fiercynn

Title: We Didn't Start the FireVidders:andArtist: Billy JoelFandom: MultifandomLength: 05:04Summary: Fifty years of fandom.Content notes: contains brief images of nudity, violence, drug usepassword: fandom! Download:slylilgoblin, redbrickrose, zephyrprince, my roommate, veverghede, djinntonic, P, my sister, everyone else at whom I ever blabbered about this vidZach, Greg, Asa, Elana, Chloe, Bill, Susan, David, Hansi, Rob, Patrick, Tegan, petra, freckles42, fizzyblogic, selenak, such_heights, denorios, spatz, inlovewithnight, copperbadge, the muncle community, the mag7daybook community, the starsky-hutch community, eff_reality, laerwen, second_batgirl, everyone who let me pick their brain about various fandomsStar Trek: The Original Series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Doctor Who, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Beatles, Hawaii Five-O, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (1968), Dark Shadows, Blake's 7, Battlestar Galactica (1978), M*A*S*H, The Professionals, Starsky and Hutch, Star Wars: A New Hope, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, James Bond: The Spy Who Loved Me, Led Zeppelin, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Raffles, Yes Minister, Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Young Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Miami Vice, James Bond: Octopussy, Another Country, Kiss of the Spider Woman, This Is Spinal Tap, Blade Runner, Quantum Leap, Back to the Future, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Granada), The Outsiders, Wiseguy, 21 Jump Street, The Lost Boys, Labyrinth, The Goonies, Red Dwarf, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Alien Nation, The Sandbaggers, Beauty and the Beast, Terminator, The Princess Bride, Robin of Sherwood, The Real Ghostbusters, Remington Steele, Wiseguy, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Friends, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Oz, The X-Files, The West Wing, Sports Night, Homicide: Life on the Streets, Star Trek: Voyager, Queer as Folk (US), Hard Core Logo, Highlander, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, due South, *NSYNC/popslash, The Simpsons, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Horatio Hornblower, Newsies, Jeeves and Wooster, Stargate SG-1, BBC Pride & Prejudice (1995), Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, Angel, Queer as Folk (UK), The Magnificent Seven, Farscape, The Sentinel, Forever Knight, The History Boys, Band of Brothers, Smallville, Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, Prison Break, Troy, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Lord of the Rings behind the scenes, High School Musical 2, Community, Castle, Supernatural, Sleeper Cell, Merlin, Stargate: Atlantis, Heroes, Leverage, The Vampire Diaries, Robin Hood, Legend of the Seeker, Supernatural, Life on Mars, The L Word, One Piece, Torchwood, Slings & Arrows, Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock Holmes (2009), Glee, White Collar, Bones, Fringe, Brokeback Mountain, Inception, Grey's Anatomy, Top Gear, Being Human (UK), Veronica Mars, My Chemical Romance, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Rachel Maddow Show, Anderson Cooper 360, Lost, Persepolis, Sherlock, How I Met Your Mother, Battlestar Galactica (2004), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Firefly, RENT, Dexter, House M.D., Pirates of the Caribbean, American Idol, Bend It Like Beckham, Om Shanti Om, The Middleman A Very Potter Musical , by StarKidProductions The Death and Return of Superman , produced by Max Landis Star Trek by the Girls on Film Blood Drips on Newsies Square , directed by Michael A. Goorjian Wonder Woman: Balance of Power , Red Cape Cinema Star Wars: Revelations , directed by Shane Felux Harry and the Potters concert footage by filmapino Us , by limIanto Memorial Footage by such_heightsI first had the idea for this vid in November 2008, while I was on an interminably long bus ride from college to’s house for Thanksgiving. She was just a budding vidder and she’d asked me to find a good song for her first Doctor Who vid that we could work on during the vacation. Instead shuffle took me onto Billy Joel, and I started thinking about how awesome it would be to create a multiandom vid about fannish history set to We Didn’t Start the Fire.That was not the vid we worked on that Thanksgiving, but we did talk about how cool it would be – and how greatly out of our depth. Someone should do it, we said, but we didn’t realistically think we could. Still, the idea stuck in my brain for a while, and I even started mentally planning some of it – the first shot I ever matched up in my brain was the Smallville clip set to the lyric “Stranger in a Strange Land”, which ended up coming out exactly as I had imagined it.I don’t think it was for another year or so that we actually decided we wanted to do this, damn it, even if I wasn’t a vidder and all of’s vids up to that point had involved incredibly small ranges of canon to choose from (seriously; see her Merlin S1 “His Name Is Lancelot” vid all drawn from one episode, for example). And it definitely wasn’t until February 2011 that we physically started the vid, whenvisited me during my semester abroad in London. We spent goodness-knows how much of that visit in my tiny dorm room, trying to figure out how it was all going to work, then walking around Hyde Park discussing it, and then going back to complete most of the last two verses just in that visit. I can’t even tell you how exciting it was to look even those few pieces put together; I watched the bit from “birth control” to “rock and roller cola wars” so many freaking times even back then.After that we had a few more visits where we could actually work on it at the same place at the same time, but we mostly worked on this remotely, exchanging hundreds of emails, Skype calls, voice mails, texts, even Facebook messages about how to work on this vid. After we did the modern fandoms, the earliest stuff was the hardest for us. It involved a lot more research, of course, and we relied on sources like Fanlore, TV Tropes, LJ and DW communities (including ship_manifesto, crack_van, newbie_guide, and individual fandom communities) ,and wikipedias of all shapes and sizes for information. We also bugged all of our friends for information, texting them random questions at all hours like “are there any black people in Sailor Moon?” (slylilgoblin’s response: “AHAHAHAHA”) and “which BtVS episode has the backstory of Spike as a poet?” (redbrickrose quickly obliged). All of our roommates were subjected to watching many versions of the vid, which for my roommates at least meant hiding their eyes every time “British politician sex” came up, and our flists were barraged with questions and suggestions about “seminal fandom moments” and random lyrics like “Lebanon”. I still remember exact moments when we figured out what to do with certain parts, like when scribe’s roommate Patrick helped her solve “children of thalidomide”, or when I decided that a really bad pun plus a civil rights reference would work for “Little Rock”.The original footage also required a lot of help from our friends and families. Scribe is responsible for most of it, but I’m proud to say that the Star Trek cocktails and Enterprise pizza cutter were filmed as my apartment, as well as the Inspector Spacetime poster (though, full disclosure, it was actually a birthday present from scribe).Also, a couple of the more unexpected outcomes of making this vid include:- me randomly referencing the song in my senior thesis for no other reason than that I could- scribe getting into White Collar (and possibly Man From UNCLE?)- both of us becoming geniuses at crosswords- both of us knowing way more about boxing than we’d ever intended to- me finding out that the keynote address at my college graduation this year was going to be given by the creator of a show we only knew about due to the vid, and concluding that my life had turned into WDSTF- scribe coining the phrase W(ds)TF!!- neither of us actually getting sick of this songAnd then, we finished it barely in time to submit it to Vividcon’s Non-Attending Premieres. Way back when we had fantasized about actually being able to make it to Vividcon, but both of our jobs and finances didn’t really allow for it. So we submitted it, and scribe had a few freakouts about whether or not it had uploaded, and I had a few freakouts about how I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore, and here we are.So's already talked a lot about how this vid came to be, which is good because it is a proven fact that she has a much better memory than I do. That said, there are a couple of turning points that have stuck in my mind.When we first started actually considering this vid we didn't plan to pay much attention to the lyrics. The idea was just to use the long list-like concept of the song to illustrate a long list of fandoms, and that would be that. Of course, we soon realized that there were lyrics we'd have to be careful with. We didn't want to offend anyone by pairing their fandom with an offensive lyric, and we also didn't want to gloss over complicated lyrics in a problematic way. It was quickly apparent that we'd have to match at least some of the lyrics with care, and from there we figure we might as well go all the way. (You can see a chart of the historical meaning of each lyric and the reason we chose the corresponding clip here . The School for Champions website "We Didn't Start the Fire (Facts) History Sumamry from 1949-1989 by Ron Kurtus" was a key tool in making this vid; many of the historical explanations in the chart are his.)The decision to match all the lyrics created a lot of work, a lot of fun, and a lot of problems. We Didn't Start the Fire deals with a whole host of topics (race, religion, war, politics, corruption, slaughter, to name a few) that are not always easy to pair up with popular television and movie sources, especially within the constraints of a particular decade. Throughout the process we had a working list of lyrics that needed to be matched with extreme care, and it was always a great victory when we could finally cross one of them off.That said, we weren't able to match all of them unproblematically. We tried to walk a line between using popular fandoms, which was the point of the vid, and finding clips that fit the lyrics in a way we were comfortable with. Sometimes we pulled in sources that might not otherwise have been included (for example, Persepolis is in the vid more for its match with "Ayatollah's in Iran" than for any significant fannish import). Sometimes we couldn't even find non-fannish shows or movies that would fit. There are still a number of lyric-clip matches that are problematic (for example, the lyrics "Syngman Rhee," "Afghanistan," "Lebanon," "Belgians in the Congo," "Ho Chi Minh," and "Alabama," to name a few, are filled with white people and the occasional alien played by a white person).That was one of the things this vid really drove home: it was staggering to go through popular fandoms over the years and see almost nothing but white men, white men, cisgendered able-bodied straight white men, and white men. (Oh, and buddy cops. SO MANY BUDDY COPS.) It was another case of walking the line between being true to popular fannish history and making the vid we wanted to make. On the positive side, you can also see the source material getting more and more diverse as the vid goes on through the decades, which is...something.This brings me to the end of the vid. The ending was the one thing that fiercynn and I disagreed about for a long time (turns out she was right, I should have known), but we always had the same idea of what we wanted it to be, just different thoughts about how to accomplish it. The ending is- hopefully- what takes the vid from being about a bunch of fandoms to being about fandom. We wanted to address the above problem, to show the amazing way that fandom deals with problematic, beloved source canons, the transformative works we create, and the way we engage with media and society. (For example, you should definitely check out the rest of the sexswap Star Trek scene by the Girls on Film)And if I can get sappy for a moment, the ending is also about the way that our stories do go on, and on, and on, through remakes and reimaginings and fanworks alike, and about the amazing communities we've built around them, and the work that we'll keep doing, and hey, I love you guys.was away from the internet and in the middle of a ridiculously busy week when this was posted, so she now has even more notes over at her journal, here.





chart of lyric/clip matches