It's a magical world

Dear Festividder,

First off, thank you for making me a vid! I love vids, and quite honestly I would be happy to see a vid in any of these fandoms. I have no qualms about oft-vidded songs, either.

Festivids! I only made one vid this year because book revisions, but I received three great vids!

My assignment vid was the Nimona vid Anti-Hero for thiswildernessismyhome. This song came to me in a flash about a week after assignments went out and I did not resist because how can you resist a Taylor Swift vid when it calls to you? And why would you try? People seem to have quite liked this one, and that makes me happy, because I'm very pleased with it. Secretly my favorite part is how Nimona is always throwing herself off a high place at the same point in the chorus.

I got two vids for Fire Island, a queer Asian-American retelling of Pride & Prejudice. One is if I were a fish by kaydeefalls, which looks more at the friendship side of the movie, and the other is Boys in the Ocean by rhea, which leans a little more into the romance side. They are both excellent!!

My other gift is Jackrabbit by tafadhali, which is for the movie Catherine, Called Birdy. I loved the book and really enjoyed the movie and it's a great vid to a song that I have thought about vidding myself but never did. 

Thank you Festividders! This year for the first time in a while I actually managed to watch all the vids before reveals and you know, we really knocked it out of the park. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Festivids are revealed!

ohvienna made both of my Hocus Pocus gifts, Another Night (an excellent vid about the Sanderson sisters and also an excellent vidding joke) and On All Hallows' Eve, which is basically a mini silent film. It's funny, I have made this request at least once before and this year it obviously clicked and paid off!

I made the Andor vid Life During Wartime for thingswithwings. I'm very pleased with how this vid turned out, especially because I've had the song in my vidding playlist for eons and I knew when I got the assignment that I would be using the song even though I sort of wondered whether it would work. Well, obviously it does. It's funny -- the first time I actually listened to the lyrics in this song I was kind of blown away. The 70s were a different and very weird time and in its own way Andor is the most 70s Star Wars since Star Wars (1977), before they started calling it A New Hope. Anyway, I really enjoyed adding this to my growing playlist of Star Wars vids, and I can't wait for the next season of the show.

Sadly I didn't accomplish any treats this year, as I was sort of not in a great headspace for most of last month for various reasons and I had competing deadlines on other things, but there are so many amazing Festivids this year, as a collective we have outdone ourselves again. As for me, I am already looking ahead to the rest of the year's vids.

Festivids 2022 is live! There are a whopping 163 vids in the collection and I have only watched a fraction of them so far but they have all been great.

I got two gifts! Both for the Hocus Pocus movies, both of them equally fun in different ways.

And if you, too, would like to try your hand
at resurrecting the Sanderson Sisters,
Black Flame candles are half off for Halloween!

Hocus Pocus: the Sanderson sisters through the ages.

I never would have come up with this idea in a million years, but it's fiendishly well done. 

As for me, I made precisely one (1) Festivid. If you guess it, you win a yet to be determined prize. Or at least bragging rights.

source: Muppet Treasure Island
audio: Klaus Badelt, "Fog Bound/He's a Pirate"
length: 2:00
download: 126MB on MediaFire

summary: On the big blue wet thing.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link

source: Star Trek: Picard
audio: Death Cab for Cutie, "Black Sun"
length: 4:51
download: 302MB on MediaFire

summary: 
There is a role of a lifetime

Festivids 2021 is live at AO3! There are a whopping 149 of them; I made three, which is a gratifying return to form. I'll be interested to see if anyone guesses which ones at the guessing post.

I received one excellent vid as a gift: a strange pair, which is a vid for The Fall (2006) which does some really cool work with integrating audio from the film with the music track. There are so many ways a vid for this beautiful movie could go and this is a great one.

Festivids have been revealed! 

seekingferret made me Istanbul, a fun, snappy and very slightly snarky Charlie's Angels (2019) vid. I should have known that someone with a penchant for making vids to non-English songs and the same sense of humor displayed in the vid would make me a treat displaying those traits. Many thanks!

thuviaptarth made me a vid for Watchmen (2019), Nothing Is Safe, a devastatingly effective vid to a clipping. song that really leans into the hard truths the show embraces and which is just a great example of the way thuvia can build things through a vid. If you haven't seen the show, heed the warnings in the tags.

I made two Festivids this year and I'm very proud of both of them. This was kind of a hard year in the exchange for me--between the pandemic and the post-election, pre-coup jitters I didn't sit down to really start vidding my assignment until the week after Christmas and I was moderately worried about getting it done. Then I finished it in, um, two days. Welp.

Stranger Companies – I really love how this vid came out; I think it does exactly what I wanted and I was really happy with the way the vid reflects, at least for me, the queerness and the power of queerness that the show celebrates. I loved the show so much after I sat down to watch it in November (I offered it sight unseen, a practice I recommend if you like to live dangerous) and then I tried to find some criticism fo the production when it was on and…a lot of the criticism is bad. Straight people missing the point everywhere. I really like the Perfume Genius track I chose, and I think it fits very well with the play.

Odds Are – I had been planning to make an "Odds Are" vid for vid_bingo all last year, and had basically settled on the idea of an animated fandom, but never quite decided which one until Star Trek: Lower Decks started airing, and then it was inevitable. I clipped for bad things happening in the show in October and November and then sat down and put it all together in a few days in January. There was a lot of trial and error with various things and the dog lip-syncing was not intentional, but some things like the stuff with Q never really moved after I laid them down. That colls is also the mod for vid_bingo made it even better, imo. And yes, I thought this one was pretty obviously me; someone even guessed in the vidding Discord beforehand that I would make a Festivid for this show! I have a brand and I'm pleased with it.

source: A Midsummer Night's Dream - Bridge Theatre and National Theatre 2019
audio: Perfume Genius, "Slip Away"
length: 2.50
download: 298MB on Mediafire
summary: Lo, the transforming power of love.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics





This production blew my mind. I was watching it without paying full attention, yeah, Athens is Gilead, Theseus is a jerk, uh-huh, and then I realized that Oberon was speaking Titania's lines. It's so wild to me how flipping a single element makes a play that's extremely familiar--I first read it for English class in seventh or eighth grade, and my high school performed it when I was a sophomore--into something new and rich and strange. And how the staging can create associations or possible connections between Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania without ever answering them conclusively. And how queerness, well, saves the world, or at least Athens--which is why I was particularly happy with my choice of a queer artist for the song.

Dear Festividder,

First off, thank you for making me a vid! I love vids, and quite honestly I would be happy to see a vid in any of these fandoms. I have no qualms about oft-vidded songs, either.

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