VividCon 2004: panel notes, part 1
I went in more for panels than vidshows again this year; vidshows I can watch later, while panels can't be duplicated. Fair warning: my notes are sketchy, and sometimes have more to do with what I was thinking about than with what was actually going on.
The Language of Vidding
cereta and I ran this one, and pretty much everything we had to say is covered in the handout (for which, incidentally, I still welcome additions, corrections, and clarifications).
I was surprised at how many people showed up for this one, and particularly surprised to see so many experienced vidders and vidwatchers there - a number of the folks who attended have been making and/or thinking about vids for much, much longer than I have.
Melymbrosia suggested to me afterwards (and noted in her post about the panel) that the panel should probably have either a) been more focused, or b) had a double time slot. I incline more towards the first option, myself, but I'm not sure what the best choice for a narrower focus would be. I do think that the questions of how to focus panels and how best to handle the wide range of attendee expertise are issues that are going to need increasing amounts of attention at VividCon.
Mely also noted that more examples would have been helpful, and argued that examples of the same type of shot or motion used to produce different effects would have been particularly helpful. I think this is a great suggestion, and hope that whomever's leading the equivalent panel next year will give it a try.
Mostly I came out of this panel with an overwhelming sense of gratitude to lapillus and astolat, who pretty much moved heaven and earth to set up a system that could project the sample clips I'd put together for the panel. (If anyone wants those samples, or some subset of those samples, posted online, just let me know.)
The Language of Music
I liked this panel, especially the opportunity to do some musical analysis of vids: why "IBS" is so creepy, why "Rook" is so haunting, what makes "Mundian To Bach Ke" sound non-Western. nestra and _par_avion had obviously tried to prepare both for people who didn't know anything about musical terms and for people who already knew a lot about musical terms and wanted to work on applying those terms in a vidding context; of course they ended up with a mixed-bag audience, but they trundled us along just fine, and, let's face it, no panel that lets us watch "Rook" can go too wrong.
I do think that music, more than any other subject at the con, would benefit from tracked panels. I have no idea whether it's possible given the con's space constraints, but it occurs to me that although having more than one panel at a time is *generally* not going to work, having simultaneous panels for beginning music and advanced music might be a worthwhile experiment.
Song Choice
The panel focused on "unexpected song choice." My notes yield the following observations:
Giving Good Beta and Feedback
Note to self: always go to any panel that cesperanza or the_shoshanna is moderating.
Beta and feedback are both aimed at the vidder herself: Beta is about process-what the vidder's doing; feedback is about product-what the vidder's done. Review is also about product, but is not meant for the vidder; it's about the vid, but its audience is different (although the vidder may certainly be part of that wider audience too).
Ces noted that when she's giving beta it's best not to know what the vidder's aiming for so that she can give an unprejudiced assessment of what the vidder's actually done. I identified with this as both beta and vidder; I make a point of asking renenet specific questions only after she's had a chance to establish her initial responses.
I was particularly struck by the different heuristics people use to formulate beta and feedback. Shoshanna explained that she has a mental checklist ("Color? Motion? Clip choice?"), and that while she doesn't always talk about everything on that list, she does at least remind herself to think about whether to mention those elements. My own organizing principle, particularly for feedback, tends to be much more temporal: What did I like about the vid the first time around? What made me want to rewatch it? What did I notice about it on later viewings?
To be continued...
The Language of Vidding
cereta and I ran this one, and pretty much everything we had to say is covered in the handout (for which, incidentally, I still welcome additions, corrections, and clarifications).
I was surprised at how many people showed up for this one, and particularly surprised to see so many experienced vidders and vidwatchers there - a number of the folks who attended have been making and/or thinking about vids for much, much longer than I have.
Melymbrosia suggested to me afterwards (and noted in her post about the panel) that the panel should probably have either a) been more focused, or b) had a double time slot. I incline more towards the first option, myself, but I'm not sure what the best choice for a narrower focus would be. I do think that the questions of how to focus panels and how best to handle the wide range of attendee expertise are issues that are going to need increasing amounts of attention at VividCon.
Mely also noted that more examples would have been helpful, and argued that examples of the same type of shot or motion used to produce different effects would have been particularly helpful. I think this is a great suggestion, and hope that whomever's leading the equivalent panel next year will give it a try.
Mostly I came out of this panel with an overwhelming sense of gratitude to lapillus and astolat, who pretty much moved heaven and earth to set up a system that could project the sample clips I'd put together for the panel. (If anyone wants those samples, or some subset of those samples, posted online, just let me know.)
The Language of Music
I liked this panel, especially the opportunity to do some musical analysis of vids: why "IBS" is so creepy, why "Rook" is so haunting, what makes "Mundian To Bach Ke" sound non-Western. nestra and _par_avion had obviously tried to prepare both for people who didn't know anything about musical terms and for people who already knew a lot about musical terms and wanted to work on applying those terms in a vidding context; of course they ended up with a mixed-bag audience, but they trundled us along just fine, and, let's face it, no panel that lets us watch "Rook" can go too wrong.
I do think that music, more than any other subject at the con, would benefit from tracked panels. I have no idea whether it's possible given the con's space constraints, but it occurs to me that although having more than one panel at a time is *generally* not going to work, having simultaneous panels for beginning music and advanced music might be a worthwhile experiment.
Song Choice
The panel focused on "unexpected song choice." My notes yield the following observations:
- Vids successfully using unexpected song choice are usually comic. Not always, not inherently, but usually.
- There are at least two different ways in which a song choice can be "unexpected": the song can be a genre we don't expect to hear in vids generally (hip-hop and rap are, I suspect, unexpected for a lot of people who aren't familiar with sisabet's work, par for the course for those of us who do) or it can be a genre/sound/artist/whatever that doesn't initially seem to fit the show/character/pairing being vidded. These are pretty different values of "unexpected."
- To be successful, a non-comic vid set to an unexpected song needs to a) avoid literalism, and specifically b) match up the throughline of the song and the visuals in ways that the audience can see - that is, it needs to find the point of connection between the visuals and what the song means, not what the song says.
Giving Good Beta and Feedback
Note to self: always go to any panel that cesperanza or the_shoshanna is moderating.
Beta and feedback are both aimed at the vidder herself: Beta is about process-what the vidder's doing; feedback is about product-what the vidder's done. Review is also about product, but is not meant for the vidder; it's about the vid, but its audience is different (although the vidder may certainly be part of that wider audience too).
Ces noted that when she's giving beta it's best not to know what the vidder's aiming for so that she can give an unprejudiced assessment of what the vidder's actually done. I identified with this as both beta and vidder; I make a point of asking renenet specific questions only after she's had a chance to establish her initial responses.
I was particularly struck by the different heuristics people use to formulate beta and feedback. Shoshanna explained that she has a mental checklist ("Color? Motion? Clip choice?"), and that while she doesn't always talk about everything on that list, she does at least remind herself to think about whether to mention those elements. My own organizing principle, particularly for feedback, tends to be much more temporal: What did I like about the vid the first time around? What made me want to rewatch it? What did I notice about it on later viewings?
To be continued...