Sometimes I shouldn't use words

I finished my festivid! It's the first vid I've ever made specifically for a challenge, which was a deeply scary concept at first (what if I can't think of anything, what if it sucks) but it worked out fine. Much like ordinary vidding except for actually getting made instead of floating around as a brain vid before gradually fading into virtual nothingness. Also the parts that were hard or hardly formed in the brain version just flowed easily onto the screen and the parts I thought I had nailed were as hard as. Lyrics are not your friend when vidding. I need this bludgeoned into me with a very blunt instrument and speaking of blunt instruments, a rec:

Ego by cappylicious In which Arthur Pendragon is totally worthy of Beyoncé Knowles.

Other, non-instrumental, vid recs:

Some Time Around Midnight by bop_radar When Lee met Kara and was doomed. For three minutes feel how that feels.

Black Velvet by wistful_fever Kurt brings the living colour.

So Vividcon has happened. I haven’t watched ALL THE VIDS or even downloaded them but there is one I’d like to talk about.

On the Prowl by sisabet and sweetestdrain

( Peeping Tara or this vid has ALL THE PAIN )

Damn comics. I may have inadvertently written my very own Buffy/Angel manifesto. I think I need to go and exfoliate until it bleeds. Or watch Spuffy vids as a penance, although most of them are really Spike vids in disguise. The unholy combination of the camera’s male gaze and the creator’s object of desire. There are some honourable exceptions. This one in particular is Buffy through and through:

One Last Time by dualbunny
Turbulent and self-excoriating but with occasional moments of grace and not a flaming hand in sight. It ends with the “Does it have to mean anything?” scene, which is pretty much my philosophy on love. I feel better now.

January is the teachingest month, February isn’t much better and what fandom time I had has largely been funnelled into making the Summer Glau vid of ass-kicking (mostly mine). But now it’s done, so time to start savouring all those other-people productions, which have been piling up on the hard drive waiting to be fed back and recced.

Wicked Game by obsessive24 Third time is the charm Dee. You loved Billy and then Lee but falling for hope, for that dream of earth, was the real killer.

Mr Blue Sky by charmax who always makes the best robot vids. Robot hands, hands of love. Concentrate of WALL-E, one drop to save a world.

I Will Follow Savannah Weaver saves her world with duckies and happy feet.

Past in Present by sol_se makes me want to play hockey. Even though every time we did play (at school) it rained. Like Glastonbury without music, drugs or choreography. In this vid still the best days of your life.

Etheric Messages by thuviaptarth Alchemical beginnings A pale woman with mermaid hair. The dead sing. The drowned world speaks to her in patterns. What’s important is what’s missing.

Disclaimer: I suppose these are more (entirely subjective) reactions than recs as such. But words are hard and a vid has to get under your skin for any to come. There is no bad. There is much good. Links to all vids and vid shows are here.

( Non-attending Premieres (3 vids) )
( Club Vivid (9 vids)  )
( Premieres One (6 vids) )
( Premieres Two (4 vids) )

Long time no post but some vid recs:

Fever by sweetestdrain
When you kiss me I want to die. Twilight.

I've been to a marvelous party by charmax
Like the periodic table of party.

DLZ by bop_radar
Like the show, this T:SCC vid is hard to condense down to a single phrase. It has density, it has layers. After multiple rewatches my abiding impression is of how inimical the state of perpetual war is to human life. Machines inhabit the drowned, post-Judgement Day world like fish, like eels, while the humans struggle for breath and lose everything they once held dear.

Order in the Sound by chaila43
Although this is based on Battlestar Redactica it works quite independently. It’s a beautiful, strange synthesis of women and architecture, bodies and buildings, music and mathematics in which Bob Dylan is not God.

In spite of its failings, or maybe because of them, I think the BSG ending rather lends itself to vidding. A vidder can work around all the darns and duct tape holding the original together and weave the good threads back into one small but perfect tapestry.

Follow Me into the Darkness by threezerotwo
To me, one of those small perfect things was the penultimate chapter of Kara’s story. Not the ultimate because Kara is no angel (and certainly not a bloody pigeon) but Kara as not quite Kara, who had her memories but hadn’t had to live through them. I liked the way it seemed to give her the distance to finally piece together the puzzle of herself. This vid’s subdued colouring and fragmented images express that Kara beautifully and gives her an ending that feels just right. With fire, not fade away.

Slow Down Gandhi by obsessive24
The Cylons had a plan but there never did seem to be much of one for the civilians on the show. The two-part mutiny in S4.5 was one of the few times they got to play centre stage and even then the focus was on the leaders and the dice clearly weighted - Zarek’s murderous ambition was hammered home from his killing of Laird. It’s all there in this vid. Gold lit decadence aboard Colonial One while the masses lurk in the shadows. The egocentric anger driving the men who would be Ghandi. Throughout the people remain a blur, camera pans over hands and feet, only coming face to face with the viewer when the show’s over and still nothing has changed.

Unnatural Selection by charmax
Terminators and cylons are very different kinds of robots. But both were made to be perfect and in both cases their first free act was to destroy their maker. They enter the evolutionary process by trying to end it only to find that perfection is incompatible with survival. They adapt, they change, they die and in dying live. Who’d have thought classic Darwinism could be so visually striking or bust such a beat?

Lost at Sea by halcyon_shift
The tragedy of Jesse. The strong smooth movement through water that eventually draws her down, a strange counterpoint to the clatter of jagged images from life on land.

giandujakiss’s new Dollhouse vid It depends on what you pay combines biting critique with a dark infectious wit perfectly matching that of the song. I particularly love what she does with the hand gestures.

I do part company with the argument made by the vid even though it's a strong argument and eloquently made. However, to me the show feels like it’s coming from the same place as the show tune. More or less ( Read more... )

ETA: The vid was linked on whedonesque to much defensiveness and being nothing if not counter-suggestible I wanted to add the major criticism I have of the show in its current form. Which is that since it’s found its feet it’s largely switched focus from the actives as victims/future heroes to their possible complicitness in their fate and to the people who work there. Why they do what they do, what keeps them there. If things stay that way the show will be essentially telling a “white man’s guilt/burden” story, which sits very uneasily with any claims to have things to say about human trafficking as the people being trafficked will have no voice.

There’s a thing they do in musicals where it starts with some really staid event, often literally a square dance, then suddenly the band lets loose or the beer arrives and the next thing you know they’re Lindy Hopping like it’s 1999. That thing. I love that thing and this is the vid version:

Beverly Hills by giandujakiss

Merlin itself is like the High School AU version of Arthurian legend or being British not so much high as more than usually eccentric public school. Also on the local TV front I had hopes that with the introductions out of the wayThe Devil’s Whore might evolve into something not necessarily better (because better can take many forms) but at least more coherent. But it remains a rollicking crack-history romp through the Civil War, bootstrapping itself over its scripted limitations through sheer force of acting and visual flair. Next week Cromwell and Ireland, yes feed the vid bunny why don’t you.

I was going to be organised and do show by show reviews of all the VVC vids but RL pretty much precludes that ever happening, so this is more of stream-of-consciousness approach scribbling down thoughts as they occur. First off reactions to three of the most pushing-the-meta-envelope vids of the con:-

How Much is that Geisha in the Window? by lierdumoa for the “Fuck You! Challenge show

White America anonymously for the same

Climbing up the Walls by obsessive24 for Premieres

( Read more... )