cosmic_llin

For anyone wanting to know, my fandom_stocking is HERE!

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amaresu said: Vidding!

Quite a broad topic there! :D 

Like so many people, I started vidding because there was a vid I had to make. When I was living in St Petersburg as part of my year abroad, when I got homesick I  would watch Sarah Jane episodes of Doctor Who. At around the same time I discovered a Cerys Matthews song called Open Roads (Never Said Goodbye). I  realised that it would make an awesome vid, but from previous failed experiments I knew my computer was too slow to handle it. (Someday I will remake that epic Scully sciencing vid that just refused point-blank to render.) So I played the song over and over and thought about what clips would go where, for months, until finally I  got a new computer that could just about run Windows Movie Maker ok.

My next stint in Russia was in a rural community with basically non-existent internet access, and I made some of my next few vids there as a way to amuse myself and make myself feel less lonely. For the first couple of years that I vidded I only made Sarah Jane/Doctor vids - when The Sarah Jane Adventures started I branched out into that, but at first for me vidding was very connected to Sarah Jane and the community at sarahjane_fic on LJ, where I spent most of my fannish time. It wasn't until I dived head-first back into my first fannish love, Star Trek, that I started to branch out a bit, and now I vid mostly Star Trek but also other things now and then.

That was when I realised that vidding, as well as being a fannish activity in many fandoms, was also a fandom in and of itself. It was an interesting change - I went from being basically the only big vidder in a very small pond to discovering that actually there was way more to vidding than I'd thought and that some vidders were hugely popular across fandoms, and some vidders were doing amazing things with special effects that I hadn't even imagined, and some vidders were using vids to make their own narratives, and some vidders were having conventions that were all about vidding! 

Sometimes now when I watch my early vids I cringe a bit, but when I watch that very first vid, it still says exactly what I want it to say, albeit possibly in a different way than I  would choose to say it now. I'm still on a very steep learning curve, vidding-wise, and I don't think I'm naturally talented at it, especially the whooshy, make-it-pretty side, but I do have a lot of fun doing it!

 So, I thought I'd do snowflake_challenge this year since so many people seemed to have fun with it last time. Here goes!

Day 1: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. Secret Agent - I've made a lot of vids that I really love, but this one still makes me feel extra-bouncy every time I watch it in a way that nothing else can quite match. 

2. Never Said Goodbye - This isn't the first vid I ever made, but it's the first that's still around (it was preceded by a Jack/Sam vid that I've lost and a Scully vid that never saw the light of day). It's also the first vid that sprang into my head almost fully-formed when I heard the song and practically begged me to make it, and considering how little I knew about vidding then, I think it still stands up, and still says exactly what I wanted it to say.

3. London - There were a couple of other fics I considered mentioning, ones that I think are really good, that I enjoyed writing and that I still enjoy reading back now and then. But this one won because it's about Deanna Troi, and for basically as long as I can remember Deanna Troi has been my muse - except that where I used to run around the house pretending to be her, now I write stories where she's a badass.