Resolutions, and my year in vidding

[laurashapiro]

I'm not gonna go on and on here, because I want to get the Some Fantastic remaster done today. But I feel a bit out-of-the-loopy, not having participated in Yuletide or any of the other secret santa things (vidders: could we do a similar vid challenge next year, do you think?), so I wanted at least to participate in the year-end musing that's going around.

These were my 2004 resolutions. Let's see how I did:

1) Take swing dance lessons -- done! We've had three or four lessons now, and we're still having fun and not sucking. We want to learn some new and more complicated moves, and in particular I want us to work on our style, so that we grasp that low-center-of-gravity, limbs-aflying feel more securely. Right now, we're just a little too white for me. (:

2) See more independent and foreign films -- total failure. Not even close. I may have seen four or five movies at the theater this year, and they were all mainstream stuff except for the re-release of "Donnie Darko".

3) Read more really good books and fewer merely decent books -- moderate success. I didn't grab as many free uncorrected proofs from work, and I started several that, when they turned out to be mediocre, I didn't finish. OTOH, I didn't buy as many new, excellent books as I wanted to. Standouts this year were Everything is Illuminated (many thanks to tzikeh for the rec) and Ursula LeGuin's The Birthday of the World, a collection of relatively recent Ekumenical stories.

For 2005, I have more going on:

1) Continue trying to clarify what I want for the future, as regards relationship(s) and marriage. Emphasis on defining marriage in a way that seems healthy and desirable for me, if at all possible.

2) Be more patient and generous with P., while continuing to ask, clearly and verbally, for the things I need. Rediscover the balance between independence and self-care, and the desire to do for and give to the one I love.

3) Establish a regular yoga schedule. DO NOT FLAKE OUT.

And now...

'

I wasn't going to do this, because I completed a whopping two vids this year. But then untrue_accounts pointed out that I could talk about remastering, too.

In 2004, I made "Come Together" for Escapade and, with killabeez, "Not Only Human" for Vividcon. My vidding cycle shrank to meeting con deadlines only, with no time for the third vid I generally make: the small, personal one. Three factors were related to this: general fannish malaise, the huge effort and cost of moving in the middle of the year, and beginning to remaster old vids for the DVD release.

I remain pleased with "Come Together", my first Farscape vid. Although it wasn't a vid I'd planned to do, and I didn't precisely enjoy such close and continuous proximity to Scorpius, it was an interesting experiment for me in a couple of ways. First, the emotional tone is very different from anything I'd done before. It's a horror vid. I don't like horror, in general. I'm not a consumer of it, and had never been a producer of it. Until this point, my vids have been about love, hope, sadness, joy, dedication, curiosity -- there's been plenty of angst, but nothing in the darkest color palette, nothing scary.

My goal with "Come Together" was to scare people, or at least to freak them out. I wanted to create goosebumps. I wanted to make people shudder. I wanted them to feel that they, like Crichton, were going crazy.

I can trace a direct line from "Beatitudes" to "Come Together", oddly enough. My vids had always gone for The Big Emotion (TM sockkpuppett), but "Beatitudes" was the first time I realized that I could move so many people so intensely. Drunk with power, I wanted to try what I could do besides make people cry. *g*

The other experimental thing about "Come Together" was the extremely rapid intercutting, stolen shamelessly from inspired by heres_luck's "Superstar". Although "Come Together" is a pretty slow song, it has that interesting and creepy syncopated rhythm that I really wanted to use in this way. I'm kinda known for using pretty long clips -- longer than is fashionable, I think -- so I wanted to try using short ones and setting up a deliberately choppy, rockin' rhythm and see how that turned out. I think it was successful, but I find it pretty difficult to do. It's still not natural to me. I think my eyes track more slowly than a lot of folks in my generation, in part because of the media I consume; I was never a big MTV viewer, and I don't go to action movies or watch action shows, for the most part. I even zone out during the fight scenes on Buffy, a lot of the time.

Anyway. I am very fond of "Come Together" and I think it's a strong piece of work, but it didn't go over very well at Escapade, being in a fandom that isn't widely known there. I got a somewhat better response when I offered the vid up on Farscape Fantasy, thanks to suelac, who pimped it enthusiastically in the community. But I wish more people had talked about this vid. I still don't know whether it meets the emotional goals I set for it.

The other vid I made this year, "Not Only Human", had very different emotional goals. Thank god I drafted Killa to work with me, or it wouldn't have met most of them.

"Rook" had been hard for me at the time I made it, because I was pretty much over The X-Files at the time and I had to reach back to the way I used to feel about the show. "Not Only Human" was even harder. I love Scully in a way I never loved Mulder, but that love is old and dry and dusty now, so far removed from the fresh fannish squee I want to have in my heart when I vid. So while I wanted "Not Only Human" to bring the viewer right inside of Scully's questioning mind and sore heart, *I* never got there while working on it. The process of making the vid was very much a technical exercise for me. And I loved every minute of that.

I think in general I'm moving further away from fandom sources. There aren't any shows that are really making me squee. The thing that excites me about vidding now is vidding itself; the process, the constant learning, trying something new -- all my creative juice is now in the creative process itself, and virtually none of it is coming from show-love. I don't know if this is visible in the resulting vids. I kind of hope it isn't, because I imagine that would read coldly to a viewer. But until I can find show-love again, I'm kind of stuck in this place.

"Not Only Human" was, for me, about learning. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could from Killa, whose work has awed me since I started watching vids. Killa's mind works differently than mine, visually; the biggest difference is that she's totally unafraid of transitions and effects. I got so much "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" beaten into me when I started vidding, with respect to effects, that I've tended to be pretty sparing with them over the years. Killa, who has mastered these things completely, is unabashed about creating them when they suit her, for purely aesthetic as well as content-driven reasons, and the result is a vid that *glows* in ways I could never have created on my own.

We worked extremely well together, often having very similar ideas or showing each other snippets that we both immediately loved, or both found the exact same problems with. We were very much on the same wavelength, and I was always grateful for Killa's patience in working with the less technically experienced vidder that I am -- she would frequently suggest things and then I'd have to ask her how to do them. (: I hope she enjoyed the process as much as I did, because I frelling *loved* it, and I learned so much.

The vid was a rousing success at Vividcon, which made me happy and helped alleviate some of the "OMG how do I top myself this year?" anxiety I'd been feeling.

I want to talk a little about remastering now. Originally, I approached this with a bad attitude: "Mutter mutter gotta do this for the source queens mutter mutter rather be making new vids mutter mutter." I was quite resentful. (: But as I started getting more involved in the process, I realized that remastering is a great opportunity to fix things that have always bothered me about the originals, whether those things are VCR artifacts and network bugs, or clip issues and timing problems.

As a result, some vids are a little bit more "new and improved" than others. I have been quite the purist on some of them. "Rook", for example, is as close to the original as I can make it. Some of the other vids have more changes -- timing improvements, transition improvements, and in a couple of cases, clip replacements. It's my hope that these fairly minor changes do not annoy or offend fans of the original vids. I really tried hard not to do a George Lucas here, and I think viewers will find that, in every case, the meaning of each vid is totally unchanged. But I'll be interested to hear from eagle-eyed enthusiasts about how they feel the new versions compare to the old.



Whew. That was longer than I'd intended. Now I really have to get remastering...