laurashapiro

Hello fandom! I have been quiet and unposty after a relatively prolific 2012, and every time I have a cool fannish or personal thought, I think "I should post that," and then life happens.

In case you're interested, here's what I've been up to:

( Seeing Iron Man 3 )

( Getting diagnosed )

( Making a vid! )

( Working my ass off )

The first thing I ever wanted to do was to tell stories.

I was reading by age three; by age nine I was voracious. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where books were abundant. But narrative held me harder than anything. Stories allowed escape from the bullying at school, the tantrums of my little sister, my nightmares about nuclear war and alien invasions. But they also opened doors to new ways of thinking, new worlds, and new ways of being in the world.

I tried being a writer, but by the time I left for college, I knew that the stories I would tell wouldn't be mine. I would shape them and share them with the world, as a director of films. It took me two years in the film department to get discouraged; as one of three women in the program, I was one of the few who had never operated a camera before and had no illusions toward auteurism. I loved editing but hated having to write screenplays and compete with other students for equipment. After months of expensive frustration reviewing overexposed and blurry stock and having my little lesbian romances dismissed by a teacher, in front of the whole class, as "clichés" (this, in 1987!), I transferred to the theater department.

By the time I was a senior, I was having passionate arguments with my academic advisor about the irrelevance of the Dead White Male Canon. My feminism was not yet intersectional, but even then I realized that if I were unmoved by the ambivalence of a Danish prince, that was probably true for a lot of women -- and maybe even more true for women who didn't grow up rich, white, American. The plays I wanted to direct were by women, and about women. After graduation, I formed a feminist theater company and worked at several others. Audiences were small. Rewards were few. Nobody wanted to hear the stories I was telling, and I didn't know how to learn to tell them better -- or sell them better. Eventually, out of hope and out of money, I found Something To Fall Back On.

In the late 1990s, if you knew HTML people would basically throw a suitcase full of money at you. Some friends of mine were using this thing called the World Wide Web to tell an epic science fiction story (which I realized only much later was basically multimedia Babylon 5 fanfiction), and I wanted to learn. The new medium opened up all sorts of possibilities, but at that time, as now, the thing I cared about most was that I could use it to tell stories.

I found Internet fandom. I wrote fanfiction, telling stories through text for the first time in more than a decade. I learned to vid -- using my film school skills at last! I learned about social justice, that my voice wasn't every woman's, that there were stories I needed to listen to, that listening matters as much as telling.

And just three years ago, my life came full circle and I landed at Global Fund for Women, where an organization of women dedicated to supporting the struggle for women's human rights around the world welcomed me as their website manager, and now as Director of Online Communications.

Recently, we shared a story of a teenage girl who was able to escape the pressure of early marriage and go to university thanks to the efforts of one of our grantee partners. Every day, I am helping to shape and share stories of women working against patriarchy, working toward a better world for themselves, their daughters, and their communities. It is a great gift.

Meanwhile, in fandom, I continue to argue -- in vids and sometimes in words -- for better stories about women, stories where women are heroes, where women are fully human. I am very grateful not to be alone in this argument. If you're reading this, take a moment to celebrate the community of women we are continually building and shaping here. Happy International Women's Day.



P.S. If you haven't yet seen Anita Sarkeesian's new video, she argues eloquently for better representation of women in video games. I think she missed an opportunity for a racial analysis, but it's still a very strong -- and funny -- piece.

Quick update to say my Troy/Abed vid is now available for download!

kiki_miserychic wants to know:

What makes you want to vid certain characters? Are there any recurring traits that a viewer might not realize that make you want to vid a character?

Early on, I made a conscious choice to vid women as often as possible. When I started vidding in 2000, almost every vid I had ever seen was about men (nearly all were slash vids), and I wanted to change that -- partly because I believe representation matters, but mostly because I loved a lot of female characters and knew I would have something to say about them.

And I think this choice has also shaped the characters I focus on overall: I strongly prefer to vid characters, relationships, and themes I haven't seen tackled elsewhere. This means I have a lot of vids featuring characters that get short shrift from the narrative or from other fans: I was vidding Faith, Willow, Xander, and Anya when most of my friends were vidding Buffy, Angel, and Spike. When I look at just Buffy vids as an example, I see that I was drawn to vidding as a way to tease out ideas and themes that weren't fully explored in the text, or go more deeply into a character or her story than the show did. And I see that while a character's relationships are always part of one of my character studies, I am much more likely to do a character study or thematic vid than a 'ship vid. Although I have been known to be shippy...::eyes my Doctor Who vids::

Expanding the list, I've done character studies of:

• Faith


• Ray Vecchio


• Benton Fraser


• Willow


• Xander


• Francesca Vecchio


• Anya


• Fox Mulder


• Almost the entire Farscape crew in one vid (but I'm not sure this one counts)


• Sharon/Boomer


• Lee Adama (auction vid, doesn't count)


• Gaius Baltar


• Dana Scully


• Lorne


• Martha Jones


• Chae Ohk


• Alisha Daniels


• Britta Perry


• Baby Houseman


• Yitzhak


• Damiel


• Peter Dragon

I'm seeing that I rarely vid protagonists, and I tend to choose underdogs or characters I think are somehow hard done by. Characters people don't notice or don't like. Characters who are crazy. Characters who get screwed.

ladyjax says:

I immediately thought of "Hurricane" and the night I watched it during the BASCon vid show. I've always loved how you center women in so many of your vids ("Ing" is another that I love), so I want to know more about how you came to juxtapose Starbuck and Aeryn. On one hand, it seems obvious and yet at the same time that's almost too easy. Also, song choice. I don't know much about Joan Osborne so why that particular song?

It all was born of a deep, as-yet-mostly-unfulfilled need to read Starbuck/Aeryn fic. I can't remember what originally gave me the idea, but once the thought occurred, it was an Unstoppable Force: two hot pilots with serious mommy issues and deeply frustrating boyfriends, both with strong tendencies toward independence and unhealthy ways of expressing their emotions, meet in a Space Bar^TM and get it on. I found and continue to find both of them really hot, and I tend to identify with both of them in an "if I lived in the future I hope I would be this cool" kind of way.

At first I was only thinking of the eyebrow-melting hotness of the pairing; their similarities hadn't really struck me. But once I began plotting out the vid I realized that I needed to use parallel structure to introduce each character, partly because the verse lyrics didn't immediately lend themselves to the sex part of the plot, but also because most viewers would not be familiar with both characters. Most people I know have seen either BSG or Farscape but not both.

So, parallel structure. And lo, the structures were parallel. The more I clipped, the more similar these women were to each other. I mean, the maternal abuse thing I had never thought of consciously until I got to those episodes of BSG and winced and then went YAY! in that way vidders do: gleeful about terrible things that will make great vid fodder.

As for the song, I got it from nestra. I think she shared it with a few other songs, but I remember her remarking that it sounded like a Starbuck song. She was 100% right, and for a long while I thought I'd make a Starbuck character study. But then EVERYBODY made a Starbuck character study, and if there's one thing I try to do as a vidder it's to tackle characters, relationships, and subjects that other people don't tend to. So I sat on the song for a while until I realized that a) Starbuck/Aeryn would make me happy, b) nobody was going to write it for me, and c) this song would totally work for it.

The clipping and overall editing process were relatively smooth and painless. I used a spreadsheet for this vid, which I hadn't done for a while, putting the lyrics alongside clip ideas before and while reviewing the source. The more I worked with the material, the more I became convinced that this pairing was Meant To Be and that, after watching this vid, everyone else would be able to see it. But it was my first foray into constructed reality, and the technical challenges were considerable: the shows' color palettes are nothing alike, and I knew I would need to bring in outside footage for the sex scenes (I used The L Word, and in the end only a very little of it).

The hardest thing was erasing the men. My favorite moment of the vid was the most technically challenging to produce: when Aeryn rolls off of Starbuck at the end of the sex sequence, she's originally rolling off of a dude, Velorek. I had to mask him out, frame by frame. I'm really glad I did, though; that clip is SO satisfying to me now. (:

Fun fact: it was important to me to build the vid without faked kisses* or the like. The only time you see two bodies in the frame together, it's L Word footage. Aeryn and Starbuck are never in the frame together. What you think you see is from the juxtaposition of clips alone.

The Ask Me Anything Meme is still running! If you have a burning question about any of my vids, please leave a comment here!


*Indeed, I don't think Aeryn and Starbuck would kiss each other at all in this situation, though I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.

Title: They Call Me Lucky
Vidder: laurashapiro
Fandom: Action (TV)
Song: They Call Me Lucky
Artist: They Call Me Lucky (no, really)
Summary: You're only as good as your last picture

Made for kiki_miserychic! Happy Festivids!

Download 113MB .mp4 | Get captions (.srt file)

( Streaming behind the cut )

I am OVER THE MOON! I got such lovely, lovely gifts! I am flailing like mad!

Diving into the masterlist now. I don't know when I'll come up for air. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

I can think of a handful of you right off the bat who would qualify for this:

PSMag.com is the daily Internet arm of Pacific Standard, a new bimonthly print magazine of cutting-edge ideas and innovative research. We're looking to expand our team by hiring a Digital Director who will be responsible for:

Overseeing all content on PSMag.com, ensuring it fits with and bolsters the mission to put social and behavioral science research in lively conversation with the news and the national debate. Support and development of editors who are responsible for various subject areas at PSMag.com. Manage the acquisition of bloggers for PSMag.com<http://psmag.com/> who will complement, and strengthen the site's mission. Proactively use best practices to grow traffic to site, including establishment and execution of social media strategies. Develop feature story ideas that can be influential in policymaking, across platforms. Manage web producer, staff writer, and associate editor. Working with editorial staff and Web Producer, create, conceive, and execute web extras to complement print features.

More info here.

I know the guy who's hiring for this, so if you decide to apply, let me know and I can pass on your info directly.