“Becoming a part of the storytelling”: Fan vidding practices and histories

This chapter explores the practice of fan vidding, where fans edit film and television footage to music to tell a story about the visual text. Part of the much larger media fandom community, vidding is often described as “visual fan fiction.” This chapter will follow the development of vidding as a fan practice and as a community. It will discuss vidding as a form of fannish textual engagement, how vids simultaneously disrupt and celebrate televisual texts, and the function of music in vids. This (mostly female) community of vidders has a thirty-year history: the earliest vids were created with slide projectors and VCRs, before moving to digital video software. After detailing the historical roots of the practice, this chapter will investigate how vids and vidding communities have evolved through an analysis of online spaces on LiveJournal and Tumblr.