jetpack_monkey_ljarchive

All the vids! I kind of put this off because most of my vids are just available at Youtube, but that's not 100% true anymore. So here we are!

( Behind the cut... )

I think my days of vidding with any regularity are narrowing to a close. And it's because I am very bad at listening to music. You'd think this is something that one couldn't actually suck at, but it is and I do.

I don't listen to music, really. I don't put on iTunes and listen to favorite tracks or check out a new artist. It never occurs to me to do so and even now, I'm blanking on a scenario where listening to music for funsies would be something I would do instead of anything else.

The only time I listen to music is when I'm actively trawling for vidding material. And frankly, over the years, it's become exactly as frustrating as clothes shopping. It even tenses up the same neck muscles. I find something that I like, but they don't have it in my size or worse, they have it in my size but it doesn't quite fit. It's just a shade wrong. And I could wear the shade wrong thing, but I would know all the ways it doesn't fit.

Same with songs. Even when I'm just generically listening to stuff for general "put it on the vidding list" music, I hear songs that are great in some ways, but either structurally or lyrically go to a place that make them ill-suited except in very narrow scenarios in which I have no interest. Listening to music with the knowledge that the songs could be used for vidding but aren't suitable for my needs makes the whole process awful. (And yes, I realize that the solution is "Stop looking at it that way" -- see above, re: I wouldn't listen to music otherwise).

It gets worse when I run into the vidding scenario that's been plaguing me for the last year -- I find something that seems a perfect match for a fandom or a multi scenario, spend days or even weeks gathering source and clipping, and the *instant* I get more than one clip on the timeline, I see exactly how the two are a terrible match. And now I've wasted oodles of time clipping something. Trying to find a song that's like the one you were using but is different in key ways is nearly impossible.

It's even more frustrating because I don't tend to vid things I'm actively obsessively fannish about. I prefer to vid in weird niches that I have some technical or historical interest in. So all of that time I spent clipping was really wasted, because it was only to support that specific vid idea for that specific song. The clipping work can't be repurposed for another vid in the same fandom because I'm not attached enough to the fandom itself to explore another angle. So I either find a replacement song for that specific idea or I fail.

The short of this is, you are not getting my ultimate lulzy Run Boy Run vid at Vividcon Premieres this year. I'm not sure I have any more vids in me for this year's Vividcon at all.

Festivids 2015 dropped a week ago, but I haven't had a chance to make a post. So here it is.

First of all, I received *FOUR* vids this year. Honestly, I'm absolutely flummoxed and gratified that these even exist. That they are all amazing in their own way is just f**king sweet.

What's especially awesome is that there are now THREE vids for the 1977 what-the-eff-did-I-just-watch masterpiece Hausu that didn't exist before, and they all come from different angles:

Great White Cat (unexpected instrumental music choice works amazingly well)
A Happy Song Where Everybody Dies (bulletproof music kink + dark humor = EEEE)
Rock Lobster (lyrical resonance makes everything MORE WTF, not less)

None of the vids are safe-for-work and they all contain copious amounts of blood (well, red water). Also your brain my never be the same again.

Last but under no circumstances least is a vid for The Mummy (1932);

Love Lockdown

Oh my heart. This is exactly the kind of vid I was hoping for when I requested the source, but it exceeded all of my expectations by using a Kanye West song that dug to the eternal soul of the material. Plus more Boris Karloff vids are never a bad.

I haven't had a chance to do as much viewing as I'd like, but here are some of the vids that I really dug this year:

• They Are Afraid of Us Together (A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia)
• Motivational Speaker (Edge of Tomorrow)
• Relations of Life (Europa Report)
• See You Again (Girl Meets World)
• Blow (Gone Girl)
• All 9 Hamilton vids for convincing me to give the musical another. Shot!
• Show Me Your Teeth (Hieronymus Bosch)
• Legs (Kingdom of the Spiders)
• Under Pressure (The Martian)
• He Drives Me Crazy (Night at the Museum)
• Bitch Puddin's Fuckin' Theme Song (Robot Chicken)
• Your Mother (Saga)
• Centuries (Wayne's World)

For the sake of ongoing mystery, I am not reccing anything that I have been guessed for. We'll see how those guesses turn out in a week.

thuviaptarth set up a vidding love meme for ultimate feelgoods! Yay!

You can find me here.

It's looking like I'm not going to finish off my robots vid before the year is up, so let's just do this now, shall we? As I normally do, I only count the vids I released in 2014, even if the majority of work was done in 2013.

February (Festivids reveals)
Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Danger 5)
Radio (Hey Ash Whatcha Playin')
Raise Your Glass (Space Cases)
The Ballad of Wesley Crusher (Star Trek: TNG)

August (Vividcon)
Dracula Has Risen from the Dance Floor (Hammer Dracula)
Carries On (Jim Henson)

( Rest of the meme behind the cut! )

Fromviolace andkillabeez 
1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-vid.

I absolutely adore making multisource vids centered around a particular theme or film series. Drawing out meta-narratives and tropes is totally my jam. It's not just the vidding process, though. It's the research. The deep delve into film/television history, looking for those rare sources, finding new favorite sources (or suffering through sources that Should Not Be). Example vids: 

Fromviolace andkillabeez andkiki_miserychic :

2. Is there a genre or style you've yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

I am trying my hand at comics vidding right now and I really really really want to make a video game vid at some point. Mass Effect, probably, but I had a terrible idea for a Mario Kart vid (or, well, jmtorres had it and I stole it)

shati wants to know:

5. Share one of your strengths.

I have a strong sense of film/media history that informs my vidding. It's a bit like having an Intersect for movies in my brain (what? I've been watching a lot of Chuck lately).

Also, I'm apparently crazy fast when I want to be.

6. Share one of your weaknesses.

My sense of montage is very weak. I'm laser-focused on individual clips, but I have difficulty parsing the interactions between a group of adjacent clips in terms of primary and secondary visual attractors, movement, lighting, and color.

Also, I don't know if this is a weakness, but I strongly emphasize the literary (especially in terms of narrative) in my perception and vidding of visual media. This means my vids tend to emphasize important Narrative or Thematic visuals and I don't spend a lot of time with aesthetics beyond what's provided for me. My vids have a lot of medium-to-close shots and very few landscapes or inanimate objects.

More answers to come!

Finding an Italian academic article on fan vids (link goes to Google's English translation)

They use works by luminosity, thirdblindmouse, tree,  hollywoodgrrl and ohvienna as examples (as well as a couple of mine). One of the sections is even called "The Self-Taught Cinéphile", after my old journal subtitle.

Plus loads of quotes from Francesca Coppa and tishaturk. 

Vividcon is in, like, a week and a half! *GLEE* Who else is going? Can I get a show of hands?

- Within the last few months, I've finished rewatches of Buffy, Angel, and Farscape. Now I'm pondering my next big pop culture move.

- jmtorres is our roommate now. It is awesome. She brought oh so many books.

- I really, really, really want to make an album-vid of Farscape a la Luminosity's Scooby Road, but finding good, consistent albums that are also salient to the subject matter throughout is *hard*. This is especially true since I only really discovered music in the era of MP3s, so I don't keep a lot of albums in my head.

- I'll have DVDs for sale at the orphan vids table at Vividcon again. Nothing new, just a repackaging of Volumes 1 and 2 from last year as a single unit. If you have one and not the other, let me know and I'll bring a few single-volume of each as well.

- Poking at a couple different vids here and there. Finished one vid, then decided it wasn't awesome enough, so I unfinished it.

- Went to see Puppet Up! on Friday. Puppet improv from the Jim Henson Company. Dirty, dirty dirty puppet improv. It was hilarious.

- Running Fiasco again at the con. Interest posts at Dreamwidth and Livejournal. There's still plenty of room on both Thursday and Sunday nights.

That's... pretty much everything I can think of right now.

I highly doubt I'll have any vids I'm releasing between now and December 31st, so here we go:

Vids premiered in 2013

February (Festivids reveals)
All the Rowboats (The Godfather series)
The Angelic Look (Charlie's Angels)
Back to Avalon (A League of Their Own)
Feel Dead Inc. (Cabin in the Woods)
I Don't Speak Hungarian (A koppányi aga testamentuma)
Wolfsbane (The Wolf Man series)
Burn Brighter (Firestarter)

May
Wonderful World (multi)
Blow (The Prisoner, VidUKon)

August (Vividcon)
crushcrushcrush (Star Trek: DS9)
Let's Go to the Mall (Dawn of the Dead 1978)
A Quite Serious Thematic Analysis of the Works of David Cronenberg (David Cronenberg)
Slippery Slope (The Wicker Man - 1973)
Starships! (Monochromatic Remix) (multi)
Va Va Voom (I Love Lucy)
Vividcon 2013 Premieres Intro (Werewolf multi)

My favorite video this year (of my own):
It's a tie between All the Rowboats -- where I really challenged myself -- and Starships! Monochromatic Remix, which was fun to make, fun to watch, and was an overall educational experience.

My least favorite video this year:
I'm still not completely comfortable making vids about interpersonal relationships, so I feel like The Angelic Look could have come out so much better than it did.

Most successful video:
My instinct here is to say Starships! remix, but that one is such a gimme based on how great and loved the original by bironic is. So I'm going to go with Blow, because it was a labor of love for me and it had an unexpected, nigh-overwhelming response.

Video most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Wolfsbane. Hands down. Some of my most emotional, angsty work there.

Most fun video:
It's probably a tie between Starships! remix and Feel Dead Inc. The latter was just a blast to make and I still have fun watching it.

Video with single sexiest moment:
David Cronenberg has a whole spate of them. I worked really hard to make that vid both sexy and uncomfortable at the same time.

Biggest vid fail:
I still owe nakedbee a vid for making my amazing Prisoner jacket for Club Vivid. It's going to happen, I promise!

Hardest video to make:
Different levels of hard. Va Va Voom was the most difficult in terms of work-to-enjoyment. It was really kind of a slog, because while I was theoretically a fan of I Love Lucy, in practice, I wasn't feeling it. All the Rowboats represented a challenge I gave myself to bring my vidding to the next level and really be more than just the guy who makes fun vids or horror vids.

Most unintentionally telling video:
This is always such a weird category, so I'm going to go with the vid that told me the most about myself in the making -- Starships! (Monochromatic Remix). I have always been a film history buff, but I was astounded at how much easier it was to make that vid (which encompassed 77 different sources) simply because I was learning while I was doing it. I've always known that my external reason for vidding is to curry the respect and admiration of my peers. Making the Starships remix clarified my internal, personal reasons for vidding -- I do it to learn. I gain an intimate insight into editing, cinematography, and film history with this one hobby. The more I vid, the more I understand how film works and the more I understand I have more to learn yet.

Other vidding miscellany:

So I wanted to repost one of my responses from last year's iteration of this meme, where I talk about my expectations for 2013:

I honestly think 2013 is going to be a big year for me. I have some really interesting vids planned (or already made in terms of two Festivids vids). I plan on hitting Vividcon with all rockets firing and really pushing myself in terms of technique, musicality, and narrative. I don't think I could have come to this point as a vidder without the amazing community and I plan on doing more in terms of volunteering at Vividcon, running panels, and putting together vidshows.

I just got really emotional re-reading that because I am not a goal-setter and when I do set goals, I usually disappoint myself. But I feel like I accomplished all of the above. I'm a more assured vidder now. I've made vids that would've seemed impossible to me 18 months ago. It's been a good year.

For 2014:

I released 16 vids in 2013 -- I think I'm going to take a step back. I'm going to hunker down and focus on a smaller set of vids that are really important to me. And a couple of silly ones, too, because I'm me. And I'd like to make a video game vid this year. That would be cool.