thoughts on visual fanwork in two very different fandoms

[isiscolo]

I figure with everyone away at Vividcon I can post about my shameful little secret, which is: I don't really like (most) vids. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because SGA has a lot of vidders and a lot of vids, and also because it has led me into some tangential thoughts about fanart and other visual derivatives

Comments

[musesfool]

Yeah, I'm not big on vids, and I come from media fandom before book fandom, but in my case, I think I have the same trouble with fan vids that I have with music videos - I want the song to mean what it means in *my* head, not have the artist - or the vidder - tell me what it means. I can think of two fanvids that have worked for me, and in one case it was because I wasn't overly fond of the song to begin with, so I didn't mind when the vid overwrote its meaning with something I *did* care about, and the other was just fun.

hear voices, but I don't see movies. And I don't see movies when I read, either; I hear the voices, but I don't get the visuals, or rather, I get the visuals but only in a very vague and nonspecific sense

Yes. That's how I am. Occasionally, I get a very clear, sharp image and try to reproduce it in words, but mostly I have dialogue in my head, or narration, not pictures.

[isiscolo]

Oh, that's an interesting approach to vids which I think almost defines the spectrum. Because on one end you have me craving story, and the other end you have you with your own predefined story, and neither end is satisfied with the middle.

My images are rarely specific enough to include faces. I might see a place, or almost like a theatrical blocking set of where people are, but I don't really see the people themselves. The dialogue is nearly audible to me, though.

[musesfool]

Because on one end you have me craving story, and the other end you have you with your own predefined story, and neither end is satisfied with the middle

*nod*

It's interesting, because so many people love vids and talk about them, and they just ... don't interest me that much.

I might see a place, or almost like a theatrical blocking set of where people are, but I don't really see the people themselves. The dialogue is nearly audible to me, though.

That's almost exactly how I am. Which is why my stories are heavy on dialogue and light on physical description. *g*

[mamoru22]

This might sound really strange, but I think I can honestly say that I too share a certain dislike of songvids

[isiscolo]

Perhaps your dislike of vids is what motivates you to make them, because the ones you see don't match the vision you want to create?

Really interesting thoughts on the progression of vid quality and interest. Maybe what I need is someone like you :-) to rec me vids, because just randomly looking at them is too hard for me. There is so little I connect with.

I think the images in the show register to me in more of a gestalt way with the rest of the show (the action and the dialogue) - looking at the images in isolation never occurred to me, but of course it seems obvious now that this would be essential for a vidder.

I am not OTP Snape/Harry, but I do like that pairing, and I can't imagine a vid of that. Squick city. Just as manips of Rickman and Radcliffe together ick me out bigtime. But Snape/Harry art which does not resemble the actors is fine (and sometimes better than fine :-)

[cathexys]

if you're interested, i'd loe to rec you some vids that work for me and why.

i'm not sure how well that works, though, b/c i may be the complete opposite of you...while i just got started getting interested in vids, i have been trying to learn to read them, i.e., i see it as a text that i haven't quite mastered yet. as such, i've been looking in particular for vids that do interesting things, regardless of music (and, at times, of fandom)

fwiw, there are maybe three vid makers in sga that i enjoy...and you can probably tell from my selection who my favorite is :-)

[isiscolo]

Well, I consider what you sent me to be your 'recs'! And I had mixed feelings - I didn't watch all of them yet (I think I will take the discs on my business trip and watch them there - privacy you know!) but some of them I found uninteresting for the reasons above.

But based on these that I like particularly, you are welcome to rec others that you think I might like.

[tiferet]

I was in the fandom pre-movies, and I always saw Luce with long hair. And NOT with Jason Isaacs' receding hairline of doom.

[isiscolo]

Now I am going to have to make an Isaacs!Lucius icon with that caption. Receding hairline of DOOM! Bwahaha!

I was specifically thinking, though, of ani_bester (I think!) who had drawn a Malfoy family portrait pre-movies in which Lucius had short hair, and who mentioned getting later feedback on it asking why Lucius didn't have long hair.

[merrymelody]

I love the receding hairline of doom! It matches Tom Felton's, which makes me giggle.

I don't actually see Isaacs as being like my mental picture of Lucius, though.

[isiscolo]

Wow. I don't think so, simply because animation is such an intensive type of art. I mean, I have worked with brevisse on a comic and just that took a lot of time. But ooh, it would be kinda cool to do a animated fanstory!

[angiepen]

I'm not into vids either. [shrug] One of the people who used to play in Palace did all kinds of vids. I watched one he did about Palace and it was cute, but I didn't bother with the next one. Raven did a Palace vid and I liked that 'cause it mentioned my character :P but I don't think that's quite the same as liking a vid for itself, you know? I've never bothered looking at any others, though. Nor do I bother with the "soundtracks" people make up for stories and fandoms; they strike me as being essentially songfics without the bother of adding original verbage to the inspirational songs, you know?

Oh, have I mentioned that I loathe songfics? I've run into one or two that I liked, which were always stories which happened to have songs incorporated as a necessary element, rather than the reposting of some song the writer likes with a few paras showing what Character X would be thinking if he heard that song, or some such rot. Sorry, boring. Give me some sort of plot or don't bother

[isiscolo]

For me, lyrics as anything other than a line or two as chapter epigraphs is obtrusive. I don't care whether or not a story was inspired by a song, but incorporating a song into a story jars me out of it. But I don't think of them as the same animal as vids.

[angiepen]

I agree, although it's more than that. For me, most songfics are an exercise in self-indulgence on the part of the writer. Fangirl hears a song, song makes her think of her favorite character(s) in some intensely emotional way. Fangirl writes songfic, half or more of the verbage of which is the song lyrics, and the main point of which is to communicate, "Hey, I heard this song and it made me think about how angsty/slashy/frustrated/whatever Joe and Bob are!" Guess what, hon? I don't care. [shrug] The writer of a songfic very rarely in my experience adds anything significant to the emotional content of the story besides what was already in the song itself, and needless to say most songfics have no plot whatsoever. To me, songfics are essentially the same as vids only with added words instead of added pictures, and the words serving essentially the same function (i.e., not much more than the creator saying, "Hey, look what this song reminded me of!") as the pictures in a vid