vidding in the Buffyverse and elsewhere
A week or so ago, renenet posted some questions from a Buffyverse fan starting work on an academic project about vids. I'm e-mailing my responses directly to her, of course, but thought I'd also post a modified version here and send her the link in case discussion ensues. Some of these questions are vidder-specific, but many aren't; I'm particularly curious about other people's responses to the vid/fic relationship question, since nearly every fan I know is more conversant with fanfic than I am.
1. What first drew you to vids?
I first got interested in vids because I was increasingly obsessed with BtVS but I wasn't all that interested in Buffyverse fanfic (although I did read some). Fanfic, as far as I can tell, is usually a form of wish fulfillment or universe extension; I was happy with the Buffyverse the way it was and didn't particularly need either of those things. Plus, I was looking for a form of fannish creativity in which I could participate, and past attempts at fanfic in other fandoms had convinced me that I don't have enough of a talent for fic to bother pursuing it, whereas I thought I could do a pretty decent job at vidding. Vids were precisely *not* a departure from the source; they were the product of obsessive attention to the source. I loved that. A good vidder could tell me something new about a character or relationship or event, or could reiterate what I already knew or believed with an added level of emotional intensity. Plus, I love music; the combination of BtVS and music was just too cool to resist.
2. What do you enjoy most about creating vids?
See above re: saying something new. Most of my best vids are what I would call argument-driven vids; they make a claim about how a character got to a particular point, or what underlies a character's actions. I've done a lot of written analysis of BtVS, and that's both fun and rewarding, but it's also very familiar (I'm a literary critic by training). Doing analysis of the show through vids has been a way to stretch myself, to learn how to convey ideas in a new medium, and I like learning new things. And I like sharing vids; I like having an audience, and I like getting responses to what I've done.
3. In particular, what do you enjoy most about creating vids using Buffy and/or Angel footage?
The Buffyverse is thematically and conceptually and symbolically rich in a way that very few other TV shows have been. It was created and written by people who think metaphorically, and who think in terms of long arcs of plot and character development, so there's all sorts of wonderful stuff that's just waiting to be brought together in a vid, to be looked at all at once rather than interspersed through three or four or seven seasons. It's got lots of interesting characters and relationships (romantic and otherwise), which means there are a lot of possible angles on the show for a vidder to adopt (although of course the vast majority of vids focus on just a few of them). It's also got great visuals, although for me that's secondary; Smallville has great visuals, too, but Smallville is a poorly-written piece of crap, and I cannot imagine wanting to spend enough time with those characters to put together a vid. I love pretty much everything about the Buffyverse, so the chance to think about it in more depth -- whether as vidder or vidwatcher -- is always welcome.
4. What is your favorite Buffyverse vid that you've created (either singly or with a co-vidder)? (Why?)
"Superstar." It's the most complicated Buffyverse I've made in terms of the points it's trying to get across. It's also my first vid that works as well visually as it does thematically, that integrates techical tricks with thematic purpose. I think it stands up to and even rewards rewatching. I'm particularly proud of it because I seem to have succeeded at making a complex vid (set to a pretty odd song) accessible to a relatively broad audience: "Superstar" is, as far as I can tell, the vid of mine that's best-known and most-recommended; it's certainly the one that's most downloaded. That pleases me.
5. What is your favorite Buffyverse vid that you didn't have a hand in creating? (Why?)
sisabet's "Peacekeeper." There are remarkably few vids that focus on Buffy; she's more commonly vidded as half of a pair (whether that's Buffy/Angel, Buffy/Spike, Buffy/Faith, whatever). I love sisabet's choice to focus on Buffy herself, her Slayerness, the source of her power. Buffy is more difficult to vid than she might seem, actually, because she's such a complex and unusual hero that very little pop music can do justice to that aspect of her; it all looks bland and banal compared to her. Some excerpts from the feedback I sent to sisabet:I love the choice to start with "Restless," which has turned out to be the centerpiece of the series in more than one way.... The use of "Restless" establishes the ensemble nature of the show early on: Buffy is the Peacekeeper, but she's never been doing that job alone.... "Love is a sweet surprise" indeed -- and it's not the romantic love that's failed Buffy so often, but the sustaining friendship of the other Scoobies and her relationship with Dawn, and even a connection with Spike that transcends romantic love. Images from "Restless" also provide the visual backbone of the vid: all the subsequent desert shots (Buffy's many quests) are grounded in Willow looking out the window, Xander seeing Buffy in her huge "sandbox," and that dolly-up on Buffy herself in the vast desert. I get chills. Also, it introduces the constellation of non-desert images, especially Buffy painting her face with mud -- which itself sets up the other "transfiguration" shots: Willow white-haired and glowing, the Potentials coming into their power.... Buffy is both supported and ultimately alone -- but NOT alone, as the very next shot reveals: joined, instead, to all the Potentials and ultimately all women and girls everywhere.... It's a remarkable tribute to this show that I adore....
6. What usually inspires a vid for you? Do you generally choose the music or the show-related themes and footage first?
Music is always first for me. Always, always, always. Without the music there is no vid; the song is the foundation, the thing on or around which the rest of the vid gets worked out and planned and structured. That said, I latch onto particular songs *because* I'm thinking about a show, or particular characters within a show. I'd listened to Heather Nova's "Not Only Human" a hundred times or more and never thought of it as a vid song at all, let alone realized that it's the perfect song for Scully, because when I was listening to it I wasn't thinking about The X-Files. But when Laura Shapiro and Killa vidded it, its perfection became beautifully, stunningly clear to me.
7. How long does it usually take you to put together a vid? What process do you go through to construct it? What tools do you use in this process?
My first few vids took about a month each to make. Then I made a small flurry in about ten to fourteen days each, because I was familiar with my tools and my source. Now... the question has become kind of unanswerable. Song choice happens in an instant: I'm listening to a song and am hit with a vid idea, and then I just have to mull over whether the idea is workable or not. (At least 60% of my initial ideas get discarded either because the source I need doesn't exist or, in many cases, because the idea is just a dumb idea.) The actual vidding -- capturing and laying down clips -- generally takes between two weeks and two months. But between choosing a song and making a vid there can be quite a lot of time, a lot of ruminating, a lot of rewatching the source and taking notes and thinking about the characters and thinking about how best to structure the story I want to tell in relation to the song I'll be using to tell it. Those processes can take anywhere from a week to a year. And then after I've vidded the first draft, there's beta feedback to get and revisions to make, and revisions can take me anywhere from a day to a month. It took me about two months to make "Superstar," I think, but I'd been working on it mentally since about nine months earlier. I made "Thistledown Tears" in less than a month, but I'd started thinking about it more than a year and a half earlier. "Window of Opportunity" took much less time, both because it was a simpler vid and because my source was so extremely limited; I think that one took about four months from song choice to completion, but it might have been less, and I'd been working on "Cat Scan Hist'ry" for part of that time as well.
Process: I listen to the song a lot. I think about the song a lot. I rewatch episodes, or parts of episodes. (I've recently started making clip databases for movies/shows, but did not do this for any of my BtVS vids to date.) I do a storyboard for the vid -- I've posted examples elsewhere. I rip chapters from DVDs to my computer using SmartRipper and save excerpts from those chapters using VirtualDub (or, for earlier vids, used the .avi or .mpg files of episodes I'd downloaded online). I import a .wav or .mp3 file into Adobe Premiere and edit the audio as necessary. Once I've tweaked the audio, I number sections and mark major beats. Then I import source clips into Premiere and start laying clips over the audio in accordance with the storyboard. The clip-laying process usually starts out fairly straightforward but then gets more complicated as I specify things left vague in the storyboard (e.g. choosing particular clips from a scene) and tweak clips to make them fit: adjust speed, make cuts, change my mind about what should go where or how long a given clip should last. Once I have a working draft of the vid, I export it and send it to renenet, my primary beta, with questions; she watches the vid, then reads the questions, then rewatches many times, and sends me detailed notes (including but not limited to responses to my questions) anywhere between a day and a month after receiving the beta version. I make revisions accordingly. Sometimes she sees a later version, or I send it to secondary betas for futher comments; the revision process, as I mentioned earlier, can go on almost indefinitely.
8. What, in your opinion, makes a good vid?
I'm going to assume that you mean a high-quality vid, as opposed to a vid that appeals to me personally, since (as I've gone on about before) they're not always the same. Roughly in order of importance to me:
A good vid is conceptually sound and rhetorically persuasive; that is, it has a point, the point is clear, and the vidder uses lyrics, music, clips, and editing to make a case for that point. I'm being deliberately vague here, because the point can be any of a number of quite different things; it can be an interpretation of a character or storyline, the telling of a particular story, the establishment of a particular mood, the celebration of a particular character or relationship, etc.; or it can just be really funny.
A good vid starts with a good song -- a song that illuminates something about whatever character or plotline or subtext the vidder wants to explore, a song that's both musically and lyrically appropriate to the vidder's rhetorical purpose.
A good vid makes stylistic sense; whether that style is long clips of external motion or short clips and rapid cuts or lots of intercutting, whether it's all hard cuts or uses dissolves or jump cuts or fades to black, whether it uses flashy special effects or subtle clip manipulations or is entirely effect-free, whether it calls attention to itself or feels entirely transparent, the style should make sense for the show as filtered through this particular vid's music, purpose, and subject matter.
A good vid handles motion and color in such a way that, at minimum, they don't detract from the vid, and ideally in ways that illuminate the vid's point or contribute to its mood.
A good vid doesn't wear out its welcome; the audio's been edited as necessary to make the song a manageable length (what constitutes "manageable" can vary considerably). Comedy vids, in particular, need to end before the joke stops being funny.
A good vid is technically clean. It uses high-quality source, is cut tidily (no stray frames), is presented in sufficiently high quality that the video isn't pixellated and the audio is clear.
9. Why do you think that vids are so popular?
I'm not sure that vids *are* all that popular, especially compared to fic. They're certainly popular in the small corner of fandom that I spend my time in, but I have very little sense of how widespread interest really is. Insofar as vids *are* popular, I can think of a few possible reasons why. For existing fans, vids are a chance to see characters we care about through the lens of music that offers insights about them (or that we just like). There's a real appeal in seeing Favorite Characters Making Out To The Tune Of Favorite Song; they're a way of focusing the viewing experience of a show we already care about. I've made those vids myself and can love them with a great and passionate love if the characters and music hit my buttons. Vids can be a great way to try out an unfamiliar show, or to try to get other people hooked on the show, and they usually offer a great range of ways to do so; recruiter vids for BtVS can focus on Buffy as a kick-ass feminist heroine, on the hotness of a particular character, on the slashiness of Spike/Angel, on the friendship between characters, on the funny, on the poignant, on the action, whatever. I also like to think, although I could be wrong about this, that vids -- smart vids -- are popular because they're a visual equivalent of intelligent and insightful episode recaps and analysis.
10. What relationship do you see between vids and fanfic?
On the simplest level, they're equivalent in that they're both fan-made creative responses to a source text. Beyond that, relationships vary. Some vids are very much like fic; constructed reality vids are the most obvious case, but the Favorite Characters Making Out To The Tune Of Favorite Song vids I mentioned above are very much like certain kinds of missing-scene and other wish-fulfillment fic. Other vids are (see above) much more like commentary or analysis, done in a creative rather than expository mode. Both kinds can be done well or badly, just as fic and analysis can both be done either well or badly. There are probably other parallels and differences that I'm not thinking of; I'm not nearly as conversant with fic as most of the fans I know.
I think it's worth remembering that it's much more difficult to make vids than to write fic, from a purely technical point of view. I don't mean to suggest that it's easy to write quality fic -- I am the last person on earth to suggest that writing is ever easy -- but all fic requires in the way of equipment is the ability to type up a text file and post it to a fic archive, whereas computer-made vids require special software, a certain amount of processing power, access to source, the financial wherewithal to purchase hosting for large media files or to make DVDs or tapes for con distribution, etc. And, of course, folks without high-speed internet connections (of whom there are many) have a lot more difficulty downloading vids than fic (although they may have access to vids on DVD or VHS).
11. Are there any other comments on vids that you'd like to make that these questions didn't allow room for?
I've written quite a bit about vids and the process of vidding at different times; my own posts, and some other posts on which I've commented, are mostly indexed in my LJ memories "vidding" category. I've also done extensive commentaries on a few of my own vids. Three posts (with attendant discussions) that might be of particular interest: notes on narrative in a vidding context, some thoughts about vid structure and the process of vidding, and answers to some general questions about my vidding processes and preferences.
1. What first drew you to vids?
I first got interested in vids because I was increasingly obsessed with BtVS but I wasn't all that interested in Buffyverse fanfic (although I did read some). Fanfic, as far as I can tell, is usually a form of wish fulfillment or universe extension; I was happy with the Buffyverse the way it was and didn't particularly need either of those things. Plus, I was looking for a form of fannish creativity in which I could participate, and past attempts at fanfic in other fandoms had convinced me that I don't have enough of a talent for fic to bother pursuing it, whereas I thought I could do a pretty decent job at vidding. Vids were precisely *not* a departure from the source; they were the product of obsessive attention to the source. I loved that. A good vidder could tell me something new about a character or relationship or event, or could reiterate what I already knew or believed with an added level of emotional intensity. Plus, I love music; the combination of BtVS and music was just too cool to resist.
2. What do you enjoy most about creating vids?
See above re: saying something new. Most of my best vids are what I would call argument-driven vids; they make a claim about how a character got to a particular point, or what underlies a character's actions. I've done a lot of written analysis of BtVS, and that's both fun and rewarding, but it's also very familiar (I'm a literary critic by training). Doing analysis of the show through vids has been a way to stretch myself, to learn how to convey ideas in a new medium, and I like learning new things. And I like sharing vids; I like having an audience, and I like getting responses to what I've done.
3. In particular, what do you enjoy most about creating vids using Buffy and/or Angel footage?
The Buffyverse is thematically and conceptually and symbolically rich in a way that very few other TV shows have been. It was created and written by people who think metaphorically, and who think in terms of long arcs of plot and character development, so there's all sorts of wonderful stuff that's just waiting to be brought together in a vid, to be looked at all at once rather than interspersed through three or four or seven seasons. It's got lots of interesting characters and relationships (romantic and otherwise), which means there are a lot of possible angles on the show for a vidder to adopt (although of course the vast majority of vids focus on just a few of them). It's also got great visuals, although for me that's secondary; Smallville has great visuals, too, but Smallville is a poorly-written piece of crap, and I cannot imagine wanting to spend enough time with those characters to put together a vid. I love pretty much everything about the Buffyverse, so the chance to think about it in more depth -- whether as vidder or vidwatcher -- is always welcome.
4. What is your favorite Buffyverse vid that you've created (either singly or with a co-vidder)? (Why?)
"Superstar." It's the most complicated Buffyverse I've made in terms of the points it's trying to get across. It's also my first vid that works as well visually as it does thematically, that integrates techical tricks with thematic purpose. I think it stands up to and even rewards rewatching. I'm particularly proud of it because I seem to have succeeded at making a complex vid (set to a pretty odd song) accessible to a relatively broad audience: "Superstar" is, as far as I can tell, the vid of mine that's best-known and most-recommended; it's certainly the one that's most downloaded. That pleases me.
5. What is your favorite Buffyverse vid that you didn't have a hand in creating? (Why?)
sisabet's "Peacekeeper." There are remarkably few vids that focus on Buffy; she's more commonly vidded as half of a pair (whether that's Buffy/Angel, Buffy/Spike, Buffy/Faith, whatever). I love sisabet's choice to focus on Buffy herself, her Slayerness, the source of her power. Buffy is more difficult to vid than she might seem, actually, because she's such a complex and unusual hero that very little pop music can do justice to that aspect of her; it all looks bland and banal compared to her. Some excerpts from the feedback I sent to sisabet:I love the choice to start with "Restless," which has turned out to be the centerpiece of the series in more than one way.... The use of "Restless" establishes the ensemble nature of the show early on: Buffy is the Peacekeeper, but she's never been doing that job alone.... "Love is a sweet surprise" indeed -- and it's not the romantic love that's failed Buffy so often, but the sustaining friendship of the other Scoobies and her relationship with Dawn, and even a connection with Spike that transcends romantic love. Images from "Restless" also provide the visual backbone of the vid: all the subsequent desert shots (Buffy's many quests) are grounded in Willow looking out the window, Xander seeing Buffy in her huge "sandbox," and that dolly-up on Buffy herself in the vast desert. I get chills. Also, it introduces the constellation of non-desert images, especially Buffy painting her face with mud -- which itself sets up the other "transfiguration" shots: Willow white-haired and glowing, the Potentials coming into their power.... Buffy is both supported and ultimately alone -- but NOT alone, as the very next shot reveals: joined, instead, to all the Potentials and ultimately all women and girls everywhere.... It's a remarkable tribute to this show that I adore....
6. What usually inspires a vid for you? Do you generally choose the music or the show-related themes and footage first?
Music is always first for me. Always, always, always. Without the music there is no vid; the song is the foundation, the thing on or around which the rest of the vid gets worked out and planned and structured. That said, I latch onto particular songs *because* I'm thinking about a show, or particular characters within a show. I'd listened to Heather Nova's "Not Only Human" a hundred times or more and never thought of it as a vid song at all, let alone realized that it's the perfect song for Scully, because when I was listening to it I wasn't thinking about The X-Files. But when Laura Shapiro and Killa vidded it, its perfection became beautifully, stunningly clear to me.
7. How long does it usually take you to put together a vid? What process do you go through to construct it? What tools do you use in this process?
My first few vids took about a month each to make. Then I made a small flurry in about ten to fourteen days each, because I was familiar with my tools and my source. Now... the question has become kind of unanswerable. Song choice happens in an instant: I'm listening to a song and am hit with a vid idea, and then I just have to mull over whether the idea is workable or not. (At least 60% of my initial ideas get discarded either because the source I need doesn't exist or, in many cases, because the idea is just a dumb idea.) The actual vidding -- capturing and laying down clips -- generally takes between two weeks and two months. But between choosing a song and making a vid there can be quite a lot of time, a lot of ruminating, a lot of rewatching the source and taking notes and thinking about the characters and thinking about how best to structure the story I want to tell in relation to the song I'll be using to tell it. Those processes can take anywhere from a week to a year. And then after I've vidded the first draft, there's beta feedback to get and revisions to make, and revisions can take me anywhere from a day to a month. It took me about two months to make "Superstar," I think, but I'd been working on it mentally since about nine months earlier. I made "Thistledown Tears" in less than a month, but I'd started thinking about it more than a year and a half earlier. "Window of Opportunity" took much less time, both because it was a simpler vid and because my source was so extremely limited; I think that one took about four months from song choice to completion, but it might have been less, and I'd been working on "Cat Scan Hist'ry" for part of that time as well.
Process: I listen to the song a lot. I think about the song a lot. I rewatch episodes, or parts of episodes. (I've recently started making clip databases for movies/shows, but did not do this for any of my BtVS vids to date.) I do a storyboard for the vid -- I've posted examples elsewhere. I rip chapters from DVDs to my computer using SmartRipper and save excerpts from those chapters using VirtualDub (or, for earlier vids, used the .avi or .mpg files of episodes I'd downloaded online). I import a .wav or .mp3 file into Adobe Premiere and edit the audio as necessary. Once I've tweaked the audio, I number sections and mark major beats. Then I import source clips into Premiere and start laying clips over the audio in accordance with the storyboard. The clip-laying process usually starts out fairly straightforward but then gets more complicated as I specify things left vague in the storyboard (e.g. choosing particular clips from a scene) and tweak clips to make them fit: adjust speed, make cuts, change my mind about what should go where or how long a given clip should last. Once I have a working draft of the vid, I export it and send it to renenet, my primary beta, with questions; she watches the vid, then reads the questions, then rewatches many times, and sends me detailed notes (including but not limited to responses to my questions) anywhere between a day and a month after receiving the beta version. I make revisions accordingly. Sometimes she sees a later version, or I send it to secondary betas for futher comments; the revision process, as I mentioned earlier, can go on almost indefinitely.
8. What, in your opinion, makes a good vid?
I'm going to assume that you mean a high-quality vid, as opposed to a vid that appeals to me personally, since (as I've gone on about before) they're not always the same. Roughly in order of importance to me:
A good vid is conceptually sound and rhetorically persuasive; that is, it has a point, the point is clear, and the vidder uses lyrics, music, clips, and editing to make a case for that point. I'm being deliberately vague here, because the point can be any of a number of quite different things; it can be an interpretation of a character or storyline, the telling of a particular story, the establishment of a particular mood, the celebration of a particular character or relationship, etc.; or it can just be really funny.
A good vid starts with a good song -- a song that illuminates something about whatever character or plotline or subtext the vidder wants to explore, a song that's both musically and lyrically appropriate to the vidder's rhetorical purpose.
A good vid makes stylistic sense; whether that style is long clips of external motion or short clips and rapid cuts or lots of intercutting, whether it's all hard cuts or uses dissolves or jump cuts or fades to black, whether it uses flashy special effects or subtle clip manipulations or is entirely effect-free, whether it calls attention to itself or feels entirely transparent, the style should make sense for the show as filtered through this particular vid's music, purpose, and subject matter.
A good vid handles motion and color in such a way that, at minimum, they don't detract from the vid, and ideally in ways that illuminate the vid's point or contribute to its mood.
A good vid doesn't wear out its welcome; the audio's been edited as necessary to make the song a manageable length (what constitutes "manageable" can vary considerably). Comedy vids, in particular, need to end before the joke stops being funny.
A good vid is technically clean. It uses high-quality source, is cut tidily (no stray frames), is presented in sufficiently high quality that the video isn't pixellated and the audio is clear.
9. Why do you think that vids are so popular?
I'm not sure that vids *are* all that popular, especially compared to fic. They're certainly popular in the small corner of fandom that I spend my time in, but I have very little sense of how widespread interest really is. Insofar as vids *are* popular, I can think of a few possible reasons why. For existing fans, vids are a chance to see characters we care about through the lens of music that offers insights about them (or that we just like). There's a real appeal in seeing Favorite Characters Making Out To The Tune Of Favorite Song; they're a way of focusing the viewing experience of a show we already care about. I've made those vids myself and can love them with a great and passionate love if the characters and music hit my buttons. Vids can be a great way to try out an unfamiliar show, or to try to get other people hooked on the show, and they usually offer a great range of ways to do so; recruiter vids for BtVS can focus on Buffy as a kick-ass feminist heroine, on the hotness of a particular character, on the slashiness of Spike/Angel, on the friendship between characters, on the funny, on the poignant, on the action, whatever. I also like to think, although I could be wrong about this, that vids -- smart vids -- are popular because they're a visual equivalent of intelligent and insightful episode recaps and analysis.
10. What relationship do you see between vids and fanfic?
On the simplest level, they're equivalent in that they're both fan-made creative responses to a source text. Beyond that, relationships vary. Some vids are very much like fic; constructed reality vids are the most obvious case, but the Favorite Characters Making Out To The Tune Of Favorite Song vids I mentioned above are very much like certain kinds of missing-scene and other wish-fulfillment fic. Other vids are (see above) much more like commentary or analysis, done in a creative rather than expository mode. Both kinds can be done well or badly, just as fic and analysis can both be done either well or badly. There are probably other parallels and differences that I'm not thinking of; I'm not nearly as conversant with fic as most of the fans I know.
I think it's worth remembering that it's much more difficult to make vids than to write fic, from a purely technical point of view. I don't mean to suggest that it's easy to write quality fic -- I am the last person on earth to suggest that writing is ever easy -- but all fic requires in the way of equipment is the ability to type up a text file and post it to a fic archive, whereas computer-made vids require special software, a certain amount of processing power, access to source, the financial wherewithal to purchase hosting for large media files or to make DVDs or tapes for con distribution, etc. And, of course, folks without high-speed internet connections (of whom there are many) have a lot more difficulty downloading vids than fic (although they may have access to vids on DVD or VHS).
11. Are there any other comments on vids that you'd like to make that these questions didn't allow room for?
I've written quite a bit about vids and the process of vidding at different times; my own posts, and some other posts on which I've commented, are mostly indexed in my LJ memories "vidding" category. I've also done extensive commentaries on a few of my own vids. Three posts (with attendant discussions) that might be of particular interest: notes on narrative in a vidding context, some thoughts about vid structure and the process of vidding, and answers to some general questions about my vidding processes and preferences.