This project asks what a fanvid (vid) is, and by extension, what vids are to television. Vids are derived from television and film sources but they are themselves neither television episodes nor films. These works approximate the music video in appearance and duration, but are non-commercial fan works which construct creative and critical analyses of existing media. Vids remake narratives for a deeply attentive fan audience who watch with a deep knowledge of the source text, or with familiarity of the codes and conventions of the vid form. This thesis is concerned with vids of live-action narrative fiction and covers technological changes from broadcast television, to VCR and the rise of home video, to digital viewership. The chapters focus on different aspects of the vid form in relation to current issues in television studies, with some recourse to the growing field of fandom studies to provide appropriate subcultural context. The first case study chapter addresses contrasting theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualise the kinds of archival work done by vidders as a form of historiography. Vids are created from personal archives of film, television and other media sources; vids bear traces of their archival origins, and their creation is the performance of the vidder’s knowledge of their own archive. This chapter includes vids from the VCR era, and has a particular focus on Star Trek. The next chapter addresses multifandom vids – a vid genre that draws together video clips from several sources to compare and contrast norms of representation – alongside critical work on found footage films, to analyse the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations (of erotics, of spectacle, etc.). The final chapter is an intensive case study of a trilogy of Battlestar Galactica vids, to analyse both the vid’s relationship with adaptation and genre, and the central role of songs in vids. While vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure meaning within the work, they are not abstract illustrations of songs. Instead, the clichés and idioms of the chosen song’s instrumentation are vital in completing the vid’s reinterpretation of its source text. Television studies is an appropriate disciplinary frame for studying the vid, as it offers ways of thinking about audiences, sequential narratives and the textuality of video forms. The creators and audiences of vids are highly competent in the deep reading and careful viewing of both mainstream and cult television and film, and keep archives of media which they reframe and re-present.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:675382 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Stevens, Emily C. |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/74095/ |
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