on "queer" vidding within the larger context of internet video negotiations at Swarthmore College, 7pm @ Science Center 199 (and also visiting Bob Rehak's class earlier that day)
• March 7 is my presentation at SCMS: "The Shape of Things to Come: Online Promotions, Fan Videos, and Other Queer Technologies in the Progeny of 'Battlestar Galactica'" (an excerpt of the chapter)
• I'm organizing the April 6 panel/screening "Media Fetish: The VIdshow!" as an event in Brown University's Pride Month
• April 24-26 is Console-ing Passions, where I'm part of a fandebate follow-up workshop -- I'm signed up to speak about The L Word's online promotions and NOT vidding, but you never know what might happen!

In preparation, I have now finished watching every vid in kbusse and jarrow272's recs posts -- phew! The remaining ones that I've chosen to re-review are below. jarrow's VVC07 picks are copious, but if you think he missed any crucial entries please let me know! The reason I haven't been trolling all over for vidrecs is that, in the course of this undertaking, I quickly discovered that taste in vids is quite subjective. I typically don't get much out of traditional, sincere vids about characters/pairings/fandoms I'm not invested in, no matter how shiny they are. That said, I'm in the market for recs and reccers that share my kinks:
a) a focus on women (especially girlslashy ones)
b) interesting thematic attention to the mediation of bodies, subjectivity, and technology
c) humor (especially in the form of juxtapositions of funny with serious/disturbing)
d) innovations in form, meta and/or self-reflexivity

( absolutedestiny )

( Dexter )

( miscellaneous )

Yeah, I'm pretty late to the party! If you want to know why, about a year ago, I suddenly realized what you all probably knew already and became obsessed with fanvids, my analysis of jarrow's "Save Yourself" in my dissertation might shed some light. So I've started keeping a vid-watching diary. The logic behind this is that, when I save a fic, it's easy enough to click through to it again and skim the text to remind myself of what it's about and why I loved it, whereas with vids, there's really no shorthand way to re-access them. While fanworksfinder is working well for me as an archive, it doesn't offer a means to share my reviews. So when counteragent declared the New-To-Me Vid Watching Challenge, it occurred to me that I could take this as an opportunity not only to pledge, but to do a dump of all my recent vidrecs.

My long-term OCD project is to cover Battlestar Galactica gen and all the BSG vids on imeem with some comprehensiveness, complete with my best-of-the-best playlist -- but that's still in the early stages. For the moment, I've been catching up on kbusse, jarrow272, and beerbad's recent recs posts. Of course, I never seem to be able to multitask, so I'm doing this in one massive blitz of ~50 vids. I got on an airplane yesterday with a stocked ipod and my Secretary swag notepad, and wrote pages and pages of comments out longhand while flying cross-country.

first, a fortnight's worth of vids that meet counteragent's criteria (new to me + I feedbacked [via my personal journal]), albeit late for the challenge and all in one day! I have a really difficult time commenting on posts that already have two or three or four pages of replies, is what I learned -- but I suppose that's why it's called a "challenge."

( challenge vids: BSG )

( challenge vids: miscellaneous )

( other reviews: multifandom )

( other reviews: BSG )

[more recs from the vid-watching blitz coming in part 2... sometime this month?]