Francesca Coppa: Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding

Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding
by Francesca Coppa
Transformative Works and Culture

1. Introduction: What is a vid?

[1.1] Vidding is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music. The result is called a vid or a songvid. Unlike professional MTV-style music videos, in which footage is created to promote and popularize a piece of music, fannish vidders use music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals, to stage a reading, or occasionally to use the footage to tell new stories. In vidding, the fans are fans of the visual source, and music is used as an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently. A vid is a visual essay that stages an argument, and thus it is more akin to arts criticism than to traditional music video. As Margie, a vidder, explained: "The thing I've never been able to explain to anyone not in [media] fandom (or to fans with absolutely no exposure to vids) is that where pro music videos are visuals that illustrate the music, songvids are music that tells the story of the visuals. They don't get that it's actually a completely different emphasis" (personal communication, October 24, 2006).

[1.2] Jake Coyle (note 1) makes this mistake in a recent news article, "The Best Fan-Made Music Videos on YouTube," in which he surveys the many "startling, worthy videos" made by fans, the best of which "make use of film in public domain or lifted from copyrighted material." Coyle's article, which was distributed by the Associated Press and widely linked across the Internet, begins, "Since the dawn of YouTube, fans have been melding their own amateur video with the music of their favorite bands." Coyle's underlying—and unquestioned—assumption is that the fans who make "fan-made music video" are fans of the audio source, that these fans edit footage to music because they like the bands. In this kind of music video, the visuals serve the music; Coyle describes these videos as music "revisualized online."

[1.3] But the assumption that music videos are intended to illustrate music leads Coyle to misunderstand the only songvid he discusses, and perhaps not coincidentally, the only "startling, worthy" video on his list made by women: T. Jonesy and Killa's "Closer" (2003).



Coyle describes "Closer" as "footage from 'Star Trek,' scratched and colored to roughly match the style of the original video"—that is, director Mark Romanek's notorious music video for Nine Inch Nails. Coyle grapples with "Closer," which he finds "weirder" than the other music videos he discusses, possibly because its footage is so evidently not engaged in the project of "revisualizing" its music. Coyle then suggests that T. Jonesy and Killa are using Star Trek to reimagine Mark Romanek's original video for the song, except that "Closer" doesn't have much to say about Romanek's footage. What "Closer" does have to say, it says about the character of Mr. Spock; in other words, both the Nine Inch Nails song and Romanek's video are used to provide new meaning to the source footage. Coyle ultimately admits this, noting that, "The song (which includes explicit lyrics) makes Spock look terrifying," but he doesn't seem to realize that this marks a shift from music criticism to media criticism.

[1.4] Vids like "Closer" come from a tradition of vid making significantly older than "the dawn of YouTube." In 2005, the year that YouTube was founded, media fans celebrated the 30th anniversary of vidding at Vividcon, an ongoing convention dedicated to vids. For those fans, the art of vidding begins with Star Trek and Spock. The Vividcon community traces its lineage back to Kandy Fong's Star Trek slide show, "What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan?" (1975). At the same time, much has changed between that first slide show and today's vids. Vidding has expanded far beyond Star Trek: thousands of vids have been made analyzing popular source texts, and most television shows and movies have had at least one vid made about them. Vidding has also advanced technologically: vidders have worked with slide projectors, VCRs, and computers; they have used film stills, VHS tape, and DVD source footage; they have shown their work at conventions and distributed it through the mail and over the Internet in both downloadable and streaming forms. A computer-generated, rapidly cut, effects-laden vid made in 2008 and distributed on YouTube or Imeem might seem a far cry from the slide shows and early VCR vids that vidders claim as antecedents, but these works share an aesthetic tradition and an analytical impulse not immediately obvious to the outsider.

[1.5] It is therefore important, in this time of rapidly growing interest in DIY video, to document the history of this decades-old artistic tradition, especially as most popular media commentators fail to realize that most of the video hosted on YouTube wasn't made for YouTube. YouTube isn't a creative force; it's a distribution mechanism, and although it and other media platforms are enabling many subcultural art forms to be visible for the first time, the coherence of vidding as a tradition might be lost in a sea of user-generated content. There is also a danger that vidding's pre-YouTube culture—invisible, underground, female-dominated—might be ignored or written out of media history, much as the history of the novel was written to exclude the lady novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne so notoriously referred to as a "damned mob of scribbling women." In this essay, I begin to write a history of vidding women, not only to demonstrate broad continuities in vidding practice over the course of changing technologies, but also specifically to connect these practices and aesthetics back to their evolution out of Star Trek.

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