Vidding

Vidding is the practice of creating fan-made music videos (sometimes called songvids or fanvids) that edit clips from favorite TV shows, anime series, movies, or even official music videos, to another song. It is a cross between narrative story-telling and visual poetry and their content can range from a simple tribute to a favorite character or delve into shipping/slash. Because only small snippets of video images are used and no profit is made, some fans (and lawyers) argue that it should fall under the Fair Use exception to copyright laws. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation for their take on how Fair Use applies to amateur video maker's creations. [http://www.eff.org/pages/UGC-test-suite] Interestingly, while a large number of anime video-makers (or vidders) are male, the bulk of vidders in media (TV/film) fandom are women (although these general lines are beginning to slightly blur). The first songvid was made by Kandy Fong in the 1970s when, at a Star Trek convention, she combined stills on a slide projector and a cassette player. Shortly after that, the Sony Betamax became available to the consumer, and vidders were able to take video clips from taped shows and place them over their own soundtracks. Most fan-run conventions ( [http://www.bascon.org/ Bascon] , [http://escapadecon.net/ Escapade] , [http://members.aol.com/MdiaWstCon/mwc.htm MediaWest*Con] , etc.) host music video shows or vid shows.

Henry Jenkins, a leading academic in popular culture studies and author of "Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture" writes that "Such works certainly interpret the original series but not in a sense that would be recognized by most Literature teachers. They are not simply trying to recover what the original producers meant. They are trying to entertain hypotheticals, address what if questions, and propose alternative realities. Part of the pleasure of fan-made media is seeing the same situations through multiple points of view, reading the same characters in radically different ways. The same artist might offer multiple constructions of the characters and their relationships across different works -- simply to keep alive this play with different readings." More on Henry Jenkins and "How to Watch a Fan-Vid" [http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html]

Invented words are also used when describing fan videos. For example, 'Ship' means a relationship between two characters and some people are referred to as 'Shippers' for a particular couple. 'Slash' stands for a male/male relationship. Also 'canon' means something that has been stated in the book/ film and is the truth in relating to it, where as 'Fanon' is something that fans think has happened but is not stated in the book/ film so is merely speculating. The initials of two characters can also be used to tell the watcher what 'ship' it is about, e.g. MM/AD. MM may also stand for multimedia, which in vidding means a vid made from more than one source show. A garbage can vid is a multimedia vid with source from tens or even hundreds of shows and movies.

Songvids are also known as "music videos", "music vids", "fan vids" or "fanvids", "song videos" or as just "vids". The creators of songvids refer to themselves as "vidders" and the act in itself, as "vidding".

ee also

*Anime music video
*Fandom
*Fan fiction
*Henry Jenkins - "How To Watch A Fan Vid" http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html
*EFF's examples of Fair Use videos http://www.eff.org/pages/UGC-test-suite
*Center of Social Media: Best Practices In Fair Use in Online Video http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/fair_use_in_online_video/
*"Visions and Revisions: Fanvids and Fair Use" by Sarah Trombley http://www.cardozoaelj.net/issues/08/Trombley.pdf