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talitha78: (psych morningxsmiles gus)
[personal profile] talitha78 posting in [community profile] vidding
For the Vividcon vidding convention in August, [personal profile] deepad and I are putting together a combined vidshow/panel called "Race and Representation in Vidding".

The blurb is as follows:

Visual markers of racial, ethnic and cultural identity are inscribed on the bodies vidders use to tell their stories. What are the political and social implications of the choices that vidders make? What narratives of resistance and subversion can be told, and what stereotypes and oppressions get perpetuated? How do the racial and cultural dynamics within fandom affect vidding and its creators? How can we analyse vids through anti-racist, anti-orientalist, post-colonial, and subaltern studies lenses?

From a vidder's technical standpoint, what are the editorial and creative issues you need to take into consideration when vidding characters of color? What implication does music and song choice have? Is there a different approach when you're vidding a character not of your own cultural/ethnic background, and what guidelines or mental reminders have proven useful to you?

We have some ideas of vids that we'd like to show, but we are also looking for suggestions. Do you know of any vids that fit this theme? Also, are there any points that you want to make sure that we touch upon in the panel? All ideas welcome.

Date: 2010-04-17 05:49 pm (UTC)
thuviaptarth: golden thuvia with six-legged lion (Default)
From: [personal profile] thuviaptarth
I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for? But I have been thinking about the tendency to bleach black women on magazine covers and the history of considering technologies finished when they work adequately for white people and how these things affect vidding. Particularly for (literally) dark shows like a lot of horror or noir, the dark-skinned characters end up poorly lit and you have to manipulate the footage to bring out their expressions. (I say "dark-skinned" instead of "people of color" because this is usually not a problem with light-skinned poc.)

Another issue I had related to tech: One of my standard post-processing techniques is when prepping a vid for Web distribution is to blend the color footage with a grayscale copy of the footage, because this brightens the video, deepens the color, and makes a lot of the compressed Web-suitable video more visible on monitors (which tend to display darker than TV screens). That is, this is standard for my vids about white people. When I did this for a vid about a light-skinned woman of color, it made her skin look paler. I had to rework the scripts that had been fine for three previous vids with different lighting conditions, but all about white women.

These are the default images, one interior and one exterior, without any alterations by me (you can tell the original editor did some brightening and blurring to add a dreamlike effect for the forest scene):

Bonnie image without any alterations Bonnie image without any alterations

These are the images with the kind of processing I usually do (+25% add, for people who work with layers and blending):

Bonnie image +25% add Bonnie image +25% add

In the exterior scene, you can see that the foliage behind her is brighter and more distinct, but that the pale tones where her skin is highlit bleach out to white and she looks a few shades lighter-skinned than she does in the original picture. The bleaching effect isn't as noticeable in the interior image.

These are what I ended up with (+25% add, +50% overlay):

Bonnie image +25% add +50% overlay Bonnie image +25% add +50% overlay


You can see the very palest highlights--for both Bonnie and the background--are still whited-out, but some of the midtones are restored and the darkest tones are darker than the original, which results in a brighter, more variable color, and doesn't make Bonnie look that much paler than the original image, although paler in the exterior shot than I remembered from the moving images. :( So possibly this is a failure and a negative example. I think the interior still has better color and still reasonably approximates her original skin tone, though.

Date: 2010-04-24 03:01 am (UTC)
thuviaptarth: golden thuvia with six-legged lion (Default)
From: [personal profile] thuviaptarth
I didn't realize it would be a problem with a show as brightly lit as Leverage!

Um, I spoke to Deepa about this and she asked me to post it in a comment so you could consolidate suggestions: [personal profile] springgreen and I are working on a vid based on a Hong Kong action movie to a Chinese pop song, which you can have as a premiere for your show if you're interested. We don't have a full draft right now, but I could send you a partial draft to give you an idea about what it will look like by Monday. The vid is not about race in any theoretical or critical way, though, it just has a woman of color as a protagonist and two other major characters who are WOC.

Obviously, it is totally okay if it is too late for you or not suitable! I hope suggesting it is not too pushy.
Edited Date: 2010-04-24 03:05 am (UTC)

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