laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
What with [community profile] tightpresent and [community profile] vidukon_cardiff happening in the same week, there have been some great vids coming out. I wanna talk about five of them.

Three Sarah Connor Chronicles Vids
We got a ton of new brilliant and amazing new TSCC vids out of [community profile] tightpresent, but these were my favorites:

We Used to Wait - a dual character study of Sarah and Jesse with an captivating lyrical beauty and great musicality. Made my heart ache.

Small Words, Bigger Lessons - an exploration of John Henry as a child, learning, and all the teachers he learns from. Outstanding song choice (I will be buying this album!), terrific paralleling of all the children and parents, all the lessons the young learn about how to be who they are and how to be in the world.

Seamstress - a flawless multi-faceted portrait of Jesse.

For the Whovians
England by [personal profile] such_heights - a showcase of all the NewWho companions: what they love, what they learn, what they lose, what they become. Moving and inspiring.

If you like The Prisoner, drop whatever you're doing and watch this
Blow by [personal profile] jetpack_monkey - Stunning song choice. The lyric-clip matching is exquisite, the structure is tight and well-considered, and the way the vidder exploits the limitations of the footage to keep it rocking is seriously impressive.
laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
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 )
laurashapiro: (so cool)


Mulder and Scully and Sherlock and John and alien invasions and science and shit blowing up, FTW.

via [personal profile] seedling, with many thanks!
laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
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.
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
[profile] frayadjascent says:
I'd like to hear more about "God Bless the Child", which I love. The momma/poppa/child metaphor works so well and so clearly in the vid, but I wonder how you came up with that? I'd also be interested to hear anything else about your process for this vid: working out the structure and pacing, working with the rhythm of the music, etc.


I released this vid more than 5 years ago, and I have to admit I'm a little fuzzy on the details. But I know that this was one of those vids where I had the concept long before I had the song. I wanted to do a Lorne character study, and I wanted to focus on him in a way that highlighted the way the show FAILED to focus on him. Lorne was comic relief, a character with no romantic or sexual life, always there to be used by the main characters or to entertain the viewing audience. He rarely got to have his own story, and when he did, he would just lose and lose and lose.

When [personal profile] lim suggested this song, I had to sit with the idea a while. Billie Holiday was an obvious thematic match, the blues totally apropos, but I wasn't sure at all that I could do the song justice.

In the end, the momma/poppa/child structure you mentioned was what sold the song to me: the lyrics gave me a built-in means for comparing the treatment of Lorne to that of the other characters and all the things they "may have": power, respect, a love life, a family...and ultimately weapons. That last was key: one of the greatest tragedies of AtS was Lorne picking up that gun. I hate to think what became of him after he played his part in the endgame. He was a gentle soul and never should have been mixed up in it.

MY LORNE FEELS, LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.

So I knew I had to end with the shooting, even though I didn't want the vid to be generally chronological. I also wanted to bookend the vid with shots of Lorne in a theatrical setting, emphasizing his role as the performer, hopefully reminding viewers of how important his life on stage is to Lorne but also of the false face any performance represents. The performer gets applause, but is always outside the real world, never a part of it. And the performer must hide his true feelings no matter what: the show must go on!

The overall structure was set up by those comparisons, and by the need to build toward the finale. The refrain took us to Vegas, of necessity -- the one time when Lorne looks like he's got it all, and it turns out to be a horrible violation. I enjoyed contrasting that with all the times Caritas got damaged or destroyed. The one home Lorne had, and he couldn't keep it. Thus, he has to move in with his "rich relations": the very people who kept blowing up his bar.

The instrumental bridge takes us to Pylea to deepen that loss of home and connect it to loss of self (what could be a better image of that than decapitation?) and the rage and pain he feels as a result. From there, you can see why he takes that gun.

It was a challenge to work with such a slow song, but I have a lot of practice with long clips! I wavered about whether to use transitions but ultimately decided that some dissolves were warranted to keep the vid flowing.
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
This vid premiered at Escapade last night. Many thanks to [personal profile] thingswithwings for beta and [personal profile] kass for squee!

Title: Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt
Vidder: [personal profile] laurashapiro
Fandom: Community
Artist: We Are Scientists
Summary: The day you move, I'm probably gonna explode.

Download 172MB mp4 | Get subtitle file

Stream it )
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
[livejournal.com profile] 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.
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
[personal profile] bironic says:

I would love to know your thought process behind the use of color in the lovely lovely "What No Angel Knows."


It seems impossible to vid Wings of Desire without exploring the ways color and black and white footage are used in the film -- it's such rich visual treasure! But once I had chosen my song and thereby worked out what the vid was going to be about, I realized I would have to throw away the meaning of color footage in the film, and create my own meaning.

Wings of Desire's color sequences are those told from the POV of its human characters. We only see in color when we're seeing the world through Marion's and Peter Falk's eyes. Whenever we're in an angelic POV, the world is black and white.

But my vid was going to be entirely from Damiel's POV. I could have chosen to make the entire vid (until the very end) black and white, and thus preserve the film's treatment of color. But the music demanded a different choice.

The song I chose, S'loyfn, S'yogn, has distinct sections that have vastly different emotional impacts. In particular, the sections I think of as choruses (no words are sung) explode into loud volume and great intensity as the singers keen and cry out sharply, and the cello does its level best to keep up. The contrast between this and the gently spoken/softly sung lyrics is marked. The bridge and first section of the chorus use a close-mouthed syllable -- "dumm"-- whereas the latter chorus opens out to an "aah". Huge.

The vid was to be about Damiel's intense desire to become human. I could set the stage of his angelic life in the spoken section and show his yearning toward the people he watches over in the sung section, but those bursts of noise had to be accompanied by bursts of color: these sections don't show the enormity of Damiel's feelings as much as they show the enormity of human life itself. The color sections illustrate the passions he can't yet feel: the flavors of food and drink, the joy of the dance, the flowering of love.

Or they're meant to. The challenge for me was that there are only about ten minutes of color footage in the entire film, and almost all of them happen in the club where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing. I had to work hard to pull out clips that weren't too samey and would communicate the kind of ideas and emotions I was after. I worked harder on these sections than anything else in the vid, which on the whole came together pretty effortlessly.

The Ask Me Anything Meme is still running! If you have a burning question about any of my vids, please leave a comment here!
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
[personal profile] 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 BarTM 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 [personal profile] 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.
laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
I realized this morning that if I keep waiting to do this until work mellows out, it will never happen. Unacceptable!

So I'm opening myself up for any questions. Ask me anything you want about any of my vids.

Taking a page from the book of [livejournal.com profile] kiki_miserychic:

If there is any question you would like to ask me about any one of my vids, then go ahead! What I meant by a particular clip or sequence, why I chose to highlight that characterization, why I chose that song, what crack I was taking and where you can get some...anything. Anything you might like to know about how I made a vid, I shall do my best to answer.

I'll post answers on the weekends, most likely.
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
I made two Festivids this year.

What No Angel Knows (Wings of Desire) for [livejournal.com profile] bironic was my assignment, and I was so happy to be working with a movie I've loved for 25 years. I was additionally delighted to match on [livejournal.com profile] bironic, whom I had just met at Vividcon and whom I liked very much. She and I have, I think, quite similar vidding styles so I was pretty sure she'd like what I was doing -- even when I held and held and held on a long clip. Wings of Desire demands long clips, IMO; the feel of the movie is so languorous.

They Call Me Lucky (Action) for [livejournal.com profile] kiki_miserychic was a treat, and it was a near thing; by the time I finished my assignment and my Escapade premiere, I had less than two weeks left. But I was determined! I had been hoping someone would request this show (I nominated it because I wanted to vid it, not because I wanted to receive it). I had a great song for it, and because the show is so WRONG WRONG WRONG I figured nobody would ever guess that I'd made the vid. In less than two weeks. A new personal record. Thank god for limited source.

For those who are curious about Action, it's a sit-com that ran for one season in 1999 and it is about the ugly, ugly side of Hollywood. In terms of the sense of humor, imagine: Misfits - England + LA - superpowers + the film industry - ensemble + one giant asshole of a main character. It's offensive on nearly every level, but it's doing it on purpose. And it somehow manages to have a heart, in the end. Also, Wendy is the bomb.
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
Title: They Call Me Lucky
Vidder: [personal profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] kiki_miserychic! Happy Festivids!

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

Streaming behind the cut )
laurashapiro: Final Cut Pro logo (vidding)
Title: What No Angel Knows
Vidder: [personal profile] laurashapiro
Fandom: Wings of Desire
Song: Dance / S'loyfn, S'yogn
Artist: Moira Smiley and Voco
Summary: What does it mean to be human?

Made for [personal profile] bironic! Happy Festivids!

Download 214MB .mp4 | Get captions (.srt file)

streaming behind the cut )
laurashapiro: (over the moon)
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!!!
laurashapiro: happy Chiana (yay!)
I'm going to Escapade!

\o/

Very special guest P. will be joining me in LA, though not registered for the con. I know he'd like to meet many of you, so I will be attempting to arrange dinners and other outside-of-con spaces for that.

Escapade vid show, woo-hoo! Escapade peoples, even more woo-hoo!
laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
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.

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laurashapiro: a woman sits at a kitchen table reading a book, cup of tea in hand. Table has a sliced apple and teapot. A cat looks on. (Default)
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