Arduinna

One last Saturday vidshow that I managed to write up before the streaming vanished (and then forgot to post). I didn't go to this show at the con; it was up against the Critique panel, which is what I attended. This particular show was paired with a panel, which I also didn't attend, so I'm coming at this completely cold, where attendees would have a lot more context and nuance, fwiw.

I wanted to say one thing outside of the cut, though:

If you ever wondered if one person can make a difference in how things are perceived, I say ye jetpack_monkey, who came to Vividcon for the first time years ago saying "hey, horror and classic film are awesome and totally viddable! we need more of that!" and kept producing more of that himself and cheerfully repeating his mantra and steadily started convincing people. There were five premieres in this show for "source from 1973 or earlier". I can't even imagine that 10 years ago.

(Which, okay, granted, is the confluence of a lot of things, not just jetpack_monkey -- more older source is available all the time, newer vidding tech makes it easier to work with all kinds of source, VVC has started shifting from "let's share big fandoms" to "let's share our fandoms-of-few" -- but the specific older-source shift has a clear beginning, I think!)

Okay, now on to the vidshow itself. Once again, this isn't the full show, just vids that jumped out at me for one reason or another.

( Brand New Classic Hits )

(I started today's post by saying I'd had a lazy day when I got almost nothing done but sitting in front of the computer reading 2-week-old threads about Worldcon, The Greying Of. Which I was going to post, then work a bit on the Critique panel writeup, to finish tomorrow. ... Hours later, here I am. Amazing what happens when you actually start working on something.)

After Club Vivid is a haze -- maybe people came back to our room for a little while? Or maybe we just went to bed? Man, I should take notes on what I do outside of panels and shows, my brain is just mush.

Anyway, the next morning there were WAFFLES! \o/ And this year, they had the regular waffle maker, plus one where you could make up to four tiny waffles, instead of just one big one. So I did. ... After toasting a bagel for myself, because somehow between getting up and thinking "yay waffles today!" and getting in line, I'd forgotten about the waffles. So it was kind of a bread-heavy morning.

Then it was off upstairs to the first panel of the day:

( Critique: Talking About the Hard Stuff )

There wasn't really a single specific takeaway here, I don't think, other than that critique is something that a lot of us really value highly, and would like to find a way to start incorporating it more again. And there were no real answers about how to go about that, other than to just start doing it: take people on faith when they say they want crit; take it on faith that people at VVC, in particular, value crit; be upfront as the vidder or beta in a beta situation about expectations (and stick to them); take a risk, sometimes, that someone will respond well to your pointing out problems in their work.

FWIW, this was a single-hour panel that takes up a big part of my memory of Saturday; there was a lot of talking, a lot of ideas floating around, a lot of energy. Definitely a highlight for me.

I do feel like the panel paid off on Sunday; while Vid Review felt more sparsely populated than usual, the conversation also seemed more on target overall, with people chiming in to talk about what did and didn't work for them, and with almost every vid having a combination of both kinds of remarks made. It just felt like people were more confident that their "this didn't work" comments would be received well than has been the case in previous years, and it made for a better discussion, IMO.

The Friday afternoon panels were all connected: a two-hour Song Choice panel, and a one-hour Audio Editing panel. I had no intention of missing any of that, even if it meant giving up an afternoon of vids.

( Song Choice )


( Audio Editing )

This is where I stop reviewing all the vids in the vidshows I saw, and just pick out the ones that stood out strongly to me for one reason or another. (Lines in italics under the vid info are the blurbs chosen by the VJ for the program book.)

So onward to midday Friday! I stuck with vidshows to balance out the panels I was planning on attending for most of the afternoon, which means that next up is:

( Glitterguts )

Then there was a lunch break, where I headed back to the room with my roommates and some other folks (I am not naming any names, because at this point everything is a blur, and I no longer remember exactly who was where, when) to eat some of the actual real food we'd bought at the store the day before instead of going out for sandwiches at Spuntino's or whatever. It's kinda fun heading out for lunch and seeing who picked the same place to eat you did and say hi, but it's also kinda really nice not stressing over how much time you have, or standing in line, and just having some nice relaxing cheese and crackers and fruit with a small group.

Although in retrospect, I'm a little facepalm-y, because I specifically didn't take my leftovers the night before because any time I do that, I fail to eat them on accounta going out for every meal. I totally could have had them for lunch. OTOH, if we hadn't started eating the cheese and crackers on Friday, we would have wound up throwing them out on Sunday night, so.

... Anyway! After lunch was one more vidshow for me:

( Worlds Collide )

After that was panels for the rest of the afternoon, which will be a different post at some point.

So since I posted my list of comms two days ago, a couple of people have created a new Person of Interest discussion comm: pofinterest_chat -- looks like it just got created today, in fact. Check it out!

Lifehacker had a post today about video conversion programs that looked interesting; I've used three out of their top five, but it's always good to have more options. All the programs they list are free and will convert multiple formats back and forth.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to write up a decent con report, and keep getting buried in the fact that I want to report on everything, which is a lot. We'll see how it goes. It wasn't helped today by digging out my panel notes from Friday and seeing the audio editing stuff, and promptly haring off to Adobe Audition to stare at waveforms for a while, and go "ooo" a lot. Time to start looking at how-to videos for that, too.

I was home sick Thursday - not sick enough to want to stay in bed, just kinda draggy and bleah, and taking advantage of a lull at work. So I decided to watch some old vids, and popped in my home-burned DVD of the VVC 2002 tape. I haven't watched most of these in ages, and I'm having a lot of fun.

Wildly generalized things I have discovered during this:

* Cutting-edge vids from 2002 are generally very comfortably paced to my eyes. Like, I relax right into them. Which is kind of cracking me up, because -- of course they are, that's the era when I learned to vid! I imprinted on that general pacing. At the time, mind you, I thought they were fast, and now they're mostly not -- but they're comfortable. There's time to take in each scene during the vid (which could be more than one clip), connect it to the lyrics or music, place it in the context of the vid, and move on -- maybe ~2-3 seconds? They seemed more likely to use internal motion to drive things, rather than cutting boom-boom-boom.

By comparison, I'd also watched some of the Media Cannibals Tape 3 the night before, and while that has a lot of my favorite vids on it, the late-90s vids overall feel pretty slow to me now. (Not all! But a lot.)

* I think 2002 was one of the only years with a real mix of VCR vids and computer vids in Premieres, and in some cases the VCR vids looked better - because people were still figuring out how to export computer vids for cons. Back then, you uploaded a small version to the web (both reduced frame size -- usually half, sometimes even one-third the original frame size -- and highly compressed), because most people were on dialup and had 800x600 resolution monitors. So that's what "a computer vid" looked like, and that's what some people submitted to the con. There are several vids here that are just tiny squares in the middle of my screen, because they were exported at something like 360x240.

It's the exact opposite of now, when you'd see a smaller square and think, ah, made off old SD analog tv source instead of shiny HD digital source. (There are also plenty of computer vids at full screen on this, of course! But it's really noticeable when a computer vidder hadn't figured it out yet, and this was while VVC was still working out the standards for electronic submission to cons, which had never been done before - people were winging it as best they could.)

* That said, everyone was using analog source, no matter how they were editing it, which made me blink for a minute when I realized it, until I put it all back in context in my head. DVDs weren't common at all (and were incredibly expensive, and if they were put out it was years after a given season ended -- none of this "last season on DVD before next season starts" business, never mind instant high-quality downloads), and everyone had a VCR or three, and knew how to use them. Again, that started changing within a year. None of us had any idea what a watershed period 2002/2003 was.

It actually makes for a fun vidshow, when every vid takes up the whole screen (assuming a 4:3 screen, that is). There's no letterboxing at all on this tape.

* Digital isn't always better. Way back when when people were warning that home-burned discs had a 5-10-year lifespan, they weren't kidding. :( There are black spots throughout this home-burned disc of mine, where the video has just dropped out. But hey, part of the reason I recorded it was so my tape would stay as pristine as possible, so I can re-do it if need be. If I can find my tape. (Analog may be fuzzier, but you also don't lose the entire image if something drops out. It just gets fuzzier and fuzzier, but still watchable for a remarkably long time. As long as you don't pause, or keep watching the same vid over and over...)

Things change so fast, though; last time I backed up this tape, I recorded it using a set-top DVD recorder (which I used to record SO MANY THINGS. Not only old tapes, but also straight off my tivo, using the old "record to tape" function. Which I'm suddenly nostalgic for, for no reason.). I didn't have the ability to capture the tape into my computer -- no pass-through device, no space on the harddrive, not enough processor or RAM to even attempt it. Now? The dvd recorder is long gone, and I can't remember the last time I recorded something off my tv. But I do have a computer that can handle both downloads and capturing, with plenty of space and RAM, and I have my trusty Canopus to hook it up to a VCR. <3 (The DVD recorder I recycled, as I'd used it so much it was burning out. The VCRs I cling to. Don't die, little VCRs!!! I have tapes I can never replace!!)

* Wow, the fandoms on this disc are like a snapshot of my corner of fandom in 2002: Farscape, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Witchblade, X-Files, Buffy, Invisible Man, Forever Knight, Brimstone, Angel, Due South, OZ, The Sentinel, Starsky & Hutch, Xena, The Matrix, Highlander, and one lone American Embassy, which I've never seen. All the rest though; even if I wasn't in the fandom, I knew enough about it to mostly follow the vids.

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More specifically, I'm fascinated by how some of my reactions to some of the vids from VVC 2002 have changed, and how some haven't.

( The most surprising difference to me was watching the Starsky & Hutch vid 'Help Me Understand' by Recycled Media Station )

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( The other audio-experiment vid, 'Unforgiven II' by DigiRay (Farscape), hasn't changed for me as much )

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( The other seriously experimental vid, 'Hero' by T4 Productions (Xena), is also interesting to watch in the wake of my own expanded horizons since I first saw it. )

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Other, less detailed stuff I'm noticing:

Man, some of my favorite vids ever are on this tape. Like Solsbury Hill, by astolat. <3 <3 The con was just a few months after S5 of Stargate SG-1, when we'd lost Daniel to ascension and had no idea if he'd ever be back. It was a pretty fraught time to be an SG fan, especially a Jack/Daniel fan, and it was all I could do to watch this vid at VVC that year. But I love this, how it follows Daniel's journey from Abydos to SG-1 to ascension, and all the different people who bring him to his new homes. It made ascension really feel like the next step on his journey, rather than a loss. *happy sigh*

And then the flip side of that, barkley's Never Die Young, where Jack is left behind over and over again, and finally as Daniel ascends, and my heart just breaks and breaks. I must have watched this at the con way back when, but man, I don't know how I made it through.

... Apparently I am not over Stargate SG-1.

Weirdly, two other favs of mine are for a show I never really watched, other than an episode or two to be fannishly literate at the time: Witchblade. The first few years of VVC tried hard to make me change my mind about this show, starting with these two vids: killa's "Comin' Up From Behind" and bonibaru's "Go" (neither of them online, alas).

Comin' Up From Behind is just a kickass, boot-stompy vid of awesome Sara Pezzini, and the song's been in my walking playlist rotation ever since I saw this. It's sort of a day-in-the-life character study, starting with her getting ready in the morning (jeans! boots! gun! motorcycle helmet!) and then riding her motorcycle out into the dawn, where she very competently deals with all the shit that comes her way, from ordinary stuff to very not-ordinary stuff, including creepy white-haired guy and his creepy dark-haired, ponytailed lackey (the cut to him on "small fry" makes me grin every time, until finally she saves the world by doing a reset on the entire globe, and ends her day by riding away into the evening on her motorcycle.

Go is just as kickass, but starts from the mystical side of Sara's life, her connection to the Witchblade throughout history, rather than the modern-day cop side. ("Grandma was a suffragette" is *perfect*) She comes to grips with this new knowledge and being part of a world she never knew existed, until it's a seamless part of her helping her to do her job. The whole thing is action and motion and woo, with some fantastic mystical stuff going on everywhere.

The two vids are the opposite sides of the show's coin, and combined are an amazing intro to the series. (Spoilery. But amazing.)

Watching them again, man, it's a pity this aired just long enough ago to have fallen off fandom's radar. I think it might have been a bigger fandom if it had aired in the last few years.

I have been writing this post forever already, so won't go into many more vids, except to mention that I was startled to discover that this vid tape included Remi d'Brebant's Sentinel vid, "Possession". This vid made a huge splash in 2002 because it did some very different things -- it used a lot of still shots, particularly on the choruses. But it didn't premiere at VVC; it premiered at Escapade earlier that year, and showed at VVC in the Experimental show, I think. *checks database* Yes, Experimental.

It was incredibly hard to get hold of; Remi never put it up online that I know of, and I didn't think it had made it onto any tape collections. I had completely forgotten it was on this one. \o/ It aired a couple more times at VVC, but it hasn't been shown since 2004.

Fanlore has some of Snady's comments about Possession from when it was being discussed on Vidder after Escapade. IIRC, the still shots weren't just artistic choice (although they worked well that way), but also limits of the source and technology. I can't remember where I saw that being discussed, though (so probably shouldn't say it, but hopefully someone else has a better memory than I).

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It's 1:30 am ET heading into a weekend, and if I post this now, almost no one will see it. But if I don't post it now, I'll save it as a draft and then decide it's not good enough to post, like I do with most of what I write. So here, have a post, whoever is up at this hour!

To keep myself busy and online so I don't forget to register, I wrote up the world's longest, rambliest post. \o/ There are spoilers for practically everything here...

I'm settled in for a nice snowy weekend -- lots of cat food, plenty of people food, clean laundry, and a good parking spot. (... I'm a little compulsive about parking spots in bad weather, after 20 years of unassigned street parking in a neighborhood where snow emergencies mean there are too many cars vying for juuuust too few spots, especially given how many people don't know how to shovel, argh, so we wind up losing potential spots to crappy shoveling jobs. But I digress.)

This is going to be much better than last weekend's 27 inches in 24 hours; it'll be more like 4-ish inches in 24 hours, just enough so I can indulge my hermit-y ways and not budge till I have to go to work on Tuesday.

My only concrete plan for today is to sign up for Vividcon, yay! I can't believe it's already time again. All my fannish plans keep winding up on the backburner, but at least maybe this will kick the vidding in the butt, because if reg is here, deadlines are nearly upon us.

I've grabbed a bunch of tv that I probably won't have time to watch, but it looks interesting enough that maybe I'll give it a try at some point, like The Americans and Cracked. I'm banking them for the moment, for some day I'm looking for something new to watch and can marathon through.

I've been watching a bunch of other stuff, though. A couple I've only seen the pilot for so far:

( Zero Hour )

( The Following )

And then there were the shows that ended recently:

( Leverage )

( Fringe )

( Alphas )

And then, of course, there are the shows that are currently airing and ongoing. Anyone else remember how, 15 years ago, we used to fret every year that this year would be the last year of fannish tv? How we hung on cancellation news, because if X got cancelled, what would we watch?

I kinda miss those days, to tell you the truth. How is there this much tv all the damn time? I feel like I never talk about any of it, because I'm always racing to catch up to just watching it. And for all that I tend to really like the summer shows, man, I miss having a few months every year to catch up on stuff I missed, or rewatch things, or get involved in complicated discussions about What! Might! Happen! (... with other unspoiled people, because for me the fun is guessing, not knowing in advance).

So instead, have a bunch of brief overall reactions to shows, with only a little specific commentary, just so people have some idea of what it is I'm watching these days:

( Person of Interest )

( Elementary )

( Lewis )

( Once Upon a Time )

( White Collar )

( Revenge )

Shows that I'm waiting to come back:

( Grimm )

( Burn Notice )

( Haven )

I know as soon as I post this I'll come up with another half dozen shows I meant to mention. Oh well.

I would write about the reality tv I'm watching, but this is already an absurdly long post. Suffice to say, my favorite shows -- Amazing Race, Project Runway, Top Chef -- still have me, but I'm burning out from overload, and less invested every season. All three shows have had aired four complete seasons since December 2010, and all three are in or about to start another season. I hate to give any of them up for completist reasons, but man. I am just burning out.

With a few minutes to spare, even. \o/

And then I packed up all the source I'd brought over to therienne's over the last month and dragged my sorry ass home.

This is the first time we've tried doing a CV vid, mostly out of worry at the early deadline; it takes us a long time to creak up to vidding. But we persevered and pulled it out, go us! And hopefully we haven't screwed up the aspect ratio. (The curse of switching software as often as we do -- it's always a different method, and we always have to just cross our fingers and hope.)

*sends sympathy to Ian and Lum, facing the deluge of last-minute CV vids and desperate emails*

*crawls off to turn on tv for the first time in a week to decompress*

I didn't actually intend to make a follow-up post; I didn't think one would be necessary. But I think it is. I mention several people by name in this, because I can't see any other way to have a conversation about concrete things. I hope no one takes this personally; my intent is to look at a trend that caught me very much by surprise, and that I don't think anyone else has noticed, and that I think has real bearing on the current conversation.

So, after making my last post, I started catching up on other posts a little, and came across laurashapiro's announcement that she's going to be warning for common PTSD triggers and common triggers for migraine or epilepsy. She included a list of the vids she's showing at Vividcon this year in various shows, with warnings attached, so people can be prepared when they see them.

I generally skip warnings, because I don't want to know what's in vids before I see them. But I spent hours yesterday watching vids specifically with that trigger list in mind, and when I came across Laura's post I wanted to see if it matched my general experience with those vid discs.

It didn't, at all, and in fact was so different I sat there blinking, because her warnings also didn't match my memory of her vids. So I re-watched them.

I think she got these warnings very wrong in the context of the current discussion. In fact, I'm honestly boggled at how how much my interpretation differed from Laura's. So I went looking to see if it was just her I disagreed wtih.

It's not. My take is different in the vast majority of the cases I found.

Laura linked me to the list of vidder-provided warning posts being gathered by were_duck, so I went through every vid I could. Everyone on this list says they're using that same list of PTSD and physical triggers to provide their warnings.

I'm only going over individual vidders' warnings; I can't speak to how accurate the VJs who are providing warnings for their entire shows are. Also, I'm only including vids I could find online (one of the vidders on were_duck's list had no listed vids online that I could find, so that person isn't included here).

( avendya )

( chagrined )

( china_shop )

( damned_colonial )

( laurashapiro )

( mresundance )

( such_heights )

( thuviaptarth )

( my take on all of that, cut for length )

Maybe what's needed really is a second convention, run by people whose focus is on warnings-based risk-aversion, or at least risk-alleviation, to cater to a crowd that's uncomfortable in the Vividcon environment, with a specific infrastructure in place to help cope with the difficulty of accurately warning for triggers appropriately. I think there's enough passion and dedication being shown to make that possible; maybe some of those passionate folks could be the beginnings of a concom, working in concert to create the sort of con environment they envision, and from the look of the response the idea is getting, this would be a hugely popular con.

That would be fantastic, if you ask me - more vid cons, aimed at different vid audiences! \o/ Vividcon for fans who don't want warnings; the other con for fans who do. Any vidder submitting to either con would know what was expected, and could choose to submit to the con that best suited them (or to both, if they were fine with both methods of distribution).


(edited to cut for length, with apologies!) (eta2: to fix the cut to where it was actually supposed to be *facepalm*