Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Pride before a fall, Friday missed a beat and I’m back down one, these vids are too tempting just to watch rather than post about. Today’s offering is a Life on Mars vid I took from a rec on the_reel.

This Town’s Religion by severa The link is to a livejournal post listing all of severa’s vids.

I really like the nuanced way this presents Sam’s essential ambivalence, the way he’s baffled and repelled by his new environment but still drawn to it, good at it in spite of himself. It manages to imply a growing sense of acceptance without ever flinching from how violent the lifestyle Sam is gradually embracing is. The whole vid flows beautifully, keeping pace with the music yet every so often introducing some unexpected image, maintaining interest throughout. I really need to rewatch this show.

I’m a very hard sell for Supernatural vids, downloaded this one on the strength of greensilver’s entirely joyful vidlet made for more joy day (Band Candy meets The Who) and was sold.

White Light by greensilver takes a very simple idea and applies it with ruthless economy. There’s nothing spare, not a frame wasted. It’s brutal and I like that in a vid. Shifts from desaturated to full colour during tiny intervals of let up from the relentless beat are used to capture brief moments of light in the Winchester’s lives. People smiling, talking, connecting, nothing more. The bridge provides a longer moment but the colour is that little bit too bright, the normality not real, it falls away. The killer lies in one last glimpse of true colour for a moment of brotherly love, which transcends their blooded faces, before the end.

Someone on metafandom made a post about finding it difficult toget vids and parts of the subsequent discussion turned to accounts of ‘why we vid’ or why vids make sense. This would have been my contribution except that it got too rambly and off-topic.

A while ago the ipod was playing an old Joni Michell song from her jazzy experimental era. Hejira to be precise, it’s the title song of the eponymous album with the picture of her dressed like a crow, the open road visible behind/through her on the front cover and a similarly, desaturated shot of a frozen river on the back. So I was doing the washing up and singing along when I caught myself making up pictures to match the music. Very literal ones, very tied to the lyrics – for the line “there’s a man and a woman sitting on the rock” for example, I’d zoom in to the far bank of the river from the back cover to reveal, yes, a man and a woman sitting on a rock. The thing is, it also reminded me that I do this all the time with music and always have. Joni and I go back a long way and I think that particular image has been coming to mind ever since I first heard the song back in the days before I’d ever seen a fanvid or for that matter a music video - it was pre-MTV. So OK there was the one Queen did for Bohemian Rhapsody but that was about the only precedent. Still, even without the MTV experience growing up the idea of music being associated with images or narratives was hardly foreign. Movies and music go together like two very mixy things and most of my favourite movies are musicals. Sure dance sequences aren’t just a visual response to music and they don’t all tell stories but the idea that they might would be intuitive to any ballet fan.

I think visually, I solve genetic problems by conjuring up pictures, I read books and run mini-movies as I process the words, I listen to music and it evokes serial images and words set to music have even more power. They get caught in the crevices of your mind, sometimes I finds myself thinking in song lyrics, like an adult-onset form of echolia. All of which is to say that vidding, both making vids and reading them, seems an intuitively natural process. It feels right even while I’m not very good at it.

The original post was in response to lim’s new Harry Potter vid In exchange for all your tomorrows to House of the Rising Sun so while in a tl;dr mood, for illustrative purposes here’s the thoughts I had on it after obsessively watching it for most of this afternoon.

( Watch the vid first, it’s much better than the exegesis )

Title: Rock Steady

Artist: All Saints

Movie: Gilda

Format: DivX

Size: 36.8 MB

Summary: Rita Hayworth gave good face

Download here (Right/control click and save target as)



Feedback is a very exciting emotion.


( Notes )

( Lyrics )

Very late in the day but here’s a second batch of VVC reactions this time to vids in the Premieres First Half and Premieres Second Half shows.

( Read more... )

This is half of a very incomplete list of VVC vids basically ones I happen to have downloaded and have thoughts on. Reactions rather than reviews and often meandering off into issues with the shows or surrounding discussions as much as the vids themselves. Links are here for Challenge and Auction and here for Club Vivid

( Read more... )

Some old, some new, all Who.

Don’t stop me now by charmax. Let all other Master vids speak its name. Finger drummingly, reloadably, I love Lucy bad. So very, very bad.

The Lonely People by laurashapiro Rose as Eleanor Rigby drifting through life. He comes but it’s all too much, no one was saved. Father Mackenzie burys her in blue, Wendy abandoned by Pan. A vid that pulls you in on a rush of emotion and dazzles you with its intelligence in retrospect.

My Hit Song by butterfly Happier times. Rose’s awfully big adventure. She just lights up the screen.

Two vids to die for.

Birth of a Geisha by charmax

( Spoilers for the movie 'Memoirs of a Geisha' )

Blood Fugue by sockkpuppett

(  Spoilers for Dexter S1 )

I’ve had a vid recs post in mind ever since reading narahttbbs’s post on the appeal of vids being about being able to experience what other people see. As brain posts tend to, it grew and grew but here at least is the beginnings of a list.

Vids of vicarious love.

Don’t Panic by cherryice I’m not able to watch Heroes but have enjoyed reading about it in other people’s journals. Then yesterday I downloaded this and was instantly blown away by the Claire love. It’s a beautifully constructed vid that pulls the eye into it with constant motion mixed with contrasting scenes of visceral horror and human connection. By the climatic sequence it feels as if you’ve gone through so much with the character I dare anyone not to weep from pride.

You can call me Al by sdwolfpup. Due South is a show I saw relatively little of back in the day (damn you BBC and your snooker shaped scheduling obsessions) but always remember with affection. This vid shows me why.

This is how it was by lim.
This is an early SGA vid from the maker of Us also to a Regina Spektor track. Us is technically more accomplished but this one speaks to me more. Mostly because of what it has to say. It’s a vid about memory and loss and regret and I love it because it manages to actually look like memories look to me inside my head. Little flashes of disconnected images with weird colour distortions, some almost photographic others mere sketches and words. And numbers because music is made of numbers and Rodney is a physicist so he knows that.

Loggerheads by obsessive24. Based on an indie movie that may never get a release outside of festivals this is another vid about regret. Third person weaving multiple stories together where TIHIW was first person and singular it uses dissolves quite beautifully to convey memories being triggered and linked and airy, rarefied colours that give a feeling of being simultaneously caught up in events and yet distant from them. Most of all though, to bring things back to the original theme of this post, is a sense of the deep impression the movie made on the vidder in turn creating a longing to see what they did.

Classification is a big thing in biology. It’s about much more than the convenience of having a searchable name for every species, the process of naming is an analytical tool for working out evolutionary histories. When phlya get re-assigned it’s in recognition of the fact that some enormous body of evidence and deep reasoned argument has finally convinced the community that fruit flies and threadworms had a common ancestor several million less years ago than we’d previously thought. Really if ‘creation scientists' were doing the job they claim to be doing they should out there re-naming all the animals not wilfully misinterpreting the second law of thermodynamics.

But this post is actually about vids. A while back when iMeem started being used by vidders there was a run of posts in the forum about whether ‘book/fic trailers’ (slide shows set to music to advertise fanfic) could be counted as vids. Subsequently the_reel hosted a debate about whether two ‘vids’ that had been put up for review that consisted entirely of ‘vidder’ filmed material made as a homage to a show or a movie counted as vids. In both cases a number of different ways to classify vids versus non-vids came up. Some were based on content, self-filmed material could be excluded although a certain amount of non-media source was acceptable. Others, especially those thinking in terms of what they might be prepared to review rather than just watch, used process as a determining factor. Original film requires directing rather than purely editing skills, slideshows rely on Photoshop to manipulate images rather then standard video editing programmes and lack all the cues from internal and external motion used to interpret conventional live-action vids. A third group used history and community based arguments, for example that because the first ‘vid’ is often said to be a K/S slideshow, other slideshows should count too. Or should count because they arose from within the same slash community or (this is me extrapolating) were made by vidders as extensions of their previously more conventional work.

Really this post is about lim’s new vid, Us. Which is a thing of beauty and artistry to be sure but is it a vid or an art animation or something else entirely? Does it matter? Not really, a whale is just as awesome whether you call it a fish or a mammal but biologists would argue the point all the same.

Us has media content in abundance but where does the source stop and the filters and effects take on their own life as original animations? It just highlights the continuum that exits along the special effects axis, from editing to directing with no clear-cut cut-off points when one becomes the other. It’s also interesting how the pencil-like effects obscuring the original source work much better as a metaphor for what fic writers often seem to do – overlaying and overwriting the original story with their own whereas I tend to think of vidding as illuminating aspects of the original, making it clearer. But this vid isn’t about the source stories but the story ’we’ made about ‘us’ and about that the clarity is frightening.

Using history as the determinant things get even more interesting, the vid *is* a history, a virtual cladogram, so surely that counts. And if it does, does that mean that vidding has reached the decadent state of being its own subject and is about to disappear up its own fundament? BBC4 had a 90 minute special on last night called The Reichenbach Falls, which turned out to one of those fictions about being a fictional character and specifically the crime writer’s dilemma. To a non-writer it came across as ultimately a little self-indulgent, all me, look at me, this is what I do. That’s where the community aspect of fandom makes it fundamentally different perhaps. Not about Me but about Us.