Vividcon 2002
I was home sick Thursday - not sick enough to want to stay in bed, just kinda draggy and bleah, and taking advantage of a lull at work. So I decided to watch some old vids, and popped in my home-burned DVD of the VVC 2002 tape. I haven't watched most of these in ages, and I'm having a lot of fun.
Wildly generalized things I have discovered during this:
* Cutting-edge vids from 2002 are generally very comfortably paced to my eyes. Like, I relax right into them. Which is kind of cracking me up, because -- of course they are, that's the era when I learned to vid! I imprinted on that general pacing. At the time, mind you, I thought they were fast, and now they're mostly not -- but they're comfortable. There's time to take in each scene during the vid (which could be more than one clip), connect it to the lyrics or music, place it in the context of the vid, and move on -- maybe ~2-3 seconds? They seemed more likely to use internal motion to drive things, rather than cutting boom-boom-boom.
By comparison, I'd also watched some of the Media Cannibals Tape 3 the night before, and while that has a lot of my favorite vids on it, the late-90s vids overall feel pretty slow to me now. (Not all! But a lot.)
* I think 2002 was one of the only years with a real mix of VCR vids and computer vids in Premieres, and in some cases the VCR vids looked better - because people were still figuring out how to export computer vids for cons. Back then, you uploaded a small version to the web (both reduced frame size -- usually half, sometimes even one-third the original frame size -- and highly compressed), because most people were on dialup and had 800x600 resolution monitors. So that's what "a computer vid" looked like, and that's what some people submitted to the con. There are several vids here that are just tiny squares in the middle of my screen, because they were exported at something like 360x240.
It's the exact opposite of now, when you'd see a smaller square and think, ah, made off old SD analog tv source instead of shiny HD digital source. (There are also plenty of computer vids at full screen on this, of course! But it's really noticeable when a computer vidder hadn't figured it out yet, and this was while VVC was still working out the standards for electronic submission to cons, which had never been done before - people were winging it as best they could.)
* That said, everyone was using analog source, no matter how they were editing it, which made me blink for a minute when I realized it, until I put it all back in context in my head. DVDs weren't common at all (and were incredibly expensive, and if they were put out it was years after a given season ended -- none of this "last season on DVD before next season starts" business, never mind instant high-quality downloads), and everyone had a VCR or three, and knew how to use them. Again, that started changing within a year. None of us had any idea what a watershed period 2002/2003 was.
It actually makes for a fun vidshow, when every vid takes up the whole screen (assuming a 4:3 screen, that is). There's no letterboxing at all on this tape.
* Digital isn't always better. Way back when when people were warning that home-burned discs had a 5-10-year lifespan, they weren't kidding. :( There are black spots throughout this home-burned disc of mine, where the video has just dropped out. But hey, part of the reason I recorded it was so my tape would stay as pristine as possible, so I can re-do it if need be. If I can find my tape. (Analog may be fuzzier, but you also don't lose the entire image if something drops out. It just gets fuzzier and fuzzier, but still watchable for a remarkably long time. As long as you don't pause, or keep watching the same vid over and over...)
Things change so fast, though; last time I backed up this tape, I recorded it using a set-top DVD recorder (which I used to record SO MANY THINGS. Not only old tapes, but also straight off my tivo, using the old "record to tape" function. Which I'm suddenly nostalgic for, for no reason.). I didn't have the ability to capture the tape into my computer -- no pass-through device, no space on the harddrive, not enough processor or RAM to even attempt it. Now? The dvd recorder is long gone, and I can't remember the last time I recorded something off my tv. But I do have a computer that can handle both downloads and capturing, with plenty of space and RAM, and I have my trusty Canopus to hook it up to a VCR. <3 (The DVD recorder I recycled, as I'd used it so much it was burning out. The VCRs I cling to. Don't die, little VCRs!!! I have tapes I can never replace!!)
* Wow, the fandoms on this disc are like a snapshot of my corner of fandom in 2002: Farscape, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Witchblade, X-Files, Buffy, Invisible Man, Forever Knight, Brimstone, Angel, Due South, OZ, The Sentinel, Starsky & Hutch, Xena, The Matrix, Highlander, and one lone American Embassy, which I've never seen. All the rest though; even if I wasn't in the fandom, I knew enough about it to mostly follow the vids.
More specifically, I'm fascinated by how some of my reactions to some of the vids from VVC 2002 have changed, and how some haven't.
The most surprising difference to me was watching the Starsky & Hutch vid "Help Me Understand" by Recycled Media Station (sadly, it looks like the downloads all broke when Megaupload vanished). RMS also has an AO3 account as![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
recycledmedia, with youtube links, but YT has blocked this particular vid everywhere.
It's an experimental vid, where the vidder incorporated a fair amount of show dialogue into the vid. I don't know if I'd ever seen anything like that before in 2002. But these were the early days of digital vidding, and people were experimenting with all kinds of effects to see what they did, and I think that's what was happening here -- why not use the show's audio as well as the video, to tell the vidder's story?
In 2002, this didn't work for me at all; in fact, it was sort of painful to watch, and I think I started tuning it out pretty fast.
In 2013, it still doesn't work for me, but I'm a lot more intrigued by what she did and how she did it.
On the down side, the audio is often hard to understand. The song is always present, even under the show dialogue, but the levels are off when the two are combined - the song isn't lowered enough, so the dialogue sounds like incomprehensible mumbling. It's clear that I'm supposed to be paying attention to the words, but I can't hear them -- and I also can't hear enough of the song to get any clues from that. This is a particularly big problem because the vid starts off with this sort of dialogue, setting up the entire vid.
On my first viewing this time around, as in 2002, I missed the verbal setup completely, but was so intent on trying to catch the audio that I was ignoring the visuals, so also missed the visual setup. By the time the music came back up to the foreground, I was lost, and stayed lost. Making things more difficult is the vidding style: it's an old-fashioned vid in that it doesn't concern itself about talkyface, so there were lots of scenes of Starsky and Hutch talking to each other for fairly extended periods that I would strain to hear any dialogue for (sometimes it was there because the vidder wanted the dialogue to push the vid forward; sometimes it wasn't, because the vidder just wanted the visual).
In 2002, this frustrated me no end, and I never managed to hook into the vid as the music rose and fell apparently randomly to showcase some bits of dialogue but not others. I had no idea what she was doing or why she was doing it.
In 2013, despite missing most of the words, the structure made much more sense to me even on the first watch. But weirdly, not because it feels more like a vid than it used to; it's specifically because it doesn't really feel like a vid. It feels more like the modern industry does with soundtracks, where they'll swell music with lyrics under emotional scenes, then tone it back down for the characters to talk, then swell the music back up again.
It didn't succeed at that, either, for me, because of the muddy audio levels, but it was just fascinating to realize how much I now recognize and respond to that type of presentation.
And once I'd realized that, I went back and watched again, which did the trick; I finally managed to catch the audio at the beginning, which let me hook into the visuals, and the whole vid fell into place on a visual level. It helped to know S&H, and the episode the vid is about, even though I haven't seen it in probably 15 years, but even without that, if the audio at the beginning had been clearer (and maybe shorter), I think it would have succeeded better overall.
The other audio-experiment vid, "Unforgiven II" by DigiRay (Farscape), hasn't changed for me as much. (That goes to the Recyled Media Station website, where this is hosted. Again, downloads are borked, but it's available on CD, according to the page.) It does the same thing as RMS's vid, of adding in the show's audio track, but without lowering the music even as much as the S&H vid did, and as far as I can tell, without ever lowering the show's dialogue track at all. So sometimes, when the lyrics have backed off a bit, you can almost hear what people are saying on the screen; other times, you can tell people are saying things, but can't hear anything but whispery mumbles. And at one point, I think the very soft-voiced dialogue has show soundtrack under it briefly, as well as the vid song.
I have no real idea of what's going on here, because I don't know what to pay attention to; everything is given equal weight. (And the song is Metallica, so raspy everywhere and shouty in spots.)
During the vidshow, this felt incredibly long -- like, 9 minutes long, which is what I was convinced all this time it was. With the DVD player's timer up, though, it's more like 6:40. Which is still way, way too long to have muddy, confusing audio.
I'm fascinated at the difference between the two, though; I really can see what RMS was going for in the S&H vid, and I assume the idea was the same for the Farscape one, but the execution failed the Farscape vid. I can't remember if either/both of them have done any other work with audio levels; it'd be interesting to see what they could do with it with better equipment, even just better controls in a video editing program's audio track.
... Okay, and I just watched it again, and now am wondering if this was an experiment, or if maybe their editing software didn't allow them to strip out source audio, and they just coped with that the best they could. For both this, and maybe the S&H one? (although really, that feels deliberate and planned to me now.) Huh. That's entirely possible, and renders all my analysis kinda moot...
The other seriously experimental vid, "Hero" by T4 Productions (Xena fandom), is also interesting to watch in the wake of my own expanded horizons since I first saw it. I don't think the vid ever made it online, unfortunately -- I found T4 Productions' site on Wayback, but Hero isn't listed. (This is two vidders, but there are very few instances of their names online, so I'm going to err on the side of caution here and just stick to T4.)
Again, this was a period when some folks were experimenting all over the place with what computer vidding could do, but the VVC audience wasn't really used to the idea yet; this was all brand new, and there was still a lot of VCR vidding going on, and I for one had a bit of a purist attitude back then -- the music, visuals, and cutting were what made the vid, not effects. (Except for cross-dissolves. ♥) So from my pov now, major props to vidders back then who were willing to poke at things and see what happened, because hey, some of that stuff is amazing!
That said, this vid was not amazing. But my god, it tried, and looking at it now, with a much better understanding of what went into it, I'm really impressed. The tools back then just weren't all that good, and they used the hell out of what they had. They have split screens, with a textured background to lay them over, so they weren't just floating on black (these days, black seems normal and downright neutral, but we just weren't seeing much split screen then. 24 had just finished its first season, and that was the show that brought split screen into the general toolbox, imo). They had flying-bird masks that she put Xena and Gabrielle's faces into as the flew dreamily around. She even had moving, bird-flapping credits! They used color washes to emphasize things, jagged transitions, light effects, overlays; they sometimes had different things in the split screens and sometimes the same thing (for emphasis), they swoooped her split screens in and out to single full screens... they worked their asses off on this, and tried to make all those effects support the vid.
Unfortunately, they got one thing really wrong, and it undercut the entire vid, all the way through: the split screens were the identical size, sitting side by side. They should have watched 24 more closely: the trick is to let one screen be the focal point, even if you switch back and forth between them. The easiest way is to let one be bigger; you can also change the footage inside so one's closer and one's more of a distance shot. But they not only had identical sizes, the footage in each was usually largely similar -- Xena fighting someone in a middle-distance shot vs. Gabrielle fighting someone in a middle-distance shot. The viewer's eye has no idea where to go. Even when the footage was different (e.g., an arrow shooting straight and steadily across the left-hand box, while Gabrielle fought someone in the right-hand box), it's not clear which is the focus.
Then they go into a more intensive overlay section, which is a little too much -- they did great desaturating the background image to cut down on clashing, but there's too much motion in both layers. I was getting dizzy in my living room watching it.
So I'm pretty sure the vid's message is that Xena and Gabrielle are both hereoes, and they belong together, but I couldn't tell you what that message looks like, because there was too much vying for my attention for most of this.
It's a real pity; I don't think these vidders ever came back to VVC, probably because their vid wasn't well-received. It was an unfortunate collision between vidding cultures, vidding styles, and a failed experiment. People mentioned the identical-size boxes at Vid Review, IIRC, and I would guess that there may have been comments about too many effects, too, because that was such an unusual thing. But I also know that people afterward were wondering how that vid would affect other vidders' work going forward, once they'd seen the possibilities. And I for one was hoping to see what these vidders would do the next year. Ah well.
(Seriously, I'd love to see a remaster/reworking of this vid. I think it could be amazing.)
I wish I'd gone looking for Xena fandom at the time to see if this was the sort of thing going on there in general; Xena was always such a standalone fandom, largely cut off from other fandoms and just doing its own thing, and if this was an example, they were several years ahead of other live-action vidders in their willingness to embrace the shiny. I really wish they'd come back the next year to show us something else new, even if it failed in its execution.
Other, less detailed stuff I'm noticing:
Man, some of my favorite vids ever are on this tape. Like Solsbury Hill, by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
astolat. <3 <3 The con was just a few months after S5 of Stargate SG-1, when we'd lost Daniel to ascension and had no idea if he'd ever be back. It was a pretty fraught time to be an SG fan, especially a Jack/Daniel fan, and it was all I could do to watch this vid at VVC that year. But I love this, how it follows Daniel's journey from Abydos to SG-1 to ascension, and all the different people who bring him to his new homes. It made ascension really feel like the next step on his journey, rather than a loss. *happy sigh*
And then the flip side of that,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
barkley's Never Die Young, where Jack is left behind over and over again, and finally as Daniel ascends, and my heart just breaks and breaks. I must have watched this at the con way back when, but man, I don't know how I made it through.
... Apparently I am not over Stargate SG-1.
Weirdly, two other favs of mine are for a show I never really watched, other than an episode or two to be fannishly literate at the time: Witchblade. The first few years of VVC tried hard to make me change my mind about this show, starting with these two vids:killa's "Comin' Up From Behind" and bonibaru's "Go" (neither of them online, alas).
Comin' Up From Behind is just a kickass, boot-stompy vid of awesome Sara Pezzini, and the song's been in my walking playlist rotation ever since I saw this. It's sort of a day-in-the-life character study, starting with her getting ready in the morning (jeans! boots! gun! motorcycle helmet!) and then riding her motorcycle out into the dawn, where she very competently deals with all the shit that comes her way, from ordinary stuff to very not-ordinary stuff, including creepy white-haired guy and his creepy dark-haired, ponytailed lackey (the cut to him on "small fry" makes me grin every time, until finally she saves the world by doing a reset on the entire globe, and ends her day by riding away into the evening on her motorcycle.
Go is just as kickass, but starts from the mystical side of Sara's life, her connection to the Witchblade throughout history, rather than the modern-day cop side. ("Grandma was a suffragette" is *perfect*) She comes to grips with this new knowledge and being part of a world she never knew existed, until it's a seamless part of her helping her to do her job. The whole thing is action and motion and woo, with some fantastic mystical stuff going on everywhere.
The two vids are the opposite sides of the show's coin, and combined are an amazing intro to the series. (Spoilery. But amazing.)
Watching them again, man, it's a pity this aired just long enough ago to have fallen off fandom's radar. I think it might have been a bigger fandom if it had aired in the last few years.
I have been writing this post forever already, so won't go into many more vids, except to mention that I was startled to discover that this vid tape included Remi d'Brebant's Sentinel vid, "Possession". This vid made a huge splash in 2002 because it did some very different things -- it used a lot of still shots, particularly on the choruses. But it didn't premiere at VVC; it premiered at Escapade earlier that year, and showed at VVC in the Experimental show, I think. *checks database* Yes, Experimental.
It was incredibly hard to get hold of; Remi never put it up online that I know of, and I didn't think it had made it onto any tape collections. I had completely forgotten it was on this one. \o/ It aired a couple more times at VVC, but it hasn't been shown since 2004.
Fanlore has some of Snady's comments about Possession from when it was being discussed on Vidder after Escapade. IIRC, the still shots weren't just artistic choice (although they worked well that way), but also limits of the source and technology. I can't remember where I saw that being discussed, though (so probably shouldn't say it, but hopefully someone else has a better memory than I).
It's 1:30 am ET heading into a weekend, and if I post this now, almost no one will see it. But if I don't post it now, I'll save it as a draft and then decide it's not good enough to post, like I do with most of what I write. So here, have a post, whoever is up at this hour!
Wildly generalized things I have discovered during this:
* Cutting-edge vids from 2002 are generally very comfortably paced to my eyes. Like, I relax right into them. Which is kind of cracking me up, because -- of course they are, that's the era when I learned to vid! I imprinted on that general pacing. At the time, mind you, I thought they were fast, and now they're mostly not -- but they're comfortable. There's time to take in each scene during the vid (which could be more than one clip), connect it to the lyrics or music, place it in the context of the vid, and move on -- maybe ~2-3 seconds? They seemed more likely to use internal motion to drive things, rather than cutting boom-boom-boom.
By comparison, I'd also watched some of the Media Cannibals Tape 3 the night before, and while that has a lot of my favorite vids on it, the late-90s vids overall feel pretty slow to me now. (Not all! But a lot.)
* I think 2002 was one of the only years with a real mix of VCR vids and computer vids in Premieres, and in some cases the VCR vids looked better - because people were still figuring out how to export computer vids for cons. Back then, you uploaded a small version to the web (both reduced frame size -- usually half, sometimes even one-third the original frame size -- and highly compressed), because most people were on dialup and had 800x600 resolution monitors. So that's what "a computer vid" looked like, and that's what some people submitted to the con. There are several vids here that are just tiny squares in the middle of my screen, because they were exported at something like 360x240.
It's the exact opposite of now, when you'd see a smaller square and think, ah, made off old SD analog tv source instead of shiny HD digital source. (There are also plenty of computer vids at full screen on this, of course! But it's really noticeable when a computer vidder hadn't figured it out yet, and this was while VVC was still working out the standards for electronic submission to cons, which had never been done before - people were winging it as best they could.)
* That said, everyone was using analog source, no matter how they were editing it, which made me blink for a minute when I realized it, until I put it all back in context in my head. DVDs weren't common at all (and were incredibly expensive, and if they were put out it was years after a given season ended -- none of this "last season on DVD before next season starts" business, never mind instant high-quality downloads), and everyone had a VCR or three, and knew how to use them. Again, that started changing within a year. None of us had any idea what a watershed period 2002/2003 was.
It actually makes for a fun vidshow, when every vid takes up the whole screen (assuming a 4:3 screen, that is). There's no letterboxing at all on this tape.
* Digital isn't always better. Way back when when people were warning that home-burned discs had a 5-10-year lifespan, they weren't kidding. :( There are black spots throughout this home-burned disc of mine, where the video has just dropped out. But hey, part of the reason I recorded it was so my tape would stay as pristine as possible, so I can re-do it if need be. If I can find my tape. (Analog may be fuzzier, but you also don't lose the entire image if something drops out. It just gets fuzzier and fuzzier, but still watchable for a remarkably long time. As long as you don't pause, or keep watching the same vid over and over...)
Things change so fast, though; last time I backed up this tape, I recorded it using a set-top DVD recorder (which I used to record SO MANY THINGS. Not only old tapes, but also straight off my tivo, using the old "record to tape" function. Which I'm suddenly nostalgic for, for no reason.). I didn't have the ability to capture the tape into my computer -- no pass-through device, no space on the harddrive, not enough processor or RAM to even attempt it. Now? The dvd recorder is long gone, and I can't remember the last time I recorded something off my tv. But I do have a computer that can handle both downloads and capturing, with plenty of space and RAM, and I have my trusty Canopus to hook it up to a VCR. <3 (The DVD recorder I recycled, as I'd used it so much it was burning out. The VCRs I cling to. Don't die, little VCRs!!! I have tapes I can never replace!!)
* Wow, the fandoms on this disc are like a snapshot of my corner of fandom in 2002: Farscape, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Witchblade, X-Files, Buffy, Invisible Man, Forever Knight, Brimstone, Angel, Due South, OZ, The Sentinel, Starsky & Hutch, Xena, The Matrix, Highlander, and one lone American Embassy, which I've never seen. All the rest though; even if I wasn't in the fandom, I knew enough about it to mostly follow the vids.
More specifically, I'm fascinated by how some of my reactions to some of the vids from VVC 2002 have changed, and how some haven't.
The most surprising difference to me was watching the Starsky & Hutch vid "Help Me Understand" by Recycled Media Station (sadly, it looks like the downloads all broke when Megaupload vanished). RMS also has an AO3 account as
It's an experimental vid, where the vidder incorporated a fair amount of show dialogue into the vid. I don't know if I'd ever seen anything like that before in 2002. But these were the early days of digital vidding, and people were experimenting with all kinds of effects to see what they did, and I think that's what was happening here -- why not use the show's audio as well as the video, to tell the vidder's story?
In 2002, this didn't work for me at all; in fact, it was sort of painful to watch, and I think I started tuning it out pretty fast.
In 2013, it still doesn't work for me, but I'm a lot more intrigued by what she did and how she did it.
On the down side, the audio is often hard to understand. The song is always present, even under the show dialogue, but the levels are off when the two are combined - the song isn't lowered enough, so the dialogue sounds like incomprehensible mumbling. It's clear that I'm supposed to be paying attention to the words, but I can't hear them -- and I also can't hear enough of the song to get any clues from that. This is a particularly big problem because the vid starts off with this sort of dialogue, setting up the entire vid.
On my first viewing this time around, as in 2002, I missed the verbal setup completely, but was so intent on trying to catch the audio that I was ignoring the visuals, so also missed the visual setup. By the time the music came back up to the foreground, I was lost, and stayed lost. Making things more difficult is the vidding style: it's an old-fashioned vid in that it doesn't concern itself about talkyface, so there were lots of scenes of Starsky and Hutch talking to each other for fairly extended periods that I would strain to hear any dialogue for (sometimes it was there because the vidder wanted the dialogue to push the vid forward; sometimes it wasn't, because the vidder just wanted the visual).
In 2002, this frustrated me no end, and I never managed to hook into the vid as the music rose and fell apparently randomly to showcase some bits of dialogue but not others. I had no idea what she was doing or why she was doing it.
In 2013, despite missing most of the words, the structure made much more sense to me even on the first watch. But weirdly, not because it feels more like a vid than it used to; it's specifically because it doesn't really feel like a vid. It feels more like the modern industry does with soundtracks, where they'll swell music with lyrics under emotional scenes, then tone it back down for the characters to talk, then swell the music back up again.
It didn't succeed at that, either, for me, because of the muddy audio levels, but it was just fascinating to realize how much I now recognize and respond to that type of presentation.
And once I'd realized that, I went back and watched again, which did the trick; I finally managed to catch the audio at the beginning, which let me hook into the visuals, and the whole vid fell into place on a visual level. It helped to know S&H, and the episode the vid is about, even though I haven't seen it in probably 15 years, but even without that, if the audio at the beginning had been clearer (and maybe shorter), I think it would have succeeded better overall.
The other audio-experiment vid, "Unforgiven II" by DigiRay (Farscape), hasn't changed for me as much. (That goes to the Recyled Media Station website, where this is hosted. Again, downloads are borked, but it's available on CD, according to the page.) It does the same thing as RMS's vid, of adding in the show's audio track, but without lowering the music even as much as the S&H vid did, and as far as I can tell, without ever lowering the show's dialogue track at all. So sometimes, when the lyrics have backed off a bit, you can almost hear what people are saying on the screen; other times, you can tell people are saying things, but can't hear anything but whispery mumbles. And at one point, I think the very soft-voiced dialogue has show soundtrack under it briefly, as well as the vid song.
I have no real idea of what's going on here, because I don't know what to pay attention to; everything is given equal weight. (And the song is Metallica, so raspy everywhere and shouty in spots.)
During the vidshow, this felt incredibly long -- like, 9 minutes long, which is what I was convinced all this time it was. With the DVD player's timer up, though, it's more like 6:40. Which is still way, way too long to have muddy, confusing audio.
I'm fascinated at the difference between the two, though; I really can see what RMS was going for in the S&H vid, and I assume the idea was the same for the Farscape one, but the execution failed the Farscape vid. I can't remember if either/both of them have done any other work with audio levels; it'd be interesting to see what they could do with it with better equipment, even just better controls in a video editing program's audio track.
... Okay, and I just watched it again, and now am wondering if this was an experiment, or if maybe their editing software didn't allow them to strip out source audio, and they just coped with that the best they could. For both this, and maybe the S&H one? (although really, that feels deliberate and planned to me now.) Huh. That's entirely possible, and renders all my analysis kinda moot...
The other seriously experimental vid, "Hero" by T4 Productions (Xena fandom), is also interesting to watch in the wake of my own expanded horizons since I first saw it. I don't think the vid ever made it online, unfortunately -- I found T4 Productions' site on Wayback, but Hero isn't listed. (This is two vidders, but there are very few instances of their names online, so I'm going to err on the side of caution here and just stick to T4.)
Again, this was a period when some folks were experimenting all over the place with what computer vidding could do, but the VVC audience wasn't really used to the idea yet; this was all brand new, and there was still a lot of VCR vidding going on, and I for one had a bit of a purist attitude back then -- the music, visuals, and cutting were what made the vid, not effects. (Except for cross-dissolves. ♥) So from my pov now, major props to vidders back then who were willing to poke at things and see what happened, because hey, some of that stuff is amazing!
That said, this vid was not amazing. But my god, it tried, and looking at it now, with a much better understanding of what went into it, I'm really impressed. The tools back then just weren't all that good, and they used the hell out of what they had. They have split screens, with a textured background to lay them over, so they weren't just floating on black (these days, black seems normal and downright neutral, but we just weren't seeing much split screen then. 24 had just finished its first season, and that was the show that brought split screen into the general toolbox, imo). They had flying-bird masks that she put Xena and Gabrielle's faces into as the flew dreamily around. She even had moving, bird-flapping credits! They used color washes to emphasize things, jagged transitions, light effects, overlays; they sometimes had different things in the split screens and sometimes the same thing (for emphasis), they swoooped her split screens in and out to single full screens... they worked their asses off on this, and tried to make all those effects support the vid.
Unfortunately, they got one thing really wrong, and it undercut the entire vid, all the way through: the split screens were the identical size, sitting side by side. They should have watched 24 more closely: the trick is to let one screen be the focal point, even if you switch back and forth between them. The easiest way is to let one be bigger; you can also change the footage inside so one's closer and one's more of a distance shot. But they not only had identical sizes, the footage in each was usually largely similar -- Xena fighting someone in a middle-distance shot vs. Gabrielle fighting someone in a middle-distance shot. The viewer's eye has no idea where to go. Even when the footage was different (e.g., an arrow shooting straight and steadily across the left-hand box, while Gabrielle fought someone in the right-hand box), it's not clear which is the focus.
Then they go into a more intensive overlay section, which is a little too much -- they did great desaturating the background image to cut down on clashing, but there's too much motion in both layers. I was getting dizzy in my living room watching it.
So I'm pretty sure the vid's message is that Xena and Gabrielle are both hereoes, and they belong together, but I couldn't tell you what that message looks like, because there was too much vying for my attention for most of this.
It's a real pity; I don't think these vidders ever came back to VVC, probably because their vid wasn't well-received. It was an unfortunate collision between vidding cultures, vidding styles, and a failed experiment. People mentioned the identical-size boxes at Vid Review, IIRC, and I would guess that there may have been comments about too many effects, too, because that was such an unusual thing. But I also know that people afterward were wondering how that vid would affect other vidders' work going forward, once they'd seen the possibilities. And I for one was hoping to see what these vidders would do the next year. Ah well.
(Seriously, I'd love to see a remaster/reworking of this vid. I think it could be amazing.)
I wish I'd gone looking for Xena fandom at the time to see if this was the sort of thing going on there in general; Xena was always such a standalone fandom, largely cut off from other fandoms and just doing its own thing, and if this was an example, they were several years ahead of other live-action vidders in their willingness to embrace the shiny. I really wish they'd come back the next year to show us something else new, even if it failed in its execution.
Other, less detailed stuff I'm noticing:
Man, some of my favorite vids ever are on this tape. Like Solsbury Hill, by
astolat. <3 <3 The con was just a few months after S5 of Stargate SG-1, when we'd lost Daniel to ascension and had no idea if he'd ever be back. It was a pretty fraught time to be an SG fan, especially a Jack/Daniel fan, and it was all I could do to watch this vid at VVC that year. But I love this, how it follows Daniel's journey from Abydos to SG-1 to ascension, and all the different people who bring him to his new homes. It made ascension really feel like the next step on his journey, rather than a loss. *happy sigh* And then the flip side of that,
barkley's Never Die Young, where Jack is left behind over and over again, and finally as Daniel ascends, and my heart just breaks and breaks. I must have watched this at the con way back when, but man, I don't know how I made it through. ... Apparently I am not over Stargate SG-1.
Weirdly, two other favs of mine are for a show I never really watched, other than an episode or two to be fannishly literate at the time: Witchblade. The first few years of VVC tried hard to make me change my mind about this show, starting with these two vids:
killa's "Comin' Up From Behind" and bonibaru's "Go" (neither of them online, alas).Comin' Up From Behind is just a kickass, boot-stompy vid of awesome Sara Pezzini, and the song's been in my walking playlist rotation ever since I saw this. It's sort of a day-in-the-life character study, starting with her getting ready in the morning (jeans! boots! gun! motorcycle helmet!) and then riding her motorcycle out into the dawn, where she very competently deals with all the shit that comes her way, from ordinary stuff to very not-ordinary stuff, including creepy white-haired guy and his creepy dark-haired, ponytailed lackey (the cut to him on "small fry" makes me grin every time, until finally she saves the world by doing a reset on the entire globe, and ends her day by riding away into the evening on her motorcycle.
Go is just as kickass, but starts from the mystical side of Sara's life, her connection to the Witchblade throughout history, rather than the modern-day cop side. ("Grandma was a suffragette" is *perfect*) She comes to grips with this new knowledge and being part of a world she never knew existed, until it's a seamless part of her helping her to do her job. The whole thing is action and motion and woo, with some fantastic mystical stuff going on everywhere.
The two vids are the opposite sides of the show's coin, and combined are an amazing intro to the series. (Spoilery. But amazing.)
Watching them again, man, it's a pity this aired just long enough ago to have fallen off fandom's radar. I think it might have been a bigger fandom if it had aired in the last few years.
I have been writing this post forever already, so won't go into many more vids, except to mention that I was startled to discover that this vid tape included Remi d'Brebant's Sentinel vid, "Possession". This vid made a huge splash in 2002 because it did some very different things -- it used a lot of still shots, particularly on the choruses. But it didn't premiere at VVC; it premiered at Escapade earlier that year, and showed at VVC in the Experimental show, I think. *checks database* Yes, Experimental.
It was incredibly hard to get hold of; Remi never put it up online that I know of, and I didn't think it had made it onto any tape collections. I had completely forgotten it was on this one. \o/ It aired a couple more times at VVC, but it hasn't been shown since 2004.
Fanlore has some of Snady's comments about Possession from when it was being discussed on Vidder after Escapade. IIRC, the still shots weren't just artistic choice (although they worked well that way), but also limits of the source and technology. I can't remember where I saw that being discussed, though (so probably shouldn't say it, but hopefully someone else has a better memory than I).
It's 1:30 am ET heading into a weekend, and if I post this now, almost no one will see it. But if I don't post it now, I'll save it as a draft and then decide it's not good enough to post, like I do with most of what I write. So here, have a post, whoever is up at this hour!