I didn't make him for you!
Sep. 28th, 2009 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynThere's this thing I've wanted to talk about since Vividcon, but after the fan fracas took over any discussion of the con, I just decided to keep my yap shut for a while because it feels like anything about it will fan flames. I have a lot I wish I could say about the overreactions I saw, about the language people used and the conclusions so many people jumped to, but I'm just going to focus on one area that I know a lot about because I think it needs clarifying.
Vid review panels are not for the vidders. They never have been.
There. See, a number of con reports I read exclaimed against the fact that things people say in the review panel on Sunday morning aren't helpful for the vidders, and how much they hate those comments, etc. etc. There was even a bingo game played surreptitiously (which many of my friends engaged in, to my dismay) where you got to mark off cliche comments the audience makes during the panel, I guess because those comments get aired every year and they don't help the vidders.
Review panels for Saturday night vid shows aren't necessarily a fandom-wide thing. At fan cons with vids, historically the vid programming fell into two camps -- vid contests and vid shows. Award winners at the contest-having cons were often announced at Sunday morning panels or breakfasts. But there were always fans running cons who don't like contests, and they simply presented vid shows, erasing the competition factor (because let's face it, in fandom, competitions aren't really competitive, they're often popularity contests or fandom du jour contests). Review panels came about because people wanted to discuss the vids and what they thought of the shows. How that helped or didn't help a vidder wasn't really part of the conversation; it was about the audience having a chance to discuss these things in lieu of any awards or honors.
That's a huge simplification, but it helps to put some of this in context for new fans who know nothing about the history of cons and vidding. Cons generally have fallen into a couple different categories, and what people think of as fan-run cons (see this page at Fanlore for a good introduction to cons) tend to focus on fan-created entertainments as a highlight or one of the highlights of the weekend. Many of the most well-known ones started at a time without the Internet to communicate with other people who wanted to go; there certainly wasn't computer vidding, and fanfic appeared in zines that were sold at dealer's tables (or frequently under the table, literally, if it was slash). You couldn't just get started in fandom by clicking a button or searching -- often you needed to know someone or go someplace where you could find out about fandom in general before you ever got to the specifics of fanfic, vids, etc. Vids were most often obtainable only on tapes of fannish con vid shows or contests -- few vidders put out their own collections (speaking from experience, it was quite an ordeal putting together vid tape collections and you were lucky if you could make back the high costs of getting them out to people). It was a lot easier to let the con do it for you!
A lot of cons feature entertainment other than a vid show -- SF cons often have masquerades or costume shows, some historically held plays or filking as their primary entertainment. But as vidding grew (slowly) as a source of fannish entertainment and more people were able to do it using emerging and cheaper technology -- and this encompasses everything from the first home VCRs to the first editing-specific tape decks to Hi-8 to computers -- vid shows became more popular because they were easier to put together. Back in the VCR days and in the early days of computer vidding, people brought their tapes (later discs) to the shows, so breaks between songs were a natural occurrence. Escapade already had instituted a vid review panel for attendees to talk about the vids, but they decided in the mid-'90s to utilize the breaks by creating comment sheets for the viewers to write quick notes about the vids.
Comment sheets were for the vidders. We used to gather round after the show in some common space or someone's room and read the comments people left for us, resulting in hurt feelings, anger, extreme happiness, pride, laughter, and mocking. It was Escapade comment sheets that gave us immortal vidding lines like "nice use of vid clips." But a lot of the audience felt like, as the comment sheets got more complicated and larger, they were in school taking some kind of 30-second test in between each vid, and gradually comment sheets faded away, from both audience malaise and vid show comm antipathy. I worked on the vid show comm at Escapade, and spent way too many hours putting them together, collecting and organizing them, and reading comments designed to be cruel and cutting, with nothing redeeming for the vidder at all. Many of my friends loved them, but I grew to hate them, though I confess I do miss reading some of the loopier, funnier comments.
A lot of that commentary slack has been taken up by vid show reports in LJ and whatnot. It's definitely not the same environment and if people aren't on your flist, or linked from a community, you may never have the chance to see those comments and pick up feedback on your vid. But few cons offered anything like the comment sheets anyway (I think Zebracon did once, but otherwise, I really don't know of another con like Escapade that used such a tool; if you do, please let me know). The general feeling was that the vidders would get personal comments at the con, and if there were awards or review panels, they could go to those and hear stuff. But neither were designed to provide in-depth feedback; if you wanted that, you had to look elsewhere.
I've run vid review panels before at Escapade and this past year co-modded with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jarrow, and I generally try to be pretty honest and straightforward about my feelings on vids. I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings, and I also try to focus on the vid rather than make assumptions about a vidder or decide I know what the vidder's intent is, but I say what I think. I do that because I believe that as the audience, we have the right to talk about the vids and say what we think -- if a vid has been made public, in any kind of venue, then it is fair game for discussion and critique. OF ANY KIND. Now, I'm not advocating some of the nastiness I see people engage in, and attacking a work simply because they can. But if you put it out there, then it will be talked about, and you have to prepare yourself for that.
That said, it's important to realize that most of the time, the audience in a show like this is not talking about it for your benefit or with you in mind. At some con review panels, they won't know if the vidder is there or not. They're talking about their impressions, their feelings, and they're not providing a critique to the vidder. They're not reviewers, but they are reviewing their impressions about the vids. If we as vidders are in the audience and taking away the feedback, that's fine -- after all, vidders so rarely hear anything about their work that it's like finding gold nuggets in their Honey Nut Cheerios: here's an audience in one place, talking about what they liked or didn't like in a vid, in great detail. 's wonderful, 's marvelous! This year, I found the discussion about my Mad Men vid utterly fascinating and people said things I never would have expected, but they weren't saying them for my benefit. I got to take home some of the cool comments and pet them, but I looked to post-con review comments for more detail, for information that may have offered me more to learn from and grow.
Not every vidder wants to learn and grow. While that disappoints me personally, I know that's not what motivates everyone, and I have to accept that a lot of people just come to a vid review panel to hear what they hope will be nice comments. However, people in the audience may be critical, and for vidders or attendees to lament the cruelty of comments that "don't help the vidder" is missing the point of these gatherings. It could just as easily be awards for a contest, where you're not going to hear anything except who won "best humor vid" and it's a vid you thought was lousy and decidedly unfunny when your own was the biggest ROTFLfest to hit vidding in decades.
Another side effect of griping over the comments in a vid review panel and whether they are/aren't helpful to a vidder is that it quashes discussion. John and I were adamant about not seeing the same hands during review this year; I think in large part that helped encourage some folks who were timid about saying anything initially. But when someone posts a great big rant about people who compare a new vid to a prior vid made to the same song or turns a comment like that into a mocking entry in a sekrit bingo game, future audience members will be a lot less likely to participate in the discussion, and then everyone loses.
Vidders are probably already filtering out what they don't want to hear at a review panel anyway, and non-vidders tend to self-censor primarily because they aren't vidders, feeling they don't have anything valid to say. This is something I've been battling against my whole time on LJ, and for a large part of my fannish life. I think everyone has something to say and it doesn't matter whether they're a vidder or a writer or an artist or whatever. Consumer opinion is as valid as producer opinion. If we believe that vid review has to become a tool for giving the vidder what they want and thus censor comments that aren't helpful to a vidder, then we all lose, because those people who won't speak up since they're "just a consumer" are lost to us completely. Deriding their comments or ranting about it later aren't going to help ANYone.
If VVC vid review has to change because the nature of vidding is changing -- fewer and fewer cons have vid shows where new vids are entered; instead they're cherry picked by a person or committee; most awards programs have moved online and are often confined to highly specific criteria -- then that's cool. But it's important to understand, before anything happens, how vid review evolved and who it's for. Without that, all we're doing is reacting to a kerfuffle over something that doesn't even really exist in the form some people think it does. Vid review at VVC is a bit of a chimera, really -- it has all these different parts that seem to exist for various people, but it really only began as one animal. I have a lot of faith in the con comm that if it does evolve into a different creature, it will be because it makes sense for everyone, both the vidders and the general audience, to discuss the show. But I have a feeling a lot of people will kick and scream because they believe it's something it's not.
With as many new folks as we had this past year, history and fannish culture becomes more important than ever, I believe. You shouldn't condemn the review panel without understanding its purpose and its history. Though fannish culture, and vidding culture in particular, is evolving at light speeds these days, we have to keep in mind that traditions are usually created in some specific era or to fulfill some specific need. In this case, non-contest vid shows needed a place where the non-Internet-era audiences could discuss the vids they'd seen at a given con, and thus the vid show tradition was born. Anything we do in the future has to keep in mind that past, not to quell a few fans' crankiness over this year's review panel or the types of comments they hear each year. Vid review is a good tradition and one that I think can evolve and maintain its usefulness, and its fun, especially at a vid-focused con like Vividcon.
Vid review panels are not for the vidders. They never have been.
There. See, a number of con reports I read exclaimed against the fact that things people say in the review panel on Sunday morning aren't helpful for the vidders, and how much they hate those comments, etc. etc. There was even a bingo game played surreptitiously (which many of my friends engaged in, to my dismay) where you got to mark off cliche comments the audience makes during the panel, I guess because those comments get aired every year and they don't help the vidders.
Review panels for Saturday night vid shows aren't necessarily a fandom-wide thing. At fan cons with vids, historically the vid programming fell into two camps -- vid contests and vid shows. Award winners at the contest-having cons were often announced at Sunday morning panels or breakfasts. But there were always fans running cons who don't like contests, and they simply presented vid shows, erasing the competition factor (because let's face it, in fandom, competitions aren't really competitive, they're often popularity contests or fandom du jour contests). Review panels came about because people wanted to discuss the vids and what they thought of the shows. How that helped or didn't help a vidder wasn't really part of the conversation; it was about the audience having a chance to discuss these things in lieu of any awards or honors.
That's a huge simplification, but it helps to put some of this in context for new fans who know nothing about the history of cons and vidding. Cons generally have fallen into a couple different categories, and what people think of as fan-run cons (see this page at Fanlore for a good introduction to cons) tend to focus on fan-created entertainments as a highlight or one of the highlights of the weekend. Many of the most well-known ones started at a time without the Internet to communicate with other people who wanted to go; there certainly wasn't computer vidding, and fanfic appeared in zines that were sold at dealer's tables (or frequently under the table, literally, if it was slash). You couldn't just get started in fandom by clicking a button or searching -- often you needed to know someone or go someplace where you could find out about fandom in general before you ever got to the specifics of fanfic, vids, etc. Vids were most often obtainable only on tapes of fannish con vid shows or contests -- few vidders put out their own collections (speaking from experience, it was quite an ordeal putting together vid tape collections and you were lucky if you could make back the high costs of getting them out to people). It was a lot easier to let the con do it for you!
A lot of cons feature entertainment other than a vid show -- SF cons often have masquerades or costume shows, some historically held plays or filking as their primary entertainment. But as vidding grew (slowly) as a source of fannish entertainment and more people were able to do it using emerging and cheaper technology -- and this encompasses everything from the first home VCRs to the first editing-specific tape decks to Hi-8 to computers -- vid shows became more popular because they were easier to put together. Back in the VCR days and in the early days of computer vidding, people brought their tapes (later discs) to the shows, so breaks between songs were a natural occurrence. Escapade already had instituted a vid review panel for attendees to talk about the vids, but they decided in the mid-'90s to utilize the breaks by creating comment sheets for the viewers to write quick notes about the vids.
Comment sheets were for the vidders. We used to gather round after the show in some common space or someone's room and read the comments people left for us, resulting in hurt feelings, anger, extreme happiness, pride, laughter, and mocking. It was Escapade comment sheets that gave us immortal vidding lines like "nice use of vid clips." But a lot of the audience felt like, as the comment sheets got more complicated and larger, they were in school taking some kind of 30-second test in between each vid, and gradually comment sheets faded away, from both audience malaise and vid show comm antipathy. I worked on the vid show comm at Escapade, and spent way too many hours putting them together, collecting and organizing them, and reading comments designed to be cruel and cutting, with nothing redeeming for the vidder at all. Many of my friends loved them, but I grew to hate them, though I confess I do miss reading some of the loopier, funnier comments.
A lot of that commentary slack has been taken up by vid show reports in LJ and whatnot. It's definitely not the same environment and if people aren't on your flist, or linked from a community, you may never have the chance to see those comments and pick up feedback on your vid. But few cons offered anything like the comment sheets anyway (I think Zebracon did once, but otherwise, I really don't know of another con like Escapade that used such a tool; if you do, please let me know). The general feeling was that the vidders would get personal comments at the con, and if there were awards or review panels, they could go to those and hear stuff. But neither were designed to provide in-depth feedback; if you wanted that, you had to look elsewhere.
I've run vid review panels before at Escapade and this past year co-modded with
jarrow, and I generally try to be pretty honest and straightforward about my feelings on vids. I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings, and I also try to focus on the vid rather than make assumptions about a vidder or decide I know what the vidder's intent is, but I say what I think. I do that because I believe that as the audience, we have the right to talk about the vids and say what we think -- if a vid has been made public, in any kind of venue, then it is fair game for discussion and critique. OF ANY KIND. Now, I'm not advocating some of the nastiness I see people engage in, and attacking a work simply because they can. But if you put it out there, then it will be talked about, and you have to prepare yourself for that.That said, it's important to realize that most of the time, the audience in a show like this is not talking about it for your benefit or with you in mind. At some con review panels, they won't know if the vidder is there or not. They're talking about their impressions, their feelings, and they're not providing a critique to the vidder. They're not reviewers, but they are reviewing their impressions about the vids. If we as vidders are in the audience and taking away the feedback, that's fine -- after all, vidders so rarely hear anything about their work that it's like finding gold nuggets in their Honey Nut Cheerios: here's an audience in one place, talking about what they liked or didn't like in a vid, in great detail. 's wonderful, 's marvelous! This year, I found the discussion about my Mad Men vid utterly fascinating and people said things I never would have expected, but they weren't saying them for my benefit. I got to take home some of the cool comments and pet them, but I looked to post-con review comments for more detail, for information that may have offered me more to learn from and grow.
Not every vidder wants to learn and grow. While that disappoints me personally, I know that's not what motivates everyone, and I have to accept that a lot of people just come to a vid review panel to hear what they hope will be nice comments. However, people in the audience may be critical, and for vidders or attendees to lament the cruelty of comments that "don't help the vidder" is missing the point of these gatherings. It could just as easily be awards for a contest, where you're not going to hear anything except who won "best humor vid" and it's a vid you thought was lousy and decidedly unfunny when your own was the biggest ROTFLfest to hit vidding in decades.
Another side effect of griping over the comments in a vid review panel and whether they are/aren't helpful to a vidder is that it quashes discussion. John and I were adamant about not seeing the same hands during review this year; I think in large part that helped encourage some folks who were timid about saying anything initially. But when someone posts a great big rant about people who compare a new vid to a prior vid made to the same song or turns a comment like that into a mocking entry in a sekrit bingo game, future audience members will be a lot less likely to participate in the discussion, and then everyone loses.
Vidders are probably already filtering out what they don't want to hear at a review panel anyway, and non-vidders tend to self-censor primarily because they aren't vidders, feeling they don't have anything valid to say. This is something I've been battling against my whole time on LJ, and for a large part of my fannish life. I think everyone has something to say and it doesn't matter whether they're a vidder or a writer or an artist or whatever. Consumer opinion is as valid as producer opinion. If we believe that vid review has to become a tool for giving the vidder what they want and thus censor comments that aren't helpful to a vidder, then we all lose, because those people who won't speak up since they're "just a consumer" are lost to us completely. Deriding their comments or ranting about it later aren't going to help ANYone.
If VVC vid review has to change because the nature of vidding is changing -- fewer and fewer cons have vid shows where new vids are entered; instead they're cherry picked by a person or committee; most awards programs have moved online and are often confined to highly specific criteria -- then that's cool. But it's important to understand, before anything happens, how vid review evolved and who it's for. Without that, all we're doing is reacting to a kerfuffle over something that doesn't even really exist in the form some people think it does. Vid review at VVC is a bit of a chimera, really -- it has all these different parts that seem to exist for various people, but it really only began as one animal. I have a lot of faith in the con comm that if it does evolve into a different creature, it will be because it makes sense for everyone, both the vidders and the general audience, to discuss the show. But I have a feeling a lot of people will kick and scream because they believe it's something it's not.
With as many new folks as we had this past year, history and fannish culture becomes more important than ever, I believe. You shouldn't condemn the review panel without understanding its purpose and its history. Though fannish culture, and vidding culture in particular, is evolving at light speeds these days, we have to keep in mind that traditions are usually created in some specific era or to fulfill some specific need. In this case, non-contest vid shows needed a place where the non-Internet-era audiences could discuss the vids they'd seen at a given con, and thus the vid show tradition was born. Anything we do in the future has to keep in mind that past, not to quell a few fans' crankiness over this year's review panel or the types of comments they hear each year. Vid review is a good tradition and one that I think can evolve and maintain its usefulness, and its fun, especially at a vid-focused con like Vividcon.
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Date: 2009-10-12 06:50 am (UTC)