Blast from The Past: An Homage To Every Fan Who Has Voluntered To Run A Fan Vid Show

This post was from 2007, back when I was well enough to volunteer on fan-run conventions. If you have ever VJ-ed a vid show, you may appreciate it……..

“As some of you may know, I help run the Bascon vid show. My mission: solicit vids, create the playlist for the 2 hour Sat show and the 1++ Bonus show. We have a few rules and requirements about submitting vids and how we show them and what we need from the vidders … But after watching Vividcon host three days of vid shows over the past five years involving hundreds of vidders - and doing it very well with only a few snafus, I, as the solo Bascon vid show playlist DVD person, promise you this:

1. I will do my best to show your vid and have it look as best as possible. Having said that…..
2. I do not promise to show your vid unless you’re an attending member, in which case I do promise to show at least one of your vids - if you’re lucky it will be at the very end of the show sandwiched between a 6 minute long montage of black and white footage from the A Team set to Britney Spears and the vid about polar bears. I also promise to never tell you which vid I am showing or why. I will lose every email you ever send to me.
3. I will fuck up your vid. I will squeeze it into the wrong aspect ratio. I will encode it in such a way that it looks fuzzy and we stare at it like it is a Rhorshack drawing.
4. I promise that your audio will drop at least twice and your video will go black at least once - and that this will *not* be because you used a fade to black effect.
5. I promise that the vid show DVD will always freeze when it reaches your vid - and only your vid.
6., I promise I will confuse your name with the lemon vidder on your left, to mix up your song title/vid title and to copy and paste Evanescence and/or Linkin Park into where your really cool artist/band name should be.
7. I promise that when your vid is shown, there will be at least one person trying to narrate the entire 12 season arc of X-Files to her neighbor loudly - even if your vid never has one X-Files clip. The audience will laugh at all the wrong places and cry when you thought you were being funny. You will receive the weirdest, most insulting and frankly disturbing feedback from my audience. If you receive any feedback at all.

Now I realize that is a lot to promise. I hope I don’t screw it up.

So now that we’re all clear on what to expect, please sit back and enjoy the show.

*Two quick anecdotes - my first submission to VVC, my Due South vid ‘Flying Home’ came on the screen - with no sound. The audience clearly enjoyed the pretty images - but seemed less enthused about the (lack of) music. This was on every copy of the DVD they had prepared for the show. I stood up and handed my “neurotically carry it with me everywhere copy of my vids on DVD” so they could play it at the end of the show. I spent the rest of the con feeling like (a) I had a target painted on my back and (b) convinced that I was the only vidder this had ever happened to and © that they were all really really meanincompetentcluelessmaybe I’m being too sensitive people. Then I went back next year and laughed when it happened to someone else. OK, I didn’t really laugh - but I did wince.
** When I persuaded gwyn_r to send her first vid to Bascon, she told me: “Do not fuck up my vid or I will fly down there and sit on your head” (she’s very tall, this is not an idle threat). I ripped her DVD and did multiple test encodes of the vid show. On the fourth playback I noted that her vid looked…crappy. Really, really crappy. I realized that when I ripped the vid, the stupid software had defaulted to 50% quality so her vid had lost half of its resolution. I thanked the Gods that she would never know and re-ripped it at full quality. Whew. Bullet dodged. ……ooops. I think she may be reading this post……”