AMVs vs Vids: A Comparison

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Preface

I've had the idea for this entry since When Fun Has a Time Limit, which was... Oh gosh, June of last year.

I kept putting it off because I wanted to do the proper research. I made a few cursory searches for info but then decided I was far too lazy, and kept putting off the entry.

Nearly a year later, I have found the perfect excuse to write an entry without doing the proper research.
It's the all-useful label of

~An Opinion Piece~

And now I can finally get this idea out from my brain and away from anyone saying "these facts are wrong... In fact, they're not facts at all!!"

So, before continuing, please realize that:

- I am, foremost, an AMV editor.
- I have extremely limited exposure to the vidding community at large
- The rest of this entry is absolutely filled with generalizations.
- There will always be exceptions.



Time to break out a table.

AMVs vs Vidding: A Comparison
Thing	AMVs	Vidding
Act of making the things	Editing (Very rarely "AMVing")	Vidding (Very rarely "Editing")
The people who make the things	Editors (Very rarely "AMVers")	Vidders (Very rarely "Editors")
The things themselves	AMVs (anime/animated music videos) GMVs (games) MMVs (manga) Edits	Vids Fanvids
Community hubs * not super active ** not the typical editing culture/scene	https://a-m-v.org/ * https://amvnews.ru ** Discord Every social media site	https://ao3.org https://tumblr.com https://dreamwidth.org Small presence on most social media sites, including Discord https://vidders.net * https://creaspace.ru **
Challenging yourself/others to edit a video in a specified (usually short) time-frame	Iron Chef (IC) Iron Editor	Sprint
Works in progress and getting people to give you feedback on them	Beta Beta testing Beta tester	Draft (sometimes "Beta") Beta request
Events related to fan editing	Conventions Competitions Contests (Rarely "Expos")	Conventions Exchanges Fests (Vidders don't usually do any sort of competition)

So there's the boring vocabulary part out of the way.

Now for the actual opinion part.

My totally skippable personal history with both communities

I started editing in 2001, and joined a-m-v.org in 2002. Back then, I just considered everything an AMV, even if it wasn't anime, because a-m-v.org was the only forum I knew that existed for any such fan edits. Of course, there was videohelp.com, doom9.org, and gametrailers.com, but those weren't really the same thing. I literally grew up on "the org", actively participating and editing up until about 2005. I was still involved, just not very much, from 2005 - 2009. 2009 - 2018 I still edited maybe once a year or two, but did not interact with the community at all. 2018 onward, I got back into editing, and the community, but of course by this time "the community" had changed drastically and so I am mostly just on Discord.

Youtube was created in February 2005, and I joined in December. Youtube links were censored on the org and this is when a schism in the community started forming (for this and several other reasons). I don't know much about vidding history, but I imagine Youtube and Vimeo had it taking off in popularity now that some sort of hub existed outside conventions. Sidenote: If you're interested in actual vidding history, Vidding: A History exists, and the electronic version is free.

I made my first vid with live-action in 2005 and my first exclusively live-action vid in 2007. I don't make many live-action vids, but I wanted to connect with people who made more of them. Eventually I discovered vidders.net. It opened in 2008, and I joined it in 2015. But I could never really get into it.

Tumblr seemed to be the vidding hub for a long time, especially when Superwholock was dominating the platform. I did make 2 supernatural videos in 2013 when I (briefly) had a tumblr account (that wasn't primarily for vidding OR spn stuff), but ultimately I got nowhere.

I've been circling the vidding community periphery for years. For some reason, the group seems really difficult to get involved in? My perception was that it's either:
- people dedicated to a specific fandom and only making vids for that fandom (which I wasn't interested in doing)
or
- groups of friends making stuff for their small friend groups and really not interested in interacting with anyone else

There's also this third group of people that just make vids of their crossfics or original stories by sharing masks and stuff and I find that SUPER INTERESTING but even MORE of a mystery in how to become involved in.


I realize the easiest answer is "just make those things and you're in" but what I am talking about is not the making of the things, but the talking to the people who make the things like in a forum.
Fortunately, 1-2 years ago I was introduced to vids on ao3.org and dreamwidth, which should make the entry barrier much lower, but for some reason I still have yet to jump over it.

I get the impression that vidding groups are just super inclusive and protective; that the actual non-public forums are extremely careful with who they invite/allow in.
I am in one vidding discord server that isn't very active, and I still get that impression even from them; although they've told me it's not true.

So I really don't know what's going on there. Maybe I just don't communicate the same way they do?? Who knows.

So basically:

The Culture Clash

Both communities have tons of history, but this entry is already quite long and it's getting kind of late (and I don't want to delay this entry for several more months lmao).

So let me over-simplify the over-arching appearance of the community cultures I have experienced, and how they differ. And again let me emphasize that these are: 1. generalizations, and 2., my impression, so they could also be entirely wrong.

Gender

AMVs (or at least A-M-V.org) started out pretty male-dominated, but now seems to be equally spread among all binary genders. There are queer editors, but they're usually not the "out and proud" type; the ones who are seem to make their own communities dedicated to the purpose.

Vidders are by and large female-dominated, and always have been. There are male vidders, but in my experience they typically don't participate in any sort of community, although they may lurk in some of the community hubs. Most vids have queer content, though I have yet to have come across a vidder that identifies themselves as queer. Maybe this is just an oversight on my part. I've never seen a bigoted, sexist, or queerphobic vidder, though; they all appear to be extremely accepting, inclusive, and welcoming.
Meanwhile, AMV editors run the gamut; They're mostly fine but I've run into quite a few bigots too.

Accessibility

In a nut shell, AMV editors just don't care, sorry to say. I think it's mostly ignorance (myself included). "Why would blind/deaf/photosensitive people be interested in music videos, which comprise all the things they can't do?"
Turns out, quite a lot of them are interested, and blindness, deafness, and photosensitivies are a whole spectrum and not a binary on/off switch.

Vidders have always been at the forefront for accessibility; their major community hubs are built around it; their conventions, expos/shows, etc., often require subtitles for the songs, and many vidders will list "physical triggers" in their descriptions for photosensitivities. This is casting aside the predominance of content/trigger warnings which they've adopted from (I assume) the fanfiction community. Those have always been present in vidding and are basically muscle memory to add to every vid at this point.

Meanwhile, back in AMV land, CWs/TWs are only just now being thought about in larger scale events (and it's usually only the "big ones" like suicide or sexual violence), and it's really only being pushed by the female editors. Photosensitivities are only just now being considered in small groups (and not at all in large-scale events) due to the recent popularization of the VPR (Vidding Photosensitivity Relay). Alt text, music lyrics, and/or subtitles are only even barely considered if the sources are not in English.

The Events

AMVs have tons of events, or should I say... Competitions.
AMVs are extremely competitive. Even among in-group events, there's almost always a winner, and from any large AMV contest, there's almost always some sort of physical prize.

Contrast this with Vidders, who also have all sorts of events, but they are more focused on small groups. Somewhat due to the legal nature of Vidding (live-action media companies are far less forgiving than the animation ones), they had to be somewhat secretive; but even then, I've never heard of a vidding competition where there's a winner or a prize. It's always about sharing their vids and getting more people to view them, and never about who is better than anyone else.

The AMV community is split on this; there are some expositions and there are more non-competitive events for small groups, but the competitions and contests at conventions dominate and always have.

This leads to some interesting culture shock when an AMV contest allows live-action videos and then the vidder finds out they need to give the contest their name? and address (to mail the awards)??? More than once I've seen a vidder get wigged out by this and just not enter at all. They value their privacy a lot more than AMV editors seem to.

On the small scale events, smaller groups of AMV editors hold lots of Iron Editors (timed challenges) for fun. Typically the smaller ones in my experience are not judged, and thus don't have a winner. They also do exchanges, primarily for birthdays and christmas.

Meanwhile, Vidders seem to deal with "fests" (which are more or less videos made to some sort of theme or prompt), and their own version of exchanges, which have tons of made up holidays. These exchanges differ from AMVs as they appear to be more... public? For lack of better wording. It's similar to a secret santa, but it's a collection on ao3 and/or a community/group on dreamwidth and/or tumblr. They have a whole system with special terms for all the parts involved.
For example, a "pinch hit" is a vid that needs to be made in a very short timeframe because the original vidder dropped it, and a "safety fandom" is using a fandom/source that is much more common than the request you would actually prefer.

Self-Promotion

I really don't think Vidders do much self-promo, to be honest. They post their vids on their platform(s) of choice and hope people see them.
You could argue that many AMVers do the same thing, but, it seems to me that there are far more AMVers that are interested in cultivating some "professional" type of image, like making their youtube channel out to be some kind of brand, having "studios" with their own promo accounts, and having some quality control by refusing to release videos they did on the side for fun or small exchanges.

Obviously I don't have as much insight into Vidders for this since I'm not really close to any, but they by and large seem to just... Be themselves, sharing everything and everything, and if they "brand" themselves, it's because they only edit to a particular fandom and want to broadcast that. They don't generally appear to come up with bumpers/intros for their videos, and studios aren't really a thing. Sure, many get embarassed by older works and remove them later, but that's totally different from refusing to upload them in the first place, which is a thing that far too many AMV editors seem to do.

Video Goals

AMVs are filled with competition, and as such, this really leaks through to their content. AMVs are generally about showing off a certain technique someone learned, trying to be the best at something, having a goal for winning an award/fame/notoriety, or just putting out some sort of "quality piece." There's a lot of visual effects play, with different AMV communities focusing on the most vfx they can use and/or making original content with them (telling a story independent from the sources) while other schools of thought stick to "raw AMVs" which avoid (obvious) vfx as much as possible.
There are some unwritten rules in AMVs, like how it's generally seen as "better" if someone can understand the story in the AMV without having any familiarity with the source footage, or that an AMV always has to have some type of story contained within.

If I had to summarize what AMVs do, I guess it would be to "show off" whether that be their editing skills/techniques, or their desire to tell a specific story.
The most famous AMVs in history all have some kind of "new technology/technique" component, "Euphoria" probably being the most well-known for its use of masks, which was ground-breaking for the time.

Vidders do the opposite.
They expect the audience to know the source footage, and are often making some sort of commentary on the footage or production of the footage.
There are the vidders who do their own fanficcy thing, but I'm not sure they're the typical type of vidder; the "famous" fanvids in vidding history are all commentaries on media in some form or fashion. Arguably, the most famous vid (I know of) is "Women's Work" which shows the suffering of women in the show Supernatural, and is essentially a commentary of the fridging of women.

By and large of course, both communities just do it "for fun," but when the goal isn't "fun," for AMVs it's generally "winning" and vidding it's shining light on some issue they've noticed with their fandom/source footage.

Scholarly Work

Vidding seems to be chock full of people in academia. You can't seem to walk three feet without some sort of essay on something fandom-related, and vidding is no exception.
There are books, a whole "fanlore" wiki, any sort of "fandom essay" on even just a hobby blog is often formatted and sourced, and the main organization behind their popular community hubs are legally fighting for vidding to be considered fair use.

Contrast this with AMV editors, who seem largely involved in the convention circuit. Tons of editors run or staff some sort of convention or contest, if not multiple. There have been a few attempts at documentaries, but mostly seem to be focused around documenting the hobby rather than scholarly work.

I don't have much to put in this section but I did want to note that this difference existed.

The terrible segue for the conclusion

What are your experiences with both communities?
What assumptions have you made?
Observations you've seen?
Changes you've noticed?

Is there anything in particular you like or don't like about one of the communities or wish was in yours?

Comments

[katranat]

Interesting stuff!
This is definitely also my own opinion and I don't know how accurate it is because I am also primarily an AMV editor, but I feel some the differences you've observed here could be explained by the type of people these different media's attract in the first place.

Live action is live action, apart from niche arthouse films there's very little visual difference, and even then most people would still be watching those for the entertainment rather than the artistry. So I believe the attraction towards vidding here is people being interested specifically for the fandom aspect of loving the source and connecting with others through this love.

Anime is a hugely mixed bag of animation styles and genres of shows. Definitely in the olden days this used to bring rise to a certain type of "elitism" in the anime fandom, and I feel that spilled over into AMVs leaving ripples today. IE, the whole competition aspect and wanting to impress with the most cutting edge effects and to a certain extent, which anime sources chosen for videos. There are pockets of people who don't fall into these trends but by the large this is the most prominent part of the AMV community.

*Editing to add more and to clarify my thoughts on these two communities.
If you're a fan of Star Trek, you're a fan of Star Trek, and when you interact with other Star Trek fans that's pretty much all it'll be. Sure there will be intersecting interests with other things, but primarily communication will be about that specific fandom.

If someone is a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, they will be interacting with anime fans as a whole. There will be spaces specifically for Fullmetal Alchemist, however people will have the expectation that they are an *anime fan* not just a Fullmetal Alchemist fan. The designation of *anime fan* trumps any interest in a specific source. Which is weird, because anime is simply a medium like live action, and no one would call themselves a *live action fan* would they? Live action is simply the default and anything else must be described otherwise as it used to be no one knew what you were talking about unless you specified anime.

I guess what I'm getting at here is because people are overarching *anime* fans, this is what leads to pockets of elitism and trying to follow trends, where this doesn't really happen with live action because no one is trying to prove anything to each other, you're all under the same fandom banner for the most part.

Sorry for the long rambling comment. You got me thinking a lot about this!

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If someone is a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, they will be interacting with anime fans as a whole. There will be spaces specifically for Fullmetal Alchemist, however people will have the expectation that they are an anime fan not just a Fullmetal Alchemist fan. The designation of anime fan trumps any interest in a specific source.

I know this comes from way back when anime was extremely hard to find, and you got whatever you got, so if you liked one, you, by default, had to like them all. And I know that expectation carried over for several years....

But now that there are tons of anime-inspired animations outside of Japan, and animation as a medium is being seen as more than just for kids (although USA is still lagging in that regard, it still way better than it was before).

I would've thought we have finally migrated past the assumption that if you like one anime you like them all. I certainly don't like all anime. In fact at this point I like very few lmao.

So much anime is being exported across all genres, I thought we had collectively moved away from calling "anime" itself a "genre"... But I guess not?

Anyway, as far as live-action goes... If you like star trek, you probably like scifi, so why isn't there that same sort of assumption that you're a sci-fi fan and would be interested in other scifi? Are there not scifi (or other genre-based) vidding communities?

It seems so weird to me that live-action vidding groups are oh-so-specific, but then you get the "non-disney" fandom which is pretty much anything that isn't disney but is animated (but not anime!).

[katranat]

I would've thought we have finally migrated past the assumption that if you like one anime you like them all. I certainly don't like all anime. In fact at this point I like very few lmao.

Honestly I would hope this to be the case as well, but in my limited experience it's not so. Perhaps in younger fandom spaces it is and I'm just unaware of it.
I feel you about not liking many anime anymore. I have very little interest these days in watching any of it but conversely my interest in AMV's is skyrocketing.

It seems so weird to me that live-action vidding groups are oh-so-specific, but then you get the "non-disney" fandom which is pretty much anything that isn't disney but is animated (but not anime!).

I wasn't going to even try and touch on the animation vidding communities as I know even less about them than I do live action vidding. Massive speculation here, but I feel again because it's animation, that's treated as more of an umbrella term and people who edit with different animated movies/shows are likely to create/interact with other types of animation more freely - so it's a bit more similar to anime in that sense.

Another thing I feel is unique to AMV's, is specifically the animation itself. There is a subsection of editors who edit simply for the aesthetic and to provide visuals for songs. I haven't really noticed live action or other animation editors doing this to the same extent - but then, I also haven't been looking.

I should really stop with all the assumptions.

Anyway, as far as live-action goes... If you like star trek, you probably like scifi, so why isn't there that same sort of assumption that you're a sci-fi fan and would be interested in other scifi? Are there not scifi (or other genre-based) vidding communities?

I would love if someone out there who is more familiar with vidding would come across your post and answer this and many, many other questions lol.

[seasaltmemories_14]

Some experiences I've had:

- This is not based off any actual asking around and more observational-wise, but I've always assumed vidding communities were pretty queer, mainly bc the other transformative spaces I've been were also really queer and they give out the same vibe, but I also wouldn't be surprised that what you assume is what you mostly see, never really stopped to ask anyone, but I did meet a vidder that was pretty vocally a lesbian so they do exist

- Picking back off of Katranat's comment, even as anime grows more known in the West, I do think it is like a lot of amv editors are fans of animation as a medium, so that leads to there being less strict fandom divides, I think it is telling that even as cons open up their contests to include GMVs and Western animation, live action is only really encouraged in select spaces, also the vidding community I hung out with a few years back did seem to center around Chinese wuxia dramas, so subgenre might be a common ground for some

- Also I don't think only focusing on one fandom is unique to vidders, like I can point to you several editors who solely edit with Utena or Yugioh or whatever is their fave fandom. Rather than a divide between editors and vidders, I see this as a divide between the con circuit and transformative fandom spaces. A lot editors outside of con circles seem to edit for the same reason ppl write fanfic, to see their ship kiss or show off their faves. I know because I come from this tradition lol, and I was stunned to find more competitive spaces where it was odd to edit with a source more than once yet not to edit with something you hadn't seen. Maybe the difference is that vidders don't really have the same competitive spaces for a similar divide to form

- One thing that is cool is even when editors use Live Action or vidders use animation, they still have distinct styles. I do think you're right about even LA vids made by editors, there is still this sense of showmanship with sync, flow, made for an outside audience. Meanwhile I think vidders using animation tend to use less tricks than editors so to say (ken burns/masks) maybe because those tend to be harder to do with LA if that is their usual medium, but also bc I do think there is less focus on ironing out "distractions" like lipflap and more on communicating a certain concept. Don't want to devalue the work they put into it, but to me their work always felt looser. I'll link a few examples of vidders working with animation if you aren't familiar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au2FZFRaisU
https://archiveofourown.org/works/36937996
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Vexercises_Collection/works/28455570
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Vexercises_Collection/works/32453686

Overall while I understand why vidders might be happy in their own little corner, I do like branching out from just amv circles, especially con amv circles, I think there's a lot of cool art we might miss out otherwise, and there is always stuff our communities can learn from one another


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