vividcon 2003 report, part 3
The first part of the report covered Friday and Saturday up through the Premieres show. The second part covered the Premieres show.
Sunday
Sunday's big event, at least for me, was the Vid Review panel. I was really hoping that "Superstar" would get discussed, but given that the Premieres show was pretty much one long string of interesting, effective, well-made vids, I didn't want to get my hopes up *too* high. I was jittery and anxious all morning, which reminded me of how much the "I vid for myself" claim is *not* true for me. I make the vids I want to watch, but I share them because I want other people to want to watch them too. I like making vids, but I would not have continued to make them for this long if I couldn't share them. I like approval, and I like having, or even just overhearing, conversations about my vids. So Vid Review became, for me, the focal point of a lot of hope and anxiety.
As it turned out, "Superstar" *was* one of the vids that got discussed, along with "Uninvited," "Haunted," "Darkness, Darkness," "Gortoz A Ran," "IBS," and "Monster" - quite a range of styles, moods, and material. I liked Lum & Laura's choice to focus on vids they thought were working well; I don't often get to learn from really excellent vids, and this was a fantastic chance to do so. I enjoyed the engaged, intelligent discussion about what makes the vids effective and how each one does what it does. It was particularly interesting to hear people familiar with context talk about that element of the vids (particularly "IBS" and "Darkness, Darkness"), since I have at best only a passing familiarity with any source material outside BtVS and Firefly.
And, of course, I got to hear people talk about "Superstar," and I liked hearing which moments and elements people focused on. I was especially delighted that so many people mentioned movement as one of the things they thought was working; as I couldn't refrain from commenting, I learned that at VividCon. Once I fastened onto motion as the thing I most wanted to do well in that vid, I set myself the goal of making a vid that Lum could use as a sample vid at a VividCon panel on motion. And hey, it kinda happened! So I was pretty high on that for the rest of the day. Also, tzikeh called the vid an object lesson in the value of getting away from top-40 songs, which was not only a kind thing to say in general but also reassured me that she wasn't totally bored by the vid, a matter about which I'd been getting paranoid. (The fact that she hadn't said anything about the vid had nothing to do with the fact that she'd had an incredibly stressful week or that she'd just burned hundreds of vids to DVD; no, no, it was All About Me. Behold my solipsism.)
The Vid Review panel also cemented my commitment to articulating specifically what I like about vids I like - not just because I want to give other vidders the feeling I got when people praised specific aspects of "Superstar," but because people's comments at the panel demonstrated (to me, anyway) that talking specifically about what we like also helps us be specific with our questions and critique: "The vid seems to me to be doing x, and I love x, but there's this line / scene / choice that doesn't seem to fit with x." We talked about this particularly in terms of "Darkness, Darkness"; the general consensus was that the vid does an amazing job of evoking a mood, particularly through color palette, but that right at the end it seems to take a detour into plot in a way that, while it didn't detract from the rest of the vid, did leave people who don't watch the show saying "who's that character and why is she just now appearing in the vid?" I don't think one can call this a flaw in the vid; if anything, it highlights how well the rest of the vid works for someone who doesn't know the show. But the discussion of what happens in those last few seconds did help me articulate why I experienced the ending as a bit of a letdown: it required knowledge that I didn't have.
Anyway. After Vid Review I was feeling pretty wiped out - too much excitement, too many people - so I went back up to my room and had a quiet solo lunch so as not to be a mess at the Challenge Vids show.
The challenge vids were interesting. I didn't love any of them with the wild abandon that other people seem to have felt, but I think that that's largely because I didn't know most of the source material (and didn't know any of it well). In some ways that unfamiliarity didn't matter; since the theme was "dreams," the vids were all mood pieces to some extent, and on that level I could really get into and appreciate them. But the way dreams are used in visual media to convey important, difficult information means that any dream or dreamlike state (whether native to the source material or "invented" by the vidder) automatically has layers of meaning built into it; "just pretty" is simply not how that kind of visual trope works. "Reading" dreams - whether our own or those in fictional texts - is a game of pattern recognition, and without knowledge of the source material it can be difficult, I think, to appreciate the meanings of the patterns one sees, or even in some cases to see the patterns in the first place. The problem of recognition was complicated for me by the fact that several of the vids mimicked the dream state by using lots of layers and dissolves, which was effective in terms of mood and frequently gorgeous in terms of visuals, but often left me unclear as to exactly what I was seeing (which of course is much more of a problem for someone who lacks even a working knowledge of the source).
The Director's Commentary Track panel was really interesting, although we ended up talking about a set of issues only tangentially related to the ostensible topic of the panel. In theory, we were talking about when background information about the vid helps (or detracts from) a viewer's experience with the vid. In practice, we talked more generally about textual reception and the autonomy of texts, and I think at some point we wandered off into a conversation about beta viewers and how much or little information a vidder should give her beta in order to get a helpful yet unbiased reading of the vid.
One of the things this panel highlighted for me was how little I know about offline vid distribution. I don't have any vid tapes; I do have some individual VCDs, but they're really just personal copies of vids, not carefully-put-together tape or DVD sets. So I'm unfamiliar with the conventions of vid tape liner notes, and it would have been helpful to me to see some examples in order to have something specific to discuss. I'm curious about liner notes now: how they're are usually written, what kinds of information viewers like to have in them. In terms of online distribution, I've noticed that some vids have only minimal information (in some cases, so little that there's not enough information to grab my interest), while others come with long paragraphs about how we're supposed to understand the relationship that's being portrayed in the vid. The long paragraph phenomenon annoys me; it sounds like typical liner notes aren't quite of that ilk, but I'd have liked to get a clearer idea of them in order to make a better comparison. Of course, Dorinda had no way of anticipating that one of her panel attendees would be appallingly ignorant, so my wish is less that the panel had provided me with this information than that I'd known it to begin with. Ah well.
I remember thinking that the Calls from the Public dead dog panel was interesting, although I was so tired that I remember very few details about it. I really liked the choice to go beyond just discussing this year's con and start brainstorming next year's con - a smart thing to do while memories were clear and energy & enthusiasm were high.
And then I had some quiet hanging-out-and-chatting time with renenet, sisabet, and (later) jackiekjono. renenet and sisabet tried to lure me into staying over another night - which I would have loved to do, actually; but I had so much stuff at home waiting to be done that I knew I'd feel guilty, and I didn't want to bum everybody else out or end the con on a less-than-happy note, so I declined and went out to catch the shuttle that would take me to my bus home. And in fact the con ended on a perfectly delightful note, since just as the shuttle was pulling away it got flagged down again so Lum could give me a goodbye hug. And I really can't imagine a better end to the weekend than a hug from Lum.
Once on the bus, I wrote in my journal for a while, and then as it got dark I put Kris Delmhorst's Five Stories in the CD player and watched the fireflies flickering over the evening fields. Got home tired but happy.
And that was VividCon 2003.
Sunday
Sunday's big event, at least for me, was the Vid Review panel. I was really hoping that "Superstar" would get discussed, but given that the Premieres show was pretty much one long string of interesting, effective, well-made vids, I didn't want to get my hopes up *too* high. I was jittery and anxious all morning, which reminded me of how much the "I vid for myself" claim is *not* true for me. I make the vids I want to watch, but I share them because I want other people to want to watch them too. I like making vids, but I would not have continued to make them for this long if I couldn't share them. I like approval, and I like having, or even just overhearing, conversations about my vids. So Vid Review became, for me, the focal point of a lot of hope and anxiety.
As it turned out, "Superstar" *was* one of the vids that got discussed, along with "Uninvited," "Haunted," "Darkness, Darkness," "Gortoz A Ran," "IBS," and "Monster" - quite a range of styles, moods, and material. I liked Lum & Laura's choice to focus on vids they thought were working well; I don't often get to learn from really excellent vids, and this was a fantastic chance to do so. I enjoyed the engaged, intelligent discussion about what makes the vids effective and how each one does what it does. It was particularly interesting to hear people familiar with context talk about that element of the vids (particularly "IBS" and "Darkness, Darkness"), since I have at best only a passing familiarity with any source material outside BtVS and Firefly.
And, of course, I got to hear people talk about "Superstar," and I liked hearing which moments and elements people focused on. I was especially delighted that so many people mentioned movement as one of the things they thought was working; as I couldn't refrain from commenting, I learned that at VividCon. Once I fastened onto motion as the thing I most wanted to do well in that vid, I set myself the goal of making a vid that Lum could use as a sample vid at a VividCon panel on motion. And hey, it kinda happened! So I was pretty high on that for the rest of the day. Also, tzikeh called the vid an object lesson in the value of getting away from top-40 songs, which was not only a kind thing to say in general but also reassured me that she wasn't totally bored by the vid, a matter about which I'd been getting paranoid. (The fact that she hadn't said anything about the vid had nothing to do with the fact that she'd had an incredibly stressful week or that she'd just burned hundreds of vids to DVD; no, no, it was All About Me. Behold my solipsism.)
The Vid Review panel also cemented my commitment to articulating specifically what I like about vids I like - not just because I want to give other vidders the feeling I got when people praised specific aspects of "Superstar," but because people's comments at the panel demonstrated (to me, anyway) that talking specifically about what we like also helps us be specific with our questions and critique: "The vid seems to me to be doing x, and I love x, but there's this line / scene / choice that doesn't seem to fit with x." We talked about this particularly in terms of "Darkness, Darkness"; the general consensus was that the vid does an amazing job of evoking a mood, particularly through color palette, but that right at the end it seems to take a detour into plot in a way that, while it didn't detract from the rest of the vid, did leave people who don't watch the show saying "who's that character and why is she just now appearing in the vid?" I don't think one can call this a flaw in the vid; if anything, it highlights how well the rest of the vid works for someone who doesn't know the show. But the discussion of what happens in those last few seconds did help me articulate why I experienced the ending as a bit of a letdown: it required knowledge that I didn't have.
Anyway. After Vid Review I was feeling pretty wiped out - too much excitement, too many people - so I went back up to my room and had a quiet solo lunch so as not to be a mess at the Challenge Vids show.
The challenge vids were interesting. I didn't love any of them with the wild abandon that other people seem to have felt, but I think that that's largely because I didn't know most of the source material (and didn't know any of it well). In some ways that unfamiliarity didn't matter; since the theme was "dreams," the vids were all mood pieces to some extent, and on that level I could really get into and appreciate them. But the way dreams are used in visual media to convey important, difficult information means that any dream or dreamlike state (whether native to the source material or "invented" by the vidder) automatically has layers of meaning built into it; "just pretty" is simply not how that kind of visual trope works. "Reading" dreams - whether our own or those in fictional texts - is a game of pattern recognition, and without knowledge of the source material it can be difficult, I think, to appreciate the meanings of the patterns one sees, or even in some cases to see the patterns in the first place. The problem of recognition was complicated for me by the fact that several of the vids mimicked the dream state by using lots of layers and dissolves, which was effective in terms of mood and frequently gorgeous in terms of visuals, but often left me unclear as to exactly what I was seeing (which of course is much more of a problem for someone who lacks even a working knowledge of the source).
The Director's Commentary Track panel was really interesting, although we ended up talking about a set of issues only tangentially related to the ostensible topic of the panel. In theory, we were talking about when background information about the vid helps (or detracts from) a viewer's experience with the vid. In practice, we talked more generally about textual reception and the autonomy of texts, and I think at some point we wandered off into a conversation about beta viewers and how much or little information a vidder should give her beta in order to get a helpful yet unbiased reading of the vid.
One of the things this panel highlighted for me was how little I know about offline vid distribution. I don't have any vid tapes; I do have some individual VCDs, but they're really just personal copies of vids, not carefully-put-together tape or DVD sets. So I'm unfamiliar with the conventions of vid tape liner notes, and it would have been helpful to me to see some examples in order to have something specific to discuss. I'm curious about liner notes now: how they're are usually written, what kinds of information viewers like to have in them. In terms of online distribution, I've noticed that some vids have only minimal information (in some cases, so little that there's not enough information to grab my interest), while others come with long paragraphs about how we're supposed to understand the relationship that's being portrayed in the vid. The long paragraph phenomenon annoys me; it sounds like typical liner notes aren't quite of that ilk, but I'd have liked to get a clearer idea of them in order to make a better comparison. Of course, Dorinda had no way of anticipating that one of her panel attendees would be appallingly ignorant, so my wish is less that the panel had provided me with this information than that I'd known it to begin with. Ah well.
I remember thinking that the Calls from the Public dead dog panel was interesting, although I was so tired that I remember very few details about it. I really liked the choice to go beyond just discussing this year's con and start brainstorming next year's con - a smart thing to do while memories were clear and energy & enthusiasm were high.
And then I had some quiet hanging-out-and-chatting time with renenet, sisabet, and (later) jackiekjono. renenet and sisabet tried to lure me into staying over another night - which I would have loved to do, actually; but I had so much stuff at home waiting to be done that I knew I'd feel guilty, and I didn't want to bum everybody else out or end the con on a less-than-happy note, so I declined and went out to catch the shuttle that would take me to my bus home. And in fact the con ended on a perfectly delightful note, since just as the shuttle was pulling away it got flagged down again so Lum could give me a goodbye hug. And I really can't imagine a better end to the weekend than a hug from Lum.
Once on the bus, I wrote in my journal for a while, and then as it got dark I put Kris Delmhorst's Five Stories in the CD player and watched the fireflies flickering over the evening fields. Got home tired but happy.
And that was VividCon 2003.