![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labellementeuseSo this is the post in which I'm chronically incapable of picking only one vid. I'll try to do better next post.
A preamble: I don't think I've said this stuff before, so: I recommend that you watch the vid at least once before you read my commentary. Although I hate to advise using up other peoples' bandwidth, if stuff is available for direct download (especially at MU or wherever) I recommend that you do that rather than streaming. They're around 50mb and it's the days of miracles and broadband, splash out! And remember I'm not a vidder and in fact I haven't really studied visual texts at all, so where my language is not right please forgive me. Also, just like fanfiction, vidders appreciate comments if you like their work.
Day 4 - An ensemble vid you love
Imma Be, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talitha78
Leverage; Hardison, Parker, Eliot; Spoilers through S2; crappy song but awesome vid.
I don't even have to put my comments about this one below a cut. It's not real deep, it's beautifully, cleanly cut, it's basically a romp. A romp heavy on the Hardison, which is nice because he's my TV boyfriend, and on the Parker, which is nice because she's my TV girlfriend. Eliot's also in there which is nice because I care about him! But not as much as the other two. Um, so yeah, it's a romp.
Honourable mentions: (Glad I'm) Not a Petrelli, by my bestiessixth_light and lady_larla, Heroes, Claire & the Petrellis, season 1; umpteen billion awesome Buffy vids that I couldn't list if I tried all year. (Never seen a good Angel one, though. Recs?)
Day 5 - A vid everyone should see at least once
So, there actually isn't a day for "political vid you love", and since I LOOOOOVE political vids and think absolutely everyone should watch them, I'm doing three political vids for Day 5. More has been written about each of these vids than I could really get into, but they all made me re-evaluate their source and my understanding of what vidding can do. I probably would not have watched as many amazing vids as I now have if it weren't for these vids.
1. How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, bylierdumoa
Firefly; race; spoilers throughout; violence, language. Read about it on fanlore.
This vid is, to my mind, a masterclass in viscerality. It didn't teach me anything I didn't already know - I knew about the skeevy race issues in Firefly when I first watched the vid, and I didn't understand the Confederacy imagery until I read more about it (I did understand Serenity's basic conservativism, but I didn't have the cultural context for that stuff.) What this vid made me do is FEEL the issue and understand it. Also, I think the use of sound at the end is incandescent.
2. Women's Work, by Luminosity and Sisabet
Supernatural; women; spoilers through season 3; violence, sexual violence. Read about it on fanlore.
So the Fanlore page validates something that I have long felt about this vid, which is that its relevance goes beyond commentary on Supernatural. Because, let's face it, it's three years old, the show goes on, it's not necessarily useful as that kind of commentary anymore. What it does do, to my mind, is illustrate a problem of which Supernatural is merely one symptom: the Woman Problem in media. What happens to women on our tv screens - especially, particularly, on genre shows and in genre movies, especially in horror. It makes one point, it makes it hard, and it makes it - to me, anyway - convincingly. It clarifies my understanding of part of SPN's construction - women dying on ceilings for men - and its place in a culture of women's sacrifice for men. Also, snappy cutting, great clips, consistent storytelling.
3. Us, by Lim - That's the fanlore page b/c I can't find the original vid page & I don't believe in direct-linking to vids.
Multi-fandom; fandom; not spoilery, no warnings.
Everyone's seen this, right? And some people love it and some people hate it, and I personally find it very moving & meaningful, but I sound like a moron when I talk about it, and it's not really late and I'm tired! Watch it! My favourite bits are: the bits with the books; the bits with the Pirates: Ye Be Warned sign; I Want To Believe; the stills around 2:44; the comics; Ian McKellan.
And now for something completely different!
Day 6: A vid you've watched more than 10 times.
So I immediately went to one of my favourite vids, and then I stopped and looked at another one, and another one, and another one, and then I thought: this is ridiculous. This could be a themed post all of its own. and then I thought: but I goddamned freaking love these vids! So I'm going to talk about them and that's that.
Day 6: Women: They're Pretty Fucking Incredible
Bionic, bytallulah71; Glorious, by such_heights; One Girl Revolution, by arefadedaway; and I'm Your Man, by charmax.
Very, very multifandom; women; not specially spoilery for anything in particular; TV violence.
So these vids all have a central message, and that message is basically about how women are amazing, and they use visual texts that were built by the patriarchy to show that: so in one basic sense they're all a triumphant reclamation, turning The Man into The Woman. And that is a narrative that you can get me with every time, and I mean every time: I am a sucker for that. And it mans that they all have one particular technique in common: they use moments of visual similarity to compare and connect two or three or four characters. This is a favourite technique of mine in vids because I think it does something that fanfiction struggles to do well, which is the crossover character study. Fic character study crossovers often suffer when source texts are too different from each other in tone, and they can be laboured. But with a shot of Catwoman whipping the head off a dummy cutting to Buffy yanking the head off a vamp, a vid can compare those two characters briefly and as a part of its narrative and move on a second later. And these vids all take source from absolutely goddamned everywhere and so they're doing it with, in some cases, hundreds of characters from the whole history of film. It's beautiful.
But the other thing I like about them is that - with the exception of I'm Your Man which is fairly different from the other three - they're each running a different message, parallel to that one, reinforcing it or commenting on it and I just think that's really cool. I think it's really cool that vids which use even some of the same shots can still make a very different point in some ways.
Bionic
So Bionic is the oldest of these vids. I've probably seen it, oh, conservative estimate, 50 times. I love this vid, I make everyone I know watch it, you should too! And the thing I like about this vid is that these aren't just women with superpowers who kick ass. These are, for the most part, women who have had alteration forced on them, by the Watchers' Council, by a creepy stalkery Replicator who made them, by a solar flare, by a creepy genetic modification company. (Sometimes they're just born with it, true.) And for the most part these women have had their powers forced on them by men; and if not, men are trying to control them. Often both are true. (Riot Nrrd has a whole comic about this and you should read it. Riot Nrrd is amazing, btw.) And yeah, it sort of does ruin their lives! And that's what this vid is about! Those women kicking back for a bit, but I think the vid never loses sight of the fact that most of these women are pretty damn unhappy in the worlds that their (male) creators have constructed for them.
Favourite moments: Mystique's finger at :37. Ripley doesn't want to be human at :42. Six million dollar smile (I can't help it!) at 1:10. All the flips and cartwheels at 1:48. We have the technology (yay, robots). Better, stronger, faster with baby!Max - I think this is a wonderful moment, because these children were so miserable, made so miserable by their childhoods. From 2:22 til 2:35 is a beautifully coherent, narrative progression - the take-back-our-mutant-bodies moment. At 2:58, with Kitty Pryde and the anime girl - this is a particularly good moment of visual connection. One of the things this vid really excels at is the way the motion in one source - a body flying, someone jumping through the window, a kick - will be completed in the next source.
Glorious
So of these vids, I think Glorious is the one with the strongest narrative, and yet I also think it has the broadest purview. (Also, it LIVES off the visual comparison stuff I was talking about earlier, especially in the introduction.) Glorious is about women who dare to know, and then to act. Glorious doesn't shy away from the consequences, either. While the other three vids I talk about are more or less purely ass-kicking moments (and I like it that way), Glorious is willing to go to the "cuts and the bruises" and show the consequences for these women of getting up, getting out of bed, getting out of the world, exploring, thinking, learning, knowing, acting. Women aren't invulnerable or superhuman in Glorious: they are just human, and they die, sometimes horribly. It's hard for them, just like it's hard for anyone. But they do it and they get through it and they're just, basically, glorious. I love that these women mostly aren't the same women as the women in Bionic; this vid celebrates women who know and think and understand and explore, a quality that I think is very difficult to depict visually, and I think it's incredible how well this vid manages to do so. I mean, you can't see someone knowing! You can't see someone asking questions! But in this vid, you can.
Best bits: I think the introduction is seamlessly good, from :05 to :54 - which, wow, that's a long time, and yet it doesn't feel that long. Incredible build, brilliant editing, beautiful, beautiful beautiful, and then cutting to the light from Luna and Sue Storm as the voice comes in - lovely. I love the moment later on when Eowyn is shouting on the lyric "glorious" - most triumphant! "Satellites that compromise the truth" is the seeing-knowledge thing I was talking about, and Lyra was a brilliant choice there. Going from the grueling cuts and the bruises lines, with dead and crying women, to breaking the cuffs at 1:32 - that's a moment, alright. The swords around 1:50 I think the movement there is really incredibly edited. And, um, I'm stopping because I keep stopping and starting the vid and writing down more stuff (there are like three things between 1:32 and 1:50 that I love) - please just watch this vid, it's fairly short and not taxing.
One Girl Revolution
Alright, now, this vid is the romp. At the end of this vid there's a screen that says "awesome chicks ftw", this one... okay, yeah! That's pretty much the message: "I'll be everything that I want to be", and I'm sorry but that message rocks. The best bit about this vid, to my mind, is its range.arefadedaway's summary is "How about a 155-girl revolution?", and those 155 women are from all over the damn place. Dorothy Gale. Elizabeth Bennet. Sarah Connor. Temperance Brennan. These vastly different women and girls and all of the different things they do are celebrated. It's not just about the asskicking, it's not just about the brains. It definitely draws on the visual similarities again. There are moments when the vid dwells on women with knowledge and moments when the vid dwells on women who can fire a bow - or women who can fire two guns at the same time, or women who can run an office. All kinds of women are here - 50s secretaries and communications officers and teenagers and villains, oh yeah! RANGE, man, it's what it's about. And all of these women are celebrated respectfully. I love the way a shot of Joan from Mad Men is paired with the lyric "insecurity", for just one example - Joan is a woman trapped into a certain way of life by the time she's living in.
Best bits: At :25, women throwing men on the ground! And just before that, Anne of Green Gables! :48-1:03, VILLAINS doing the power-walk, finishing with Carmen Sandiego! CARMEN SANDIEGO! Uhura at 1:09 ("revolution"). 1:31-1:36: Trinity, Aeryn, and Zoe. Whoa. 2:22-2:28: "I'll be everything that I want to be", with women running - a potent visual metaphor for women's journeys to become the people that they want to be - and cutting to women actually working, scribbling on notepads. 2:38: Sarah Connor, um, just because. 2:40-2:50: women dancing and hugging each other. I'm really a sucker for women hugging each other, man.
Which brings me neatly, and not before time, to:
I'm Your Man
OK, let's face it, this one's not like the others. It was made for International Femslash Day and is a celebration of, well, femslash in media. I love it, I LOVE it, and if this vid was required viewing I think there'd be more hot femslash in this world. I love the way this vid uses those visual techniques to make, not a motion, but an emotion follow through: look, it says, these women are standing like those women, and now those women are kissing, so maybe these women... This vid has everything: hatesex, schmoop, crossdressing (unf!): no complicated message, just femslash.
Best bits: I love the crossdressing montage at the beginning. at :36, woman in the cowboy hat looking up. :42-46: strike me down in anger/here I stand. At 1:00, the cutting from Willow and Tara to I'm-pretty-sure-that's-Xena is so smooth that someone in the Youtube comments hasn't noticed they're two different scenes! The dancing sequence (and if anyone knows what 2:16 or 2:24 are I'd be grateful for the tip.)
Now I'm going to finally go and watch the vidscaramarie has been reccing!
Vid Meme: Days 1-3
A preamble: I don't think I've said this stuff before, so: I recommend that you watch the vid at least once before you read my commentary. Although I hate to advise using up other peoples' bandwidth, if stuff is available for direct download (especially at MU or wherever) I recommend that you do that rather than streaming. They're around 50mb and it's the days of miracles and broadband, splash out! And remember I'm not a vidder and in fact I haven't really studied visual texts at all, so where my language is not right please forgive me. Also, just like fanfiction, vidders appreciate comments if you like their work.
Day 4 - An ensemble vid you love
Imma Be, by
talitha78Leverage; Hardison, Parker, Eliot; Spoilers through S2; crappy song but awesome vid.
I don't even have to put my comments about this one below a cut. It's not real deep, it's beautifully, cleanly cut, it's basically a romp. A romp heavy on the Hardison, which is nice because he's my TV boyfriend, and on the Parker, which is nice because she's my TV girlfriend. Eliot's also in there which is nice because I care about him! But not as much as the other two. Um, so yeah, it's a romp.
Honourable mentions: (Glad I'm) Not a Petrelli, by my besties
sixth_light and lady_larla, Heroes, Claire & the Petrellis, season 1; umpteen billion awesome Buffy vids that I couldn't list if I tried all year. (Never seen a good Angel one, though. Recs?)Day 5 - A vid everyone should see at least once
So, there actually isn't a day for "political vid you love", and since I LOOOOOVE political vids and think absolutely everyone should watch them, I'm doing three political vids for Day 5. More has been written about each of these vids than I could really get into, but they all made me re-evaluate their source and my understanding of what vidding can do. I probably would not have watched as many amazing vids as I now have if it weren't for these vids.
1. How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, by
lierdumoaFirefly; race; spoilers throughout; violence, language. Read about it on fanlore.
This vid is, to my mind, a masterclass in viscerality. It didn't teach me anything I didn't already know - I knew about the skeevy race issues in Firefly when I first watched the vid, and I didn't understand the Confederacy imagery until I read more about it (I did understand Serenity's basic conservativism, but I didn't have the cultural context for that stuff.) What this vid made me do is FEEL the issue and understand it. Also, I think the use of sound at the end is incandescent.
2. Women's Work, by Luminosity and Sisabet
Supernatural; women; spoilers through season 3; violence, sexual violence. Read about it on fanlore.
So the Fanlore page validates something that I have long felt about this vid, which is that its relevance goes beyond commentary on Supernatural. Because, let's face it, it's three years old, the show goes on, it's not necessarily useful as that kind of commentary anymore. What it does do, to my mind, is illustrate a problem of which Supernatural is merely one symptom: the Woman Problem in media. What happens to women on our tv screens - especially, particularly, on genre shows and in genre movies, especially in horror. It makes one point, it makes it hard, and it makes it - to me, anyway - convincingly. It clarifies my understanding of part of SPN's construction - women dying on ceilings for men - and its place in a culture of women's sacrifice for men. Also, snappy cutting, great clips, consistent storytelling.
3. Us, by Lim - That's the fanlore page b/c I can't find the original vid page & I don't believe in direct-linking to vids.
Multi-fandom; fandom; not spoilery, no warnings.
Everyone's seen this, right? And some people love it and some people hate it, and I personally find it very moving & meaningful, but I sound like a moron when I talk about it, and it's not really late and I'm tired! Watch it! My favourite bits are: the bits with the books; the bits with the Pirates: Ye Be Warned sign; I Want To Believe; the stills around 2:44; the comics; Ian McKellan.
And now for something completely different!
So I immediately went to one of my favourite vids, and then I stopped and looked at another one, and another one, and another one, and then I thought: this is ridiculous. This could be a themed post all of its own. and then I thought: but I goddamned freaking love these vids! So I'm going to talk about them and that's that.
Day 6: Women: They're Pretty Fucking Incredible
Bionic, by
tallulah71; Glorious, by such_heights; One Girl Revolution, by arefadedaway; and I'm Your Man, by charmax.Very, very multifandom; women; not specially spoilery for anything in particular; TV violence.
So these vids all have a central message, and that message is basically about how women are amazing, and they use visual texts that were built by the patriarchy to show that: so in one basic sense they're all a triumphant reclamation, turning The Man into The Woman. And that is a narrative that you can get me with every time, and I mean every time: I am a sucker for that. And it mans that they all have one particular technique in common: they use moments of visual similarity to compare and connect two or three or four characters. This is a favourite technique of mine in vids because I think it does something that fanfiction struggles to do well, which is the crossover character study. Fic character study crossovers often suffer when source texts are too different from each other in tone, and they can be laboured. But with a shot of Catwoman whipping the head off a dummy cutting to Buffy yanking the head off a vamp, a vid can compare those two characters briefly and as a part of its narrative and move on a second later. And these vids all take source from absolutely goddamned everywhere and so they're doing it with, in some cases, hundreds of characters from the whole history of film. It's beautiful.
But the other thing I like about them is that - with the exception of I'm Your Man which is fairly different from the other three - they're each running a different message, parallel to that one, reinforcing it or commenting on it and I just think that's really cool. I think it's really cool that vids which use even some of the same shots can still make a very different point in some ways.
Bionic
So Bionic is the oldest of these vids. I've probably seen it, oh, conservative estimate, 50 times. I love this vid, I make everyone I know watch it, you should too! And the thing I like about this vid is that these aren't just women with superpowers who kick ass. These are, for the most part, women who have had alteration forced on them, by the Watchers' Council, by a creepy stalkery Replicator who made them, by a solar flare, by a creepy genetic modification company. (Sometimes they're just born with it, true.) And for the most part these women have had their powers forced on them by men; and if not, men are trying to control them. Often both are true. (Riot Nrrd has a whole comic about this and you should read it. Riot Nrrd is amazing, btw.) And yeah, it sort of does ruin their lives! And that's what this vid is about! Those women kicking back for a bit, but I think the vid never loses sight of the fact that most of these women are pretty damn unhappy in the worlds that their (male) creators have constructed for them.
Favourite moments: Mystique's finger at :37. Ripley doesn't want to be human at :42. Six million dollar smile (I can't help it!) at 1:10. All the flips and cartwheels at 1:48. We have the technology (yay, robots). Better, stronger, faster with baby!Max - I think this is a wonderful moment, because these children were so miserable, made so miserable by their childhoods. From 2:22 til 2:35 is a beautifully coherent, narrative progression - the take-back-our-mutant-bodies moment. At 2:58, with Kitty Pryde and the anime girl - this is a particularly good moment of visual connection. One of the things this vid really excels at is the way the motion in one source - a body flying, someone jumping through the window, a kick - will be completed in the next source.
Glorious
So of these vids, I think Glorious is the one with the strongest narrative, and yet I also think it has the broadest purview. (Also, it LIVES off the visual comparison stuff I was talking about earlier, especially in the introduction.) Glorious is about women who dare to know, and then to act. Glorious doesn't shy away from the consequences, either. While the other three vids I talk about are more or less purely ass-kicking moments (and I like it that way), Glorious is willing to go to the "cuts and the bruises" and show the consequences for these women of getting up, getting out of bed, getting out of the world, exploring, thinking, learning, knowing, acting. Women aren't invulnerable or superhuman in Glorious: they are just human, and they die, sometimes horribly. It's hard for them, just like it's hard for anyone. But they do it and they get through it and they're just, basically, glorious. I love that these women mostly aren't the same women as the women in Bionic; this vid celebrates women who know and think and understand and explore, a quality that I think is very difficult to depict visually, and I think it's incredible how well this vid manages to do so. I mean, you can't see someone knowing! You can't see someone asking questions! But in this vid, you can.
Best bits: I think the introduction is seamlessly good, from :05 to :54 - which, wow, that's a long time, and yet it doesn't feel that long. Incredible build, brilliant editing, beautiful, beautiful beautiful, and then cutting to the light from Luna and Sue Storm as the voice comes in - lovely. I love the moment later on when Eowyn is shouting on the lyric "glorious" - most triumphant! "Satellites that compromise the truth" is the seeing-knowledge thing I was talking about, and Lyra was a brilliant choice there. Going from the grueling cuts and the bruises lines, with dead and crying women, to breaking the cuffs at 1:32 - that's a moment, alright. The swords around 1:50 I think the movement there is really incredibly edited. And, um, I'm stopping because I keep stopping and starting the vid and writing down more stuff (there are like three things between 1:32 and 1:50 that I love) - please just watch this vid, it's fairly short and not taxing.
One Girl Revolution
Alright, now, this vid is the romp. At the end of this vid there's a screen that says "awesome chicks ftw", this one... okay, yeah! That's pretty much the message: "I'll be everything that I want to be", and I'm sorry but that message rocks. The best bit about this vid, to my mind, is its range.
arefadedaway's summary is "How about a 155-girl revolution?", and those 155 women are from all over the damn place. Dorothy Gale. Elizabeth Bennet. Sarah Connor. Temperance Brennan. These vastly different women and girls and all of the different things they do are celebrated. It's not just about the asskicking, it's not just about the brains. It definitely draws on the visual similarities again. There are moments when the vid dwells on women with knowledge and moments when the vid dwells on women who can fire a bow - or women who can fire two guns at the same time, or women who can run an office. All kinds of women are here - 50s secretaries and communications officers and teenagers and villains, oh yeah! RANGE, man, it's what it's about. And all of these women are celebrated respectfully. I love the way a shot of Joan from Mad Men is paired with the lyric "insecurity", for just one example - Joan is a woman trapped into a certain way of life by the time she's living in. Best bits: At :25, women throwing men on the ground! And just before that, Anne of Green Gables! :48-1:03, VILLAINS doing the power-walk, finishing with Carmen Sandiego! CARMEN SANDIEGO! Uhura at 1:09 ("revolution"). 1:31-1:36: Trinity, Aeryn, and Zoe. Whoa. 2:22-2:28: "I'll be everything that I want to be", with women running - a potent visual metaphor for women's journeys to become the people that they want to be - and cutting to women actually working, scribbling on notepads. 2:38: Sarah Connor, um, just because. 2:40-2:50: women dancing and hugging each other. I'm really a sucker for women hugging each other, man.
Which brings me neatly, and not before time, to:
I'm Your Man
OK, let's face it, this one's not like the others. It was made for International Femslash Day and is a celebration of, well, femslash in media. I love it, I LOVE it, and if this vid was required viewing I think there'd be more hot femslash in this world. I love the way this vid uses those visual techniques to make, not a motion, but an emotion follow through: look, it says, these women are standing like those women, and now those women are kissing, so maybe these women... This vid has everything: hatesex, schmoop, crossdressing (unf!): no complicated message, just femslash.
Best bits: I love the crossdressing montage at the beginning. at :36, woman in the cowboy hat looking up. :42-46: strike me down in anger/here I stand. At 1:00, the cutting from Willow and Tara to I'm-pretty-sure-that's-Xena is so smooth that someone in the Youtube comments hasn't noticed they're two different scenes! The dancing sequence (and if anyone knows what 2:16 or 2:24 are I'd be grateful for the tip.)
Now I'm going to finally go and watch the vids
caramarie has been reccing!Vid Meme: Days 1-3
no subject
Date: 2010-08-01 08:16 am (UTC)Maybe for you. For me it's the days of oh god why is my reading page taking so long to load, oh, I know, we've used up all the bandwidth again. (It makes last minute additions to my design portfolio quite difficult). Okay, so probably half the reason we use up all our broadband is because I go around downloading vids indiscriminately.
I have seen most of these, but not Bionic, I think I will have to download that one. Just not today...
Whenever I'm out and I hear the song used in 'Us', I always think about fandom and there is no way that song can be about anything else, right? Even I feel like I don't really get half that vid in the way that it kind of blows my mind.