thuvia ptarth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thuviaptarth) wrote2010-02-08 11:59 pm
thuviaptarth) wrote2010-02-08 11:59 pm
Year in Fandom: 2009
Current project is balking, so it must be time for procrastination. I didn't want to do a year-end summary earlier because I wanted to talk a little about "Etheric Messages," most of which was done in 2009. (Because I am shameless, I am going to double-dip and talk about in the 2010 summary, too, where at last I will have more than one vid per year. But then I will talk about reception and here I want to talk about it as the result of my 2009 vidding learning curve.)
It was a pretty unproductive year, even by my standards: one story and one vid.
Naturally, that will not stop me from making a huge post anyway.
Fiction
The Certainties is one of the longest pieces of fanfiction I've written--certainly the longest story I've written for Yuletide--and I wrote it in two days to make the pinch hit deadline. It shows. Usually my first drafts come in a quarter to a third under their final lengths, but in this case, I think it probably could have been a novel. I only realized a few days into Yuletide that each section should have been an independent story or novella, each in a different genre and style, each with a subtly (or strikingly) different take on the characters and events, no two consistent with each other.
William and the rake's children should have been Edwardian ghost story, something like an M.R. James pastiche, and the climactic section probably should have been imaginary-world fantasy, and the New York section should have been shorter and/or made more explicit reference to album events, and ... I didn't get past that, and am much too lazy to put that much work into rewriting something I've posted already.
At the time, I was disappointed this didn't get more love, because I thought it worked pretty well even if you didn't know canon, but since I saw more and more things to fix as I came down from the post-draft-completion high, I realized it was just a good first draft, not a good final story. I have been afraid to reread it since the reveal.
And some of the comments I got were just lovely, much lovelier than the flaws deserved. I will forever cherish the perfect stranger who compared me to four or five of my favorite obscure fantasy writers.
Vidding: General
Laura asked, "How was your first year as a vidder?" and I said, "I've been vidding more than one year!" and then I looked at release dates and realized I hadn't. I tend to count it by the time I started working on "Low Red Moon," which makes it a little over a year and a half.
As far as vidding goes, it was a bad year and it was a good year. I finished my third vid, even if I didn't post it until January 10 (and, okay, kept fiddling with it until about January 20). One could be a fluke, two could be coincidence, but three means I am a Real Vidder. Most people seem to take that as a reference to velveteen and rabbits, but I think of wooden puppets and noses that grow, like egos, with each false claim and every lie.
I have some issues, okay?
There are a lot of reasons I didn't vid for most of 2009, but mostly they amount to the pressure I put on myself. The vid had to be good. It had to be better than "Low Red Moon." It had to show I'd learned things since then. It had to do something new or at least new for me. It had do something ambitious. It had to say something big. It had to be about a subject or character that deserved more attention than it had gotten.
It had to take less than eight months and not exhaust me to make. It had to not be on the same subject as any of the vidders I admired were vidding, because I was afraid of being compared to them.
It had to be about a different topic than my first vid, because for over a decade every single story I wrote was about depression, even if the readers never noticed and I didn't always realize it myself at the time.
Around August, I realized that I was becoming just as neurotic about vidding as I am about writing, and just as silent. This was not going to work. I only have room enough in my life to be that stressed out and pressured about one thing, and writing already has that spot. Vidding was going to have to get less stressful, or it was going to have to go. I did not want it to go. I wanted to get better at it. The only way to get better at doing something is to do it; sitting around and worrying about getting better does not actually help. (I am still sad about this. It would be so much easier. I have so much practice at sitting around worrying about things.)
So I narrowed down my decision-making process about what to vid to three questions:
The problem never was that I didn't have vidding ideas. I had a list of over twenty, and I could say "yes" to the first question on all of them. It's just that instead of the two questions above, what followed was a snake's nest of other questions and ifs and buts and shoulds and should-Is and I-shoulds, and every time I answered one question, I'd find twelve more. (Greek mythology failed me here.)
It's not exactly that all my worries and concerns and second thoughts and second guessing went away after I narrowed everything down like that; it's just that they became more manageable. I still picked "Riot Act" to work on partly because I didn't think anyone else would make a Riley vid. (I also picked it because I was in mourning for my show, and it was a way I could express what I loved without having to re-watch those three final episodes, which I was just not in the general emotional shape to bear.) I still worried about "Riot Act"--was it going to be a step backward? It was so much simpler, in idea and in style. I still freaked out when reading the summer crop of vidding meta and hitting a comment where one vidder said they had to do something new and different in each vid. I still worried about the similarities in subject or style between the vids, that I was falling back on easy solutions instead of searching for the best ones.
But I would take a deep breath and repeat my three key questions to myself. Or I would take a deep breath and close the window and quit reading vidding meta for a while. Or I would think about what I wanted to do, what I really wanted to do, and ask myself, "A year from now, are you going to be unhappy that you used nothing but straight cuts in 'Riot Act', or are you going to be unhappy it didn't punch people in the gut?" And the answer was obvious.
So in the last five months of the year, I made a vid, I began working on another vid I'd been thinking about for a long time, Festivids was proposed, I started working on a Festivid I suspected I might get assigned, I got assigned something else, and I made (most of) a Festivid. (And then I made a Festividlet and then I went back to work on the vid that was no longer going to be in time to be a treat, but that's 2010.) So now I know I can make a vid in two to three months, instead of six to eight, and that's a relief. (Thanks to "Names," I know I can make a vid in two to three days, including reviewing the source and finding a song, or a week if I count all the post-Festivid revisions I made. I can't say I really want to make vids in two to three days, though. It's exhausting.)
Part of me still thinks it would be nice to have more variety and emotional range in my vidding. I'm perfectly happy with just vidding women for a while, but it would be nice to have a greater variety of races and ages and I have to admit I'm kind of freaked out by the predominance of blondes. But I'm trying to stick to "What do I want to vid?", not "What should I vid?", because the extra pressure wasn't making me vid new subjects, it was just making me not vid at all. And, much as I would like to make happier vids and comedy vids and ensemble vids and ship vids and action vids someday, they are not what I want to do right now. Right now I want to keep making my melancholy and angry and creepy character studies with a side of mood pieces. Those are my favorite types of vids in general, so maybe it's not surprising that I want to make them. (I'm used to writing, where what I want to read and what I feel compelled to write don't always have a lot in common.) Also, hey, the faith_care_hope auction vid is an action vid, so I will have to figure out something about action vidding by the end of the year.
"Riot Act" notes
Things I realized while making "Riot Act":
2009 goals
I didn't have any 2009 writing goals. Looking back at my end-of-year 2008 post, I see I was feeling pretty burned out, and I continued to feel pretty burned out for most of 2009. I even blogged less than usual for most of the year.
2009 vidding goals were:
Taking it backwards: I did not make a premiere for VVC. I didn't touch AfterEffects for most of the year and when I looked at it again after finishing "Riot Act," I discovered I had forgotten almost everything I learned about it in 2008. I started doggedly reading through my AfterEffects book and doing all the exercises (I can't tell you how much I hate exercises), but dropped that when focusing on my Festivids. I still have to pick it up again, but I feel like I've lost less this time; I haven't been doing the exercises, but I used AE for a little bit of masking in both Festivids and for some effects which may or may not make it into the final version of the vid in progress.
My really big goal for 2009 was to improve clarity, and I'm kind of pleased with myself on that front. I went from a first vid which was incomprehensible in parts even if you knew the canon to two or three vids that had clear central meanings even if you didn't know the canon. I also feel like I'm doing a lot better at managing the visual pacing and flow of information; I have a much better sense of whether the clips are working well together and where they direct the eye and how much time the viewer needs to absorb the visual information presented.
2010 goals
It was a pretty unproductive year, even by my standards: one story and one vid.
Naturally, that will not stop me from making a huge post anyway.
Fiction
The Certainties is one of the longest pieces of fanfiction I've written--certainly the longest story I've written for Yuletide--and I wrote it in two days to make the pinch hit deadline. It shows. Usually my first drafts come in a quarter to a third under their final lengths, but in this case, I think it probably could have been a novel. I only realized a few days into Yuletide that each section should have been an independent story or novella, each in a different genre and style, each with a subtly (or strikingly) different take on the characters and events, no two consistent with each other.
William and the rake's children should have been Edwardian ghost story, something like an M.R. James pastiche, and the climactic section probably should have been imaginary-world fantasy, and the New York section should have been shorter and/or made more explicit reference to album events, and ... I didn't get past that, and am much too lazy to put that much work into rewriting something I've posted already.
At the time, I was disappointed this didn't get more love, because I thought it worked pretty well even if you didn't know canon, but since I saw more and more things to fix as I came down from the post-draft-completion high, I realized it was just a good first draft, not a good final story. I have been afraid to reread it since the reveal.
And some of the comments I got were just lovely, much lovelier than the flaws deserved. I will forever cherish the perfect stranger who compared me to four or five of my favorite obscure fantasy writers.
Vidding: General
Laura asked, "How was your first year as a vidder?" and I said, "I've been vidding more than one year!" and then I looked at release dates and realized I hadn't. I tend to count it by the time I started working on "Low Red Moon," which makes it a little over a year and a half.
As far as vidding goes, it was a bad year and it was a good year. I finished my third vid, even if I didn't post it until January 10 (and, okay, kept fiddling with it until about January 20). One could be a fluke, two could be coincidence, but three means I am a Real Vidder. Most people seem to take that as a reference to velveteen and rabbits, but I think of wooden puppets and noses that grow, like egos, with each false claim and every lie.
I have some issues, okay?
There are a lot of reasons I didn't vid for most of 2009, but mostly they amount to the pressure I put on myself. The vid had to be good. It had to be better than "Low Red Moon." It had to show I'd learned things since then. It had to do something new or at least new for me. It had do something ambitious. It had to say something big. It had to be about a subject or character that deserved more attention than it had gotten.
It had to take less than eight months and not exhaust me to make. It had to not be on the same subject as any of the vidders I admired were vidding, because I was afraid of being compared to them.
It had to be about a different topic than my first vid, because for over a decade every single story I wrote was about depression, even if the readers never noticed and I didn't always realize it myself at the time.
Around August, I realized that I was becoming just as neurotic about vidding as I am about writing, and just as silent. This was not going to work. I only have room enough in my life to be that stressed out and pressured about one thing, and writing already has that spot. Vidding was going to have to get less stressful, or it was going to have to go. I did not want it to go. I wanted to get better at it. The only way to get better at doing something is to do it; sitting around and worrying about getting better does not actually help. (I am still sad about this. It would be so much easier. I have so much practice at sitting around worrying about things.)
So I narrowed down my decision-making process about what to vid to three questions:
- Do I want this vid to exist?
- Do I want to make this vid?
- Do I want to make this vid right now?
The problem never was that I didn't have vidding ideas. I had a list of over twenty, and I could say "yes" to the first question on all of them. It's just that instead of the two questions above, what followed was a snake's nest of other questions and ifs and buts and shoulds and should-Is and I-shoulds, and every time I answered one question, I'd find twelve more. (Greek mythology failed me here.)
It's not exactly that all my worries and concerns and second thoughts and second guessing went away after I narrowed everything down like that; it's just that they became more manageable. I still picked "Riot Act" to work on partly because I didn't think anyone else would make a Riley vid. (I also picked it because I was in mourning for my show, and it was a way I could express what I loved without having to re-watch those three final episodes, which I was just not in the general emotional shape to bear.) I still worried about "Riot Act"--was it going to be a step backward? It was so much simpler, in idea and in style. I still freaked out when reading the summer crop of vidding meta and hitting a comment where one vidder said they had to do something new and different in each vid. I still worried about the similarities in subject or style between the vids, that I was falling back on easy solutions instead of searching for the best ones.
But I would take a deep breath and repeat my three key questions to myself. Or I would take a deep breath and close the window and quit reading vidding meta for a while. Or I would think about what I wanted to do, what I really wanted to do, and ask myself, "A year from now, are you going to be unhappy that you used nothing but straight cuts in 'Riot Act', or are you going to be unhappy it didn't punch people in the gut?" And the answer was obvious.
So in the last five months of the year, I made a vid, I began working on another vid I'd been thinking about for a long time, Festivids was proposed, I started working on a Festivid I suspected I might get assigned, I got assigned something else, and I made (most of) a Festivid. (And then I made a Festividlet and then I went back to work on the vid that was no longer going to be in time to be a treat, but that's 2010.) So now I know I can make a vid in two to three months, instead of six to eight, and that's a relief. (Thanks to "Names," I know I can make a vid in two to three days, including reviewing the source and finding a song, or a week if I count all the post-Festivid revisions I made. I can't say I really want to make vids in two to three days, though. It's exhausting.)
Part of me still thinks it would be nice to have more variety and emotional range in my vidding. I'm perfectly happy with just vidding women for a while, but it would be nice to have a greater variety of races and ages and I have to admit I'm kind of freaked out by the predominance of blondes. But I'm trying to stick to "What do I want to vid?", not "What should I vid?", because the extra pressure wasn't making me vid new subjects, it was just making me not vid at all. And, much as I would like to make happier vids and comedy vids and ensemble vids and ship vids and action vids someday, they are not what I want to do right now. Right now I want to keep making my melancholy and angry and creepy character studies with a side of mood pieces. Those are my favorite types of vids in general, so maybe it's not surprising that I want to make them. (I'm used to writing, where what I want to read and what I feel compelled to write don't always have a lot in common.) Also, hey, the faith_care_hope auction vid is an action vid, so I will have to figure out something about action vidding by the end of the year.
"Riot Act" notes
Things I realized while making "Riot Act":
- The series is so tight about POV. We get maybe one Riley POV scene before the reveal (Cameron confronting Riley in the parking lot) and get a bunch of them after. But before, all the scenes with Riley in them are from someone else's POV, usually John's.
- I didn't originally think John was as responsible for Riley's death as Jesse was, but making the vid changed my mind. Unfortunately, I don't think this comes through in the final draft, which is one of the things that makes me wish I'd held off posting a little longer.
- In a huge number of Riley scenes, she's eating something. She's eating a candy bar or a granola bar when she meets John for the first time, she takes him to a van for food, she looks in the fridge when he takes her to the Connor house, she goes to her foster family's fridge when she comes home from meeting Jesse, she brings John shakes when he's repainting his room. The only other character that consistently associated with food is Sarah, and she tends to be making it, not eating it. I read this as a sign and effect of Riley's food- and resource-starved childhood; she's the only human character we've met who was born after Judgment Day, and the only one who doesn't have any memory of a resource-rich world. She is used to starving. And scavenging. It's my theory that when Jesse finds her rooting among soldiers' packs, Riley is looking for food. No way to prove it, and of course we know she steals small objects, like the lighter; she could be looking for other things, too. But in my fanon, she's looking for food.
- There's all this imagery around suicide and cut wrists. Riley cuts her wrists. Cameron opens her arm up after seeing the attention John pays to suicidal Riley. Sarah cuts her wrists to escape handcuffs.
- So far, I have ended up cutting out the clip or sequence or image that inspired my vids from about half my final drafts. In "Riot Act," almost the first clips I lay down were Riley bending to get food out of the refrigerator dissolving into Riley bending down in the tunnel flashforward. (I looked so hard for physical mirroring between the tunnel scene and other Riley scenes. I wish we had more future imagery of Riley.) It looked great and it said in two seconds at least half the things I wanted to say in the vid, all the effects of Riley's history (the world's future) bleeding through Riley's present (her world's past). The visual equivalent of her outburst about bleached bones.
It had to go because (a) it was the only dissolve in the entire vid (except for the suicide fade-to-white, which could be unique for the obvious reasons) and it was just too asymmetrical to have it there; (b) so there was this sequence of running, running, fighting, fighting, guns, fear, guns--
-- and then there was a refrigerator.
It was not working for me is what I'm saying.
But I kept it through the entire first draft as a talisman, even after I knew it had to go.
2009 goals
I didn't have any 2009 writing goals. Looking back at my end-of-year 2008 post, I see I was feeling pretty burned out, and I continued to feel pretty burned out for most of 2009. I even blogged less than usual for most of the year.
2009 vidding goals were:
- Improve everything (notice my love of specificity and achievable metrics)
- Improve clarity
- Learn AfterEffects
- Make a VVC premiere
Taking it backwards: I did not make a premiere for VVC. I didn't touch AfterEffects for most of the year and when I looked at it again after finishing "Riot Act," I discovered I had forgotten almost everything I learned about it in 2008. I started doggedly reading through my AfterEffects book and doing all the exercises (I can't tell you how much I hate exercises), but dropped that when focusing on my Festivids. I still have to pick it up again, but I feel like I've lost less this time; I haven't been doing the exercises, but I used AE for a little bit of masking in both Festivids and for some effects which may or may not make it into the final version of the vid in progress.
My really big goal for 2009 was to improve clarity, and I'm kind of pleased with myself on that front. I went from a first vid which was incomprehensible in parts even if you knew the canon to two or three vids that had clear central meanings even if you didn't know the canon. I also feel like I'm doing a lot better at managing the visual pacing and flow of information; I have a much better sense of whether the clips are working well together and where they direct the eye and how much time the viewer needs to absorb the visual information presented.
2010 goals
- Give more feedback on things I watch or read.
- Write that Sweet Charity story that was due in 2007.
- Keep trekking through the After Effects books.
- I said this last year, but I keep getting sidetracked: Learn more about color.
- Improve timing.
- Improve vid structure.
- Remaster "Low Red Moon."
- I've finished one vid and one vidlet and am reasonably sure I will finish the halfamoon vid (although probably not by the halfamoon deadline), the big vid after that, and the faith_hope_care auction vid (my first action vid). That's four vids in one year, which is four times what I've managed before, ha. Still, a goal should be a stretch: so let's say six. Six vids in 2010, or five vids and two to three vidlets. We'll see how it goes.
- I think that focusing on smaller, simpler vids was a good call for 2009; it made it easier to figure out how to convey information, and it is tremendously satisfying just to post the vids and get feedback. That sounds trivial, but it's not; when projects take a long time, I feel like they'll never finish, or won't communicate with anyone if they do. I get disconnected easily, and then I get discouraged. So I was happy to find out I don't have to take most of a year to complete a single vid.
Right now I think part of the slowness of my first vid was learning everything for it, and part of it was recalcitrant source. I thought at first it was the difference between major and minor characters--oh my god, guys, it is so easy to vid Dean Winchester and Olivia Dunham! They're the protagonists! There is so much source! There are clips of them doing everything! I feel spoiled rotten--but even vidding Bonnie and Riley was much, much, much easier than vidding Ruby. Part of this was probably that I was figuring everything out for the first time, but honestly, I still think part of it is that Season Three has crap writing and not enough active Ruby and way too much Ruby standing around being the Exposition Demon.
Supernatural's being nice to me for the Dean vid, but I have to say, the easiest source I've worked with so far is Fringe. There was this major roadblock in that I remembered the footage being completely the wrong color and tone; I picked "Etheric Messages" because it was golden and I remembered Fringe as golden and then I pored over the entire goddamn series and there is maybe one warm golden scene in the entire thing. There are some warm reds and yellows, not one of which I ended up using, and basically everything I remembered as warm and golden was chilly and green. So much green! But once I figured out how to adjust the original concept for that, it was like the show could hardly wait to give me anything I wanted. Okay, I could have used one more red-and-green scene when it kept on giving me red-and-blue, but I made do.
Anyway! The point of all this is that it was good to do simpler, clearer vids with shorter editing times, but I am kind of missing working a huge, absorbing, ambitious, frustrating project that takes six months and is kind of incomprehensible because I've stuffed everything I ever thought or felt about the topic in it somewhere and only taken half the stuff I can't support out. So after I finish the halfamoon vid, I will work on the Big Vid. I might use it as a premiere if I go to VVC this year, but then again it's a long song and an overvidded fandom, so maybe I will end up without a premiere again. I have to admit it that the idea of premiering is kind of stressful, and right now my budget isn't looking good for going anyway.
So: of the six vids, one should be a big vid, at least in terms of my personal ambition. It may not read as big to anyone else, but I'm okay with that.