A recent video I produced and presented for the HitFilm channel was all about editing gaming videos. Pretty simple but useful stuff, presented in a nicely relaxed manner. Given the channel has a fairly diverse viewership, I wanted to have a brief overview that established the culture of online gaming videos for anybody unfamiliar with the concept. Here’s the finished video:
When scripting the episode I had a moment of weakness and it’s been irritating me ever since. During that quick montage of gaming at the start, I whip through a range of gaming video genres, from Let’s Plays to design analysis.
One of the channels I mention is Feminist Frequency. This channel, hosted by Anita Sarkesian, specialises in addressing feminist themes in popular culture, especially games. They and others have experienced an onslaught of hate from a group of men who hate women, are terrified of equality and attempt to cover their insecurities in a blanket of faux-ethics, inexplicably conflating their gender fears with mostly spurious debates about journalistic integrity.
To cut a long story short, I paused while writing the script and debates taking out the reference to Feminist Frequency. Given the relatively high profile of the HitFilm channel I was concerned that it would attract unwanted attention. Both for myself and the people I work with, I didn’t want that kind of hassle.
It was about that point that I became annoyed with myself. I was letting fear create a self-censoring chilling situation, where I was considering removing a mention of a feminist YouTube channel because I was worried about rampaging misogynists.
Taking out that reference would have pre-emptively admitted defeat. It would have ceded the battle to the haters, and that wasn’t something I was OK with. They don’t get to control the world.
So the video went up. And, inevitably, it did attract some of the expected rhetoric. Not much, and not intense. But enough to be weird. A handful of commenters were incensed by my inclusion of Feminist Frequency, and especially my describing them as ‘intellectual’ and ‘academic’, even though that’s precisely what that channel is. That categorisation wasn’t me assessing FF’s quality – merely their genre and style.
I found it quite odd that a 5 second mention in a non-political tutorial video still brought those kind of comments, like a summoning ritual in a 1980s horror movie.
I’m glad I left the script intact. Maybe one day everyone will learn to stop worrying about The Other and just get on with getting on.
All the other comments were from the usual lovely, varied bunch of filmmakers and content creators who find themselves drawn to HitFilm. And, really, it’s those people that really matter.
Anyway, here’s an old FF video so you can make your own mind up:
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