December Meme: First Fanvid You Ever Watched

[melannen]

(I ended up not going on the computer at all yesterday; I'll make up the missed day on one of my free days.)

The first fanvids I ever watched were on a VHS tape that a friend of my sister's brought over to our house in the summer (or maybe early autumn) of my freshman year of high school. I'm fairly sure it was a vid show from Otakon 1997, or maybe a premiers vid from the previous Katsucon, because the only vids I remember (probably because they were the only ones I recognized both the canon and the song) were this Ranma 1/2 vid to the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" and this Dragonball vid to TMBG's "Particle Man". We watched them on the VCR in the downstairs sitting room, the one where the remote control wasn't wireless.

In a way that was also my intro to real life organized fandom - I wouldn't have enough internet access to be involved in online fandom for several more years, and before that I'd been limited to things like pro-published accounts of the history of Star Trek fandom. But now I had met someone who had been to actual cons! Watched actual fanvids! (He still has all his old tapes, we re-watched them a few years back, I could probably track down the exact one if I needed to.)

My taste in fanvids has not noticeably improved since then. (My current strong desire is for someone to vid the Venom movie to "I came in like a wrecking ball")

On that note, all the people wanting a home for vidders: AMV.org (ETA: actually http://www.animemusicvideos.org )has been going for nearly 20 years, has been the undisputed hub of AMV fandom nearly that whole time, and it took me literally five minutes to track down copies of vids I hadn't seen in 20 years. Why aren't more people talking about AMV.org? (...probably because it doesn't stream, embed, or allow comments. It does a very good job of making vids findable, though!)

Comments

[sholio]

If that's the Ryoga vid to that song, I remember that one! :D

AMV.org was a total godsend in the days before fandom was more centralized and vids in general were easier to find. I used to contribute to their various funding drives. I didn't actually realize they were still up and running.

I actually find it a little disconcerting when people talk about vidding history and don't mention anime vidding, because it was first of all an early adopter of digital source/streaming/downloads (I learned to vid in about 2001-02 by making AMVs, and AMVs were quite widespread online by that point - good quality too, whereas I could usually only find vids of Western source in tiny low-quality RMs and the like; a bunch of the AMVs I torrented in about 2000-01 are big and clear enough to still comfortably watch today) and second because it was relatively well organized and accessible to people (like me) who were well outside the fan-con mainstream. Long before Youtube, if you got into a big anime fandom like DBZ or Ranma or the like, you could be assured of oodles of vids that were relatively easy to find. I guess because online anime fandom was already organized around acquiring and downloading fansubs, it wasn't too hard for vids to be included in the same chain of informal online trading via message boards and download sites like Streamload.

[flamebyrd]

Oh gosh, I remember both those vids. The "Particle Man" one was actually my first introduction to both DBZ and TMBG.

[espresso_addict]

Am I misreading or did you see a fanvid before you read any fanfiction?

[mindstalk]

Makes sense to me, there's no causal link from fanfic to AMVs. My own sequence was filk, Buffy fanfic, AMVs, but easily could have gone in a different order.

(Though fanfic comes first if you count 1980s Star Trek novels, which were basically authorized fanfic.)

[mindstalk]

The first two I recall are a Hannibal/Hellsing crossover, "Silence of the Vampires", seen at a con, and the Golden Boy/Queen "I want to ride my bike" AMV in anime club, which probably came first. I've been told the bicycle race is the best part of Golden Boy and I can just stop there.

[finch]

I think the first time I saw vids was at Otakon in 2000? The ones I remember were Right Now Someone Is Reading This Title and Vision of Escaflowne | Sweating Bullets. The first one is dated as 2001 so I dunno. But it sure was easy to find the videos!

[espresso_addict]

In my neck of the woods, text was way more available than video in the 1990s, but sure, there are many routes through the forest that all lead here.

[sylvaine]

*bursts out laughing* oh, your Venom vid idea is FANTASTIC, I love it!

ETA: um, AMV.org takes me to a German frat choir site...? O.o

[ratcreature]

Their actual domain is the words written out, so animemusicvideos.org

[ratcreature]

My first fanvids were The Sentinel videos that the fan who I got the undubbed episode copies from filled the space on the VHS tapes where no episodes would fit. I didn't really connect to this or remember which -- I think some were Media Cannibals vids and some by Glorug.

[anotherslashfan]

https://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php
There you go!

ETA: Ah, sorry, ratcreature already helped you out and I didn't see the comment.

[anotherslashfan]

I think the first fanvid I saw was a Neon Genesis Evangelion amv set to Crucify by Tori Amos? It must have been in 2000 or so. An online friend sent my sister some files (via CD?!) and it was included there, iirc.

[seekingferret]

We definitely talk about AMV.org as a model, but for a variety of reasons including some of the ones you mentioned, the fact that in general anime creators give AMVs more of a pass legally speaking than Western media companies do, and the general lack of centralization among vidders, we're not sure it's a plausible model for us.

There is vidders.net, which has been around for about a decade operating at a smaller scale on a fairly similar model.

[melannen]

It is! I don't even know if I knew enough Ranma canon at that point to get the context, but the visuals were very evocative.

I think AMV.org will never die, which makes me happy. It seems to be one of those 90s-era forum sites that is uninterested in changing and therefore endures.

AMVs definitely started later than media fanvids, but they have had a very strong, centralized community since nearly the beginning, and they were definitely a stronger earlier adopter of the internet. And yeah, for people in our generation, they were so much more visible and accessible that I bet for most Americans our age an AMV was the first fanvid. It's always astonished me how little crossover there is between the two traditions, even now.

[melannen]

I think I had already encountered both if only a year or two previously (all the counselors at my summer camp were TMBG fans and DBZ was on broadcast TV in the afternoons), but that vid started a long tradition of trying to cast Particle Man in all my fandoms.

[melannen]

Yep, at least by the sensu strictu definition of fanfic (but that's today's question!)

I didn't have reliable or private internet access at the time (in fact, I think we might have still been on one of those walled-garden providers where it was hard to access the world wide web and Usenet was out of the question), so I had not found internet fanfic fandom (which was still mostly mailing lists and Usenet at that point anyway.) I knew about fanfic from reading every single Star Trek and Star Wars tie-in book available, (including a few that were authorized compilations of carefully vetted 'zine fic), but the only way to actually get any would be through personal connections (which I didn't have) or con-going (which I didn't have the money or freedom of movement for.) (I probably could have gone to one of the local SF or Star Trek cons if I'd begged my parents as a birthday present, but they would have come along to chaperone, and I wouldn't have had the money to buy zines anyway.)

Whereas pretty much everyone in the upper echelons of the geek social circles at my high school was plugged into anime con-going fandoms, which were very heavy on the vids and cosplay at the time (and very light on fanfic), so I had the personal connections there.

In terms of internet fandom, yeah, fanfic was first.

[melannen]

Hannibal the movie, not the show, right, otherwise I feel very old. :P

There are quite a few anime I have only seen via AMVs and feel satisfied!

[melannen]

Ah, sorry, I could have sworn it had a redirect! Maybe it used to.

I have many great vid ideas yet somehow the work to make them never magically gets done. :P

[melannen]

VHS vid solidarity!

I have no idea what my first Western vid was, but it would've been online; probably Harry Potter to some early-2000s pop song that made 0 impression on me, although I'm not entirely sure, my intro on online fandom was also kind of strange and sideways. (The first Western vids I remember specifically were Stargate SG1 but I can't track any of them down anymore.)

[melannen]

Aww, I remember the CDRs full of anime and music that were getting passed around in 2000 or so! That's how I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion (And the last few episodes were in some format I didn't have a player for, so I still haven't seen the ending.)

[ratcreature]

I still have those tapes in a box somewhere, so I could find out, but I haven't rewatched them in years, though I still own a VHS, that last I tried, uh some time ago, still worked.

[melannen]

I guess I just haven't seen it mentioned in any of the wider-fandom discussions of moving, but fair enough! I'd've though the music was as much of a problem as the source, though, and AMVs tend to pull from more or less the same Western music? I suspect not streaming or embedding is their best defense there.

Even just a database with no downloads, but links to personal sites, would be great for me as a passive consumer, but you're right about the lack of centralization. (Also, I somehow feel like Western vidders would be more freaked out by a database that will tell them everyone else who has vidded the same source to the same song. Although maybe that's gotten better in the last ten years.)

The thing with vidders.net is that it's completely opaque if you don't have an account - I went and looked the other day just to see what it was like these days, and without a login I couldn't even tell if it would be useful to me as a vid-watcher-not-producer, or if any vids I'd want to watch are there. There isn't even a public "about us" or FAQ; basically all I can see is the TOS. Does it have a database like AMV.org? I might sign up if it does!

I understand wanting tighter security, but I can also see why it's stayed small-scale, since you basically have to already know all about it to know if you want to join.

[umadoshi]

AMV.org is pretty amazing. I haven't used it regularly in forever, but maybe the new Fruits Basket anime will change that. ^_-

I did recently go poking around in my downloads history there, because quite a while back now I had a hard drive failure that claimed my "media from A-L" folders, including "AMVs", and I was hoping to reconstruct some of my collection of favorites. :/ Alas, it didn't help that much. (So now I'm really hoping I still have some burned CDs or DVDs someplace that have copies of most of the vids I loved most. >.<)

[melannen]

I think some of the dates may be a little off for older stuff on there, but on the other hand it's easy to mix up years on vid shows. Hooray for Otakon! (Which, shamefully, I have still never been to after twenty years, despite having been friends with former concomm people at various points.)

[kore]

....did I do something wrong? I put AMV.org into the search box and got "Veranstaltungen der AMV"? https://www.amv.org/

[melannen]

It's just. So reliable! It's always there, it's always the same.

I will admit I haven't done much downloading from there lately, so I don't know how bad the linkrot is, or anything like that. (I do still have some of my very old anime-fandom CDRs, but I have no idea if they still play - cdrs have a much shorter than ideal lifespan, and I know some of my newer fanmix CDs have already stopped playing. :/ )

[melannen]

It's animemusicvideos.org , sorry! That's been the shorthand since forever, but I g guess they lost their redirect at some point.

[kore]

DUH, thank you! Also that was a clear case of Should Have Read the Comments First Before Making One :-/

[kore]

OH NOT JUST ME. I was like "....is this....a very elaborate kind of front door....?"

[melannen]

No no, it was my fault for being lazy about the link.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Hi, Jim!

I never saw the original The Sentinel videos at the time, and very few since.

[ratcreature]

There were several production collectives (? I think was the term, most seemed group efforts? ...) that published Sentinel fanvids. I vaguely recall vids being offered in listings alongside zines, so you could get also VHS tapes dedicated to just copied fanvids. And for a while as online fanvids became a thing the Cascade Library had a specialty index for them. But I've never been much of a vid fan, and still rarely watch them.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I came in (I was in brick and mortar fandom prior) to internet media fandom as zines were waning because postal charges went astronomical. I was cash strapped enough that acquiring any was out of the question.

YouTube, so helpful.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I only ever got a few US zines, getting them from the US to here was a pain. Most of my fandom spending always went to buying comics.

[dejadrew]

Not sure which was first, but one of the very first ones I remember is the "Right Now" AMV (Right Now Someone is Reading this Title? Right Now Someone is Watching this Video?)

AH! Here! I think? https://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=3684

I would have seen it in my university's anime club, possibly at a dedicated AMV night event.

[espresso_addict]

Fascinating -- we got into fandom at much the same time, but because I was older with concomitant money & freedoms (miles of separation from parents, not the least), had rather different experiences. I didn't know anyone who was into media fandom at school, though there were lots of geeky folk whom I would now categorise as Tolkien/sf fen. And of course there wasn't even a hint of a sniff of the internet at that date.

[umadoshi]

I think a lot of the things I downloaded back in the day were hosted offsite, and a lot of those links seemed to have gone dead. Alas.

*shudders* Maybe I should rip my "backup CDs" back to my computer (if possible) and make a new DVD. Scary to think of how many places in the house they could be tucked away in, though.

[duskpeterson]

I was sitting at a consuite table at Connexions, the first slash con I'd ever attended. I'd just discovered slash three months before, via The Phantom Menace. I knew nothing about fanvids.

And suddenly somebody in the consuite began playing this on a laptop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpEcJUbssDQ

I melted.

[sylvaine]

Ooooh, that makes sense, thank you!

[sylvaine]

I should have known you'd know the site ♥

[sylvaine]

Vidding is so MUCH work, though, is the thing! I too have many ideas but, uh. So far I prefer mediums where I get results (and comments/kudos) quicker xD

[sylvaine]

*giggles* I was thinking, like, "Is this just what the site directs to in Germany? Is it music videos everywhere else but here? No, I don't think the internet works that way..."

[anotherslashfan]

I wish! I had to wiki it ;)

[anotherslashfan]

I think I still have a tall stack of DVDs and CDRs with anime lying around.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, honestly I don't care that much about wider-fandom discussions. I never went to tumblr so I can't get that worked up now that it's not looking as useful for fandom again. :P I just meant that when vidders talk to each other about how to stop being nomads, AMV.org is obviously one of the things we talk about.

vidders.net is not all that useful a site. I've put a couple of my vids up there, but not all of them, and there isn't that much to see, though it depends on your fandoms. But it's been up and running for a decade, run by an actual vidder/vidfan, and it's been funding itself with donations/subscriptions from other vidders and vidfans, and it's stayed beneath the radar of legal problems, and nobody else can say all of that.