![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Snowflake Challenge day 10
For the moment I'm skipping challenge #8 (promo a canon) and #9 (make a fanwork) because that's so much of the content around here anyway.
Day 10: In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts. This could be your first fandom, your first fandom friend, the first fanwork you created, the first fanwork you interacted with... The options are endless!
I thought about this a bit and decided to talk about Baby's First Fanvid. (Although this was back in my anime fandom days, so they were called AMVs, anime music videos.)
I absolutely loved vids from the jump, as soon as I realized it was a thing, which is no big surprise because I also loved music videos and used to watch a ton of them on TV as a teenager. The closest thing to fanvids that I saw then, though - other than the times when TV shows and movies would set part of the action to a song, which was also a pretty big thing in the 80s and which I also loved - was this series of Hanna-Barbera cartoon clip vids set to popular 80s songs that one of our local UHF channels used to run as filler between shows. (They're called "Hanna Barbera Country Rock"; you can find a lot of them on Youtube.)
Once I got online and found out that fan-made AMVs were a thing, I started collecting them - of course they were absolutely tiny by today's standards, due to much smaller hard drives and slow download connections. The better quality ones were MPEGs (fascinating that this is still so much of a thing - it's MP4 now, but I can still play them on most modern programs) and the "lossy" format for more easily downloadable vids was RM, which isn't. I can't play the first vid I ever made, at least not without a converter, because I saved it as RM. (Although I do still have the exported file, if not the files I made it from; I've always been a bit compulsive about backing things up.)
So anyway, I decided to try making one in 2002, and I made a vid cobbled together out of clips from downloaded, subtitled anime. From what I remember, the vidding editor I had at the time was an ooooold copy of Adobe Premiere that I had walked away with from my college computer lab in the 90s, back when pirating software was just a matter of putting it on a disk. Anyway though, it was multifandom and it was a fighting vid set to the Tom Petty song "Won't Back Down." I can absolutely guarantee, even without being able to watch it, that it was Not That Good, and also has visible subtitles. At the time I was just making vids for myself, so I didn't care. Some of the later early vids that I made that way are actually not that bad - I went on making them throughout the early 2000s, got better at it, and started planning them in more detail in advance, although I was still just making them for myself to rewatch for fun. There were ones for One Piece, Saiyuki, and Fullmetal Alchemist, among others.
But that very first one was really just trying things out. I remember that I did actually figure out all the basic stuff, particularly things that I had seen other people doing, like how to create moving title transitions (not necessarily easy in 90s-era Premiere), fade clips, and I remember being especially happy with one action transition that carried the movement from one show into a clip from another show, as well as just figuring out the basics of importing the clips and exporting a vid. (Dealing with codecs and formats was also complicated in 90s-era Premiere ... the general simplicity of being able to export vids from modern editors without jumping through a bunch of hoops is very nice, although it was also completely new to me in 2002, so possibly would be easier for me now than it was then - but my tolerance for that kind of fiddly technical stuff has also dropped through the floor in this era of computer tech that just works out of the box and doesn't have to be massaged to get basic functions out of it. Complaints about modern enshittification are certainly valid, but do you even remember how difficult and fiddly 90s-era programs and tech could be to use, and how many weird software/hardware/format incompatibilities there were??)
Anyway, at the end of all that, I had a vid that I genuinely enjoyed rewatching, set to a song I liked, and I had found out that it was a Thing I Could Do and dropped it into my list of ongoing hobbies. I've never really considered myself a serious vidder, although at this point I've made probably upwards of 50 or so vids, just because I don't really care all that much about, I guess, the things vidders care about - getting better at it, or having extremely high-quality source, or learning how to do fancy effects, or picking Songs Of Quality, or vidding rarely vidded canons; basically I don't care in the slightest about being A Vidder in any particular way. I am very happy to just make playful, fun vids set to overplayed pop songs forever. It's something I do because I find it enjoyable and I like the source canons and want to wallow in them for a while to the sound of a song I like to listen to, and really the only requirement I have at the end of it is that it's a vid that I, personally, would like to watch. (Although I am of course delighted when other people like it too.)
Day 10: In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts. This could be your first fandom, your first fandom friend, the first fanwork you created, the first fanwork you interacted with... The options are endless!
I thought about this a bit and decided to talk about Baby's First Fanvid. (Although this was back in my anime fandom days, so they were called AMVs, anime music videos.)
I absolutely loved vids from the jump, as soon as I realized it was a thing, which is no big surprise because I also loved music videos and used to watch a ton of them on TV as a teenager. The closest thing to fanvids that I saw then, though - other than the times when TV shows and movies would set part of the action to a song, which was also a pretty big thing in the 80s and which I also loved - was this series of Hanna-Barbera cartoon clip vids set to popular 80s songs that one of our local UHF channels used to run as filler between shows. (They're called "Hanna Barbera Country Rock"; you can find a lot of them on Youtube.)
Once I got online and found out that fan-made AMVs were a thing, I started collecting them - of course they were absolutely tiny by today's standards, due to much smaller hard drives and slow download connections. The better quality ones were MPEGs (fascinating that this is still so much of a thing - it's MP4 now, but I can still play them on most modern programs) and the "lossy" format for more easily downloadable vids was RM, which isn't. I can't play the first vid I ever made, at least not without a converter, because I saved it as RM. (Although I do still have the exported file, if not the files I made it from; I've always been a bit compulsive about backing things up.)
So anyway, I decided to try making one in 2002, and I made a vid cobbled together out of clips from downloaded, subtitled anime. From what I remember, the vidding editor I had at the time was an ooooold copy of Adobe Premiere that I had walked away with from my college computer lab in the 90s, back when pirating software was just a matter of putting it on a disk. Anyway though, it was multifandom and it was a fighting vid set to the Tom Petty song "Won't Back Down." I can absolutely guarantee, even without being able to watch it, that it was Not That Good, and also has visible subtitles. At the time I was just making vids for myself, so I didn't care. Some of the later early vids that I made that way are actually not that bad - I went on making them throughout the early 2000s, got better at it, and started planning them in more detail in advance, although I was still just making them for myself to rewatch for fun. There were ones for One Piece, Saiyuki, and Fullmetal Alchemist, among others.
But that very first one was really just trying things out. I remember that I did actually figure out all the basic stuff, particularly things that I had seen other people doing, like how to create moving title transitions (not necessarily easy in 90s-era Premiere), fade clips, and I remember being especially happy with one action transition that carried the movement from one show into a clip from another show, as well as just figuring out the basics of importing the clips and exporting a vid. (Dealing with codecs and formats was also complicated in 90s-era Premiere ... the general simplicity of being able to export vids from modern editors without jumping through a bunch of hoops is very nice, although it was also completely new to me in 2002, so possibly would be easier for me now than it was then - but my tolerance for that kind of fiddly technical stuff has also dropped through the floor in this era of computer tech that just works out of the box and doesn't have to be massaged to get basic functions out of it. Complaints about modern enshittification are certainly valid, but do you even remember how difficult and fiddly 90s-era programs and tech could be to use, and how many weird software/hardware/format incompatibilities there were??)
Anyway, at the end of all that, I had a vid that I genuinely enjoyed rewatching, set to a song I liked, and I had found out that it was a Thing I Could Do and dropped it into my list of ongoing hobbies. I've never really considered myself a serious vidder, although at this point I've made probably upwards of 50 or so vids, just because I don't really care all that much about, I guess, the things vidders care about - getting better at it, or having extremely high-quality source, or learning how to do fancy effects, or picking Songs Of Quality, or vidding rarely vidded canons; basically I don't care in the slightest about being A Vidder in any particular way. I am very happy to just make playful, fun vids set to overplayed pop songs forever. It's something I do because I find it enjoyable and I like the source canons and want to wallow in them for a while to the sound of a song I like to listen to, and really the only requirement I have at the end of it is that it's a vid that I, personally, would like to watch. (Although I am of course delighted when other people like it too.)
no subject
This was lovely to read and I'm definitely watching your MASH videos when their time comes!
no subject
And thank you so much for the encouragement! <333
no subject
no subject
no subject
Good to have that kind of hobby! I hope to learn to vid this year, and I'll definitely be that kind of vidder :D
no subject