It's a magical world

I didn't even have strong feelings about stormpilot before I started this vid. But you know what? It is a good ship! But I got so annoyed at the Star Wars discourse earlier this year that I decided to make this vid, and you know what? I had fun! Poe is Leia and Finn is Han and Oscar Isaac and John Boyega have very good faces!

source: Star Trek (through Star Trek 2009)
audio: Death Cab for Cutie, "Grapevine Fires"
length: 4:19
download: 0.3GB on Backblaze - right or ctrl+click save as
summary: An HD remaster of skywaterblue's vid, which is no longer available online. skywaterblue passed away in 2017.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics | inset comparison on Sendvid

I got to thinking about this vid about a year ago; I loved the original, and I was sad that it was no longer available online. So I decided to remaster it myself.

Here's what I said about it in the VidUKon con book:


This vid is a remaster, but right off the bat I made some choices that differentiate it from the original in some fairly major ways. First and foremost, I chose not to crop the various sources to match some unitary ideal (which one?); skywaterblue cropped to the widescreen DVD of the Star Trek 2009 movie, but to me the patchwork nature of Star Trek is one of the things that I love about it, and also those shots that were framed for 4:3 (or widescreen, in the case of DS9) should be what they were meant to be. This vid plays that up by including some of the HD remastered footage of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind; if you watch the side by side vid comparison, you'll see that I actually chose some slightly different clips at a few points to make that possible. There are also a few points where the original vid had stray or blank frames, or some very short clips which I excluded in order to spend more time on the more important shots. I spiced up the Captain Proton footage with a reverse iris transition, straight out of Flash Gordon, but I ignored a lot of the apparently Vegas-induced two second transitions between clips. I also did not replicate the old magnetic tape splice transitions.

There's also quite a lot of color grading in this vid. I matched all of the DS9 clips to the What We Left Behind HD shots, as those clips' color grading was personally supervised by the DP for S3-S7 of the show. (I didn't match the TNG shots to anything, as they are all from the Blu-Ray restoration. Having no standard for Voyager, I left those clips alone too.) I also matched all of the Blu-Ray footage from the TOS and TNG movies to the DVD footage that skywaterblue used in her vid, as this thread from TrekCore on Twitter pointed out just how ghastly the color grading is on the Blu-Ray transfers. (Okay, it could be worse. But it's uniformly that paler washed out blue in the original movies, while the TNG movies make everyone look orange.) Very late in the game I also noticed that the aspect ratio was off in the "Trials and Tribbleations" clips and managed to fix it, which was gratifying. All remaining errors and infelicities are, of course, my own. LLAP.

source: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
audio: Vienna Teng, "Copenhagen (Let Me Go)"
length: 3:04
download: 201MB on Dropbox
summary: get it in your head, where we're headed/You gotta let it all die, let me go

AO3 page | tumblr post

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

My Festivids assignment, for sandalwoodbox

source: Good Omens
audio: The Magnetic Fields, "The Book of Love"
length: 2:42
download: 181MB on Dropbox
summary: The book of love is long and boring/and written very long ago
It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes/and things we're all too young to know

AO3 page | tumblr post

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics




What is there to say that hasn't already been said about these two? They love each other, and that was the ineffable plan all along. I knew I had to vid them using a song from 69 Love Songs, and it didn't take too much relistening to decide it had to be this song. Many thanks to aria for the beta watching, and to the fandom and the creators, all of whom know why. ♥

source: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
audio: Charli XCX, "Girls Night Out'
length: 3:39
download: 270MB on Dropbox
summary: She-Ra is gay, pass it on

AO3 page | tumblr post

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

Made for Sparkle Motion 2019, the official dance party of fanworks 



I was determined to make a vid for Sparkle Motion, since I'd made one for Club Vivid the last few years, but I didn't have a pre-existing concept so I picked this song off the list. And then I promptly had no time because my panel premiere dropped into my lap. So this vid is, well, not the most accomplished thing I've ever made; I want to specifically thank bironic for reminding me that "people will be drunk," which gave me the temporary confidence boost necessary to push through and finish. Done is better than perfect. 

All that said, I didn't watch it for two months, and it's nowhere near as obviously terrible as I thought it was when I first finished it. I also relearned, by not clipping, the importance of clipping to my process. So that was a useful reminder.

audio: Yeasayer, "Rome"
length: 3:49
download: 295MB on Dropbox
Lyrics on AZ Lyrics


My roommate: "You realize you're the only person who likes Lorca."
Me: "Nuh-uh! Me and lizbee makes two!"

I recognize that liking Lorca is a character flaw, but here we are anyway. He's got his problems as a captain, but he's pretty darn effective! If only he weren't secretly impersonating his hapless prime universe counterpart. If only he didn't have his own agenda about crossing back over to the mirror universe and overthrowing Emperor Georgiou! If only.

source: seaQuest DSV
audio: Enya, "Caribbean Blue"
length: 4:02
download: 297MB on Dropbox
summary: The future lies beneath the surface.

My equinox_exchange assignment, for valika.


AO3 page | tumblr post

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

I loved SeaQuest DSV with all my heart when I was eight years old and I watched almost all of the first season as it aired. And then in the second season they axed half the cast (including one of my favorite characters, Dr. Westphalen) and moved it against Lois and Clark, and I didn't watch it as much. It jumped the shark almost literally at the start of season three with a timeskip and casting a mean man as the captain and that was that. I hadn't watched any of it since it first aired twenty-five years ago, but I couldn't pass up the chance to revisit it when I saw it on the list of nominations. This vid very intentionally only uses footage from the first, best season of the show, and it mostly focuses on the bits that stuck with me all these years. I leaned all the way into the 90s theme and used my one of my favorite Enya songs, even after I realized that I'd been hearing the lyrics wrong.

It was deeply fun to go back to this show, and also bittersweet. Roy Scheider and Jonathan Brandis, who were the heart of the whole story and were both quite good in it, are both dead, and only Ted Raimi did anything I've ever heard of after this. The show could have been great, and it's painful to watch all the parts that were actually quite good, especially for the time, and know that the production actively chose not to double down on them. And the future that the show envisioned never happened: setting aside all the strange technology assumptions, which are understandable, the world of seaQuest still has ice in the Arctic in 2019. I can only assume that Al Gore became president in 2001 and that catastrophic climate change was averted, unlike our current timeline where we are barreling toward it at full speed and the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching to death as I write this. Even Darwin wouldn't play the same now as he did then, given what we now know about the dolphin propensity for sexual assault. I wish I had better tidings; it's crazy what we could have had. It's crazy what we are preparing to accept. Right this minute, the future can still be changed--but not without collective action from all of us.

source: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
audio: Low, "Poor Sucker"
length: 3:33
download: 273MB on Dropbox
summary: There is a war going on for your mind.

AO3 page | tumblr post


I don't think I've seen this movie since I saw it in the theater in 2004, but watching it again brought it all back--the fear, the paranoia, the despair of watching most of the society around me fall into lockstep on a pointless war that would kill millions. Yet it's impossible to watch the movie now and not think that hey, it's not so bad, as the hostile interests only suborned the vice presidential candidate, and not the presidential candidate himself, and he didn't go willingly. I'm not sure how much of that made it into the vid, but it was on my mind through every second, partly because of the song choice. Double Negative is a stunning album, a cry of rage and despair over what has happened to the country since 2016, and this was the only song I ever considered for the vid. 

source: The Good Fight
audio: Paramore, 'Hard Times"
length: 3:01
download: 268MB on Dropbox
summary: Nevertheless, she persisted.

source: Star Wars movies
audio: Dessa, "Congratulations"
length: 2:01
download: 185MB on Dropbox
summary: Congratulations, you have invented a new kind of stupid.

Premiered at con_txt 2018.

AO3 post | tumblr post

Hello, my name is Electra, and I like Star Wars. A lot.


You will note that one of the tags on my reblog of the above gifset is "it works on multiple levels omfg," which…is what this vid does. I ship the prequel OT3, and in a weird way this is probably as close as I will ever get to trying to make a prequel OT3 vid. (It already contains about 80% of the shots in the entire three movies in which all three of the main characters are in the same frame.) I love them, and this vid is about the end of everything. Sixty years later in-universe and people are still fighting the war that resulted because these three people couldn't get it together.

As you can probably tell from this vid, I have a weird Hamilton ship too; let's just say that if I were to rewrite it in space, it would include Alexander/Angelica as well as the more popular Hamilton ships. So it wasn't a difficult choice to make Obi-Wan the Angelica/POV character here, just like it wasn't a difficult choice to cut the last verse about Eliza's future, which…doesn't exist for Padmé. (The greatest injustice and worst canonical fate for any character in the saga, and those are the facts.)

Technically, I think they need to do a new 4K scan of the original ROTS film print, because there are parts where the current Blu-Ray doesn't look so good, particularly in comparison to Rogue One (bonus points for spotting the one shot from that movie in this vid). It would be nice if they could also re-release the original DVD deleted scenes when they do that, because working with those clips in this vid was not thrilling. I enhanced them as much as I dared before they got too grainy, which was not a lot, and you can totally tell. ANH, by contrast, looks pretty great on Blu-ray, and Alec Guinness' performance is amazing.

May the Force be with you. And for the sake of the galaxy, tell people you love them before you amputate their limbs and leave them to burn to death on a hellfire planet.


( Lyrics )