The two assigned books for the course are Lawerence Lessig's Free Culture; How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, and Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers edited by Cynthia Selfe (The Ohio State University). Lessig's work directly intersects with my experiences in and scholarship about online media fandom. Selfe's work is more focused on covering arguments for writing with new media and a great group of materials to actually use in the classroom. While reading Selfe's anthology, I realized how I have learned most of my multimodal literacies in fandom! We also read, viewed, and discussed a number of online multimodal texts (which are linked on the course blog).
One of the reasons I had for signing up for the class was that for some time I have been wishing to try my hand at vidding, at making a fan video, but never had the time to sit down to learn some of the technology. I went into class with the plan that my project would be creating a fan vid.
This page features the final draft of my project. I also provide information on fandom and vidding in general. Because I am very oriented toward process in any sort of writing/creating, I give an overview of my process of developing the vid. Shannon set up an extremely good structure for the course: we played around with the technology and programs and were brainstorming from the start. As a writer and teacher, I am *very* fond of process oriented courses in which the process is embedded in the class, and I think such an approach is the best way to incorporate new media in classes from first year to graduate. I became an immediate fan of the class method and began planning way to use "writing with new media" assignments in science fiction courses offered next fall in my department.
All of my vids for the semester can be found at my account on imeem.org I chose imeem rather than Youtube because fan vidders I know post over there.
I am not sure whether I have one project or two: I keep going back and forth on that, but it's time to hand things in, so here are the final versions!
Only One Window -
Windows Final Draft -
(A few 'clicks' make it into the uploaded version, and I apologize. I've not yet learned how to avoid those!)
Fandom and Vids
I am creating a fan vid: vidding is a major modality in media fandom (it would be interesting to consider to what extent vids exist for book fandoms which have films!). Fans have been creating vids since the 1970s, and vids in every "genre" of fan creation exist, ranging from fictionalized slash relationships to feminist arguments about the position of women in fandom.
I write fanfic, but of course this is a new media class, and I came into it wanting to learn to make fan vids (not academic, or in fanspeak, meta vids). I have a secondary interest in what I'd consider variants of e-poetry! I have some idea for male/male slash vids, but wanted to develop this women-centered vid which does reflect some of my fanfiction scholarship and interest in writing female characters in fanfiction. I am old enough (53) that many of my earliest and primary fandoms had few women characters (although looking cynically at newer media texts, I'd say little has changed!). However as a resistant reader and proto-feminist, I could read those few women (Emma Peel in The Avengers, Uhura in Star Trek, Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings) as important even if I had to create more of their stories in my mind. (I did look for images of Zoe Saldaña, playing Uhura in Star Trek: Reboot for inclusion at the very last moment, but could not find any I liked.)
My audience is a fan audience, primarily media fans, primarily women (my area of fandom is largely women), but specifically women who are interested in women characters. There are segments of media fandom who disdain the women characters in the shows/films (and/or the women romantically involved with the actors, band members, celebrities)--those would not be my audience--women in those parts of fandom often express hostility and hatred toward women characters and women involved with celebrities). And, as a friend on LiveJournal pointed out to me, there is the larger group of women who are fairly neutral to the women characters but do not want to see them abused and are interested by new takes on them (lferion).
My interest for some years has been how women characters have been constructed in sf/f. By some years, I mean spending about ten years doing presentations and papers on feminist science fiction, which also led to the chance to edit the Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy for Greenwood Press. My academic interest affects my fan work (which is not necessarily true of those academics who are also fans!). I'm not sure if the 'academic' focus shows in the vid, but I know I do see similarities between my academic work/processes and my creative work/processes, and always have.
My focus in this vid is mostly sf (but not entirely) over the decades (the focus of a good deal of scholarship that I am familiar with) has been limited--but even in earlier decades, resistant and proto-feminist readings were possible. The women characters in my vid are ones I have been and are drawn to to, often women who in my reading are more independent, less heternormative, and are often constructed as "other" in various ways by the dominant culture. I am interested in queering the source material (thus my choice of songs by Etheridge and Lang, both out as lesbians), and my remixed titles ("I'm the one constantly craving" and "Only One Window."). The passion and love I have for the characters is an important part of fandom culture and discourse.
Fan audiences and expectations: a fan audience expects source material from the fandom or fandoms (my vid is multi-fandom). I've chosen still pictures rather than excerpts ripped from television or film (partly my level of expertise, partly my attempt to downplay the context of the specific show/film). A fan audience expects a song, or songs, one that relates to the theme/message of the vid. I've chosen two songs for a remix effect, a dialogic effect. A vidding fan audience would expect a much higher level of technical capability than I have: my first efforts are rough. I am still very much in the learner mode, and I am happy to receive commentary about technical issues (the handling of music, timing of images and music).
My composing process: the idea for my project comes as do my ideas for fiction, poetry, and scholarship: an "image," a flash. After inspiration hits, I'm often left scrambing with how to embody that vision (and I never feel I quite suceed). I work alone: while I can collaborate very well with some people on essays-non-fiction projects, I've never been interested in collaborating on creative projects (and I now realize I feel that this vid is very much creative rather than argumentative.). There are too many voices in my head to try to work with somebody else.
I am very much a revision driven writer--I don't tend to the nice neat pre-writing, outlining, drafting, or even audience analysis like this one--ahead of time. I tend to get the inspiration then leap in: although, an alternative version is that I'm always processing/composing. I've been in online media fandom since 2003; I learned photoshop to do icons; I started seeing vids, and reading about vidding, and started thinking it would be cool to do a vid (a year or so ago), especially in the context of visual rhetorics (which were part of a new media class I taught, and then the e-poetry unit in my online creative writing poetry class).
My composition process for this version of the vid, and earlier ones, has been very similar to my poetic writing process--intuitive, driven by emotion, working off feeling rather than "rational" analysis (choosing the images, choosing the songs--the songs and artists are all long time favorites of mine; the images of the women characters are all ones I've been a fan of, in some cases going back decades). Synching image and music (still very rough, still not what I want) is a case of trying one effect, then trying another (I am still not completely integrated with the programs, so I'm learning as I'm doing).
The revising I did within moviemaker was not dissimilar to rough drafts (cutting stuff that didn't work, putting in new stuff); however, there will be an addictional level now that I've formatted the project as a movie (meaning, I draft something, then go back and start again from scratch and try to integrate the stuff I've learned in a new version.
I chose to post my vids on imeem.org rather than YouTube because I've heard about imeem in my fan circles, and I gather YouTube is cracking down on vids because of music companies putting pressure on it. Individuals posting vids (Youtube.com) are a huge part of Web 2.0 (distinct from Web 1.0 by, among other elements, allow user content to be posted by non-professionals--ie all of US).
But fans were doing it earlier (often under lock and key because of copyright police)
I cannot remember whether the fan production came first: I think it was the "Bad Bad Bean" one (see below), or the academic one ("The Machine"). So I'll note here that in my actual memory, I'm a bit undertain of which came first, but in the official narrative of memory, I'm going to privilege fandom.
First, for those who do not know about vids or fandom or fandom and vids, here are some links:
Links about vidding: Interview with Francesca Coppa Francesca is someone I know from conferences and online; she is an aca-fan (a term coined by Matt Hills), meaning someone who is in fandom active as a fan and is also an academic who is doing scholarship on fandom. She is the main person bringing scholarship on fan vidding into the academic mainstream.
"Women, Star Trek and the early development of fannish vidding" by Francesca Coppa, The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures Vol I Women were doing "vids" back in the 1970s when the technology was a lot clunkier than it is today; when in recent years male academics began talking about the machinima that male fans were doing as a totally "new" artform, Francesca said, more or less (my paraphrase): wait a minute, women were doing this way long ago, let's not lose that herstory! She and I were both in the old skool Trek fandom where you had to climb uphill both ways in cold snowstorms on shoes made of oatmeal to find another fan!
Fans are not only making vids, but fans are also participating in the pushback that Lessig advocates. The Organization For Transformative Works has submitted a reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption to allow the extraction of clips from a DVD for inclusion in noncommercial remix videos, such as fanvids, that are found to be fair use.
OTW believes that noncommercial works that make creative use of existing copyrighted material, such as fanvids, are transformative, and that transformative works are legitimate under US copyright law.
The site has discussion and sample vids from fandom that they believe meet the criteria for legitimacy under copyright law.
Fans are promoting vids as teaching resources:
"Fan Vidding: A Labor of Love," Part One, and Part Two.
Background: Henry Jenkins, who is one of the major scholars in new media literacies and convergence culture, worked with Francesca and Laura Shapiro to product documentaries for the MIT Learning Library.
Project New Media Literacies has been collaborating with the Organization for Transformative Works to develop a series of short documentaries, designed for inclusion in our Learning Library, which explain the phenomenon of fan vidding. These videos have been produced by Francesca Coppa and Laura Shapiro, both long time contributors to vidding culture. Their stated goal is to introduce vidding to a larger public, whether in support of the classroom and after-school deployment of our resources for promoting the new media literacies or as a tool within fandom for passing along the craft and poetics of vidding to future generations or for that matter, as resources for teaching about participatory culture in undergraduate and graduate classes.
A major argument in Henry Jenkin's Convergence Culture, is how fandom consists of early adopters of computer technologies (I taught in the first "computer assisted classroom" at Boise State in 1986) and the internet, but that with the development of tech that does not require computer language training, more and more people outside of fandom are doing the same sorts of things that fandom have done all along. He then builds on that work to argue for the necessity of teachers beinging in these technologies and literacies to their classroom (the scary part is of course that many of the students will be more multimodally literate than their teacher!). So in this project, we see academia and fandom working together.
So, here's the first vid that really *caught* my attention: "It's Raining 300 Men" (by suburbanla) (There are nearly 4000 comments to the 53 second version which I first link to):
It's Raining 300 men, the 53 second version (the full 6 minute version was pulled due to a copyright claim
Notification here).
Due to the amazing nature of the internet, here's a short clip that's different from the earlier short clip--I suspect that the shorter ones can claim a more transformative/parody status?
300 was a Frank Miller comic which is loosely based on the attack on Thermopylae (VERY losely, as in, Alternate Universe), which became a movie (starring one of the LOTR actors, David Wenham (Faramir). The film attracted a large amount of attention among fandom due to the comic tie in, and the promise of a large number of very buff men in very little clothing. I did not actually see it (I dislike Frank Miller's misogyny, and the racist/stereotypical constructions of the Persians--which were noted and discussed in fandom, were an additional turn-off.).
However, I love this vid (proving that one does not necessarily have to be a fan of the source text to appreciate a fan production). It takes a lovely robust woman-centered song by "The Weather Girls" (whom I'd not heard of before--they are Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes--and according to some internet data, not checked for authority, it is a song that became very popular in the gay community.
(Here's an interview with Martha Wash).
The vid takes the text of a male-dominated popular comic and film and queers it. By queering I mean it goes against heteronormativity: even if the audience is defined as only straight women (disallowing gay men, bisexual men, bisexual women, etc.), queerness exists because traditional patriarchal ideology dictates that women do not respond to "visual images," and that women do not go lusting after lovely men in public. Some gay men might enjoy this vid as well (whether or not suburbanla knows that the song was popular in the gay community or not, there's still that link--and I would not be surprised if zie did.
The homoeroticism and homosocial nature of Frank Miller's comic and film (I have always wondered how much he knew about the nature of male/male relationships in historical Sparta) is also worth noting. Much of the earliest and most "traditional" slash fiction was based on texts (film and television as well as books) that were primarily focused on male characters. Both ST and Man from Uncle (MFU) as was common in television of this era tended to focus on the "male buddies," and have mostly male casts; there were not many main women characters. Captain Kirk especially is notorious for the "dead girl friend a week" syndrome.
I write slash fiction and do scholarship on slash fiction (same-sex relationships, romantic sexual and even more). Slash fiction originated in the female fan community (Kirk and Spock, from the original Trek series, were among the earliest focus of slash stories--there's some debate whether Kirk and Spock or Solo and Kuryakin were the "first" slash pairing--and the name 'slash' arose from the convention of indicating a story was about a relationship bewteen the two characters: Kirk/Spock, Aragorn/Boromir, etc.) So I was interested in the slashiness of this vid, of the transformative nature of it (and I should say here I do not know the vidder's gender) even thought I am not a fan of the film (or comic).
There's a lot of debate in fandom: how well does one have to know the source text to appreciate the fan production (story or vid), and that all goes to a lot of important questions discussed in literary studies, composition, linguistics, etc. I know people who start watching a show or see a film only after reading fan fiction in the fandom, so it's not always as simple as love the show/be engaged in fandom (meaning in a community of other fans in some way)/consume the fan production: I'm a fan of a number of shows and books, but I'm not active in fandom/don't read fan fiction.
But my primary fandom (LOTR) which has led me to watch a number of films by the LOTR actors, is connected to this second vid:
Baby Did a Bad Bean Thing/Bean did a Bad Bad Thing. By elessarsgirl. Song by Chris Isaak
This vid is a collection of publicity pictures, film stills, and wallpaper graphics (which the vidder created herself). Sean Bean (one of my fannish obsessions; he played Boromir in LOTR). Bean, like many UK actors, has been typecast as playing "villains" in US films (he played the bad guy against one of the Bonds--I do not remember which, I think Pierce Brosnan) even though he plays a wider range of characters in British productions. Still, he has a certain "bad boy" aura/image in his PR and public persona that I think makes this song a good choice, and while I don't know *all* the roles/films referenced in the vid, I know enough of them to know that some of them connect directly to the "bad bad" thing.
On a more academic and postmodern level, I found this vid a few years ago and immediately started using in my online classes (some of my classmates here may have been in one of those classes!):
Web 2.0..The Machine is Us/ing Us.
It's a brilliant hypertext essay on the nature of the ever-changing relationship between technology and communication skills. The creator, Michael Wesch, is at Kansas State University where they are clearly doing amazing things:
Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University: they have a blog, a video showcase, a YouTube project, and World Sim.
Vidding is getting much more attention both in academia and the mainstream media: here's a Henry Jenkins Blog entry on the first Vidder (Luminosity) (as far as I know) to be profiled in a mainstream magazine: New York Magazine
The vid by Luminosity and Sisabet has received major attention in and outside the Supernatural fandom:
Fanlore wiki: Entry on "Women's Work," the vid
In a Supernatural wiki, this entry on fanvids covers information on the medium, the genres, and the fandom.
Imeem Stream of Luminosity's and Sisabet's Vid "Women's Work" Warning: extremely graphic imagery although the footage, is as far as I know, all taken from the television show Supernatural.
I'm linking to this vid because I believe it's an example of a different type of fan vid than the others in this post: it is a fan essay, meta, rather than a story. It's powerful, and the vidder is widely considered one of the most accomplished in/among multiple fandoms.
I do not watch the show, nor am I familiar with the fandom beyond what is posted on my fan journal's flist, but this vid made a huge impression on fandom--the discussion of gender roles in the genre of horror, the incidents with this particular source text, the issue of possible misogyny in the female parts of fandom that are the primary (not exclusively but majority) producers of fan fiction and fan vids.
My Process
As I said above, I enjoy the process oriented class although I found myself working more on Thursdays before class than in class itself because I found that I don't like working at a strange/lab computer. I also prefer solitary composing rather than in a group (I teach with a lot of group projects, but probably would not enjoy a semester-long major group project). I enjoyed working with my classmates on the short, collaborative, interactive "play" projects we did in class: perhaps I need to incorporate more of those types of group projects in my courses in future.
I've also learned that when I'm starting to learn a new creative medium, I regress to my older process (lots of rough drafts, lots of messing around, lots of hand-waving and inarticulate voicings of my inspiration). That process is not a bad one, but I've had to learn to move more quickly through the steps in academic discourse. I'm not a good "planner" when it comes to writing/creating texts (in any genre, any medium). I write to discover my plan, rather than work my plan out.
Drafts of vids
Very first draft--a test run--without sound!
Girls Test Run 1 - Robinr
First Draft trying to meld images w/music: "I'm the one constantly craving"
Im the only one constantly craving - robin reid
This draft took about five hours, start to finish.
Another pretty rough draft: "Fun with Windows"
Fun with Windows - Robin Reid
This draft took three hours. Practice does help!
I received feedback both in my class and on my LiveJournal.
Then I spent all of one day, except for lunch and a meeting, working on applying the feedback to revising my draft, especially with regard to sound/image rhythms. I used a new program, Picasa, to edit my images, and make collages, and I spent a whole lot of time trying to synch the images to the beat of the music (fingers are sore from pounding on desk!). The more I listened to the music file and watched the audio patterns in moviemaker, the more I saw that 2.80 seemed to be a significant interval in the song--so a lot of the images are timed to that, or very close, which makes the pace faster. The class and friends on my LiveJournal agreed that I'd improved the relationship between image and beat greatly!
Only One Window -
With my next iteration, I tried to play around with the Picasa movie-making function, and also experimented with images w/out sound and sound w/out images. I'm not as happy with this draft, overall, but I'd like to explore more of the possibilities of varying sound and images.
first draft second half only one window -
The Future
I will be working to assign multimodal compositions in my courses in future, as well as incorporating wikis. For my own pleasure, I plan creating more vids, incorporating movie footage as well as stills.
This blog will thus become my vidding blog as well as my poetry blog!
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