Case Study: Luminosity

Luminosity began television and film fan video making when sending physical media by post (e.g. VHS tapes) and fan conventions were still the main distribution methods. She explained to me the reasons why she made videos and the types she made:

I make all sorts of vids. When I started vidding, slash was predominant, but I felt that there were many ways to subvert the text, highlight the text and talk back to the text. I make meta vids, character studies, parodies, arguments, mood pieces, both gen and slash.

One typical example of Luminosity's videos is the character study of Dean from Supernatural:

Luminosity's video "Goddammit"

Luminosity concurrently used eleven different platforms to distribute her videos during the period of my fieldwork, which included journaling, social networking, video hosting and other types of sites. She announced her videos by posting to Dreamwidth, and then used Dreamwidth’s cross-posting function to simultaneously post to LiveJournal.  Links to the Dreamwidth posts would be posted on her Facebook and Twitter accounts (links have been omitted to these last two to protect her pseudonymity).  In the latter part of my fieldwork, she also started embedding her videos from YouTube within Tumblr and Pinterest, an online pin-up board.  Also, while she was not using it regularly, she had also embedded three of her videos within her Archive of Our Own account, a platform developed and run by the Organization of Transformative Works, a non-profit fan run organisation.

A page from Luminosity's Pinterest account

The most recent journal posts contained videos embedded from YouTube, although ones in the earlier period of my fieldwork had videos embedded from Viddler.  However, even in the later period when she embedded from YouTube, she still uploaded a copy to Viddler for redundancy in case YouTube rejected a video.  She also uploaded a copy to vidders.net to support that site, as it was a fan-run project, although she stopped doing that during the course of my fieldwork when it started charging subscription fees.