It's a magical world

source: Hogfather
audio: Sufjan Stevens, "Get Behind Me, Santa!"
length: 2:48
download: 64MB on Dropbox
summary: It's just another solar festival. Or is it?

AO3 | tumblr


I've had this idea in mind for at least five years. When I saw mithborien's request, I knew I had to seize the opportunity. I am an unabashed fan of Christmas, and I wanted to make a vid that got at that aspect of the movie. Also, Susan is the best.

Clipping soon presented a series of challenges: my ancient avi files (!) had weird issues, and I discovered midway through that they were, collectively, missing about 45 minutes of the movie. A search for full-length rips of the movie eventually resulted in ripping them off YouTube, as my computer couldn't deal with the copy protection on the DVDs and the Blu-ray links I found were all dead. I had thought about remastering the vid so that all the clips were from the YT version of the file, but closer viewing showed not much difference between them. 

The other thing that clipping demonstrated was just how much of the movie is talking. I decided to trim the song down rather than try to fill the very long bridge with material that very probably would have gotten repetitive. It also became clear to me that I wasn't going to make the treat deadline with the full vid, so I uploaded a much shorter version for the deadline in order to give myself time to finish the full version, which is the one you see here. 

Happy Hogswatch to all, and to all, a good night.

source: The Clone Wars
audio: Daft Punk, "C.L.U. (Paul Oakenfold remix)"
length: 4:40
download: 217MB on Dropbox
summary: Beware the dark side. 

My 2017 Club Vivid premiere! 



tumblr | AO3


I watched all of The Clone Wars over the course of the past eight months or so--the (re)watch was originally scheduled to coincide with the release of Rogue One, but then November happened. Somewhere around October, I realized that I wanted to make a vid about the show, and that I wanted to use this track. This is the easier vid to make from the show; its complex exploration of sentience, personhood, and free will playing out with the clones and the droids is more difficult. I also decided fairly early on that I wanted to make this vid by colors--the lightsabers go from blue to green to red by the end of the vid, just like the galaxy slides further into chaos and the fall of the Jedi and the Republic. The black darksaber, something of a wild card in the morality play of the lightsaber color codes, appears at the beginning, middle, and end. 

I'm really happy with how this vid turned out. It was a fairly easy vidding process, possibly because I was using an extensive spreadsheet and because the realities of who fought who meant that I was somewhat constrained in my clip choices at each point through the timeline, until I hit the wall of trying to find copies of episodes that weren't TV rips with logos and started tearing my hair out. Anyway. May the Force be with you.

source: Yuri!!! on Ice
audio: CHVRCHES, "Clearest Blue"
length: 3:54
download: 229MB on Dropbox
summary: Will you meet me more than halfway up?

Premiered at vidukon_cardiff 2017.

tumblr | AO3

Vidding TV shows is so much work. I was cutting this one until about two hours before the deadline, exacerbated by the fact that the Blu-Ray of the last volume came out literally the day before the deadline. I initially used a low quality rip of the creditless ending and was resigned to a different version online than on the con DVD, but then due to some serendipitous technical difficulties, resolved at length by the very patient and excellent con staff, I actually was able to get a file with a high quality rip of the ending into the con--of course it came out less than 24 hours after said deadline. (If I ever get access to Blu-Ray rips, I may remaster it, just because they changed so much for the disc releases.)

As for the vid itself…I had this song in mind since about January. Yuuri and Victor love each other a lot, okay, and they meet each other in the middle, eventually, every time.

Lyrics

source: Star Trek Beyond
audio: Kesha, "We R Who We R"
length: 3:26
download: 202MB on Dropbox
summary: We'll do what we always do, Jim.

My spring 2017 equinox_exchange assignment, for usuallyhats.

AO3 page | tumblr





I love this dumb movie, and I had vague thoughts about how much it parallels the under-appreciated by wonderful Star Trek III. Those thoughts are not in this vid explicitly because making this vid took an unexpected amount of time, what with one thing and another, including politics. But they do underlie it (if you liked this movie, you should go rewatch Star Trek III, because there are a lot of parallels and also STIII is delightful) in various ways. 

Other than that, it does (I hope) what it says on the tin. The technical process was a bit nightmarish this time around, not helped by jetlag; I was about 1/3 of the way through clipping a 720p release when I freaked out about clip quality and decided I needed to use 1280. (Also, my video card is slowly dying.) I was about 80% of the way through reclipping before I realized that I could just use the existing clips and only redo whatever I wound up actually using in the vid. Then I wound up using quite a few bits from clips I hadn't redone because that section was the part where the Enterprise crashes on the planet. Whoops. My outlining process also failed me, because I hadn't written down my initial thoughts when I'd had them last summer, so I only had vague notions when I got to actually vidding, and I wound up obsessively recutting the first section before I found a rhythm I liked. The real breakthrough came when I did the stutter cuts on the first chorus. Thanks Kesha.

source: A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery (1987)
audio: Scala & Kolacny Brothers, "Heroes"
length: 3:20
download: 27MB on Dropbox
summary: We can be us, just for one day

A Festivids 2016 treat for josette-arnauld.

Original Festivids post



I devoured Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels last year and was blabbering about them to my roommate (who had only read the Vane novels); I convinced her to read the rest of the books and she showed me the Petherbridge/Walters miniseries. The casting is divine, but the adaptations start out good with Strong Poison and go downhill from there. This is my love letter to Harriet and Peter, though it's not the vid I initially envisioned because the footage just doesn't exist, from a combination of the exigencies of BBC budgets (minimal) and the bad choices made in the adaptation of Gaudy Night, which rob the story of a lot of its political heft. Peter and Harriet, of course, rise above such issues, mostly because Petherbridge and Walters rewrote their scenes wholesale on set. Their relationship--the fact that they find each other, and are able to become the versions of themselves who are able to hold onto each other through each other's influence--is an achievement, and it would be so even in this day and age, even more so in the 1930s.

Technically, vidding with footage this old was…interesting. I thought about trying to correct it, but the light levels are mostly tolerable (I did alter the light levels in the courtroom scenes for visibility) and in the end I lost my vidding energy for all of November, which obviated that possibility. (Fun fact: I finished the first draft of this vid on a plane on Halloween.)

source: Interstellar
audio: Vienna Teng, "The Breaking Light ft. Alex Wong"
length: 4:19
download: 266MB mp4 on dropbox
summary: “Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.” ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

My wiscon_vidparty premiere!



( Notes and lyrics )

source: Apollo 13, Contact, Europa Report, Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian
audio: Symphony of Science, "Glorious Dawn (Cosmos Remix)" 
length: 3:38
download: 161MB mp4 on mediafire
summary: The sky calls to us/If we do not destroy ourselves/We will one day venture to the stars

Original Festivids post




A Festivids 2015 treat for niyalune. I saw her mention this vid as a throwaway concept in her letter…and started making the vid as soon as I finished my assignment. The reason, you see, is that I was convinced she would hate her gift vid, so I wanted to make her something that I was more confident she would like. (But then her reaction to Relations of Life was positive! As was other people's! Stranger things happen, I guess, but I honestly was not expecting it.)

This is the vid that I thought would be screamingly obvious, because I'd done the remaster of the Contact vid at the end of 2015 and this vid rather prominently features Contact. I also had the Interstellar and Europa Report clips sitting around, with the result that I only had to download and clip three additional movies, four if you count the BluRay of The Martian, which luckily came out in December. I had cam clips in the timeline for maybe about two weeks tops, and since everything was BluRay, I actually had a pretty easy time of it as far as multi-source vids go. This vid has the distinction of being the first (but assuredly not the last) for which I broke out a spreadsheet, so that I could make sure that I wasn't short-changing any of the sources, and that I was alternating them appropriately.

The song choice was obvious to me as soon as I thought about making the vid; I love the song and I love the concept, and for me there's no separating Carl Sagan from how I think about human spaceflight. I even named some of the Contact clips using some of his lines from this song while I was doing the remaster clipping way back in June, so it was a complete no-brainer to decide to use this song, cemented by my discovering that Neil DeGrasse Tyson had done promotional work for The Martian. (You should totally go watch the video, it's great.)

I was hugely tickled, and hugely flattered, to see some really great vidders guessed for this vid; I thought that the other dead giveaway would be the line at the beginning of the end titles. Star Trek fans will recognize the fade-in title card from the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which also features the history of human space exploration quite heavily. I definitely approached this vid in the spirit of conscious optimism that I associate with the core of Star Trek, and I hope that comes through in the vid.

One of the greatest things about getting to see other people's reactions to the vid has been seeing what they got out of it that I hadn't thought of or didn't consciously put in there; when raven remarked that it was a vid that was more about the idea of exploration than fannishness, I thought, "Huh. Yeah, I guess so!" Which is to say, while I was making the vid with my spreadsheet I wanted to show people doing science; I wanted to show people looking up; I wanted to show the joy of exploration. (I wanted to show the Europa One crew smiling in a non-ominous context.) To that end I suppressed a lot of context (and a lot of doubled actors) in these movies, or just ignored it, which is especially obvious at the ending: Jim Lovell never actually walked on the moon, but he does in this vid, just as Matt Damon is watching the sunrise in the context of being convinced that he's going to die there on Mars, and Anne Hathaway believes she's as good as the last survivor of the human race, but that's not the feeling here. The Watney hope shots in the vid are as much for me as for anyone; I love space exploration, but now that I'm not a child any more I'm less blindly optimistic about the galaxyrise that Carl speaks of in the song. So the vid is an argument with myself as much as anything, and the end title is the conclusion that I wanted to make for that reason: the human adventure is just beginning. And finally, thanks to mrquadcopter for beta watching.

( Lyrics )

source: Contact (1997)
audio: Dar Williams, "Are You Out There?"
length: 3:08
stream: on Critical Commons
download: 135MB mp4 on mediafire
tumblr post | AO3 page

It's been a year of space exploration movies for me, and about seven months ago I found myself on a deep dive in the Vividcon database and other places, looking for vids of the same. When I found the entry for thatfangirl's 2003 Contact vid Are You Out There?, and tracked down a copy, I immediately wanted to remaster the vid so that more people could see it, because it's pretty great. With thatfangirl's kind permission, I've at long last done my part of just that--the viewing is now up to you. With many thanks to eruthros for providing my copy of the original vid and to mrquadcopter for beta watching my original draft, and above all to thatfangirl, for making the vid and for letting me remaster it!



( Embed + notes under the cut )

source: Star Trek: The Animated Series
audio: They Might Be Giants, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"
length: 2:01
download: 48MB mp4 | .srt subtitles
summary: Man has a dream, and that's the start: the final frontier is still out there, just a dream away.

AO3 page | tumblr post

My wiscon_vidparty 2015 premiere.



( Notes )
( lyrics )

source: Edge of Tomorrow | Live. Die. Repeat. (2014)
audio: Steve Aoki ft. Fall Out Boy, "Back to Earth"
length: 4:03, 154MB mp4
stream: on Critical Commons
download: 155MB mp4
summary: Are you living your life or just waiting to die?

tumblr post | AO3 page

My Festivids 2014 assignment, for ohvienna. Original Festivids post.

 

( Notes & lyrics )