Slides from Vidding Talk / AMV paper

[talking_sock]

Hi everyone,   thanks again for taking my vidding survey and follow up, if you did.  I sent the 3 winners their Amazon gift cards yesterday.  I'm making available an annotated version of my slides from the talk I gave at UIUC a couple weeks ago...  I tried in the notes on it to explain some of my thematic goals--  I had a ton of content, it ran about 90 minutes, and I only managed to show snippets from the vids I wanted to show. And I didn't get to show all the ones I wanted, either. Argh, it was painful.

The audience was mostly grad students, with a few faculty/staff exceptions, including an interesting woman with a gaming video background.  If you want links she sent me, I can post those.

My not-very-pretty-but-info-rich (!) slides are here:  http://www.ghostweather.com/papers/Annotated_ViddingTalk_2010.pdf 

Vidders mentioned in it explicitly (and some whose clips were shown), in no particular order:  Killa, Lum, Deejay, Tashery (and me), Media Cannibals/Sandy-Rache, Charmax, Obsessive24, Jescaflowne, Hollywoodgrrl, Bradcpu and Laura Shapiro, AbsoluteDestiny, Proof Pudding, and Kandy Fong.  There are also some network pictures that may include fan names, from public data on LJ.  For these slides, even if you said you were okay being quoted by fannish names, I removed all names from quotes I included (it's the safest thing). 

Also, right after my talk, Mimi Ito's article on AMV communities (keywords from the title: "distinctions and status") came out in First Monday.  Her paper is here:  http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2968/2528 .  The overall First Monday issue is on "User Creativity, Governance, and the New Media."  http://firstmonday.org/

Comments

[laurashapiro]

This is so cool! Thanks for taking the time to post it.

[kass]

Thanks for sharing your notes from your talk! What an awesome thing.

[klia]

Thanks for posting!

thanks for the thanks

[talking_sock]

It was a fair bit of work, but a labor of love too.

[livrelibre]

That's awesome and thanks for the post!

Awesome!

[ravenholdt]

Thank you for coming back with your slides. :D
After yoru thread on the differences between AMV-er and vidders, I went and watched quite a few AMVs.

If you're interested, the results (my interpretation while still trying to keep my vidder core) are @ my DW as BITE: The Big One.

[thuviaptarth]

This is really great! I am so excited to see more of the survey data once you have it crunched.

I especially love seeing the graphs of the survey data: the graph which showed everyone hating clip collection made me laugh, and I will never stop finding it hilarious that a vidding generation is about three years long.

* Slide 57 - It fascinates me that the people with the most overlapping anime/live vidding LJ comms overlap with but is not identical to people who make both anime and live vids. I guess it's mostly a show of one-way traffic, anime -> live vid influence? Because a lot of live-action vidding is on LJ/DW but anime vidding seems to be mostly elsewhere, even though I see a lot of anime fandom/writing comms.

A couple of points of disagreement:

* On Slide 27, you have an annotation that meta data isn't available, but according to the specs this should be editable within the Premiere interface as of CS4 (I have CS3) and in earlier versions (like CS3) you can add custom labels, you just can't edit most of the metadata within Premiere itself. Which is hugely limiting, don't get me wrong! I hate it. But it's not quite the same thing as not having the metadata at all.

* Slide 46 is extremely problematic. The first mention of political critique within fandom is framed negatively--not only is the speaker against it, she actively mischaracterizes it. I understand that there are people who dislike the changes in fandom, but I think there are even negative critiques to be quoted which would not so clearly police other people's fannish engagement or argue that politics are an external imposition or are primarily motivated by the demonization of other people's pleasure. And then there aren't even any counteracting voices from people who are happy about the changes in fannish political awareness. I'm aware that Luminosity and Sisabet's "Women's Work" has been profoundly influential in politicizing or publicizing the politicization of fannish readings, but that's not something your notes mention, so the effect is that one group is represented only by the words of the other, and negatively at that.

Also, this quote plus an earlier comment on slash not being mainstream anymore seem to support an argument for the marginalization of slash that I don't think your own data supports. Over 60 of your respondents said they'd made slash vids (which is well over the halfway mark if you have 100-odd responses); there's a big difference from not being *the* primary genre and not being *a* primary genre.

* Slide 62 - I had a really hard time answering the questions relevant to this on the questionaire for the same reason as I question some of the conclusions drawn about isolation and fragmentation vs. community. That is, when asked how I learned to vid, I selected "On my own" because it was the closest to true, but I really feel like the mentoring->feral distinction is a continuum, not either/or. I began vidding "on my own" by reading up on huge amounts of fannish discussion on vidding and AMVs and sometimes by requesting help and getting to see how other fans did things. It's not really a lone-wolf endeavor.

[laurashapiro]

I, too, was taken aback by Slide 46, but I assumed that it, like everything else in the deck, was contextualized by whatever talking_sock said in her presentation.

I hadn't thought of your point about the community aspects of vidding being a continuum, but it's a good one. I know that far fewer people are collaborating now in the way they did in VCR days -- in the same room, at the same time -- but that's not to say that vidding isn't still a communal experience in many ways.

Thanks for the comments... a couple (long) thoughts

[talking_sock]

Hi Thuvia,
Thanks for being so engaged in the slides... very useful comments. And congrats on being one of the degree-5 folks in the community graph for 2010 :-)

This is a great point about the potentially one-way influence of amv-on-liveaction vidding. I did not get the right (or enough) data to know that for sure, but it's an interesting theory to test. Maybe AbsoluteDestiny has some ideas, or jescaflowne... I suspect the size of the amv community (larger than vidding), and the relative barriers to entry compared to those in Live Action vidding, may be disincentives for movement from LA to AMV. Some of those barriers may include the tech and fx hurdles that some live action vidders commented on. But that's my entirely outsider reading, and purely a theory.

Re meta-data in Premiere, you are right of course. Funnily enough, what I want, and was hoping the CS students I was speaking to would help provide, is a tool that extracts the meta data I want "automatically" -- like color, motion, close/long shot, scene breaks, etc. I think this is technically doable now with current video processing tools. It won't add the emotional or contextual stuff automagically, but it would still help in some ways. I could let it run overnight on an entire dvd, and come back in the morning to have pre-chunked pieces with useful data, and clean up by hand!

Regarding your disagreements - a weak defense comment from me is that this was a talk, not a paper - a written ethnographic study would be more nuanced, and even the talk itself was more nuanced than the slides, despite my addition of a few annotations to explain what I was "doing" in it. Sadly, I also didn't have the time even when talking to be very deep on many aspects, and I slide right past your issue in slide 46.

But as for the critique on the quote in slide 46. It's one person's perspective, and she was speaking from a position of having been in the community for a long time. You suggested I could have used other negative quotes -- well, I used what I had there for a reason, at a point where I wanted to talk about certain perceived changes in the community. It probably shouldn't be read as a personal attack on anyone, or an intended dismissal of anyone's work or even a statement of fact (you said it was a mischaracterization of what is happening). It's someone's representation of her own alienated feelings, and her perceptions, is all. All communities have this negotiation about what's okay, what's not, what's changed, what makes us who we are, etc. -- this is just one sample, someone from the old days feeling a change apart from the amv influence that I talked about later. In part that quote allowed me to refocus on the historical relationship to slash that I think many of us VCR vidders had, at least among the genetic thread I came from. You are right that 60% said they had made slash vids, but I was struck by how often slash came up in the "genres that you find weird" write-in. That really did surprise me. That does show a bit of a change. It may not even be a bad change for all -- one thing that used to bother us at slash cons was how the audience reacted to NON-slash vids. I think this is one of the reasons Vividcon got started, because all vidding was okay there, and a lot of slash vidders also made single character or story focus vids.

I will admit that I have a personal concern with academic or press framings of vidding as political cultural critique, whether it is overtly intended this way or not in any particular vidder's work. It's exactly the same concern I expressed at the beginning of my talk when I talked about "Computer Supported Cooperative Play"; in computer science, there is a discipline that focuses on "computer supported cooperative WORK" which has always annoyed me, for similar reasons. It's as if things people do for fun are not serious or worthy of research. I think they are. And yes, of course I believe vids that critique our media can be fun too, but I don't like seeing Mimi Ito, for instance, focus on the consciously political side of vidding to the exclusion of the, well, other aspects of why some vidders do what they do.

And your reading of my deck as focusing a lot on fragmentation and dissolution of community - I think that message came across less in the talk itself. I kept pointing out to my audience how social the activity is, despite the responses in the survey. I also said that I didn't entirely believe that people were just self-taught (your issue with that one question) because of the strong influence other vidders have on vidders (evident throughout the critiques, commentaries, tutorials and online help, and other aspects of the survey). I would like to follow up with people about how they learned, in more detail, to do that better justice. And I would love to see better tools and support for collaboration via network, too.

In no way is this slide deck meant to be any definitive work on what fan vidding is now, or who makes up the group now -- I badgered a fair number of people to take the survey personally, but there were still a bunch that I know didn't take it, who would have been valuable inputs to the picture. But regardless of how you feel about the selections and omissions in the deck, it's a few more views on the world, right? If I'd had more time (and were getting paid to do it), it might have looked a little different.

But like I said, thanks for engaging... if it turned into another talk or a paper, I would definitely amend it based on your comments.

Lynn