However, not just any vid will do. Having been on The Net earlier today, we are much wiser than you in the trends that the hip kids are using. Here, we’ve put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions to help get you on your way!

Q: I’d like to make a fanvid for —

A: Sssh, my darling, sssh. It doesn’t do us any good to name fandoms, not now. Either it’s a superpopular fandom and we’ll judge you for being mainstream, or it’s a fandom so remote you clearly chose it to impress us, and we are on to you. Just call it Bob.

Q: Okay. I’d like to make a fanvid for Bob. What is the first step?

A: First, you need to get your hands on top-quality footage and editing software. As you can see, here at Defenestration’s Abridged Classics office, we lovingly film our own footage using a broken camera-phone from across a large room where the film is playing, to maximize the size of every pixel in the finished product. Then we open our state-of-the-art video software that came with our 200 dollar computers, and get to work!

The result is a mess of movement using pixels as big as your thumbnail that make it almost impossible to determine what’s going on, which is just the way we like it. An air of mystery should be cultivated at all times!

Q. How about still photos?

A. Love them. There’s nothing that people on the internet love more than clicking a video and seeing that it’s really a collection of still photos. It’s like a sign from the universe to slow down and admire the little things in life.

Q. Okay, so I have my footage. How do I choose the right music for my video?

A. Whatever Evanescence song you like best should work.

Q. Wait, just Evanescence?

A. I’m sorry, is there any other band? Take a look on The You Tubing, and you’ll quickly realize that nothing captures the nuance of something quite like Evanescence. Why would you let artistry like that go to waste and pick some other song? Is that really a risk you can afford?

Q. Well, I was thinking about this one song –

A. This better end in “That Evanescence did.”

Q. …it does. It’s this one song that Evanescence did.

A. Wonderful! Then it’s time to begin editing. Keep a close eye on the tone of your piece as you go. If you are using “Going Under,” one of the lead characters in your video should scream (girls) or punch something (boys) at least once. The more they scream or punch things, the better the video will look. This is what makes picking the right fandom so important.

Q. But you told me not to tell you the fandom.

A. That’s because you might be making a gentle, melancholy fanvid about your two favorite characters and their doomed love, in which case you should use one of their lesser-known songs, like “My Immortal.” If you choose to go this route, make sure your characters do a lot of quiet staring. Then slow it down, and slow THAT down, until it’s physically impossible to have them go slower and still discern movement. That should be about right.

Q. This is not very good advice.

A. You should not have asked people who make their vids by setting up National Geographic bunkers across the room from their prey, then, should you?

Q. Look, I genuinely want to make a good video, here. I’m just trying to get some advice on how to layer tints on my footage to achieve a uniform coloration and how to pull sound from the original audio track in case I want to have some VO dialogue or something.

A. I think you are underestimating what we here at Defenestration know about Videoing. Here is an excellent example of the sort of fanvid that, if you follow these simple steps you can one day hope to make:

Q. Wait — that’s “My Heart Will Go On”! That’s not even Evanescence!

A. Well, two things for you:

1) Celine Dion is like the Evanescence of easy listening, and don’t you ever forget it

2) When you’re a true artist, you can bend those rules all you want! You have to earn it with your art, that’s all – if you have what it takes, someday you can tackle something like this. Only not this one, because that shit is TAKEN, young padawan.

We hope you have found this as helpful as this advice once was for us. Now go forth, artists, and beautify the world!

Obviously, I am not here to tell you that that trend has changed. Especially since we’re talking about Thomas Hardy, and even if you appreciate literature, you’ve probably given the occasional side-eye to Mr. Hardy, because he really loves making ladies miserable.

Case in point: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, recently made into a miniseries by the BBC. It’s four hours long, about three of which are taken up by the quiet, desolate sounds of somebody sobbing. The worthless parson/farmer Angel Clare, the worthless rapist Alec d’Urberville, the drunken milkmaids, the destitute mothers and sanctimonious fathers – all have their blubbery moment in the sun. However, it’s obviously Tess who suffers most, both in magnitude and sheer percentage of screen time. (Oh, is she onscreen? Bet she’s crying.)

And since the sheer amount of eye-water dropped during this made a normal Abridged Classic extremely tricky (it would have been 90% sobbing and rising violins), I went ahead and did what I had to do.

Below, Abridged Classics: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, helpfully “spell-checked” by my program to include a capital D, and containing a minute percentage of the weeping in this miniseries.

ETA: Almost forgot! Dear Hans Matheson, this is like the two hundredth asshole in a row that you’ve played. Just saying.

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

And man, there was plenty to show you. Especially because writing about this movie just doesn’t do it justice.

It’s one thing to write, “The Native American characters are useless.” But it really doesn’t capture the true flavor of a director who said, “You know who needed saving by a white guy? Those Native Americans who let themselves get killed because they were a bunch of helpless whiners!”

And thus, Pathfinder was born. Because if there was anything that would have stopped that genocide, it was one white dude who Just Wanted to Belong.

And yet, even this picture of a tribe full of childlike, passive Native Americans cowering before the mighty sword of the white man doesn’t give the full effect. (Fun fact: this is the only promotional photo that even shows a Native American, so basically it’s a movie in which the Native Americans are only important to give Karl Urban something to save.) The full effect is that of slackjawed, creeping horror.

Luckily, it looks like we can’t blame this on Karl Urban. He’s giving us serious Hostage Eyes in this picture. (Oh, Karl, you had better have lost a bet or something. Seriously.)

There is some comfort, I guess, in knowing that the movie is shitty on every possible level, and is not simply a well-executed movie with weird racial undertones. This is the kind of movie where a blond, blue-eyed twelve-year-old can grow up to be Karl Urban.

This is the kind of movie where every line is delivered with all the portentous, ponderous clunking of a steel-tipped fortune cookie. This is the kind of movie where someone cuts someone’s eye out and we get a five-second close-up on the bloody eyeball rolling around in the mud!

This is the kind of movie where the bravest, most skilled warriors in the tribe are entirely wiped out because they fail to recognize one of Karl Urban’s traps – a trap that they would have had to teach Karl Urban how to make in the first place. A trap that Karl Urban somehow made overnight, despite the fact that it’s about ten feet by ten feet and in a wooded area far away from his cave hideout, and also he really doesn’t look like the Viking kid he was when they picked him up when he was twelve and where did he get the eye makeup and OH GOD, MOVIE, WHAT THE HELL.

While it takes the full two hours to really understand how horrible this movie is, I tried to get it in under the seven-minute mark.

And I did!

And then FOX took it down because they claimed it infringed on their copyright.

Now, this is not true, since I was very clear that I was using the clips for purposes of commentary under the policy of Fair Use. Therefore, I suspect that they are just super-embarrassed to have made this movie, which is understandable, because holy shit, you guys, you have no idea.

However, I didn’t want to leave you with nothing, so I storyboarded the movie for you instead. It’s not the same as seeing it play out in front of you, but you should get the general flavor of the film. Enjoy!

IN A WORLD…FULL OF NATIVE AMERICANS…

ONE VIKING…FEELS ALL ALONE…

JUDGED FOR HIS GENETIC PROWESS AT SWORD-WIELDING…

BUT WHEN THE VIKINGS COME…

ONE MAN…

…WILL CHOP THE SHIT OUT OF EVERY VIKING HE CAN GET HIS HANDS ON.

…THEN HE IS THE BOSS OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW IT GOES WHENEVER A WHITE PERSON MAKES A MOVIE.

THE END

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

That’s what I thought before I saw Lorna Doone.

Lorna Doone, a bizarrely slapdash version of R.D. Blackmore’s novel, has a cast that seems to have been a scientific experiment to track the effect of a terrible period piece on the career trajectory of a random sample of actors.

The cast of Lorna Doone includes:

- Aiden Gillen, the star of Queer as Folk and a number of indie movies

- Jesse Spencer, a star of House

- James McAvoy, who blew up like the Fourth of July and is currently trying to stick his comely fingers in whatever franchises he can get his hands on

- Michael Kitchen, who’s been in every project the BBC has touched in the last hundred years

- Amelia Warner, who was in Aeon Flux and then sort of fell off the radar, possibly because she has no facial expressions

- Richard Coyle, who came in from the BBC’s Coupling, and then vanished until Prince of Persia, in which he briefly ruled the Persian empire.

BBC scientists mapped the results like so:

After viewing this experiment myself, I organized the following Abridged Classic so as to provide a warning to others who might try to find some logic in this movie. You won’t find it. All you’ll find is a pile of actors who should know better, and an inexplicable number of wide shots of people harvesting. (I have no answers; science never will.)

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

In this case, we got humorous fantasy. Who knew?

Many of you had problems viewing our July issue. There was some strange, Twilight Zone-type crap going on, but the problem has been solved, so no worries.

And some more important news: our September issue is filled, our October issue will soon be filled, and our November and December science-fiction issues are filling up nicely. We are officially stuffed. As of today, August 20^th 2009, we are no longer accepting regular submissions unless they are science fiction! If you submitted a non-science fiction piece to us before that date, you’re safe. We’ll be sending out acceptances/rejections soon. Regular submissions will resume December 15^th, 2009.

Anyway. Enough business. On with the pleasure! This month features eight stories by authors Bill Waters, Christi Krug, Mary Baader Kaley, Jude-Marie Green, Christopher Jacobsmeyer, Glen Batchelor, and Errid Farland, as well as two poems by Ann Howells. And if you didn’t catch Genevieve Valentine’s latest “Abridged Classics,” check that out, too. Enjoy!

—Andrew Kaye, editor-in-chief

Remember that time Vikings almost wiped out all the Native Americans, except that other Viking was there to save them, even though he had been adopted by them and then outcast for no reason? Oh, Ye Olde Times!

It made no sense then, it makes no sense now.

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

Andrew Kaye

Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Resident Cartoonist, Robot Handler

Andrew is a writer from Northern Virginia. You can tell he’s from Northern Virginia because he stresses the “Northern” part in conversation. In addition to throwing his weight around as editor-in-chief (about 120 pounds, depending on how well he’s been fed), Andrew draws Defenestration‘s weekly comic strip, Ben & Winslow.Andrew writes speculative fiction and poetry, and has work forthcoming in Electric Velocipede. He can be contacted directly at andrewdefenestrates@gmail.com. He can also be followed via Twitter and Livejournal. More of his artwork can be found in his deviantART gallery.

Eileen Lavelle

Co-Founder, Editor, Columnist, Senior Columnist Wrangler

Eileen has a Master’s Degree in Professional Writing and Editing from George Mason University. Frequent target of fallen angels, Eileen hides from their seductive wrath in the hallowed confines of Defenestration HQ, where she hopes to erect a wall of words between herself and the forces of evil. Read the latest brick in her wall in her column “This is Your Brain On…”Eileen can be contacted directly at eileendefenestrates@gmail.com. She can also be followed via Twitter andLivejournal.

Genevieve Valentine

Co-Founder, Columnist, Contributing Editor, Website Coordinator

Genevieve is a writer in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. She has terrible taste in movies, as evident in her video column “Abridged Classics.”Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction, examples of which can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. You can check up on her latest misadventures via Twitter and Livejournal.

Chris Eatman

Columnist

Chris Eatman is a jive talking cat that won’t cop out. His writing also appears in Beckett’s Massive Online Gamer. Chris may or may not be a ten-year-old girl who enjoys 80s board games. Maybe you will discover the truth of his identity in his monthly column “Encyclopedia Douchebag…ica.”

Jonathan Harper

Columnist

Resident advice columnist and vampire slayer, Jonathan holds an MFA from American University. His fiction has been published in Velvet Mafia and the anthologies Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader and Wilde Stories 2008. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the proud receipient of Defenestration‘s “Montblanc H. Hipster Award for Most Ironic Facial Hair.”

Alison Burke

Contributing  Columnist

Alison Burke is a past Defenestration contributor and present cubicle monkey. You can read about her notorious corporate adventures in her column, “Notes from the Cube.”In her spare time Alison enjoys eyeliner and adorable sapient bipeds.

Steve Elkam

Contributing Columnist

Steve Elkham was formed in high-pressure high-temperature conditions in the earth’s mantle. He also has a great smile. You can read more about his material properties in his column “<Insert Title Here>.”

Faeluver

Contributing  Columnist

Faeluver, Defenestration’s Fancologist, is obsessed with David Bowie and the movie Labyrinth. You can read her unintelligible forays into fanfiction, as well as her column Faeluver: Fandom, it’s Feyzerbeam!! Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Haratron

Public Relations

Public relations require the cold and unemotional communication skills of a mechanical man, and Haratron is one such contraption. His typically robotic desire to kill all humans has been reprogrammed to the best of our abilities. Now he only wants to kill Eileen. Haratron helps manage the Defenestration Facebook page. He also has a  Twitter feed that he sometimes uses. But only sometimes.

Bigfoot

Associate Editor for Fiction

Bigfoot is a novelist, playwright, and scholar from the Pacific Northwest. He is a frequent contributor to numerous cryptozooilogical journals, websites, and television programs. While he’s recognized around the world, Bigfoot generally prefers to keep a low profile. He’s been working for Defenestration for years-unless he hasn’t.

Jersey Devil

Associate Editor for Non-Fiction

Born Japhet Leeds, Jr., the creature now known as the Jersey Devil is a writer and amateur botanist from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. He has a well-rounded sense of humor, but hates “Why the long face?” jokes.

Elm Tree

Associate Editor for Poetry

The Elm Tree has been providing us with oxygen from Day One, and we can’t thank it enough. There’s no one better to read through our poetry submissions than the Elm Tree. After all, you can’t say “poetry” without “tree.” He told us to say that.

Amblyopsis Spelaea

Visual Content Supervisor

A blind cave fish, Ambylopsis is fond of all forms of artwork in various mediums. She’s especially partial to cartoons and photography, and loves surreal artwork. Don’t worry about pronouncing her name. We just call her “Amber.”

Benjamin Franklin

Intern

Newly hired intern Ben Franklin has a lot to learn about the humor writing industry.

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

And by “different,” I mean “flaming.”

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.

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Genevieve is a prolific writer of speculative fiction living in New York, but you’ll never find her there because millions of people live there and Genevieve likes her privacy. Examples of her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Federations, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2011. Also? She has terrible taste in movies.