Because I'm basically watching So You Think You Can Dance on a torrent time delay, I occupied myself last night by checking out the semi-final round of the second "season" of So You Think You Can Vid on YouTube. The judges had selected 80 vidders from the 420 entries in the audition round, and assigned them one of five songs to vid (entries had to be at least 40 seconds). I watched the entries for three of the songs: Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows" (playlist of semifinalist entries), Utada Hikaru's "Sanctuary" (semifinalist playlist), and Frou Frou's "Let Go" (semifinalist playlist). I haven't seen the other two batches yet for Muse's "Plug In Baby" (playlist) and Radiohead's "How to Disappear Completely" (playlist).

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 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.