Monday, March 03, 2008

Any demon you can know and any weapon you can show

The concept of a fanvid is simple: Take clips from the TV show or movie of your choice and synchronize them to a song, any song. With the right song and the right clips, you can tell your own story about just about anything. Some vids are serious, some silly. Lately, my friend Heidi has been doing a series of fanvids using Schoolhouse Rock songs and the main characters of Supernatural, with hilarious results. For your viewing pleasure, A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing:




See, TV is good for you!

crossposted at carlie@bccls

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't really get this. Most fan vids that sync songs to clips from a show make sense. There's some sort of tie in between what you're seeing and what you're hearing. These are just random clips that have nothing to do with the song being played, except for the fact that SHR is name dropped in the opening clip.

Give me the Harry Potter/Banana Phone video any day.

Robin Brande said...

I don't watch Supernatural, but I'm a huge fan of Schoolhouse Rock. Bring it anytime, anywhere.

Laini Taylor said...

That was hilarious. And I disagree with persnicikity anonymous up there -- the editor did a great job of synching the words up with the images! This isn't a show I usually watch, but in a state of advanced lethargy a few weeks ago, Jim and I couldn't even gather the energy to change the channel and so we watched it. . . and have had a Styx song stuck in our heads ever since. It was "Renegade" ("Oh Mama, I'm in fear for my life...") Who knew Styx was so awesome???

Carlie Webber said...

*gasps* Robin, you don't watch Supernatural? YOU MUST! It's a mild obsession around the House of Tea Cozy.

Laini, I think half the reason I stuck with SPN was for the music. (The other half was Jensen Ackles.) I consider myself to be just about the uncoolest person ever when it comes to music; I think most of the bands I like have at least one dead member. But I was watching SPN on Heidi's recommendation and found myself thinking, "Hey, I know all these songs! Dean and I have the same taste in music! I might as well stay." And the rest is history.

The jig is up, the news is out, they finally found me...

Kristi(e) said...

I think the best example of getting a completely different story out of clips is this Se7en "trailer."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnB_v7vJfOg

tanita✿davis said...

I haven't watched Supernatural yet either, but this was vastly amusing.

Barbara Shoup said...

This is brilliant! I love ways of "tricking" kids into learning.

Heidi8 said...

Hi - I'm Heidi, the vidder behind this Schoolhouse Rock series, and Carlie told me she'd posted about it and I got vaguely blush-coloured and wanted to thank everyone - including the anon - for your comments. It's really interesting reading what people think!

I did want to address something Anonymous said, though. I think you're absolutely right that the clips look extremely random if you don't know the show. If you don't know that the guys are brothers, and you don't know that one of them is being set upon by a Black Dog controlled by a demon, then the clip of the guy while something scratches the floor doesn't seem connected to the words. And if you don't know that the girl jumping through the window is a werewolf, then juxtaposition of her with the word "dog" makes no sense. And you wouldn't know that all the women with dark hair in the red dress are the same black-dog-controlling-demon in different guises - hence, my deeming them Mrs Jones who sends her dog to bark at the narrator and said narrator's brother.

But the example you give as prefering - Bananaphone - also has images that are completely inexplicable out of context. My kids are 8, 4 and 2, and I watch Bananaphone with them, and they love it. They don't know who Gollum is, though - my eldest has only seen the cartoon version of the Hobbit and doesn't know the Serkis version of Gollum, and the little ones are too young to have seen any of it. So they first time they watched Bananaphone, they asked me who the monster was, so I had to explain that he had a ring and he lost it, so that's why the vidder matched his picture up with the word "ring".

You understand the contexts of the images from Bananaphone, so it's clever to your mind. People who are familiar with the contexts of the images from Supernatural will inherently get more out of the vid than you will.

You might prefer the vid I did for VERB, featuring Harry Potter films - it's here. I'm curious to know what you think of a narrative vid where you know the song and the clips in context.