such_heights | Your History of Vidding

Dragon Ball Z, one of the fanartists I liked also did vids, hosted on her own site.

Awesome, thanks!

Lo, back in the days when we hung out on message boards and all had our little websites on Geocities. Or redrover. And we had WEBRINGS.

Everyone over thirty on this thread is undoubtedly now being made to feel old.

This probably doesn't help at all, but I didn't see my first fanvids online - I saw them at a Star Trek convention when I was eight or nine! And that's how I heard about them, too; my mom did a few Star Trek conventions before I did, and they were one of her favorite parts.

When I started watching online, they were flash Harry Potter videos that I found through discussion on LJ/Fiction Alley, I think. This was pre-YouTube.

No, that is super helpful and interesting! Can you remember much about what they were like?

Not much, sadly! I think they were dance party-type vids and generally more lighthearted, but I can't say for sure. I do know that it was a time period when they would have had to be on VHS, since it was before DVD.

a) The very first was Gundam Wing. (The amv was made in 2001; it's still online here.) ETA: And it's still available for download on the creator's original page, I was not expecting that! The next few I can remember were Utena and a few more anime fandoms.

The first live action fandom was LoTR, and they were terrible. I have no idea what the site was, I just googled my way there.

b) I think I got the very first ones off Kazaa, actually. I wasn't looking for fan music videos, I think I was just seeing what I could find for those shows -- probably looking for soundtrack music if I had anything specific in mind.

Edited 2013-07-23 23:59 (UTC)

The first fandom I saw vids in was SGA. I'd been in HP fandom before that but strictly book-based so I hadn't run into vids. This was in the days before I'd gotten myself an LJ so although it's possible I was introduced to vids via LJ it's just as possible that I first came across vids from the websites of various fans, either reccers' sites or author sites.

The first vids I can remember watching were on Highlander tapes that my German girlfriend had when I visited her back in 2000. She had a number of VCR tapes of her favourite shows with original audio rather than the dubbed German versions, the kind of tapes that fangirls copied for each other and sent around the world. Hers were mainly of Highlander and Due South, if I remember correctly. There may also have been The Sentinel ones. Mostly tapes with what people thought were the must-see episodes, like ones with just the Methos episodes of Highlander, for example. And on at least one of those tapes, whoever originally made it had included a set of vids. I can't remember most of them, but one that completely grabbed me and seemed perfect to me was a Methos vid to Meredith Brooks's "Bitch". There were no vidder credits, so have no clue who made it. I think someone told me years later - may have been

movies_michelle - also informing me that the vid had never been released online, but now I can't remember the vidder's name. It wasn't someone I recognized then. But, anyway, that was my first vid watching experience. Thinking of that vid still makes me happy, and it's always what pops first into my head when I hear the song.

X-Files vids, Mulder/Krycek slash, and they were on VHS. Shown to me in a friend's living room in about 1999 or 2000.

The first vids I can remember watching were when I was about 9 (so, 1989, ish?) I was at a Star Trek Convention with my parents, and before Marina Sirtis came out to talk to the audience, they played several vids on the screens they'd set up around the stage. One of the them was a vid of Data to "Domo Arigatou, Mr. Roboto" and the other one was a tribute to the women of Star Trek (but unfortunately, I can't remember the song now).

Years later, probably around 1998-1999, a friend I met online (probably via the Buffy Fandom, maybe the Hanniganite Message Boards on AOL) sent me a video tape that contained about 8 hours of vids from groups like the Media Cannibals, Media West, and the Chicago Loop, titled "Veni, Vidi, Vidded". It contained a range of fandoms, including but not limited to: X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, Oz, Highlander, Babylon 5, Homicide, and Due South.

I didn't start sourcing vids from downloads off the internet until much later, but once I did it was mostly individual fan websites housing their own vids, or Farscape Fantasy (http://www.farscapefantasy.com/).

1. a) A VCR-vid for Blake's 7 ending, to Send in the Clowns, seen c.1986. It left a big impression on me, because I hadn't considered taking source material and using it that way.
b) Pre-internet!

2. a) The Daicon III (1981) and IV (1983) opening vids. Not sure these count, as they are original fan animation, but seeing so many familiar characters in this huge melange of fannish love made me feel part of a wider community of fans. "You are not alone!"
b) Pre-internet!

(Then, no vids for nearly two decades, until I discovered YouTube and HP, dueSouth, and SGA vids.)

The first vids I ever watched were anime vids, and fandom at that time, for me, was Usenet and mailing lists, not websites. When you got videotapes of fansubs sometimes they'd stick vids in at the end just to fill in any blank space. I don't remember many of the vids specifically but a friend of mine went by JetWolf at the time and made some sailor moon vids to songs from the English language soundtrack album.

Actually, wow, turns out they're still online:
http://www.jetwolf.com/hof/4paws/sm.php

This would have been about 1997. I'm not sure when I finally got high speed internet, but I was definitely on dial-up at the time, so I only saw vids on videotapes or at cons.

Edited 2013-07-24 00:41 (UTC)

The first vids that I saw were for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometime around 2000-2001 just as online vids were really first starting to appear. They were by Bonibaru (

bonibaru/

boniblithe), if I'm not mistaken, and I stumbled across them while looking for fanfiction.

LiveJournal hadn't really taken off yet at that point, so I mostly found other vids via message boards and mailing lists (Nummy Treat, oh how I miss you) that linked to vidders' personal websites for the first year or two. Then, probably around 2003, western media fandom really started making the shift to LiveJournal.

I also watched a lot of AMVs back in the early days, and those I found mostly via webrings (which is how I also found anime/manga fic, to be honest). I remember that there was a really big one back in the early 2000s, which separated sites out by fandom and then broke it down even more with whether they had fic/vids/fanart/etc. on them, but I can't remember the name of it to save my life.

Well, they're not vids, but I saw a boatload of AMVs before I ever saw any vids--I found almost all of them through the org. animemusicvideos.org, that is. I feel like the Wiscon 2009 vid party was the first time I was really exposed to a lot of vids! If I saw any before that, they didn't make a huge impression.

Oh! I am going to be in London for Nine Worlds, as the family I babysit for has invited me along on their vacation, and my babysitting charges want to attend for a day. (I spent a chunk of today helping them figure out cosplay options: they settled on Tiffany Aching and "cute R2D2 dress.") Maybe I'll see you there!

So the first time I heard about vidding was in a fanzine I bought in about 1993. It had a column by a guy who was basically explaining what vidding was and how it worked, with two VCRs, some Star Trek: The Next Generation footage and a Police song. I couldn't figure out how or why that was meant to be exciting or interesting, but in fairness, he was talking about a Deanna Troi vid to "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic", which pings my embarrassment squick with its obviousness.

I actually saw a vid in late 2002 -- a new friend was a film student, and she was doing an assignment on vids for her editing class. She showed me a whole lot of Harry Potter vids and explained why she considered them good. No talky-face, no literality with lyrics, appropriate music choice, etc.

These vids were all saved to her hard drive, so I couldn't begin to tell you what sites they came from, but they made a big enough impression that I still have a couple of them on a CD-Rom around here somewhere.

I'm not sure if this counts, but back in the late 1980s, there was a local UHF channel that played all cartoons, all the time. They didn't have much advertising (and probably didn't last more than a couple of years ... HMM, CONNECTION) but one of the things they used for time-filler between programs were these music videos using clips of Hanna-Barbera cartoons set to various popular songs -- the only one I remember for certain was for "Freeway of Love". Google tells me that these videos were called HBTV (Hanna-Barbera TV) and it's nice to know I'm not the only one who remembers them -- thank you Internet! They weren't fan-made, which is why I'm not sure if it counts, but aesthetically they were very vidLIKE, and I loved them; I'd always look forward to seeing them.

The first fan-made vids that I remember seeing were some AMVs that my sister obtained via Napster in about 1999 or 2000. These included ones for Magic Knights Rayearth, the Final Fantasy movies, and Ranma 1/2. The quality was decent, even by modern standards, though many of them had screen artifacts that made it clear they'd been either dubbed off VHS or used some VHS source.

Not too long after that, I started finding vids online, usually as an accidental side effect of looking for fic. Most were AMVs, though I also found a few for SG-1 and Buffy. I believe animemusicvideos.org started up around that time; it was my main source for vids for a long while.

Edited (clarifying a point) 2013-07-24 02:07 (UTC)

The very first was a Harry Potter Remus/Sirius vid set to Snow Patrol's "Run" that was a mixture of clips from the PoA movie and fanart. I heard about it from the forums at FictionAlley.

:) Sounds like a great project! But I'd note that your second question presumes that everyone learned about vids via websites, which obviously isn't the case for everyone, so maybe you should change it?

a) The first vids I watched were in X-Files fandom, then a little later in due South fandom.

b) I found them via tapeswapping circles - I knew a bunch of people who swapped VHS tapes by mailing them around. I did find the tapeswapping circles via the internet - private websites on webrings, though, and maybe some on Geocities later on? But that's not how I found vids. I had done some tapeswaps for X-files random stuff (a music video that had Gillian Anderson in it, some X-Files gag reels, the Twin Peaks episodes with David Duchovny in drag, etc., and they came with vids on them as well, because the person just copied their entire tape of misc XF stuff. I then intentionally obtained some VHS tapes via friends in the XF fandom (people who hung out on the official TXF website bulletin boards).

The due South vids were shown to me by a real-life friend, who had a collection of them on VHS, and I think she got them via tapeswapping too. We used to spend a lot of time copying tapes and mailing them around. :)

a) first watched ranma 1/2 and multifandom AMVs

b) downloaded them through file sharing services like napster and ...emule, i think? so i just found them through random searches, wasn't through a website

I think the earliest two I can remember are 500 Miles and Material Girl, both Ranma 1/2 AMVs. Snap, even though I didn't know it existed at the time I watched them, here I found them both on the org:
Material Girl (haha shit, based on the url that seems to be the second AMV ever uploaded to the org??? wow)
500 Miles

Also in terms of things that were basically vids, i remember the little edited shorts on cartoon network toonami in the mid-late 90s that would sometimes show in lieu of commercials or between programs. those were effectively vids and would often have clips from a lot of diff cartoons. i remember they used a lot of clips from the old fleischer studios superman cartoons.

Edited 2013-07-24 02:54 (UTC)

Harry Potter. The person who ran the fan website I frequented posted fanvids -- until then I hadn't had the faintest clue they existed. This was pre-YouTube (and I hadn't heard of LJ yet), so I often found vids on various fan websites or on this video hosting site called zippyshare.

My experience is similar to a few people who have commented already. AMVs through webrings and mailing lists, with some vids included on dubbed tapes, mass consumption and exposure at anime conventions when 56k dialup was the fastest thing around.

I can't remember specific vids, though I can remember seeing early ones in Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo fandoms. I also remember a Golden Boy video that was specifically not the one by Kevin Caldwell, but my google is failing me.

I remember a lot of early 2000s anime music videos did lip syncing for comedic effect, then it seemed for a long time to just be good timing and narrative, and then around mid-2000s the lip-syncing trend came back, but maybe that's just the fandoms I was exposed to!

I'm guessing the first vids I saw were when I was in high school? I was really into anime and manga at the time, and I OBSESSED about the Fruits Basket manga. I definitely remember watching a couple vids cut from the FB anime. I wanna say I just found them on YouTube? If it matters, it would have probably been around 2007.

I also remember seeking out Firefly vids on YouTube when I was in college, at a time when I was aware of online fandom but had not yet begun to participate in it.

A search of my journal reveals that the first vid I watched was Merry's SGA vid "Hello" in 2005. After kind of vaguely seeing mention of vids around LJ-based fandoms, I finally checked a few out from that year's Vividcon. I was still in high school at the time, and while I don't keep super up to date with vids, I do still watch them when I see a rec or an intriguing link.

I think it was BSG, and I was probably just tootling around on YouTube.

Women's Work, Supernatural, which I'd heard about several times before I watched it on account of it being all famous and such. I think I first heard about it on JF.

Online Farscape fandom got me into vids, mostly either on www.farscapefantasy.com or at the Kansas forums (and then the Terra Firma forums after Kansas shut down).

After that I found LJ in general because I was getting into BSG fandom and there wasn't a popular centralised forum for it (my primary mode of fannish communication until then) and I found that most of the discussion was on LJ, so I got an LJ. At which point I found first the bsg_vids LJ community (which was way more active than most other fandom-specific vidding comms at the time), and after that the vidding community and started learning that there was a vidding fandom that centred on vidding, not vidding within particular fandoms.

As to making vids, I made my first one towards the end of my Farscape tenure and then started making them more frequently and incorporating vidding into my fannish identity for BSG around the time I got an LJ. (Eventually breaking into other fandoms too, of course!)

I saw my first ever vids at the Voyager: The Return convention in Blackpool in 2001. They showed them on the big screen between talks. There were several on the day I went and I don't remember them all, but I'm pretty sure there was one about Janeway set to Hair that I absolutely fell in love with. At the time it didn't occur to me that ordinary fans might have made them but in hindsight I think that was almost certainly the case, I think there might have been some sort of contest involved.

After that I kind of forgot about it for a while (internet wasn't fast enough to watch them) and I rediscovered vids through X-Files fandom in about 2005. This was one of the first ones I loved:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9fJ-9iM7vY

I was linked to it by a friend in the fandom and found others through that vidder's website and links on their site to other vidders. I wasn't aware at all of any other sorts of vidding communities or resources and didn't really become aware of them until I was looking for places to post my DW/SJA vids from about 2008 onwards, when I found the LJ vidding community.

The first vid I ever saw was probably SGA (I think it might have been one of

busaikko's) but I am afraid I don't know where it was hosted.

Definitely Star Trek:Voyager fandom, circa 2001. It may have been sooner than that, but definitely no later. I likely found them while surfing personal websites (geocities!) and associated webrings.

The first vids I saw were all AMVs. I joined the Anime Otaku at varsity in 2001, they used to host weekly anime film nights and they'd screen a few AMVs before showing the films. You'd be able to get them on the local Direct Connect network, but I soon started looking for vids at animemusicvideos.org.

I loved them, but didn't really think about the fact that you'd be able to find fanvids to tv shows or live action films until a few years later (probably in 2004) when I stumbled onto some X-files and Buffy vids online. I thinks I found them through random browsing.

I think the first vid I ever saw may have been Defying Gravity (Firefly) - I don't remember how I found it, but it was one of those ones that was all over the internet, so I probably found the link through the TWOP Firefly forum or Whedonesque or somewhere like that. Or it might have been I'm Your Man, which I found by googling for Alias femslash (specifically Sydney/Anna). I'm pretty sure it was I Enjoy Being A Girl that finally tipped me over into actively looking for vids, rather than just enjoying them when I came across them, though.

The first vids I ever saw were shown to me in my living room by

sanj (who is the one who enticed me into fandom in the first place.) She showed me some XF vids because she knew I had loved that show (I'm Only Happy When It Rains). Once I fell into Sentinel fandom, which was my first fandom, she showed me more Sentinel vids -- entirely Media Cannibals vids, if memory services, on VHS tapes she'd purchased at a con.

♥

ETA: this would have been 1998, I'm pretty sure. 1999 was when I fell headlong into Sentinel fandom, so she probably showed me the TS vids on that same Media Cannibals collection then.

Edited (to add more data) 2013-07-24 12:16 (UTC)

Awwww...I heart you for this.

My first vid exposure was in DeeJay's living room. I've mentioned this before many times, but she was telling me about vids, and I thought, oh god, that sounds horrible, I don't want to watch it, this sounds like the worst thing ever. And then she showed me some Professionals vids she'd made, and I was like, this is the BEST thing ever! That would have been in the early '90s. I met the Media Cannibals and started vidding with them not long after that.

a) Buffy the Vampire Slayer primarily, but I found them through an X-Files message board back in 1998 or 1999ish.

b) I found websites rather randomly when surfing the internet, then clicking on the vidder's affiliates page and going to another website with vids. Most of them were on geocities (LOL) and there were some on angelfire that I remember.

I suspect it was Veronica Mars, as that was the first fandom in which I actually started seeking out fanwork at all. I found them on youtube, but I fell into that fandom via TWOP, so that might be cited as the origin, too.

Oh, and it would have been about 2006, I think.

Edited 2013-07-24 13:39 (UTC)

a) the brother of a friend made a Star Wars prequel trilogy one. So 2005/2006ish? Then one of my friends mentioned AMVs to me around 2007. (I didn't watch them; I've never really been interested in anime.) When I actually started paying attention to vids, it was Doctor Who, S5 and beyond.

b) The made-by-a-brother vid was directly emailed, I think, but I honestly can't remember. The AMVs were on YouTube. Ditto for the DW vids, though I don't hunt for them-- links either by you or Elisi. I'm not much of a vid watcher.

The first vids I ever saw were SG-1 vids, which makes this about 2001, and after a lot of searching I've actually found them! They're the ones at the top of this page, by

suzvoy - the sitcom one, and For Kids Of All Ages. A friend who knew Suz passed them on to me. (And, I swear to god this is true, passed me the For Kids... one ON A FLOPPY DISC.)

I want to say my first vid was in X-Files, but I don't think that's actually true -- it was pre-YouTube, and I didn't have the software needed to play video files at that time. I'm pretty sure the first vid I watched was LotR RPS, Dom/Elijah, and I can't remember the song or the artist (but I'd definitely recognize the song title if I saw it again, argh). No idea where I originally found it -- one of the yahoogroups? Bag End Inn?

the first vids i ever watched were for buffy the vampire slayer. in my highschool's library with the headphones plugged in. probably 1999/2000. i graduated in may of 2001. one of the authors i stalked also did vids. then i found a vids recs list. and i watched every one i could find. for buffy. due south. highlander. for pretty much any fandom i could think of. downloaded one by one onto a three inch floppy. (ah the days before USB.) i would carry them back and forth from the library to my house where i had no internet and only windows media player.

i'll go looking at my external tomorrow. i can possibly narrow it down to within five vidders.

The first vid I ever saw was an Utena vid to Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" which holy crap actually still seems to be online. So that was in 1999. I think I just found a random link online and spent two days downloading it.

After that, I watched a lot of AMVs in college via the anime club, mostly on people's VHS tapes IIRC. I think they got the vids via con AMV awards. I saw a LOT of Evangelion vids. The one I remember most is Kevin Caldwell's Engel, as well as Tainted Donuts (Trigun/Cowboy Bebop crossover), Right Now Someone Is Reading This Title (multi, meta), a ton of stuff from ErMaC Studios, Brad DeMoss' Star Wars Episode I trailer redone with Evangelion footage (can't find link), and Kusoyaro's Bachelorette (Utena movie). Some of these were downloaded off my college ethernet connection, and there was a lot of wrangling with codecs, as it was pre-VLC.

The first Western media fandom vids I saw were Buffy vids around 2002-2003. The ones I remember are Strange Disease, Eunice and Myrtle's Fragile,

heresluck's Come On and Superstar, and Morgaine's She Bangs. I also remember lurking at We Band of Buggered and watching the vid camp stuff that Valerie set up. Pretty much all the recs I got through my flist on LJ, and that's when I found out about VVC and the whole chronology of media fandom vids from the Star Trek stuff. I had a hard time getting used to media fandom vids at first, because they look less flashy than AMVs, but then I learned more about the aesthetics while lurking in vid camp and stuff.

Edited (i can html...) 2013-07-25 19:36 (UTC)

The first vid I ever remember watching was "Closer", the infamous Star Trek Vid, that a friend posted a link to on Facebook, so that was back in 2005-6 or so?

Shortly thereafter I fell into Veronica Mars fandom and needed more Logan/Veronica, so I gobbled up all the fic and then vids I could get my grubby paws on. :) I either got those from YouTube or from various places linked from LJ or the TWoP forums.

That "Closer" vid was probably the one by T Jonesy and Killa... :-)

Yup, that's the one! :)

Ha! I can do better than guess; I can tell you for certain, thanks to the modern marvels of timestamps being preserved through usb file transfers. The earliest time stamps I'm seeing are from approximately early 2004.

I also remember Farscape Fantasy, actually; looking through my archive I see a couple of vids from there (such as Almost, by fieryhands). Aside from those, I also have a Cowboy Bebop vid by vicbond007, and of course I Wish I was a Lesbian by Absolute Destiny.

If you want more details or links or anything, let me know, I still have bookmarks and files for most of the early vids I know.

I started watching vids in 2009, when I got in Merlin fandom. Before that, I was in HP fandom, on the French side of things, and I don't think I ever saw a vid.

The first vids I bookmarked were Merlin/Arthur, on Youtube, but I can't recall if I found them directly or through a rec post on LJ : this one and that one

The first vids I remember seeing was at party at "The House that Slash Built", where

fairestcat lived at the time. Before I go looking for my LJ post, here are my recollections: I was just getting into fandom as a community vs. a solo activity [eta that is not entirely true... let's say I was re-entering fandom]. I think this was 2007. I knew nobody at this party! I was a very-closeted queer person! Oh my! We watched a whole lotta vids and I was like ooooh, what is this about. I don't remember what they were, except there were some SGA ones, probably.

OK, I found the post:
http://sasha-feather.livejournal.com/134395.html (Locked, from 10-13-2007)
"Item One: My Tribe

I went to a gathering of fan girls today. It was great: I learned about this vidding thing, watched some SGA (complete with much squeeing), and met some cool people (*waves to new friends-list people*). There were 8 people at the gathering, ~4 laptops, a desktop computer, a TV, two cats, and snacks. Later we decided that we should eat a meal. We walked around for a while--it's surprisingly nice weather lately--and ended up at an Indian restaurant, where we talked about some real-life things in addition to fannish things. This kind of gathering has been rare in my life, and there is a real feeling of being among people who basically understand each other. It's more than just enjoying the same entertainment. What is it, then? I'm still puzzling that out. "

Turns out I didn't blog any of the vids or give much info there. I did later mention "Without Me", the vid about David Hewlitt by mamoru22.

Edited 2013-07-29 21:06 (UTC)

Your History of Vidding

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