YouTube’s January 2009 Massacre hit many vidders using that video sharing site particularly hard because their Content ID system can not decipher between a copyright violation and a fair use of the original material. Last week fannish vidders found themselves caught in the midst of yet another online video massacre. Much of the vidding community had been using the media sharing site imeem which, until recently, had been a safe space for them to post fan works and share in fan communities. But imeem recently announced they were ’simplifying’ their website and deleting all use- generated video (UGV), again leaving vidders without a community to upload and share their works. Imeem is now “de-emphasizing” UGV because of costs and concerns over their return on investment (ROI). They say “Simply put, there’s no ROI for us in UGV.”

We feel this is an insult to the vidding and other photo/video communities that helped build imeem as a service. We think that to simply jettison user generated creative works in this way due to profit margins is shameful and abhorrent.

The end of the vidding community on imeem does not just stop with the loss of the vids but also a deletion of all comments and playlists, loss of the cumulative hit counts and vidding network disruptions. To add insult to injury, imeem continues to prohibit users from downloading their own content. Some of the startling experiences and over-all mistreatment of content producers are documented here.

What this means for our blog is that many of our favorite vids will be offline until they can be relocated to other sites. Many of our favorites will be on blip.tv since they’ve implemented a fair use policy, this despite their recent vidder-targeted takedowns for posting “copyrighted material”. Others will be moving to BAM. A comparison of the two sites’ hosting capacities is posted here.

In caution to vidders transitioning away from imeem, Morgan Dawn has outlined the copyright policies of various video services. She adds “how they will handle the transformative nature of fan vids is still anyone’s guess.”

Please be patient with us as we try to find the new location of vids we have posted here over the past few months and update our posts accordingly. If you’ve found a vid’s new digital home, please let us know!

Category: news
Topic Tags: copyright, fair use, imeem youtube, vidding

Sloane’s first vid is a visual critique of the “re-booted” Star Trek movie selectively edited to the sexist, misogynistic song, “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” by Flight of the Concords. While “Too Many Dicks…” was originally about having too many men on the dance floor and not enough women to court, Sloane reclaims it by editing together multiple images of the largely male Star Trek cast to critique it’s male dominated storyline.

“When I saw the Star Trek movie, I was disappointed that J.J. Abrams had dramatically rewritten so many elements of Star Trek canon - and had largely ignored women. I was surprised how many people didn’t seem to think that was a problem, or even that the issue existed.” — Sloane

Her vid eloquently proves her point: it is hard to ignore the male to female ratio in the new updated Star Trek movie. Uhura has the heavy burden of being the only female character with any significant dialog and, to further the disappointment, is written into “the girlfriend” role. The vid is extremely popular in the fan/vidding community, emphasizing the huge demand to see more women in prominent roles on television and in the movies.

This vid also serves as a strong argument for the importance of cam recordings used for visual criticism and critique. It is essential that these types of critiques be made in a timely fashion while films are still fresh in the mind collective consciousness of the public. If vidders and political remixers have to wait to make their visual arguments until a film’s DVD release, than the window for sparking public debate and discussion will often have past.

Because a song’s lyrics are often the critical lens through which the viewer can read the commentary in a vid, we have pasted them below the fold.
Read more…

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: bootleg, fandom, gender, hollywood, music, sexism, vidding

The Queer Housewives of New York City (Real Housewives Remix) series follows Bethenny, the only single housewife, through her conflicts with coming out.

Why Queer the Housewives? Those familiar with the Real Housewives of NYC know that there is very little male presence throughout the show. The women vocal about their successful  partnerships (ie Simon + Alex) are shunned and mocked  by the other housewives. What’s ironic is that the other women don’t even pretend to endorse the idea that their hetero relationships are all that fulfilling. Real Housewives of NYC had the unintentional effect of making compulsory heterosexuality actually appear compulsory, rendering the “Housewives” distinction  inaccurate.

Thinking about the significance of this I wondered what Real Housewives of NYC would look like if it related to a totally different audience. Instead of following white, owning class housewives in a feminism-lite, low-calorie liberation, what if the story line  stayed true to it’s lack of male presence and inaccuracy of the “housewife” distinction? I think this is a much more interesting storyline.

more of my remixes can be found here.

*thanks to Dr. Suzanne Leonard for her theory, “Do Men Matter: Real Housewives as a Post-Romance”

Category: televison show
Topic Tags: gender, hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality

This multifandom vid by British vidder Lim is self-referential to the vidding process and community. The metavid integrates iconic fandoms such as “Star Trek” and “V for Vendetta”, along with fans, including Henry Jenkins, to the song “Us” by Regina Spektor. With tight editing and a depth of references, the vid comments on how vidders interact with texts, fandoms, and media, comparing the compulsory “under-the-radar” work of fans and vidders to the insider and exclusive works of academics. The collective power of the vid’s imagery seems to be a metaphor for the history and dynamics of vidding whereby groups of fans collaborate to share technology and access to source materials, taking back ownership of and commenting on popular culture.

Get a Hi-Res version and see Lim's blip channel.
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Lim’s not only articulate through her videos but through her comments on the media as well.

“The media seems to think they own the things they’ve pumped into my brain in 27 years. It seems to me ludicrous that television spends so much time and so much money carefully colonizing my mind. But it is my mind.” 

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: hollywood, television, vidding

Mary C. Matthews at VideoPancakes remixes the now infamous anti-gay marriage “gathering storm” ad by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). She combines it with footage from the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers to create a promo for a new fictitious reality show called “Gay Marriage Chasers”. Over the past month, the ridiculous homophobic NOM ad has been thoroughly lampooned and parodied by the Colbert Report, Funny or Die and dozens of others online. Matthews’ remix is unique in that it seamlessly splices together two pop-culture phenomena to create a hilarious critique of the fear mongering and over dramatic nature of the original.

Category: tv commercial
Topic Tags: religion, rights, sexuality, television

In this vid, Luminosity & Sisabet use footage from the TV horror show “Supernatural” and Hole’s song “Violet” to construct a powerful critique of the victimization and eroticization of violence towards female television characters. It was awarded “Best Video of 2007″ by NY Magazine. It’s no surprise, since their collaboration has yielded a meticulously edited vid critical of one of their most beloved shows.

The show’s original storyline follows two heroic brothers as they rid the world of paranormal events. Week after week, a “chick of the week” is slain by the brothers or supernatural forces. Luminosity & Sisabet ingeniously remove the two main male characters and focus their storyline on these killed-off and often nameless female characters in an effort to show how women are violated and eroticized to further the plot, but are rarely part of it. We think this is an important distinction; women’s mere presence in a story does not equate or signify a meaningful existence for them beyond the roles of monster and victim.

Luminosity and Sisabet decided to construct their vid using content solely from the show “Supernatural”, but they could have easily used footage from other series like “CSI”, “Law and Order”, or “Heroes” because the story lines are often similar: the death or suffering of a female character within the first 3 minutes drives the male main characters to set out on their hunt.

In remix, it’s the visual arrangement of clips and the artist’s intent that makes the video’s message either liberating or oppressive. In addition, a basic understanding of the original show being used is often important for the viewer to understand the context. In “Women’s Work”, understanding “Supernatural”, while not being a weekly fan, allowed us to interpret the vid as critical of the depiction of women as eroticized victims, rather than assembled to glorify the violence against women. Knowing Luminosity and Sisabet’s intention and the basic concept behind their source footage helped us make this distinction. Because the remix, and in this case, vidding, forms can be used to glorify oppressive ideas, it’s important to understand these aspects.

Luminosity’s other meticulously crafted vids can be found on blip.tv.

For a more in-depth analysis of this vid, scroll to the second half of this post on the blog Ambling Along the Aqueduct.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, hollywood, sexism, vidding, violence

This classic vid was created in 1997 by the Media Cannibals collective who combined the song Detachable Penis by the band King Missile with clips from a late 70s British crime drama called The Professionals. Incredibly, the vid was created with tape to tape VCR technology making the precise edits to the lyrics all the more impressive.

We wanted to post the vid because we think it offers an insightful look at the media portal of masculinity using guns and other weapons as a hilarious metaphor for the penis. We read it to be critical of the violent and phallocentric concepts of masculinity that are driven by the media.

However, we want to note that this was not exactly the creator’s intention. The Media Cannibals did intend to make fun of phallocentric media culture but insist they were not trying to be critical of the violence and guns on TV per se.

While we may project our own points of view, critical or not, onto remixes and vids, it’s often important to understand the original intent for the piece. Because remix and vids are not an necessarily inherently critical form, we viewers can only rely on the visual display of content and the intent of the creators to decide whether or not they are political in nature.

The vid is also available in better quality for DL.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, sexuality, television, vidding, violence