thuvia ptarth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thuviaptarth) wrote2008-12-22 05:59 pm
thuviaptarth) wrote2008-12-22 05:59 pm
Year in Fandom: 2008
I bet this is the worst commentary:work produced ratio produced in this meme. Sorry.
It's been a hard year for me, life spilling over into fandom, I guess; I got less writing done than I planned, and wasn't happy with what I did. In 2009, I think I will take a break from ficathons, exchanges, and external deadlines: Remix and Yuletide both felt like trying to wring blood from a stone, and I'm afraid it showed in the end-result. The recipients deserved better. There was a story I wanted to do for last year's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
halfamoon that I'd still like to do for this year's: or intellectually I would like to, but emotionally I just feel worn out. Maybe I'll stick to recs. I have 734 words on a long overdue Sweet Charity assignment, but I think there's probably about 10,000 to go; I'd like to finish it just not to feel guilty about it, but again -- I feel so burned out.
Fiction
The Taste of Butterflies (Angel Sanctuary, Alexiel/Mad Hatter, 1800 words)
This is my favorite of this year's stories. My crazy crack-addled little fandom! And nearly all the genderfuck is from canon, too.
The Fortunate Fall (Supernatural,Sam/Ruby, 1200 words)
I am fonder of this than it deserves, given its action:exposition ratio. Jossed, alas, and in a few weird ways Kripked. But mostly Jossed. But sex, fallen angels, and heresy are one of my favorite combinations (see Angel Sanctuary, above).
Skinless (The Carnal Knowledge Remix) (Supernatural, gen/horror, 1000 words)
The original is a subtle, understated story, and I wanted to do the inverse, a brutal smash, with some creepy interrogation of gender roles slipped underneath; and instead I ended up just stripping all the subtlety out. It was horribly difficult to write -- I went way past deadline and gave the challenge organizers horrible headaches -- and didn't come out anything like my mental picture of it. My least favorite story of the year -- my least favorite story for a long time, really. The original deserved much better.
(blink) (Supernatural, Dean/Castiel, ? words)
Five-finger exercise. I was going to do more vignettes from other POVs about the episode, but lost the impetus, which is a shame, because I think I'd like this better as a part than as a whole. I like angels as aliens; I think the slash was self-indulgent and cliched. If I do the vid version, there won't be slash, which will reduce the audience, but make the vid better. (I don't mean that all slash is self-indulgent and cliched, or that all Dean/Castiel is, or that people do slash for the audience; I think people do slash, and Dean/Castiel, because they see it or they like it or both. I'm just unhappy with how I did it here.) It feels lifeless.
Yuletide
[redacted]
Writing plans for 2009
None. Maybehalfamoon and Sweet Charity, but maybe not.
Vidding
Commissions and collaborations
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giandujakiss, Origin Stories (BtVS/AtS)
astolat, Black Black Heart (Revengers Tragedy)
Solo
Low Red Moon (Supernatural)
I made a vid! I commissioned vids!
I have been accumulating an imaginary vids playlist for years and last year I could afford to buy a vidder and force her to do my bidding and it was awesome!giandujakiss took my vague thematic statements and made them make sense and also she kept anticipating things -- like, I would think, "Oh, I have to tell her to put in Dana's Red Riding Hood Slayer drawings if she can," and then they would already be in the draft she sent me before I could email her. This gave me the completely false impresssion that going from argument to visuals would be simple and also that putting vid drafts together would be fast. astolat did not help with this, either. Most of what I did for "Black Black Heart" was peer over her shoulder and say, "That's pretty, can you put that somewhere?" and she would say, "Well, maybe," and store it in the timeline and then later she would move it someplace else and it would make sense.
I am a little sorry "Black Black Heart" didn't get more attention, because that final bit with the flash of the skull in Vindici's grin (the skull beneath the skin) encapsulates at least seventy-five percent of everything I love about Jacobean drama in a single second. (I can say this because I had nothing to do with it. It was allastolat.) But not very sorry, because I am happy with the vid, regardless of the amount of the attention, and it served its original purpose, which was to notify the world there is a weird science fiction movie in which sex is death, death is sex, surveillance is omnipresent, and Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard are very slashy at each other. The fact that it is pretty and has a plot is just candy. Also, I still geek out over places where we artificially inserted the Duke's network bug on video screen footage. (By "we," I mean that I said, "Can we do the Duke's logo as a network bug on the big video screens?" and astolat said, "Sure!" and then did all the work.)
So, anyway. I have been trying to hold off explaining Low Red Moon, because I think vids ought to explain themselves; I said too much about Origin Stories, I know, but I had been thinking about it so long I couldn't shut up. I am pretty happy with Low Red Moon overall, even with the few things that REALLY BUG ME and I would fix in a remaster, and all the things I couldn't get right. The biggest flaw is probably that it is still too overpacked and the imagery I thought was obvious isn't: people seemed to respond positively to the texture, or at least the people who commented did, but a lot of people mentioned they were unclear on the overall concept. (I swear, I kept stripping stuff out and removing more and simplifying things and I was convinced it was really straightforward and then my betas would say, "This is pretty but I have no idea what you are trying to say." And this was even after I took out all the gender politics from the unfinished zero draft no one saw because I couldn't make the vid talk about gender and Ruby's plotline and make sense all at the same time. The unfinished zero draft also had the experiments with outside source, back when I was planning to keep the verse about Ruby's past and back before I decided I could handle it with show footage.* The Excised Femslash Verse. Bye, Tammy!)
*What I Learned: Incorporating external footage is technically quite simple. Haxan is a very weird movie. And The Crucible is even more boring than I remembered.
There's a bit where the pacing's off which would require more than a remaster to fix. I learned a lot about pacing and my preferences in pacing. The first draft was too slow in a lot of places, but later drafts overcompensated and were too fast, before I took more clips out. What directs and focuses attention is less the rate of speed than the variation in it: something that's fast all the way through is a lot less absorbing and active-feeling than something that alternates fast and slow, or, if you prefer, fast and faster. I don't, though. One of the things that attracted me to the song was the big difference in sounds and feel and tempo in different sections of the song, the hard driving forceful choruses and the slow dreamy verses, and I wanted to emphasize the differences with the cutting--and the shapes and colors used for each section, although I wasn't as consistent with that as I could have been; I ended up sacrificing a lot of what I had wanted to do with shape and color to trying to maintain a smooth visual flow from clip to clip and a coherent narrative from section to section.
(Secretly, I longed to make a vid with every single circular image or circular camera movement ever included in Supernatural. Alas!)
At first, I was proud of managing to cut the fast sections reasonably well, but the slower sections of the vid have ended up being my favorite parts, I think. The speed of next year's vids is going to be determined by the ideas and the music, but I do want to experiment with slower cutting and longer clips than seem to be fashionable just now; I've noticed that a lot of vids are cut too fast for my taste. Not that I can't follow them -- I can -- but that I often feel they'd have a stronger impact if the vidder let some of the images sink in, gave the audience time to react. Which isn't to say that's right for every vid! Sometimes shock and confusion and disorientation and overwhelming imagery are exactly what's right for the vid. I'm talking about my aesthetic preferences, not absolute laws.
What I learned this year: Everything!
What I want to improve next year: Everything!
Less vague:
Technical knowledge
Technique
Overall
It's been a hard year for me, life spilling over into fandom, I guess; I got less writing done than I planned, and wasn't happy with what I did. In 2009, I think I will take a break from ficathons, exchanges, and external deadlines: Remix and Yuletide both felt like trying to wring blood from a stone, and I'm afraid it showed in the end-result. The recipients deserved better. There was a story I wanted to do for last year's
halfamoon that I'd still like to do for this year's: or intellectually I would like to, but emotionally I just feel worn out. Maybe I'll stick to recs. I have 734 words on a long overdue Sweet Charity assignment, but I think there's probably about 10,000 to go; I'd like to finish it just not to feel guilty about it, but again -- I feel so burned out.Fiction
The Taste of Butterflies (Angel Sanctuary, Alexiel/Mad Hatter, 1800 words)
This is my favorite of this year's stories. My crazy crack-addled little fandom! And nearly all the genderfuck is from canon, too.
The Fortunate Fall (Supernatural,Sam/Ruby, 1200 words)
I am fonder of this than it deserves, given its action:exposition ratio. Jossed, alas, and in a few weird ways Kripked. But mostly Jossed. But sex, fallen angels, and heresy are one of my favorite combinations (see Angel Sanctuary, above).
Skinless (The Carnal Knowledge Remix) (Supernatural, gen/horror, 1000 words)
The original is a subtle, understated story, and I wanted to do the inverse, a brutal smash, with some creepy interrogation of gender roles slipped underneath; and instead I ended up just stripping all the subtlety out. It was horribly difficult to write -- I went way past deadline and gave the challenge organizers horrible headaches -- and didn't come out anything like my mental picture of it. My least favorite story of the year -- my least favorite story for a long time, really. The original deserved much better.
(blink) (Supernatural, Dean/Castiel, ? words)
Five-finger exercise. I was going to do more vignettes from other POVs about the episode, but lost the impetus, which is a shame, because I think I'd like this better as a part than as a whole. I like angels as aliens; I think the slash was self-indulgent and cliched. If I do the vid version, there won't be slash, which will reduce the audience, but make the vid better. (I don't mean that all slash is self-indulgent and cliched, or that all Dean/Castiel is, or that people do slash for the audience; I think people do slash, and Dean/Castiel, because they see it or they like it or both. I'm just unhappy with how I did it here.) It feels lifeless.
Yuletide
[redacted]
Writing plans for 2009
None. Maybe
halfamoon and Sweet Charity, but maybe not.Vidding
Commissions and collaborations
giandujakiss, Origin Stories (BtVS/AtS)astolat, Black Black Heart (Revengers Tragedy)Solo
Low Red Moon (Supernatural)
I made a vid! I commissioned vids!
I have been accumulating an imaginary vids playlist for years and last year I could afford to buy a vidder and force her to do my bidding and it was awesome!
giandujakiss took my vague thematic statements and made them make sense and also she kept anticipating things -- like, I would think, "Oh, I have to tell her to put in Dana's Red Riding Hood Slayer drawings if she can," and then they would already be in the draft she sent me before I could email her. This gave me the completely false impresssion that going from argument to visuals would be simple and also that putting vid drafts together would be fast. astolat did not help with this, either. Most of what I did for "Black Black Heart" was peer over her shoulder and say, "That's pretty, can you put that somewhere?" and she would say, "Well, maybe," and store it in the timeline and then later she would move it someplace else and it would make sense.I am a little sorry "Black Black Heart" didn't get more attention, because that final bit with the flash of the skull in Vindici's grin (the skull beneath the skin) encapsulates at least seventy-five percent of everything I love about Jacobean drama in a single second. (I can say this because I had nothing to do with it. It was all
astolat.) But not very sorry, because I am happy with the vid, regardless of the amount of the attention, and it served its original purpose, which was to notify the world there is a weird science fiction movie in which sex is death, death is sex, surveillance is omnipresent, and Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard are very slashy at each other. The fact that it is pretty and has a plot is just candy. Also, I still geek out over places where we artificially inserted the Duke's network bug on video screen footage. (By "we," I mean that I said, "Can we do the Duke's logo as a network bug on the big video screens?" and astolat said, "Sure!" and then did all the work.) So, anyway. I have been trying to hold off explaining Low Red Moon, because I think vids ought to explain themselves; I said too much about Origin Stories, I know, but I had been thinking about it so long I couldn't shut up. I am pretty happy with Low Red Moon overall, even with the few things that REALLY BUG ME and I would fix in a remaster, and all the things I couldn't get right. The biggest flaw is probably that it is still too overpacked and the imagery I thought was obvious isn't: people seemed to respond positively to the texture, or at least the people who commented did, but a lot of people mentioned they were unclear on the overall concept. (I swear, I kept stripping stuff out and removing more and simplifying things and I was convinced it was really straightforward and then my betas would say, "This is pretty but I have no idea what you are trying to say." And this was even after I took out all the gender politics from the unfinished zero draft no one saw because I couldn't make the vid talk about gender and Ruby's plotline and make sense all at the same time. The unfinished zero draft also had the experiments with outside source, back when I was planning to keep the verse about Ruby's past and back before I decided I could handle it with show footage.* The Excised Femslash Verse. Bye, Tammy!)
*What I Learned: Incorporating external footage is technically quite simple. Haxan is a very weird movie. And The Crucible is even more boring than I remembered.
There's a bit where the pacing's off which would require more than a remaster to fix. I learned a lot about pacing and my preferences in pacing. The first draft was too slow in a lot of places, but later drafts overcompensated and were too fast, before I took more clips out. What directs and focuses attention is less the rate of speed than the variation in it: something that's fast all the way through is a lot less absorbing and active-feeling than something that alternates fast and slow, or, if you prefer, fast and faster. I don't, though. One of the things that attracted me to the song was the big difference in sounds and feel and tempo in different sections of the song, the hard driving forceful choruses and the slow dreamy verses, and I wanted to emphasize the differences with the cutting--and the shapes and colors used for each section, although I wasn't as consistent with that as I could have been; I ended up sacrificing a lot of what I had wanted to do with shape and color to trying to maintain a smooth visual flow from clip to clip and a coherent narrative from section to section.
(Secretly, I longed to make a vid with every single circular image or circular camera movement ever included in Supernatural. Alas!)
At first, I was proud of managing to cut the fast sections reasonably well, but the slower sections of the vid have ended up being my favorite parts, I think. The speed of next year's vids is going to be determined by the ideas and the music, but I do want to experiment with slower cutting and longer clips than seem to be fashionable just now; I've noticed that a lot of vids are cut too fast for my taste. Not that I can't follow them -- I can -- but that I often feel they'd have a stronger impact if the vidder let some of the images sink in, gave the audience time to react. Which isn't to say that's right for every vid! Sometimes shock and confusion and disorientation and overwhelming imagery are exactly what's right for the vid. I'm talking about my aesthetic preferences, not absolute laws.
What I learned this year: Everything!
What I want to improve next year: Everything!
Less vague:
Technical knowledge
- I'm still figuring out how to organize things and how to make Premiere crash less often. I started off using an extra sequence as a scrapbook -- I'd name each track for what I was collecting, "Sam," "Ruby," "circles," "yellow eyes," "demon smoke" -- and put interesting-looking clips in it, make all the tracks invisible except one, and skim through the tracks whenever I was stuck for something.
Premiere really hated that. It crashed all the time.
I've switched to bins and subclips and I may even try a database for one vid with limited source, but I miss the scrapbook sequence. Written descriptions don't work well for me, because my visual memory and visualization aren't that precise, so I miss being able to see exactly what the clips look like. I suspect this is going to keep vidding a much slower process for me than for people with more accurate visualization skills. - Since I spent so much time struggling with AfterEffects, I feel much more comfortable with Premiere, which is such a warm, fuzzy application by contrast. The basics of how to cut and how to apply effects are pretty simple. But I would still like to have a better knowledge of different effects and what they do. Though this is leaving technical and going towards technique -- I would like to know more about color and hue and luminance and motion and what changes to these things do.
- I feel like I'm still in kindergarten with AfterEffects. It's not a program where you can learn things just by opening it up and fooling around, or at least it's not a program where I can learn things just by opening it up and fooling around. I like the books on it I got, but I was also really frustrated that I couldn't isolate the lessons I needed to do the effects I wanted right now for this vid, which made me impatient with the learning. I may have to try just doing a chapter a week (or even a chapter a month) while doing other vidding things, so that I can feel like I'm getting a thorough grounding in the program but don't feel so impatient with the delays on my current projects.
I would like to do some vids with no AE at all, just to reduce the headache factor, and it ought to be possible, because so many of my favorite vids have been made entirely without it, but then, see, I get these ideas ...
The funny thing is, I think most people think of AE as meant for big flashy effects and some of the things I used it for were really small -- they were just easier to do in AE than Premiere, or not possible in Premiere at all. I did toy with the idea of doing more drastic changes to the coloring of the vid, and maybe I should have; but in the end I decided I wanted to enhance what was there instead of rewriting it, at least to start. - I had a lot of problems exporting from Premiere, which in turn affected the AE work on Premiere clips; I'm sure there must be a better way to do it than I've been doing, but the books I've got aren't talking about avisynth scripts, which seems to add a whole extra layer of complication. The live updating turned out not be feasible -- some of the effects are still not quite what I wanted, or are done through hacks instead of by book even though the book suggestions seemed a lot more efficient, because I could not actually make the book suggestions work.
Technique
- Timing - I actually found it easier sometimes to vid with my eyes closed, or at least to listen for the beat and mark the timeline with my eyes closed and then adjust later. My betas swore to me that I was mostly finding the beat, but it was all emotional and physical and I have no intellectual understanding of the process, and this makes me deeply uncomfortable. I wish to be able to explain it so I can be sure I can replicate it. This doing things by feel, I do not trust it.
- Pacing
- Movement
- Color
- I'd like to play around with darks and lights some more
- I should probably try to move away from circles, but that's, um, not actually happening yet. Maybe in 2010. Though one vid should have a lot of verticals. In addition to the circles. Which open the vid.
I like circles, okay? - I know the conventional wisdom is you should stick to hard cuts for a while and most dissolves are unnecessary, but I like dissolves and layers and I think I've got the music to support them. I am pretty happy with where they are and where they are not in "Low Red Moon" (there's only one I'm iffy about and should probably have gotten second opinions on), but I'd like to play around with them some more and get more comfortable with the timing.
Overall
- Clarity. Clarity. CLARITY.
- I would like to take less than eight months to make my next vid.
- Also, I would like to have a vid in VVC Premieres.
- I have a few one-offs I'd like to do and a lot of BtVS and SCC vids I'd like to do. I am learning to weed out my ideas -- sometimes because the song isn't suitable after all, but more often because I just don't have the interest in a particular canon anymore or the energy to review it. (It makes me sad. I have already taken my "Cylon girls and their boy toys" and my Aeryn Sun vid songs off my imaginary vids playlist and put them back on several times.) I will have to rewatch BtVS to vid it, but I do have the interest in that canon to do it. I think I will probably try to do BtVS or SCC for VVC, instead of the movie vid I originally had planned; I want to have a firmer grasp of technique before I try the latter, and I think having a deeper investment in the source will help. But I will also need to buy another external drive if I'm going to vid BtVS.