Ubiquitous Film Review: The Fanvid FAQ You’ve All Been Waiting For

Feb 24th, 2011 | By | Category: Prose

So, you want to make a fanvid! It’s an excellent idea. In addition to bringing new people to the fandom of your choice, it’s a way to exercise burgeoning editing skills, and it keeps you off the streets, which God knows you need.

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!

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