Last night I dreamed a brainstorming session for a "visibility"-themed vidshow, covering invisible characters, queer representation (complete with debates on where subtext ends and text begins), and ending with lim's "Us" as a meditation on "mainstreaming" via its literally effaced footage. (I still don't think this tops my waking idea for a vidshow on cyborgs, which also culminates in vidding self-reflexivity.)

Obviously a sign that I should spend today finally finishing this post.

I rationalized attending vividcon by calculating the time and energy I would save catching up on the deluge of premieres through watching them all in one fell swoop. It certainly lived up to my expectations on that account! I plan for this to be the last recs post for a long while. Keep in mind that my taste in vids is idiosyncratic, and this is intended as an inventory of my subjective favorites, not as an objective hierarchy of craftsmanship.

In this vein, I made an executive decision to exclude stand-alone movie vids from this list of recs. While I saw a number of vids from single-movie source at the con that were individually captivating, I don't find movies very interesting on the whole, and thus I don't find movie vids very interesting as a genre.

Complete playlists for all VVC08 vidshows are helpfully compiled HERE.

My Winner's Circle
For all my disclaimers, I imagine this resembles many con-goers' top three (1 and 2 were the selections for in-depth review). The marked similarities here are telling: in addition to Summer Glau, all these vids feature perverse relationships, cleverly manipulated and/or external footage, and a gradually emerging reveal. The latter strategy has a particular payoff in the reception context of VividCon. Typically, one would click through to a vid motivated at minimum by the framing information in the author's post, and often by the supplementary comments of a reccer as well. A premieres show, by contrast, guarantees a captive audience "unspoiled" by any paratexts, creating different narrative opportunities from the internet's temporal and spatial dispersion. And yes, I am about to spoil you.

vidder(s): sweetestdrain
title: Gloria
music: Patti Smith
fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
focus: Sarah/Cameron
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: People say beware, but I don't care.
comments: The premiere of this vid alone was worth the price of admission: watching surprise lesbian robot porn unfold was an unforgettable encounter. Already thrilled with butch Sarah at the beginning (remember how dualbunny taught us that Starbuck IS Pink? well sweetestdrain makes a convincing case that Sarah Connor IS Patti Smith), I may never recover from how thoroughly I was bowled over by my own kinks as the story developed. jagwriter78 recently coined the term "vidfic" -- I think we have here an exemplar of that mode. I'd venture that this is the greatest femslash vid made to date.

vidder(s): obsessive24
title: Climbing Up the Walls
music: Radiohead
fandom: Supernatural, Heroes, Firefly/Serenity
focus: Sam/Dean Winchester, Nathan/Peter Petrelli, Simon/River Tam
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: Siblings. "I am the pick in the ice."
comments: My lack of patience with either Winchesters or Petrellis had me rolling my eyes when this started. My date whispered, "I don't think this is a vid about 80% boys, I think it's a vid about INCEST." Well THAT I can certainly get behind! As the author notes, this is open to multiple readings (and various commentaries are linked) -- personally I experience it as gleefully cracktastic, but I'm aware that there's a darker morality tale lurking within if one takes it seriously. For the uninitiated: these are three wildly popular pairings in fandom, not simply three random pairs of siblings -- this is a metavid about a topical fannish phenomenon. Here's to the queer frontier.

vidder(s): bradcpu
title: Tear You Apart
music: She Wants Revenge
fandom: Firefly
focus: Simon/Kaylee (River)
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: It feels so right.
comments: This vid is fiendishly disorienting until the POV coalesces. Exquisitely edited, deliciously disturbing, and perfectly River. Smart notes by bradcpu: "I tried to make a vid that would look and feel fractured, but not really tell the viewer why it looks fractured until the final segment of the vid. Hopefully the first 2/3 of the vid looks different on a second viewing. I tried to push the River POV by using lots of jump cuts and medical shots (tons of secondary source); and by connecting sexual desire to violence and Reavers, because I would imagine it would have all looked the same in River's head." It worked.


Additional Top Ten Premieres (includes Also Premiering and Fuck You! challenge shows)

vidder(s): Seah + Margie
title: Handlebars
music: The Flobots
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Ten
availability: download, imeem
summary: I'm the Doctor. Look me up.
comments: I was skeptical that I'd enjoy another vid to this song after spending so much time with kiki_miserychic's BSG 4.0 Handlebars, but it turned out to be refreshing to experience it with a close internal POV. There was another Handlebars vid in Premieres, deejay's Iron Man version, which I also enjoyed (but see above re: not putting movie vids on the list). This is the consummate portrait of a megalomaniacal hero, or, why The Doctor is a jerk.

vidder(s): buffyann
title: This World
music: Zero 7
fandom: BSG
focus: ensemble
availability: download (imeem coming soon)
summary: This world is still afloat, we still have hope.

vidder(s): nightchik
title: Beautiful Struggle
music: Talib Kweli
fandom: Harry Potter
focus: Harry
availability: download
summary: Life is beautiful. Life is a struggle.

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: King of Spain
music: Moxy Fruvous
fandom: Little Mosque on the Prairie
focus: Amaar Rashid
availability: download, imeem
summary: It's not the spiritual enlightenment he was expecting.

vidder(s): heresluck
title: Strength in You
music: Kim Richey
fandom: Gilmore Girls
focus: Lorelei/Rory Lorelei + Rory
availability: download, imeem
summary: I swear I'll be there forever.

vidder(s): cesperanza
title: Supersmart
music: The Headstones
fandom: SGA
focus: meta
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

vidder(s): keewick
title: 32
music: Regina Spektor
fandom: SGA
focus: Teyla
availability: download
summary: 32 is still a goddamn number.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Special Death
music: Mirah
fandom: Deadwood
focus: Joanie Stubbs
availability: download (divx), vimeo
summary: A terrible mistake was made.

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Scarlet Ribbons
music: Sinead O'Connor
fandom: Buffyverse
focus: slayers
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: She will not sleep on a bed of bones. / Your faces, O my sisters! Your faces filled of light!

vidder(s): lierdumoa
title: How Much Is That Geisha in the Window?
music: "Boyd's Journey" by Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman on the Ravenous (1999) Original Soundtrack; Adam Baldwin, Nathan Fillian and Gina Torres in the "Firefly Extended Gag Reel"
fandom: Firefly (2002), w/ additional source from Serenity (2005), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and Gone with the Wind (1939)
focus: Invisible Asians
availability: download (imeem coming soon)
summary: Fuck you Joss, you racist asshole.


Top Ten Club Vivid Premieres

vidder(s): Abby
title: I Will Survive
music: Gloria Gaynor
fandom: BSG
focus: Number Six
availability: [please help me find it!]
summary: As long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive.
comments: Frankly, this vid isn't very well constructed, but it doesn't matter because the concept is pure genius. Its wrongness made me dance and scream and short-circuit.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Shut Up and Drive
music: Rhianna
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Martha (Martha/Ten, but I'm ignoring that)
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Martha > you.

vidder(s): charmax
title: Smiley Faces
music: Gnarls Barkley
fandom: Torchwood
focus: Jack, ensemble
availability: download, vimeo, imeem, youtube
summary: Team Torchwood and "how hard this life can be."

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: Hold Music
music: Architecture in Helsinki
fandom: So NoTORIous
focus: Tori Spelling, Mimi LaRue (her pug) and one of her BFFs, Sasan (Zach Quinto)
availability: download, imeem
summary: For the 98% out there who don’t know anything about the show: It’s a semi-autobiographical comedy about Tori Spelling’s life.

vidder(s): f1renze
title: Television, Television
music: OK Go
fandom: The Sopranos
focus: ensemble
availability: [not posted yet]
summary: Give up the world, give up your life, 'cause you cannot fight the television.

vidder(s): mamoru22
title: A Little Less Conversation
music: Elvis Presley
fandom: Boston Legal
focus: Denny/Alan
availability: download (xvid, mp4), imeem
summary: Because Denny IS Elvis in every way that counts.

vidder(s): millylicious
title: Don't Cha / Seether
music: Party Ben (Pussycat Dolls + Veruca Salt)
fandom: Buffyverse
focus: Buffy/Faith
availability: download, imeem
summary: Two slayers, two seperate paths.

vidder(s): counteragent
title: Ladies Night
music: Kool and the Gang
fandom: multi
focus: hotness
availability: download (xvid, wmv), youtube
summary: Professional competence is sexy.

vidder(s): foomatic
title: Girl 4 All Seasons
music: Northern State
fandom: multi
focus: hotness
availability: download (divx), imeem, youtube
summary: Girls kick ass.

vidder(s): dualbunny
title: Party Join Us
music: "Shin Chan" ending theme
fandom: She-Ra
focus: ensemble
availability: [not posted yet]
summary: dualbunny was DRESSED UP as She-Ra at Club Vivid. Enough said.


Top Ten New-To-Me Vids (does NOT include Action, AMVs, and Second Bananas, which I didn't attend -- sorry!)
Honestly these categories are somewhat arbitrary, as I later discovered that I HAD demonstrably seen a couple of these before -- certainly they were less familiar than those below.

vidder(s): xandra_ptv
title: They
music: Jem
fandom: Big Love
focus: sisterwives (and Bill)
show: Ensemble
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: The problems and paranoia of living the polygamist lifestyle.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: The Lonely People
music: MystiQuintet
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Rose
show: End of the World
availability: download, imeem
summary: What is the cost of a better life?

vidder(s): charmax
title: Don't Stop Me Now
music: Queen
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: The Master
show: Sense of Play
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Sometimes an evil genius just needs to let his hair down and have some fun.

vidder(s): sisabet
title: Doctor Who on Holiday
music: Dean Gray
fandom: BSG, Farscape, Doctor Who
focus: Cylons, Peacekeepers, Daleks
show: Club Vivid
availability: download [currently broken]
summary: Remix of sockkpuppett's mashup Sci-Fi Friday in a Blender.

vidder(s): counteragent
title: In These Shoes
music: Kirsty MacColl
fandom: Alias
focus: Sydney, Nadia, Rachel [femslash subtext]
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem
summary: "In these shoes? I don't think so." Sydney and Nadia and Rachel supporting each other and being awesome.

vidder(s): andrastewhite
title: Baby, You Can Drive My Car
music: The Beatles
fandom: Heroes
focus: Hiro/Ando
show: Joy
availability: download (divx)
summary: "Our life of legend begins!"

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: The Real Slim Shady
music: Eminem
fandom: Starsky & Hutch (mostly)
focus: Everything but the redheads.
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: This vid is a shaggy dog story. You have been warned.

vidder(s): mamoru22
title: Without Me
music: Eminem
fandom: SGA
focus: David Hewlett
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download, imeem
summary: David Hewlett, how are you so awesome?

vidder(s): wistful_fever
title: Chasing Arizona
music: "Meds" by Placebo
fandom: Fall Out Boy RPS
focus: Pete/Patrick AU
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Pete is in love with his best friend. Life is great. Only... his best friend isn't real.

vidder(s): Hana no JudgeHolden Productions
title: Lost in an Anime Dream
music: Jump by Madonna
fandom: ROD TV, Lost in Translation, Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, music video for "Jump"
focus: Charlotte
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download
summary: counteragent - "This vid not only merges live action and anime and real-person source in a technologically riveting fashion, it also speaks to both the isolation and connection engendered by our relationship with modern media."


Top Ten NOT New-To-Me Vids (that I haven't gotten around to reccing previously)

vidder(s): heyiya
title: The Future Stops Here
music: Rabbit in Your Headlights by UNKLE featuring Thom Yorke
fandom: 28 Days Later, Children of Men, V for Vendetta
focus: dystopia
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download (mov, avi), imeem, vimeo
summary: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever." - George Orwell

vidder(s): halcyon_shift
title: Big City Life
music: Mattafix
fandom: Dark Angel
focus: Max
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download
summary: It's all good, all the time.

vidder(s): mranderson71
title: This Is Matrix Life
music: “This Is Your Life” by The Dust Brothers feat. Tyler Durden
fandom: The Matrix Trilogy
focus: Fight Club mashup
show: Nearly New
availability: vimeo (with download)
summary: Action-sarcasm.

vidder(s): di_br
title: All the Small Things
music: Blink 182
fandom: The Daily Show + The Colbert Report
focus: Jon/Stephen
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download, youtube
summary: This is a video about the friendship between Jon and Stephen... It's NOT meant to be a slashy vid, but these two don't make things any easier for me, OH NO!

vidder(s): newkidfan
title: The Tree
music: Chanson de L'Arbre by Autour de Lucie
fandom: SGA
focus: McKay/Sheppard
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download (rar), imeem
summary: Since the day John left him, Rodney hasn't moved.

vidder(s): keewick
title: Martina
music: Meryn Cadell
fandom: Veronica Mars
focus: Veronica
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download
summary: Knock on wood.

vidder(s): jarrow
title: About Schroeder
music: No More Kings
fandom: Farscape
focus: John/Chiana
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem
summary: Chiana tries to understand John, but he isn't reaching back.

vidder(s): beerbad
title: Early Winter
music: Gwen Stefani
fandom: Grey's Anatomy
focus: Lexie/Meredith Grey
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem, youtube

vidder(s): beerbad (with jarrow)
title: Promiscuous Girl
music: "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland
fandom: BSG
focus: Kara/Laura
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download (wmv), imeem, youtube
summary: OTP, baby!

vidder(s): fan_eunice + greensilver
title: Papa Don't Preach
music: Madonna
fandom: Torchwood + Doctor Who
focus: Jack/Master, Jack/Ianto, with Ten as "Papa"
show: Nearly New
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Jack is keeping his baby... yeah, we went there.

It's important to us that Media Fetish: The Vidshow! be not only a fleeting local event, but a permanent virtual installation that the community can share. To that end, I have much belatedly transcribed excerpts of our remarks on the vids to post here. The full playlist is in the original entry; cut are a handful of vids where our observations are already more or less documented online, as well as familiar background information. Apologies for the abridgements, and for the sustained inelegance that comes of translating our extemporaneous performance to text. We were having a great time!

~ Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa


FEMINIST FETISHISM

:: California Crew : Oh Boy : Quantum Leap ::

FC: There's a lot of female desire on that screen. Quantum Leap, like much genre television, follows this formula that fans often talk about: what they call the "bimbo of the week" phenomenon, where a man who has a thru-arc gets to meet a new, narratively disposable woman every week, who we see once and then never see again. By editing the women together, the Cali Crew has created this sort of swamp of physical desire -- all of the women appear in this three minutes -- and so, rather than have this sense of them as a disposable entity, what you actually get is a picture of them swamping the lead (pushing him, shoving him, holding him down, grabbing him). And I would say that what they've done is figured the female audience, that they've actually created a narrative space for themselves by editing this swamp of desiring women, of the female fans themselves, onto the screen.

JLR: It's so perfect with the lyrics, too -- "you don't know what you've been missing" -- writing that audience and their desires and what they value in that narrative back into the text.

FC: And also the women, right? "You don't know what you've been missing," because women don't matter on television. They come into the story, they go out of the story, and it's OK that we never see them again -- now we do, and in this kind of tidal-waving force. Obviously it also constructs Sam Beckett, the lead, as an object of physical desire, so that he is very much NOT the agent of the reception of all this lust.


:: Rache & Sandy : Hot Hot Hot : multifandom ::

FC: The subtitle of "Hot Hot Hot" is "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness." One of the things I want to be clear about is that, in addition to women as filmmakers, this is privileging a distinctly female way of seeing. What the Media Cannibals made "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness" do, and what you're really wanting to do when you watch this vid: they are showing you how the desiring female fan watches television. And one of the things that they're doing is constructing patterns. It's essentially showing the tropes that the female fan community has fetishized and found sexy -- which is not how women are supposed to watch television.

JLR: The last thing I wanted to emphasize about this is that it takes some history to get to this vid, because it's the work in community building that has come before it in other vids, and also in other aspects of fandom and fan fiction, that have created this taxonomy that's recognizable to people that they can then catalogue. In multifandom vids that use so many sources I'm always also tempted to read them as allegories for fans themselves. I think part of what it's saying in creating this largely joyous collection (there's a lot of dancing in this vid) is: "look how much fun we're having -- we're really hot!"

FC: I think that's true. And I think the argument of the vid is that television, properly viewed, is a fountain of polymorphous perversity. You also notice that the prettiness is very polymorphous -- there were straight couples, men, women, gay couples -- some that are in the text (Queer as Folk), some that are constructed. There's no limitation on the way that the sexuality goes, and some of that stuff is intended to be sexual in the text and some of it's not, or at least not to the degree to which fans are willing to admit.


:: Media Cannibals : Detachable Penis : The Professionals ::

FC: This vid stages the fan's love/hate relationship with television. The Professionals is a British cop show, and clearly we love the show and we love these guys, and yet the distinctively female aesthetic of the vid is both enjoying them showing off their penises, but also is a critique of violence and all sorts of other phallocentric stuff.

JLR: The reason I really wanted that vid in this show, which is about media technology as a fetish, is that it demonstrates the way that masculinity is a prosthesis. In the buddy cop show, which is all about the really intense homosocial relationship between these guys, there's so much anxiety around stabilizing their masculinity that it just erupts in all of these phallic images: their guns and their knives, these accessories that they need in order to feel appropriately manly. And so "Detachable Penis" is viewing the technologies that this TV show is using, through this fan technology, to create a critique or an argument about that (and its gayness).


VIDDING VIDDING

:: laurashapiro & halcyon_shift : I Put You There : Giles, original animation ::

JLR: This vid gives a little bit of the background about the motivation behind the kinds of queer and feminist readings we've been playing out in this show, because it offers the media fetishist's position of deep love for this televisual object that's indifferent to her existence. But it's talking about how vidding as a technology, and in this case literally animation as a technology, is a way of asserting agency over those representations, and reinserting the fan back into that story. The particular object is Giles, but I don't think it has to be Giles, it could be anyone, and I don't think it necessarily even has to be a character: you could also read it as, in a broader sense, about the absence of female fans' desires and stories from those narratives, and the way that vids, through reappropriating those images, can insert those desires and stories back in.

FC: You can see that in something like "Oh Boy," the figuring of female desire -- that's the grandmother of this vid.


:: Seah & Margie : Walking on the Ground : multifandom ::

JLR: This vid screened at VividCon, which is a fan convention for vidding that's been going on since 2002. So I think you can see in this vid a certain historical consciousness about this art form. It tells the story of fans' engagement with media technologies through clips of the ways that screen texts have represented technologies. I think it's very overtly framed politically in terms of struggles between fans and the industry: with every new technology, they're trying to put the brakes on what fans are doing with it, and at every stage, fans have refused and have continued appropriating these videos, moved into every new technological form to do bigger and more beautiful things with it.

FC: This vid is so clean and beautiful that it's hard to notice how complex it is. There's a framing narrative of a slide projector, and this is a shot from M*A*S*H, of them showing one of those films that they used to show in the mess hall -- there's about ten layers in this video! I think it's really easy when you're watching this vid to disregard the framing narrative of the [changing screens].


:: counteragent : Destiny Calling : vidding ::

JLR: This last metavid we're showing is a quite recent vid which was made as a tribute to vidding. On the one hand, this is very much just about vids=joy, the headline of this vid -- a simple celebration of a bunch of vids that this newbie vidder really really loves. At the same time, I think it's very much a product of this moment, since YouTube and since "Closer" leaked on YouTube, of vidding coming into some consciousness of what its intervention is in this larger world of DIY media, and how it looks to the outside world, and what it's actually doing that's unique and important. So I think through highlighting this vidder's personal canon of great vids, you'll see it's explicitly framed as a statement of what is awesome about vidding [today].

FC: It's sort of the grassroots version of me traveling around with my talk. Vidders are perfectly capable of articulating their own rationale for why they want to be included in the process.

JLR: I think the ideal viewer of this vid is someone who's actually seen most of the vids that are in it, and so has a sense, when those are referenced briefly, of the larger work. The reason that right now there can be a vid that references so many other vids from so many different fandoms is because digital video and internet video have set the stage for vidding itself to become a sort of fandom. With VividCon (the convention) and with the accessibility of vids, I think they've really captured the imagination of a lot more fans, and so fans have become interested in the form of vidding and in watching vids for the craft and not necessarily because they're saying something about the particular show that they watch.


GENDER TROUBLE

JLR: This brings us to the last group of vids that I call Gender Trouble, which I think actually depend on this whole history that has come before, in terms of the tradition of feminist critique, but also in terms of the increasing dialogue between vidding as a subculture and other forms of internet video and mainstream concerns about the media. And also [in terms of] the increasingly advanced technologies that people are using to vid, and the cross-pollination between different aesthetics and techniques. These vids are putting all of those elements, both historical and contemporary, together to make what I hope you will think are very beautiful and complex artworks that are making really interesting arguments.


:: absolutedestiny : I Enjoy Being a Girl : Alias, Buffy, BSG, Firefly, Veronica Mars ::

JLR: I think this is a very playful question about what actually it means to be a girl, and how femininity is represented. One of the things I think it's trying to suggest is that our work as viewers and fans has the potential to redefine what it might mean to be a girl through the particular elements of these televisual texts that we are drawn to and that we celebrate. It's responding very positively to a new genre of television -- the "ass-kicking girl genre teen show" -- and celebrating a revised notion of what femininity could appear as on television and in the viewing practices of fans.


:: sockkpuppett : Vogue : 300 ::

JLR: This is a vid which I think again asks the question: how is femininity represented? But as you'll see, in a much different way.

FC: Twice, both in this and "Being a Girl," you're getting violence being aestheticized as dance as a kind of feminist refusal. This is an incredibly violent movie, and there's a kind of refusal to see it as a rampage of murder, and instead to cast it as the dancefloor. It actually is staging a different way of seeing -- so is "Being a Girl," by the way: as much as it's giving credence to a new kind of femininity, it is also refusing the violence of the narrative and positing that as a certain kind of dance routine. It's staged as a musical spectacular, and saying: we like musical spectacular! And luminosity's doing that with "Vogue," with its attention to the body. She's looking at all these warriors, at how beautiful they are, and framing the battlefield as a dancefloor, which in some ways is making it camp by refusing its overt meaning about seriousness, masculinity (all the swords are phallic). So I think it is really staging a feminist way of seeing, and a feminist puncturing of the incredible pomposity of Frank Miller's 300, with its incredibly violent pretentious kind of narrative.

JLR: I think it's making a pretty convincing argument that what 300 is actually about is the spectacle of male bodies, and the way that really feminizes masculinity, because they're there just to be half-naked and making these beautiful movements on this beautiful, shiny screen -- that's all surface. I think what she's saying is: if we're going to go see 300, we're seeing shirtless men.

FC: I've been arguing in other venues that television, with its bringing of the body into the private sphere of the home, and allowing you to pause and fast-forward, has allowed women some of their first ability to fetishize without being in public space where they could get hurt. In other words, men have been able to congregate in public space to look at women's bodies in a way that women have not been able to do the reverse. And I think actually bringing certain modes of viewing into the house, into the domestic sphere (the VCR), has allowed you to look real close when you could not get to men and look at them real close. You could make an argument that this is a kind of reverse objectification.


:: obsessive24 : Piece of Me : Britney Spears ::

JLR: I think this presents in a lot of ways a much more pessimistic analysis of the representation of femininity, and particularly of the role of audiences within that. It delves quite deeply into the violence that media technologies can visit upon women, and really asks us as fans or viewers to think about how we might be complicit in that.

FC: This is what the world without fan vidding looks like, right? Unfortunately this is what mainstream values will do to you.

JLR: This vid is actually quite unusual in being about a real person rather than about TV or movie characters. One of the reasons people don't often make real person vids is because of the difficulty of finding enough footage, which is why there are a lot of stills of photos and magazines and also very pixellated, bad quality YouTube videos that are incorporated into this vid. But I actually think that the way that makes you aware of the materiality of those different media technologies gives it a lot of richness.

FC: This is Britney's song. I think what's interesting about it is that she has an actual music video illustrating her song that puts more weight on the resistant phrase "do you want a piece of me?" i.e. "I'll take you on -- I'm up for a fight." And I think the vidder is saying that it's a pose, you're not going to win the fight. There's a sense in which the actual song is a pretty noble attempt on Britney's part to portray her media trouble as a kind of belligerence. I think the vidder is suggesting that that's a game you can't really win, and in fact the extent to which she herself is complicit in these images -- that posing that challenge to the viewer from that side of the camera is a failed attempt.

JLR: I think one of the wonderful things about this vid is that, through making a vid about Britney to a Britney song, it gives her a voice. But at the same time, as you were saying, it's ultimately not very optimistic about whether she does really have a voice within this system, and whether her agressive stance in this song is actually going to get her anywhere.

Josh Guilford: I think that one of the really interesting things about a lot of these videos is that they seem to raise issues about that question of voicing, about that question of democracy value that's latched onto video production. I think it's important that they're not the kind of video like Britney Spears videos that only deal with this issue as publicity and exposure, but also that the operation and function of a video like "Closer" in the context of YouTube, this new context of distribution and dissemination, brings up all these issues which people were reluctant to discuss surrounding censorship and surrounding different contexts of reception.

JLR: Right now there's a really intense conversation going on among the vidding community about visibility and about publicity, and what kind of publicity we're prepared to take on, and what are the costs and benefits of that process.

FC: I think that one of the ways in which vidding is interesting for women is to give them the behind-the-camera role, to take them out from being the subject of the gaze and turn them into the women behind the camera. And so what's odd about the visibility is that on some level part of the anxiety is that vidders, if they figure themselves at all, will figure themselves in these kinds of allusive ways, or will figure themselves in identification with men (I'm Spock). But the way that the art is becoming visible, the women don't want to be visible, and I think they don't for the Britney Spears reason. Despite the traditional sense that wants the camera on women, they don't want to be on camera, they want to control the camera. [...] And I think that for a community that was so much about vidding itself as taking control of the camera, so much about shifting where your position was to stay behind it, that then this moment of visibility is a particular problem for women vidders. In remix culture there seems to be less debate about whether or not to take the fame and money when it comes than the women, and some people say it's because we're too invested in a kind of utopian gift community at our own loss, that it will actually hurt us to continue to do this stuff non-profit. But I do think your point is closer, I think women are more suspicious of visibility, and feeling that it leads you to the Britney Spears place, maybe too close to the wrong kind of visibility, and that we're willing to trade not getting anything.

Lynne Joyrich: It's just so interesting that they're facing the same issues now as a producing community as what they're dealing with, because if vidding is so much about taking the private consumption of TV but making it public, or showing how public forms of mass culture actually relate to your private desires, it's all about that play of public and private. But then they have to figure out themselves: how do I deal with my weird relationship between publicity and privacy?

JLR: It's a really good point that explicitly part of the question that's happening is how do we represent ourselves to the larger audience, very literally. It's part of the use of technologies like imeem, which is a media sharing site that a lot of vidders have adopted who were willing to have their work seen and linked to by people outside of the community, and also of what Francesca's doing by going on tour to contextualize vidding for a lot of different audiences. There's some sort of consensus that we have to take charge of the way we're represented in the same way that we've taken charge of that in these screen texts.

[ 06 April 2008 ]

The problem with becoming a vidding fan, as an obsessive person, is that there will always be more to watch. I seriously have a SPREADSHEET of vids to catch up on. Thanks to par_avion, veni_vidi_vids is now compiling recs via delicious, which is invaluable for keeping tabs on the buzz. I also have charmax's A-Z of women-centric vids, geekturnedvamp's girls girls girls playlist, and laurashapiro's IBARW vids of color list queued up to go through. But I'm about to be deluged with vividcon, so this is it for my back-catalogue at the moment. Except I do still have ambitions of making the rounds of Torchwood (as a preview, run don't walk to fan_eunice's Papa Don't Preach for the boys and sapote3's The Test for the girls). NB: fanworksfinder is being buggy, so I haven't ported over any of this recent spate of reviews.


3 newish vids

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Origin Stories
music: "Coffee" by Aesop Rock featuring John Darnielle
fandom: BtVS/Angel (Robin, Nikki, Kendra, Dana, Spike)
availability: download, imeem
summary: It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat.
comments: What I'd like to comment on with respect to this vid, especially with my very limited knowledge of the source, is the comment(ary) itself. Its entire trajectory -- the genesis of the vid in the Sweet Charity auction, the collaborative creative process, the pointed intervention within larger meta debates on race, the overwhelming feedback from its audience, the word-of-mouth ripples, and the vidder and viddee's retrospective analysis/response posts (linked) -- is an exemplar of what vidding at its best can be and do as a community-based political art form.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Sawatte Kawatte (Touch! Change!)
music: Spitz [J-pop]
focus: Hiro/Ando
availability: download, imeem
summary: Hiro needs Ando.
comments: The POV in this vid is true genius. It looks, and sounds, and TASTES like Hiro's remarkable charm and exuberance, without skirting the darkness that he faces (somehow without dimming his buoyancy). Its narrative is plenty strong enough to sustain the unintelligible language, and throughout these two (the BEST of the show itself) are just impossibly loving and lovable.

vidder(s): charmax
title: Angel with an Attitude
music: The Ditty Bops
fandom: Pushing Daisies (Chuck)
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Being born again is fun.
comments: It's impossible not to smile while watching this, yet it's more complex than many lighthearted vids. A virtuosic harmony between show, song, and editing, with so many delightful visual links and transitions. I especially love the dead folks sequence leading into the car chase bridge. And it seems it's an effective recruiter vid!


3 oldish vids

vidder(s): renenet
title: Man in Motion
music: John Parr, "St. Elmo's Fire"
fandom: The Matrix trilogy
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: Neo is Jesus, get it?
comments: I had the pleasure of watching this for the first time in the presence of the vidder, and discussing it with her. Out of the gajillion vids I've been watching lately, it's one of the few that have truly gotten under my skin, that I've wanted to see many times, that I'm dying to TEACH. Because if there ever were a metaphor for fan power in the age of convergence, it's The Matrix, right? But The Matrix has always troubled me (or at least, I learned at school that it's troubling) because of its paradigm of disembodiment, common to so much cyber-utopianism. These battles will NOT be fought only in the virtual video-game world, but in the ravaged material dystopia. And of course, as a corporate franchise, The Matrix is selling back to us our fantasies of liberation. So I watched this vid for the first time (not knowing it's officially dubbed a LKBV) and want: "YES, THIS is the critique I've always wanted!" Committing unrelentingly to schmoopy 80s cliche, it exposes the facile, derivative emptiness of this narrative. But, precisely through wallowing in this romanticism, it's creating a subject position that's incredibly complex (more so than the trilogy itself) -- because what it ALSO captures is how much we DO believe this fantasy (both its slash dimension and its utopian dimension), giving us (yes, even me) an occasion to revel in it shamelessly. That, to me, is the most evolved inflection of the Lord King Bad Vid mode.

vidder(s): marycrawford
title: Improper Dancing
music: Electric Six
fandom: multi (Club Vivid)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Just don't scare the horses.
comments: I don't think we can ever have too many multifandom dancevids. What sets this one apart is the unrivaled diversity of the sources used. Fantastic dancing (and other more unexpected) parallels make for a wondrous celebration of how the exuberant, ridiculous, "improper" moments are often the ones that fans cherish the most.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: The Girl or the Weapon
music: Michael Andrews
fandom: Firefly/Serenity
availability: download, imeem
summary: Who we gonna find in there when she wakes up? The girl? Or the weapon?
comments: This magnificent experimental vid to an instrumental score tells River's story in colors, movement, and impressions. Its psychedelic style suggests one rendering of the synthetic and mind-bending way River herself perceives the world. [(Written months ago --->) Rapidly becoming one of my very favorite vidders, though I've managed to review her work only sporadically.]


3 cyborgean Sarah Connor Chronicles vids

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Does Cameron Dream of Electric Sheep?
music: "Black Gold Blues" from Laura Veirs
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: See title.
comments: It's fantastic how alien this vid feels -- quite unfamiliar and jarring in a way that takes you to Cameron. The fast cutting is remarkable. And it's balanced by the clarity of the vid's overarching structure. The trajectory from Cameron as a machine and like a machine to her burgeoning, uneasy humanity in her relationships with humans was palpable (I LOVE THE SARAH/CAMERON PART). That's something I'm really missing in the show: a sense of her interiority and development. Culminating in the bizarre and haunting aria of the ending.

vidder(s): halcyon_shift
title: Human Behavior
music: Bjork
availability: download (divx)
summary: There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic.
comments: This vid's powerful opening sequence intercuts Cameron's performance of "human behavior" with the grisly pragmatism of flesh that is her reality. In a loose POV that encompasses both her meticulous observation of the Connor family and the way they see her, it unfolds its rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition in unexpected directions. I read it as a reflection on the staggering violence that humans inflict on each other in the name of their emotions (a genocidal drive of which Cameron is a by-product) -- ultimately no more humane than the entirely entirely unsentimental intersubjectivity that they find so unsettling in Cameron. Less about Cameron learning feelings than about humans learning to be killing machines. With awesome jump cuts!

vidder(s): serrico
title: Paris Is Burning
music: St. Vincent
availability: download (wmv)
summary: We are dancing a black waltz.
comments: Waltzing with machines is the best way I can describe this. And the humans are losing that chess game. In the tradition of vids that render violence as dance, this portrait of a war seductively traces the relentlessness of a technological enemy. The theme is perfectly captured in its second shot of the world as the Terminator's snow globe. Check out 1:27-1:28, but I'm probably most gleeful about the flourish of data from 1:48-1:58.


In a perfect world, I would have had time to write something about all the following vids as well. In this one, I'm just going to rec them and leave it at that.

3 instant classics (metavids)
Plenty of smart folks have had a LOT to say about these.

vidder(s): thingswithwings
title: The Glass
music: Angelo Badalamenti, from A Very Long Engagement (instrumental)
focus: multifandom slash (boy and girl varieties)
availability: download (temporary), imeem
summary: A long time ago, Henry Jenkins wrote an article that had a line in it that got deservedly famous in fandom. He said, of Kirk and Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, that slash is what happens when you take away the glass. And even though that article is mostly obsolete nowadays, that line still resonates with me. So I made a vid about it.

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Hourglass
music: Squeeze
focus: Groundhog Day, the trope
availability: download, imeem
summary: All this has happened before and will happen again. [don't miss the linked post with notes]

vidder(s): ash48
title: Channel Hopping
music: various TV Theme tunes
focus: Supernatural
availability: download (filefront), YouTube
summary: The Boys watch TV.


3 politically engaged Heroes vids
I'm probably a bad person for not reviewing these, but I'm becoming increasingly sensitized to the many things that annoy me about Heroes, and I just can't spend any more time with it.

vidder(s): shati
title: Persona
music: Blue Man Group
focus: (Bob) The Haitian
availability: download, imeem
summary: Every morning I put it on / I walk outside and I am gone

vidder(s): lcsbanana
title: Jack, or, Adventures in Reading Against the Text
music: The Nields
focus: Niki, Claire, Monica
availability: download (scroll down)
summary: A fanvid for the show they should have made.

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: Grace Cathedral Hill
music: The Decemberists
focus: Maya
availability: download, imeem
summary: I emphasize with Maya and her struggle and her confusion and wish that things were different, or could have been different for her.


3 Niki/Jessica vids
I think it's NEAT that there are THREE vids about the dimension of Heroes that pushes my buttons in a GOOD way -- the problem of self-identity mediated by mirrors, the problem of representing the split subject onscreen, and of course, the doppelcest.

vidder(s): charmax
title: The Wreckoning
music: BoomKat
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Jessica pov. It's all about the jekyll & Hyde, the love/hate, the sub/dom, the protector/protected relationship of Niki and Jessica.

vidder(s): martoufmarty
title: Wasted
music: And One
availability: download (not currently available), imeem
summary: The song is about plastic surgery. Michele thinks I'm crazy for thinking that it fit Nikki/Jessica. To me, it fits. Perfectly. There's just something about it.

vidder(s): fahrbotdrusilla
title: Only
music: Nine Inch Nails
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: Niki thinks she's going insane.

It's a disgrace that I haven't been reviewing femslash vids more concertedly. Please accept the following bonus rec as a gesture of contrition:

vidder(s): charmax
title: I'm Your Man
music: Patricia O Callaghan
focus: hot girls everywhere
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: A celebration of media clichés.


BREAKING: I just officially got into VVC!!!!!!!!!!!

In keeping with the networked structure of our collective brain, this post forks off from heyiya's Cylon meta and virtual vidshow (you can read my reviews of the older vids she picked in my previous BSG recs post). It's my rendering of an emergent BSG vidding meme that has been circulating between heyiya, beccatoria, kiki_miserychic and I, building on work already underway in the fandom at large. My first purpose here is gleefully to announce heyiya's new vid:

vidder(s): heyiya
title: Sons and Daughters
music: The Decemberists
focus: Cylons
availability: download (divx), vimeo
summary: A downloadable history.
comments:This is the BSG vid about futurity and biotechnology that I have always craved. It began life as one of those lightning bolts of musical inspiration: Alexis heard the song and instantly SAW its future, and when she played it for me it was similarly revelatory. I'm utterly in awe of her for tackling the ambitious project herself -- as her second vid! -- rather than delegating it to Sweet Charity or somesuch. My experience collaborating on this was comparable to my Sweet Charity commission: I offered elaborate feedback and recommendations from an early stage of the process, largely focused on creating and refining the vid's overall structure, while Alexis did all the MAGIC. The most difficult thing about vidding this song, from where I sat, was the sparsity of variable lyrics (the three actual verses run out at about 1:20, and the rest is just assorted repetitions) -- lacking that narrative crutch was a major headache, especially given the abstraction of the thematic material. So IMNSHO I'm particularly proud of the clarity of its construction, because believe me, we spent a long time floundering with the second half (Alexis almost always obeyed my suggestions in the end :P). I don't necessarily want to discuss the content of the vid, because my better half already meta'd, and from my perspective it contains, in itself, its entire thesis. There is nothing, nothing about it that I don't love to a profound and overwhelming degree. It will make you feel like a Cylon.

vidder(s): beccatoria
title: there's a war going on for your mind, laura
music: The Flobots
focus: everything
availability: download, imeem
summary: Laura Roslin and the Cylon Hybrid engage in a rap battle.
comments: Another vid that I (and Alexis) beta'd, but in this case only very lightly. This one, as far as I can tell, emerged fully formed from Becka's brilliant brain. What I did contribute was saying to her, when she couldn't figure out where to go after the first half, "That old woman's voice? That's the Hybrid talking." Kaboom. This vid is a tour de force. It spans the entire series to date in a collage of associative, fast-paced fragments, relentlessly astonishing in their resonances with the lyrics, striking in their political tenor. But my very favorite aspect is its self-reflexive correlation of broadcast media technologies and networked Cylon communication through editing (the interpolation of the Hybrid) and effects (visual static). And of course Laura is at the center of it all.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: so say we all (Handlebars)
music: The Flobots
focus: season 4.0
availability: download (temporary), vimeo
summary: I can ride my bike with no handlebars.
comments: I take no credit whatsoever for this one, for the record, but it intersects with this lineage because it was Becka's inspiration to vid The Flobots. kiki_miserychic's psalm of season 4.0 is more meditative: fast cutting and motion punctuate its deliberate pacing only sparingly, to great effect. But it shares the sort of hallucinatory juxtaposition of The Flobots' evocative lyrics with a flow of surprising scenes. Likewise, an awareness of media and politics is woven throughout. "I can show you how to scratch a record / I can take apart the remote control / And I can almost put it back together" exemplifies what I love most about this vid, and the entire swath from "I can design an engine" through "I can split the atoms of a molecule" makes me jump up and down in delight. And finally, the endings of the song and the season are MFEO.

One thing I especially enjoy about watching post-4.0 BSG vids is witnessing how different artists use the finale's stunning final shot. Along with the three above, you can see two more examples in beccatoria's Tricks and our Tomorrow series -- I'd give Tricks the award for being cleverest (it's the only one that doesn't place the closing shot as pretty much the closing shot of the vid), but each does something original and lovely with the footage.

Another interesting trend in evidence here is the metatextual framing of vids as artifacts that exist within the source's universe. heyiya had the genius idea of staging Sons & Daughters as output of the Cylon historical database, and I suggested that she convey that conceit in the credits. Becka formatted her epic as a transmission from the Hybrid to Laura. And kiki_miserychic told me after the fact that she was independently conceiving of Handlebars as a sort of audiovisual hymn sung by the Hybrid (I recommend listening to the lead male rapper as the voice of the Cylon God in both cases). There are certainly other vids with self-reflexive framing devices, usually by way of meta-commentary on media technologies (see, for example, Jackie K's If You Were In My Movie, wherein the vid is Daria's school project, and wistful_fever's Documentary, wherein the vid is a video made for one actor by another), but I think BSG and other Sci-Fi open up a whole alternate set of exciting possibilities in this vein. A case in point: after we had this discussion, kiki_miserychic went on to create a femslashy Cylon download:

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Memory Vid
music: "Teach Me How to Drown" by Unto Ashes
focus: Caprica/Athena
availability: download (temporary), vimeo

Now that we've assimilated her, you can expect further experimental vidlets along these lines to materialize soon... ;D


more techno-futuristic BSG vids

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Babies
music: Pulp
focus: eponymous
availability: download
summary: Love is the plan, the plan is… Shameless plagiary of James Tiptree Jnr, sexual conflict, evolutionary theory and gratuitous space porn.
comments: This is the best (and probably only) BSG vid [before 2008] focused on reproduction as a theme (my obsession). First of all, it mobilizes one of my favorite vidding modes: the perverse juxtaposition of an upbeat song with violent and disturbing imagery. It's done with special subtlety and complexity in this case -- because aycheb perfectly captures the subtlety and complexity of how reproduction operates in BSG. Hera, in particular, is simultaneously the profound miracle of love that the song implies, and the harbinger of the post-human apocalypse. And, as the song implies, she's the biological product of Helo and Sharon's lovemaking, but just as much the techno-spawn of Gaius and Six's Cylon future. I adore how the vid is structured around images of (bio)technology (like Gaius's lab and the resurrection ship), and including Kara and Leoben's anti-romance in parallel underlines the death drive that runs uneasily within these couplings.

vidder(s): superduperkc
title: Karma Police
music: Radiohead
focus: Final Four
availability: download (temporary), imeem, youtube
summary: For a minute there they lost themselves.
comments: A retrospective look at the atrocities the F4 committed against Cylons in the name of humanity, accentuating the magnitude of their coming out trauma. Aggressive colorizing and texturizing of the footage adds to the sense of extreme disorientation, but what really sells it for me is the vid's beautifully executed closing disintegration into the Cylon signal.

vidder(s): m_a_r_i_k_s
title: Lord's Prayer
music: E Nomine
focus: Cylons, Gaius
availability: download, youtube
summary: When I first heard this song the initial idea was to make a vid about the cylons mostly and their conflict with humanity through the aspect of their faith. Turned out they're much more connected to their "parents", than I thought. :)
comments: A rollicking goth-creepy meditation on the staggering violence committed in the name of faith. Summoning a much darker Cylon POV than "Sons & Daughters," this vid emphasizes, though the interchangeability of the seven models and their kinship with centurions and raiders, how fundamentalism can turn people into killing machines.

vidder(s): bop_radar
title: Southside
music: Moby
focus: Lee, Kara, Sharon, Helo
availability: download, imeem
summary: The idea for this vid came from Lee Adama's 'we're not a civilisation, we're a gang' speech sparking with a memory I had of Moby saying this song was about street gangs in a post-apocalyptic future.
comments: This upbeat action vid does a glorious job of depicting our favorite pilots' journeys as a high-speed chase across the universe. bop_radar froths a loosely linear chain of charged character moments into a generous helping of space battles, displaying a deft touch and expert attention to motion.

And now, inspired by daybreak777's BSG character study recs...

BSG female character studies
[there are more Starbuck, Roslin, and Kendra vids in my first recs post -- and I'm still searching for the great Cain vid]

vidder(s): beccatoria
title: Ghosts
music: Set the Fire to the Third Bar - Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright
focus: Caprica Six (Caprica/head!Gaius, Caprica/Tigh, Caprica/D'Anna)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Caprica Six is a love letter no one has ever read.
comments: This vid takes very seriously the problem of how, visually, to tell the story of a love affair with someone who doesn't exist, and in the process conveys a sense of almost unbearable longing. The song is haunting (NB: there is no second bar) and consequently much vidded, I know (there's a stunning Jack/Ianto version by sol_se, and apparently a Kara/Lee rendition as well); you should watch this even if you think it's already defined for you, because Becka really sells it. She created a Byzantine, impressionistic structure, which I nonetheless find eloquent and fluid -- I don't think only because I became very intimate with it in the course of betaing. I can't even highlight favorite moments because so much of it is just breathtaking. Moreover, the vid feels IMPORTANT to me, an indictment of how much time BSG as a show (and often as a fandom) spends with Gauis and his wet dreams and how little considering their relationship from Caprica's POV. Here is her story: the incredible emotional and physical violence she endures in her fruitless quest for a partner who can match her bottomless capacity for love. It's sobering how different her fantasy lover is from Gaius and Gaius's (take note of how sparingly actual Gaius is used -- because it's not about him).

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Safe From Harm
music: Massive Attack
focus: Laura Roslin
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Laura dreams.
comments: It's a travesty that I didn't see this vid until recently, when par_avion sat me down with it. I love it more and more each time I watch it -- it makes me FEEL the loss and the rage that Laura feels. It's particularly effective how the vid is anchored in her physical frailty, contrasting that with her ferocious power of spirit. Telling her story largely chronologically stitches a convincing case out of the escalating atrocities for a totally coherent and moving interpretation of Laura -- not making her actions justifiable, but certainly comprehensible.

vidder(s): jarrow
title: Falling From the Sky
music: Vast
focus: Starbuck (seasons 1 + 2)
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: A deeper look at the many pilots Starbuck has failed, including herself.
comments: It's perhaps a perverse reading of a story about failure, but my favorite aspect of this unique portrait of Starbuck as a professional is the sense of her competence, even in the face of loss (such a departure from many other vids that depict her tailspin toward self-destruction). jarrow expertly uses flashback effects to evoke a tight POV, and deploys motion with a virtuosity that befits a vid about flying, culminating in the exhilarating vertigo of its big finish.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Barcelona
music: Jewel
focus: Sharon (Athena/Helo, Boomer/Chief)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Sharon and the meaning of mercy.
comments: That's our emo kid! A Cylon coming out story before that was cool, this vid takes Sharon on a journey concluding in her -- and her human community's -- acceptance of her kinship with machines. I appreciated the sensual editing, with long crossfades and superimpositions, and the moments in Sharon's life accented on the choruses of "let me fly" punctuated the story perfectly.

vidder(s): nicole_anell
title: Jolene
music: The White Stripes (covering Dolly Parton)
focus: Cally (Cally/Chief, and if you're me also Cally/Boomer)
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: "The Ties That Bind" constructed the Chief being a Cylon like a romantic/sexual betrayal, and it knocked all the sub right out of my subtext, and I couldn't even conceive a universe where that's not awesome.
comments: In an astonishingly complex mobilization of the iconic (and let's not forget girlslashy) song, this vid renders Cally's literal rivals for the Chief's affections (Boomer and later Tory) as a metaphor for Cylonicity itself -- the aspect of her partner that is truly taking him away from her. This can't have been an easy motif to construct visually, and the fact that (to me at least) it read with total clarity is a testament to the elegant and layered editing. When, around 0:30, the first repetition of the refrain shifts us from Boomer as lover to Boomer as Cylon sleeper agent my mouth dropped open, and the next 30 seconds are chilling in their incongruous brutality. And then, while I keep trying to pinpoint particularly effective moments in the long transitional section (~1:10-1:50), I just can't, because each time I watch it I appreciate the details more -- it weaves disparate conflicts of their past and the Chief's dawning awareness of his Cylon identity into the perfect bridge to Cally's suspicions of Tory. On first viewing, I found the loose non-linear structure slightly muddling, but the rich intercutting of heterogenous moments really grew on me, and I think the limited footage and metaphorical theme demanded it.

vidder(s): sabaceanbabe
title: Nobody Knows
music: Pink
focus: Racetrack (fanonical Racetrack/Helo, Racetrack/Kat, and so on if you really squint)
availability: download, streaming
summary: This song spoke to me of a woman who was interrupted in living her life by something over which she had no control, nor would she ever have control of it.
comments: Let me get this out of the way: I hate the song choice. It's relentlessly earnest, and that almost never works for me (even in girlslash vids). Plus, I'm convinced by dualbunny's thesis that Starbuck IS Pink, but Racetrack, for all that she's awesome, is just NOT. That said, I think this is an exemplar of strategies for vidding minor characters, because sabaceanbabe turns Racetrack's fleeting appearances in the background into the story itself: the loneliness of being the one nobody notices. The vid raised my familiar ire about BSG's throwaway women in a very satisfying way, and made me happy that Racetrack is (miraculously!) still with us. She's so pretty!

vidder(s): hollywoodgrrl
title: The Greatest
music: Cat Power
focus: Kat (Kat/Kara)
availability: download (wmv), youtube
summary: This vid is dedicated to the two greatest Viper Jocks in the Colonial Fleet: Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Louanne "Kat" Katraine. Live fast, die young.
comments: An elegy for one (two?) of our favorite dead lesbians. This vid quietly captures how brutal it is to be a girl pilot -- and I think foregrounding Kat is a clever tactic in this operation, since she's so many of the things that Starbuck is, without Starbuck's privilege of exceptionality (and resurrection).

vidder(s): notpiecebypiece
title: All Fall Down
music: One Republic
focus: Tory (Tory/Laura)
availability: imeem
summary: It's about how Tory was always there for Roslin but when Tory needed Roslin, she wasn't there and Tory had to go through all her shit alone. Poor abandoned Tory.
comments: notpiecebypiece disavows that this is "Serious Vidding," which is a sign of the vidding times: burgeoning popularity, visibility, and artistic achievement alongside widening hierarchies of distinction. Let this be a reminder of the value of vids without ambitions beyond feeding our Id vortex in our psychic living rooms. It's not flashy, but it offers a lucid, original, and important interpretation of an otherwise quite opaque character AND HER DEFINING LESBIAN CRUSH. It's utterly shameless, and fills me -- perhaps me more than anyone ever -- with ardent and flaily joy.

The BSG vid