Okay, so maybe that last one doesn't exist. (Yet.)

Welcome to the world of online video, known to academics and industry insiders by the rather lifeless phrase "user-generated content", and known colloquially to participants within these communities as "vidding" and "video-remixing". It's a sub-culture rapidly going mainstream, an art form defined by the technology it uses, and it has its own history, pre-dating the launch of YouTube and other streaming video sites.

Today if you head to YouTube and type in "remix video", or "fanvid", you'll get thousands of hits. And if you take a small sample of the videos, you'll probably find that you can't easily categorize them—there's a wide range of videos, taking original source material from television, movies or video games, and remixing and interpreting it in new ways.

Streaming-video sites like YouTube are part of an improved technology that has led to an explosion of fanvids and video remixes.

However, if you had to break down these videos into categories, the main genres you're likely to find are four: political videos; anime videos (often known as AMVs); fannish vidding, which take their source video from live-action movies or television shows; and machinima, which takes clips from video games.

And each genre has its own active community of video artists attached to it, many who have been involved long before the rise of the Internet and streaming videos. Luminosity (she prefers to use her screen name) is a fanvidder from Oklahoma who saw her first fan video in 1996 on VHS. She's been making her own videos almost as long. "I've been vidding non-stop for almost eight years; that's decades in cyber time. I'm almost a geezer, I guess," she says.

Her videos, which have been showcased in New York magazine, range from subtly satirical "Vogue" (which uses clips from the film 300 to turn the male gaze back on itself as the hyper-masculine Spartan warriors "strike a pose") to the shocking "Women's Work" (which uses Supernatural clips to focus attention on erotized violence of women in genre television).

Online communities drawn along gender lines

While not every online video maker belongs to an online community, those who do have tended to group along gender lines, says Francesca Coppa, director of Film Studies and an associate professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. A fan herself who enjoys watching and creating vids, Coppa has recently been studying online communities, and has written on the early history of fannish vidding—a genre that has evolved as a predominately female art form. In contrast, machinima, political remixes and anime music videos have historically been male-dominated.

Fannish vidding traces its roots to female science-fiction fans and genre television shows like Star Trek in the 1970s, says Coppa. A Star Trek fan named Kandy Fong was the first to put together a slideshow from cutting room photo stills and to set it to music. Fong started showing her slideshow at Star Trek conventions, where female fans attended and saw them. When the VCR became popular, fans began to use recorded clips from television shows to make their own projects.

Coppa adds there hasn't been much academic or recorded history on early fannish vidding, to the extent that when she attended an academic conference at Harvard a few years ago, she was surprised to hear that remix videos supposedly started in 1996 with machinima.

"I had a moment where I thought, 'We're seeing, in user-generated content and YouTube, a recall of the novel,' which was an art form women invented and whose history was forgotten when men starting writing them."

The attraction of vidding

What is it about fannish vidding that attracts more women than men to it?

There's not one simple answer, but certain components might include aesthetics and emotional connections to the video source. As well, one of the strongest aspects mentioned by various vidders is the homoerotic tension that exists in a lot of genre shows between the male leads, such as between Kirk and Spock in Star Trek.

Fanvidder Luminosity hosts her videos on the streaming site Imeem.

"One of the things that you can argue is that women want more out of television—relationship arcs, emotional arcs... So I think there is something about the application of music to footage that acts as a way of revealing subtlety or creating emotion," says Coppa. "Particularly in genre TV, where women enjoy the action but maybe wish for more character moments, rather than moving on to the next alien or explosion."

"What peaks my interest to vid is that there's something in that show or movie that I feel needs expanding or that there's one thing that I want to tease out of the show," says Luminosity, whose vidding history has spanned television shows from Highlander to Buffy to Supernatural. "Every vid I make is an argument."

Heidi Tandy, a lawyer in Miami who makes fanvids from television shows like Doctor Who, Heroes and Supernatural, thinks some of it also may have to do with the two genders' different responses to music. "I don't know any guys who make fanvids," she says. "I think guys listen to music differently than women, and they're not as interested in making narratives that mesh together when they hear a song."

Both Coppa and Luminosity also say that the strong sense of community is a draw for many women. Within these fanvidding communities each of the two women have found support and mentorship to learn video editing—a technology and job sector that historically has not been friendly to females.

Crossing the gender divide

Despite the predominance of females, fannish vidding isn't off-limits to males. Ellen Ross, an organizer with Vividcon, a convention that hosts close to 150 vidders every year in Chicago, says while certainly a lot fewer men attend the convention, there were a t least four vidders who were either at Vividcon or sent in vids.

"But I'm sure there are more," she adds. "I think there is a transition now where more guys are coming into the areas that have traditionally been female."

And more females are moving into the traditional male video genres. Stacy Funk, 20, from Melford, Saskatchewan, has been involved in anime vidding for three years. She says it's mostly women now in her section of the anime community, which include shows like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z. After watching a number of videos online from sites like animemusicvideos.org, she began making her own. "I like how you can match the music beat with the video and see how it's animated," she says.

» The male-dominated remix genres...