it's a magical world

I just finished a vid that I started almost three years ago. I did about 2/3 of it in August 2015; today, I opened up the file and finished it in about five hours.

Gotta get back in the saddle somehow, I guess.

Festivids is live! Which is awesome, because vids! Lots of them! In rare fandoms! I got a super hilarious The Emperor's New Groove vid, Rama Llama Llama, which fills me with glee.

I particularly love Festivids and Yuletide because I generally forget what I've requested by the time they go live, so I am always, always surprised by the gifts I receive. :D

And as per, if you manage to correctly guess which vid is mine, I will totally make you a thing. I only made one vid this year, and for once in my goddamn life, the music is neither Vienna Teng nor Tom McRae. So. Good luck figuring me out. (My recipient hasn't commented yet, which makes me anxious, but they're probably just busy right now. Or something. Or they HATE IT. >_<)

In RL news, apparently the side effect of working a 9-5 job is that I'm just fucking tired all the time. It's not that work is exhausting -- I've had far worse -- but I'm just NOT a morning person, and I never will be. It doesn't matter how many hours of sleep I get; if I have to wake up before 10am, I will be sleepy and out of it all day, and last week I was pretty much crashing into bed by 8pm every evening. Not to go right to sleep, mind -- mostly just reading in bed for a couple of hours first -- but I'm too tired to be able to focus on anything else. And that's really stupid and also annoying, because there's absolutely no reason I can't get a few good hours of writing/vidding in after work except that I'm just SLEEPY ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.

Seriously, I'm getting about 8 hrs of sleep every night, which is totally normal and healthy for me. So why am I always tired? Grump grump grump.

I am strangely unstressed about Yuletide, despite the fact that the deadline is in less than twenty hours and my fic is not yet complete. Maybe it's because I had a good writing session last night, and I know I don't have much further to go, and anyway the whole thing is gonna be very short (which for me means less than 3000 words). So...yeah, I'll finish that tonight. It'll probably go unbetaed, but for this particular fic, that doesn't bother me. (I've rarely had much luck with Yuletide betas, anyway.) Incidentally, though -- is there no IRC chat this year? Or has it just moved to a site I don't know about?

Had a good second interview for the "interesting" job today. It still pays too little, and the work would either be really interesting or really stressful, but I got a REALLY good vibe re: office culture, which is pretty important to me after the toxic nature of the kids theater. They're going to bring me into the office Monday to shadow the current person in the position and see if it feels like a good fit, which is kinda weird but also kind of awesome in terms of making a smart choice about the job. (I'm not sure if any other candidates are doing this as well, or if I'm their top choice.) So...that. I'm more optimistic than I was expecting, at least. And while the starting pay is low, it's still within my budget, and there's definitely opportunity for growth (and bonuses). Plus they're very flexible/reasonable about the possibility of me picking up stage management gigs on the side, which would not be the case with the other job I interviewed for (due to potential conflict of interest).

Plus I just got offered a show in April for a theater group I've worked with before and loved, and they actually pay okay, so if I can juggle the schedules, that would be nice.

In other news -- December posting meme!

ranalore asked: What makes for a good viddable song?

I am firmly of the opinion that ANY song is viddable...with the right vidder. So there are certain sorts of songs that I do well with, and some that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. But that doesn't mean those songs wouldn't make awesome vids! Just that I'm not the right person to make them. BUT ANYWAY. I'm generally drawn to lyrics/lyricality first and foremost; I prefer songs that really tell a story, either through the lyrics or through the music. I don't like highly repetitive songs, which is why I very rarely vid pop songs, unless I can twist them into meta commentary -- i.e. Die Young taken literally for a Buffy vid. I love Vienna Teng and Tom McRae (maybe a little too much), because the lyrics are sharp and smart, the music is often surprising, and the choruses tend to shift musically with each repetition. But really, it's mainly that a song needs to click in my head as belonging to a certain fandom/character/idea. Often it's a single lyric that sells me -- for Human, which had been in the back of my head for a while as a potential sci-fi/fantasy vid, the lines "And so long to devotion / you taught me everything I know / wave goodbye, wish me well / you've gotta let me go" were SO OBVIOUSLY about the Raven/Charles relationship that I basically just hopped around impatiently until good DoFP source became available and I could vid it. More rarely, I have a strong idea for a vid and then basically shop around for a song that matches; for example, I knew I wanted to make a creepy Wishverse (Buffy) vid, but it took some searching before I latched onto the theme from Rosemary's Baby as the right music.

I have been making an effort to vary my music selection for vidding lately, because while I COULD easily vid every single Vienna Teng and Tom McRae song, that doesn't mean I SHOULD. But my personal musical tastes are fairly limited, in terms of what I actually listen to on a regular basis, so it's kind of an ongoing process finding new material to work with. I'm not really a music fan -- by which I mean, I LIKE music, obviously, but I'm not fannish about it, and I don't seek out new artists or care at all about bands or ever attend concerts. So maybe it's kind of weird that I get so obsessive about vidding. I dunno.

Crowdsourcing time! I'm starting to poke at a multifandom vid, and I need some suggestions beyond my own usual scope of source material. Specifically, I'm looking at the women in refrigerators trope. More specifically, I'm looking for sci-fi/fantasy/comic book movies and TV shows that feature main characters' girlfriends/wives who are 1) killed off and then 2) appear to them later in dreams/visions/hallucinations.

Example: Jean Grey's death in X3 and then reappearance in Logan's dreams in The Wolverine.

I will also accept girlfriends who are believed to be dead and are later revealed to still be alive. (i.e. Bucky Barnes, except, y'know, the female equivalent.)

Any suggestions? :D?

Hey...would anyone be willing to do a quick vid beta of a Steve-centric vid? It's...not quite the vid I had expected to make, very TFA-heavy, with Steve/Peggy and Steve/Bucky both prominently featured (could be read as romantic or platonic, but those are basically the two most important people in his life during the war, so yeah).

I'd originally planned to include a lot of Steve/Natasha and Steve/Sam as well, except then it became all First Avenger all the time instead of an equal balance with Winter Soldier. Hell, I'd planned to include Avengers footage, too. So, yeah, this is why I'd like another set of eyes, if anyone's willing. I need to make sure the damn thing still holds together.

It's also kind of Steve/violence, but to a lesser degree. Steve being attracted to people and situations that are inherently dangerous? Yeah.

(Why is it so much easier for me to vid than to write these days?)

I don't post at all about RL anymore, do I? Mostly because I don't have much to say. Closed a show Sunday, enjoying the couple weeks' breather before the next one starts rehearsal, being as productive in fandom as possible while I have the chance. I'm trying to work through as many of my MCU bunnies as I can before seeing X-Men on Saturday. Haven't been feeling the X-Men fandom groove for a while, but I know that the new movie will likely drag me back in with a vengeance, and I'd like to finish a couple more Winter Soldier-inspired fanworks before that happens.

(I mean, I've got two X-Men WIPs that I'd badly like to finish as well, so I AM hoping that DoFP rekindles that obsession. But I don't want to abandon this dratted Steve Rogers fic in the meantime.)

SO. In that spirit -- would anyone be willing to do a quick vid beta of a Steve vid? Uses both Cap movies and Avengers as source (and, ugh, I am so sick of this cam footage, you don't even know). Steve's not the character I have the best grasp on, and I want to make sure it flows okay before posting (and that it isn't a scattered mess). And for once the song is neither Vienna Teng nor Tom McRae, so I'm not trusting my vidding instincts as much as usual. Anyone? I'm always willing to offer up a reciprocal beta in exchange. :D?

Happy holidays to all, whatever you may celebrate! Although it's weird how freaking early Chanukah was this year. Anyway, I managed to complete my Yuletide fic by the skin of my teeth, so that happened, and now I've bounced straight into Festivids crunch time. ( some vidding blather and frustration )

So, back to Yuletide! I got two gifts -- At Day's End, a Provost's Dog fic about Beka post-series, which is very sweet and lovely, and a little treatlet, The Roommate, a little Elementary Joan/Bell + Sherlock ficlet that made me very, very happy, and also I wish there were more of it.

I only wrote one fic, but despite the last-minute rush job, I'm rather pleased with how it turned out, and it was a fandom I'd been yearning to write in for YEARS, so that was fun to revisit. There are more than 2500 works in the main collection this year, so of course I doubt anyone will figure this out, but if by some fluke you manage to guess which fic I wrote, I will totally write or vid you ANYTHING YOU WANT. Clues: 1. It is a TV fandom, that I have 2. definitely talked about on this journal before, though not recently, and have introduced at least one or two of you to personally, and 3. is a slash fic for one of my favorite ever OTPs.

And rounding out the holiday season, of course, we had the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I had...mixed feelings. ( spoilers, sweetie )

...is anyone out there able and willing to beta a high school Buffy vid?

There are so many more clips I want to use than can fit into less than four minutes of vid, omg. And I'm really, really glad that I decided to stick to just seasons 1-3, because holy shit, that was already way too many episodes to sort through. I want to say that I used at least one clip from every single episode in those three seasons, but that's a lie. I did at least pull footage from every single episode, but there are a few that I know just won't make it into the final vid. Still. Goddamn.

Today is my full day off this week, thank god. I opened a show over the weekend, which is great because it means TECH IS OVER, THANK CHRIST. I celebrated after the shows yesterday by taking myself out to the movies. Saw Zero Dark Thirty, which was quite good and very tense. Although I become completely distracted by the unexpected Captain Jack Harkness cameo, which made me giggle inappropriately. Seriously, that first scene with the CIA director, I kept thinking, man, that extra looks an awful lot like John Barrowman, but he was one of a group of faceless Suits around a conference table, and the camera never actually panned in on him, so I thought I must've been imagining it. Then, like half an hour later, there's another scene with the CIA director, and this time he actually had a couple of lines, and I nearly jumped up in my seat shouting I knew I recognized that jawline! GOOD TIMES. I was not expecting Barrowman in that movie!

I do have a lot of fandom stuff I need to be doing this week. Which is good! I like fandom stuff. Though I'm working on a vid that's giving me a huge headache right now for reasons completely unrelated to the vid itself -- the only source I could find for it is in a format that takes my laptop freaking forever to convert into something usable, so not only do I need to clip it all, every individual clip takes a good 2-10min to convert before I can load it into my vidding program. Which, ugh, I have really outgrown iMovie at this point. But while I HAVE Final Cut Express, I got a new laptop last summer and then, y'know, moved four times in five months, and I cannot fucking find the original CD-ROM with the necessary registration info, so I have this great vidding program installed that I can't fucking access. I'm like 95% sure the stuff I need is in one of the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany that I didn't have room for in my current apartment, so are in storage upstage at my parents' house, but as they go upstate only on weekends and I WORK on weekends, I haven't been able to get up there to sort through the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany to find the damn CD-ROM. And I'm still only beginning to learn how to USE Final Cut, so it's not like that will solve all my problems, but it is frustrating to have a program that I can't even open to play with.

Which is unrelated to the fact that every fucking clip I make takes, on average, five minutes to convert. Do you know how many clips I assemble in the process of making a vid? If I'm clipping a 2-hour movie, and I know specifically what I'm looking for, that's maybe 100 clips. If it's a TV show, and I know the general outline of the vid I'm making but don't know the show well enough to storyboard it blind...christ. For, say, One Mississippi, I had the benefit of knowing Doctor Who pretty much backwards and forwards (partly from having vidded it so many times already), so I could seek out the sort of clips I needed with a high degree of precision, and know that, oh, for this lyric I need this particular moment from episode X, so I'd take a few different clips from that scene and edit it out in iMovie. The folder I created for that vid holds 121 .mov files, for roughly a four-minute vid. Let's say that the vid I'm currently making only winds up needing 200 clips itself -- which is probably about right, since I'm much less familiar with the source (I've only watched it through once before) and don't have quite a strong concept in mind for the vid as a whole. Setting aside the time it takes me to rewatch everything and find the clips themselves, this added conversion time -- let's call it an even five minutes per clip, though it varies depending on the lengths of the clips themselves -- means that that's close to seventeen hours of time wasted JUST CONVERTING .MOV FILES. This is incredibly frustrating to me, because I can't actually do the vidding itself until the clips are converted and then uploaded into iMovie. And I can't continue clipping while one file is still converted, so I'm basically caught in the holding pattern from hell.

At least I can work on a fic beta while videos convert in the background. That's something.

So I've been vidding more or less nonstop (barring breaks to eat and sleep) since early yesterday evening, which feels MARVELOUS. Vidding is the first fannish activity I drop completely when RL gets insane, because it requires a certain amount of uninterrupted time at home (with my external hard drive) that can be very difficult to come by. But once I get going, man, it sure is a buzz. So is writing, when I get into the right headspace, but that's rarer -- something about vidding is just naturally soothing to me. The repetitiveness of it, maybe, of rehashing a song beat by beat over and over again while placing clips. It's a different sort of creativity than writing -- writing is hard to push, for me, and if I struggle too hard to force words out it becomes impossible to write anything at all. Vidding requires less mental energy. Dunno why.

So I've got a complete draft of my Festivid, and more than half of a Doctor Who vid that been sitting in the back of my brain for months and months and months. So that's fun! But the Festivid badly needs a beta, and I'm not sure if my usual go-tos are familiar with the source. Fortunately, I have more than a month before it's due to find someone.

Of course, this means I have NOT spent my day off working on my Secret Mutant fic, which is due in less than a week. Oops. Fortunately I have tomorrow off as well (it's like an actual weekend! Except not at the end of the week!) so, that. Remind me that I'm not allowed to do any more vidding until this fic is done. And then Yuletide, fuck, I don't even have an idea for that one yet. But this has been a recurring theme for my Yuletides, and I always manage to pull it off somehow...

First up: Happy Spirit Day! I ♥ purple.

festivids assignments are upon us! Huzzah! I am very pleased with the assignment I received -- matched on two possible fandoms, both of which I adore -- though I have no real ideas yet. But I'm not really going to have time to think much about this until next month anyway, so that's plenty of time to listen to all my playlists and find a song that works. Or just Vienna Teng and Tom McRae, WHO AM I KIDDING.

Anyway, DEAR FESTIVIDDER!

I am crap at writing these letters. Look, I love vids. I love all sorts of vids. Make me laugh, make me cry, make me flail and squee, it doesn't matter, I love it all. I love vids set to my favorite musical artists (see: Vienna Teng, Tom McRae); I love vids set to songs I would normally hate, I LOVE VIDS. Go nuts.

( my original requests, for the record )

Finally got around to installing shiny new Final Cut Express yesterday, then spent a couple of hours futzing. WOW this is nowhere near as intuitive as iMovie, though I found some tutorials on YouTube, which help take the edge off. I get the feeling I'm going to be banging my head against this software for a while before I'm finally comfortable vidding with it. Surely somewhere on the internet some wonderful fannish person has made a tutorial for vidding purposes? Because I'm looking for a somewhat different sort of functionality out of this than the software is marketed toward, and no tutorial I've found directly addresses the aspects I want to use, so it's hard to sort through the information overload on features I will never use to find brief factoids on what I do need. (For example, it took me WAY too long to figure out how to display audio waveforms, and I still haven't figured out a quick and easy way to split long clips into multiple cuts. A slow and tedious way, yes, but that will quickly drive me to drink.) Any fellow vidders have any helpful links for new users?

And then I got distracted by X-Men again. I hope we're approaching the collective fandom point where the kinkmemes are quieting down a bit and people are starting to actually write longer, plotty fic. Because I love me some good long fic with PLOTS and CHARACTERIZATION and stuff that I don't have to dig through 25 pages of commentfic for. Yes please?

I also realized that my femgenficathon prompt is eerily perfect for this fandom, and with my unintentionally epic Charles/Erik fic in beta, I'm already poking at a gen Angel fic. I know I've really landed in a new fandom when I'm writing gen fic about female characters that approximately five other people will be interested in reading. \o/ Ironically, the prompt is a quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross -- and at the time, the only fic I'd posted so far this year was a gen Tosh fic inspired by Kübler-Ross. Apparently I've got a theme going. Whatever, I'm just so happy to be writing again.

I was going to make some kind of articulate post about the show I'm currently rehearsing, but then I came home and spent five hours just watching Angel and finishing up a vid, so that other post is on hold for the moment until my brain is functional in ways not related to setting video clips to music.

So! Would anyone be willing to beta a Whedonverse vid? It's more meta-ish than my usual stuff, which makes me nervous. Familiarity with all of Whedon's TV shows helpful (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse). It's about the Whedonverse's fascination with broken dolls, and trying to reclaim their feminist narratives. Or how sudden superpowers really kind of fuck a girl up, but she can still rise up and kick ass on her own terms. Yeah. Anyone?