Vidding: A History

by Francesca Coppa

Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work.



A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.



 

Genres: Nonfiction, Fandom

275 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit which built and runs the Archive of Our Own. She writes in the fields of dramatic literature, performance studies, and fan studies, and is currently writing a book about fan music video. She is a passionate advocate of fair use.

Reviews

[Lucy Wordley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic, detailed and engaging history of vidding! Despite essentially being an academic text I found this book really touching and inspiring, because the knowledge Francesca Coppa brings to this text and the tone with which she writes clearly shows how much she cares about the vidding community. It made me emotional at times hearing the stories of the women who pioneered this art form; starting from Star Trek slideshows in the 70s, Starsky and Hutch VCR vids of the early 80s, moving through into the first digital vids of the 90s and on to today with the much more mainstream and widespread sharing of vids via Youtube.

I came across my first fanvid around 2007 and whilst I have watched many different vids for different fandoms over the years I have never really interacted with the vidding community itself; this meant that my knowledge of the history of vidding was practically non-existent. Coppa does a great job of highlighting the challenges the community faced along the way: disparaging attitudes from male SFF fans, the technical limitations of the VCR machine, copyright issues and the treatment of their work as farcical by the wider public, among others. She also does a fantastic job of demonstrating the appeal of vidding and the way in which women took their favourite media and drew out the stories, narratives and imagery that they wanted to see, interacting with the source material critically and creating a kind of visual poetry at the same time. I could feel the heart and passion at the centre of this book but it was also thoroughly researched, meticulously referenced and I especially appreciated the links to all of the vids mentioned in the text, which gave me a chance to discover a ton of wonderful and influential fanvids from over the years.

[Punk]

An open source book. Read online or download a DRM-free epub or pdf at University of Michigan Press.

[Nina ( picturetalk321 ) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book brought tremendous joy. It tells, to a large extent, my story. I found it mesmerising and couldn't put it down. It combines an engaging, friendly and entirely readable prose style (so, so unusual in academic writing) with a meticulously researched, end-noted knowledge base. The author knows her subject both as an academic and as an aca-fan / participant so this is a bit of auto-ethnography as well. The story of early vidding is particularly fascinating to me as are the details on the incredible technical challenges surmounted by the 'foremothers' of fan videos: torturing VCRs to do what you want them to do is a phrase I remember. The online apparatus with extensive appendices that include embedded videos, from the earliest one-frame Starsky & Hutch slide of 1980 to the latest youtube vids, this is a fascinating and hugely important archive. I learned a lot. I felt a lot. I am inspired, moved, motivated and wiser. I also feel hugely proud of what fans create, and blessed with fandom's existence.

With its dissection of violence, gender-bias and racism in mainstream film and TV, its analysis of the rise of commercially-driven, algorithm-dependent platforms, its legal advocacy for fair use, its careful attention to form and aesthetics, its passionate respect for all the fans, this is relevant way beyond vidding. I recommend it to anyone who has ever visited a social media platform and watched a fan-made video -- to wit: everyone of us ;p.

The electronic version is available for free. Endless kudos to the publishers.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fantastic stuff!! For all the vids I personally recognized, Coppa compellingly explained why they were so cool, which helped me really trust the info about the vids I didn't know. The book interface took a little bit for me figure out how to navigate (in terms of going between the body and the appendices) but was totally worth it because it was SO USEFUL to watch the videos right there on the page with the analysis. I particularly appreciate how well Coppa combines tech history, social/oral history, and media criticism. As Coppa argues, vids rely on CONTEXT: the tech that makes vidding possible; the canon and the fanon and the reception of the content; the audience, which is often extremely specific. It's not truly possible to *re-create* that context but Coppa does the next best thing. This would be a great book to use in a class, but I also recommend it just for personal interest.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent months with this book and loved every second, including all the time I spent away from the book watching referenced movies, mashups, remixes, more fanvids in addition to all that were shared here, and miscellaneous transformative videos. I have never had such an interactive reading experience before and I'm so grateful for it. I came into the book not knowing much about the subject, and now I have gained such a deep appreciation for the art and this piece of fandom history!

5 stars, definitely recommend.

[soph · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think fan studies is SUCH an underappreciated arm of comparative media studies! i would LOVE to know what coppa thinks about how the primary social media platforms today and their affordances have produced vidding as an entirely new short-form, vertical, ephemeral type of media + maybe how that's moved vidding from the 'transformational' side of fandom to a more affirmational medium (but maybe those boundaries are porous anyway). i'm also interested in the lexical shift that has happened around vids: from fanvids to amvs to edits to fancams, and where/when those have been happening. an amazing, thorough and precise history!

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this because these are my people and this is our history and I'm so glad someone has written it all down.