Because not all of the semifinalists submitted vids (or else some were posted privately?), and most vids were shorter than the full length of the song, you can watch each playlist in about 25 minutes. It's pretty cool to see over a dozen vid responses to the same song, though it can get repetitive. I can't say that I saw a lot of wildly divergent interpretations of the songs, but then I didn't know a lot of the sources (which skew heavily towards movies overand I wouldn't describe the ones for the batches that I've seen so far as lyrically meaty.
What does emerge really clearly is a certain YouTube vidding aesthetic (albeit not the only or even necessarily dominant YouTube vidding aesthetic). I'd describe it as rapid cutting and lots of effects, with a tendency towards heavily working over the clips through tweaking elements such as color and saturation. I'd also mention the frequent (or at least, significantly more frequent than in the vids that I see posted on LJ) use of text (generally fragments of the lyrics) and audio from the video source (lines of dialogue).
All of this typically yields a very stylized feel to the vids, where the "hand" of the vidder is quite present and visible. That sense is exacerbated with the vidders who "watermark" their names on their vids, or in a few cases open with a brief standard intro sequence that they use on all of their vids (as a branding element, like the roar of the lion preceding an MGM movie); several post their vids under "____ Productions".
I'm sure I'm grossly overgeneralizing, and reducing the diversity of styles into a falsely monolithic "aesthetic." And while I certainly wouldn't and couldn't try to conflate the vids that I watch which come out of the LJ/DW-based vidding community into a single aesthetic, it does feel like the "traditional" vidding community operates under a somewhat different set of values and priorities than this particular YouTube vidding culture (though there's certainly overlap and crossover).
As long as I'm being reductive, it's hard for me to think of these YouTube vidders along the lines of, for instance, what
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laurashapiro describes as "telling deeper." I'd probably instead go with something like "heightened sensation" or a phrase that emphasized stylization to describe their vids. Though these certainly aren't mutually exclusive approaches to vidding, and maybe I'm overestimating the differences or just less fluent when it comes to reading these YouTube vids.Either way, in the meantime, I'll be rooting for elekta to advance into the next round.
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I knew there were some vidders who have started on YouTube and came over to LJ, or come to live action vids via AMVs. But I'm sure that's really only scratching the surface; I'd love to see
Anyway, he mentioned this idea like two Vividcons back.
Your comarison to the different houses of vidding is really interesting; it's funny because those houses had to do at the time with the limitations of the technology - you had to learn from someone, live, in your geographic area. None of that's true anymore but we still form distinct enough online communities that the idea carries over.
Anyway, yes, I think it's more to do with shared interests and friendships these days than physical limitations, but having someone cocreate or beta your vid can be a pretty damn big thing, right? Whom do you trust and who gets your style and aesthetics...
I'm watching the vids right now and am fascinated by them...though I'm not sure if the fast cuts or my new varifocals are making me dizzy... :P
I'm hugely curious about how fannish vidding is feeding into commercially produced scripted television; S1 of Ashes to Ashes was fascinating in that respect, f'rex. There were scenes and bits of scenes that were straight out of what I would call a fanvid aesthetic, not to mention the overarching Bowie conceit of both Life on Mars and A2A. I'm not plugged in to any vidding community at all, but it seems at least superficially as though TPTB's drive to adopt/co-opt the practice is a both more overt and less raw, though I'm sure no less profit-driven. If that makes sense.
It makes me wonder whether that (if it's true) has anything to do with the originating materials being entirely commercial and claimable, and the artist's contributions more apparently separable than is generally the case with fanfiction. Is the form itself seen by content monopolists as easier to control than fanfiction, and thus quicker to legitimize, I guess is what I'm wondering.
Paranthetically, I'd really love to find some kind of history of the evolution of songs & music on prime time television. It feels like there's been a lot of growth role of music in general (including that composed for the show) as well as licensed commercial songs (plus appearances by bands performing "live" within shows' narratives) in recent decades, at least for U.S. television. And TV shows have themselves become more important in promoting bands and exposing people to new music, in the way that radio used to.
(There's also the interesting fannish practice of producing "soundtracks" for both canon events/characters and for fanfiction, complete with liner notes and art. I've seen the same thing on a couple of occasions, one formally (where the publisher was involved) and one informally, in an author's preface, accompanying commercially published fiction.)
Oh, man, A2A. Series 3 is confirmed and now I'm all anxiety-ridden about all the ways they could screw up the final story. PLEASE DON'T HURT ME BBC PLEASE.
"Telling deeper" is where I started, and certainly has its roots in the traditional vidding community I learned from. But many members of that community have moved lately toward more effects-driven vidding, non-narrative vidding, mood pieces, and what
I'm most interested in vids that combine the "heightened sensation" aesthetics with the "telling deeper" narrative emphasis, but I haven't managed to make any myself yet. (:
The lyric vidding that
And the prospect of new vids by you to look forward to always brightens my day. :)