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KRYPTONITE VID RELEASED
Vid announcement:
Kryptonite
song by Three Doors Down
fandom: Andromeda, property of Tribune
vid by Juliette Torres
format: divx .avi, 30.5MB
link (pls ctrl-click or right-click and save as): http://houseoftorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/jmt-andromeda-kryptonite-subs.mp4 (link updated 26 March 2023 to include embedded subtitle track)
description: ...Can I be honest and say I hate writing summaries?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jcalanthe, building on a comment from bonibaru, suggested I call it "Highlander...! In...! Space...!" (Imagine you're watching Muppets Tonight.) But seriously. It's about Rhade. It's about a slew of epic things like loyalty and betrayal and tragic love. It's about Dylan trying to understand.
I think the technical word is doohickey.1
Hardware:
VCR (four head, stereo, NTSC, JVC)
Digital Camcorder (Sony DCR-TRV110 NTSC)
Macintosh G4 Powerbook (18.6GB drive, 256MB RAM, DVD drive)
(borrowed) Dell with CD-burner for four CDs worth DVD source in .dv format
Assorted RCA, firewire, and ethernet cables
Software:
DVDExtractor 0.9b
MacMPEG2Decoder
Quicktime 5.0 Pro
Adobe Photoshop 5.0
iTunes
iMovie
Source:
Kryptonite, by Three Doors Down
Andromeda "Under the Night," "Double Helix" (ripped from DVD); "Forced Perspective," "Home Fires" (VHS-->d8-->dv)
Compression:
Video: H.263, 352x208, 15fps, key frame every 60 frames, quality 75%
Audio: MP3, stereo, 64kps/VBR
Wizardry:
I made a few significant alterations to several pieces of footage, those being:
--I trimmed all of the 4:3 footage off the tapes to 16:9 to match the DVD footage. This resulted in lots of foreheadlessness, although some of them were already foreheadless because Andromeda likes its close shots. So somebody lost half an eyebrow at some point.
--I tried to reintroduce color to bronzed over flashback sequences, with some minor success.
--I did some frame rate changes. Um. A lot of frame rate changes. Actually, I should probably be shot for my abuse of frame rate change. I did a lot of it for convenience, stretching a shot an extra second or two to fill the space, but also to get things to work with the beat.
The audio, I trimmed by about ten seconds at the beginning. I also had to jump through a few hoops running it through different programs to get it in mp3 format (guess what format it was in originally?) for the sake of compression (trade 9MB in for 1.7MB--yeah, go with the mp3). This I do not understand: mp3 is one of the most widespread and best compressible audio formats, and yet it is not a standard option in iMovie or Quicktime. Why?
Inspirations have I none--just to touch the flaming dove...2
I have, on occasion, thought that my entire life was one big inside joke. This vid reinforces the impression.
Way back in the day when I used to talk about Smallville, I reviewed Smallville vids. (I made a few people mad at me, too, and I suspect some of them will be disappointed that I'm not putting out a Smallville vid for them to take apart in the same way I did theirs. Of course, they're welcome to do that to this one anyway, but I'm not sure how many SV fans also watch Andromeda and/or worship Steve Bacic. So they may pass.) Back to the story: there were a slew of Smallville vids to Superman songs. I am Superman, the one with the line about "I'm just a man in a silly red cape," Jimmy Olsen's Blues... no, I'm kidding. But I kept thinking, how lame is it to be using songs like these for Smallville vids? How--lazy? Let's be a little more creative.
Which was how the idea of "how about using a Superman song for oh, say, Andromeda" came about. And quickly developed several layers of irony, because the Nietzscheans of Andromeda consider themselves supermen in a more, well, Nietzschean sense, so the idea is more original in the sense that we're back to talking about supermen in the original meaning, and in the sense that it's more original to use a Superman song for something besides a Superman show.
And? I never thought Kryptonite worked for Smallville anyway, really. One, Clark's never really cracked for the "If I go crazy" stuff, just minor things, and two, Will we still call him "Superman" if we've never called him that in the first place, yet?
So that's how Kryptonite came to be about Rhade and Dylan for me. Rhade, the superman who apparently had gone crazy in a very complete and permanent fashion (damn it, no recovering from death) and Dylan, his personal kryptonite, the man whom he wanted to understand that it wasn't as simple as that, that his betrayal was not what it seemed.
And so, for the past couple of months, I have been slaving over a joke.
As I write this letter, send my love to you, remember that I'll always be in love with you.3
The following is an explanation of a fairly complex metaphor I was working with that I know is not easily visible to the casual vidwatcher, or even the obsessive vidwatcher, because there seems to be a swath of my audience who have the vid on loop merely to ogle Rhade...
Here's the thing. This is what I intended in the vid, knowing full well it would not be easily conveyed. You know what they say about how a work should stand on its own and you shouldn't have to explain it? Well, I'm explaining it. But you don't have to read it, and in fact, I encourage you to watch the vid at least once without having read this.
It goes like this: the vid is Rhade POV. He's the "I" in the lyrics, the narrator. And yet, he's dead, and to me, the words indicate he's speaking with the knowledge of his own death. So how is he speaking? Rather than go for the Sixth Sense jokes, I started thinking of it as a letter Rhade had left behind: he knew he was going to betray the Commonwealth, sabotage the ship, try to kill Dylan. He planned to fail at this last objective, and he expected to die. He knew Dylan wouldn't understand his motives at the time, so he left this missive behind for Dylan to someday find.
So it's a letter from Rhade's point of view, but with the reactions of Dylan, the reader, overlaid on it. In the middle of the vid, there's a bridge with ten seconds of Rhade shots, and then he passes the ball (literally, basketball) to Dylan, and you get ten seconds of Dylan, reacting to Rhade and thinking about him. And then, with an upraised hand, Telemachus Rhade redirects Dylan's train of thought, and Telemachus stands in for Gaheris for a chorus. Dylan, it seemed to me, refused to treat Telemachus as a separate entity from his ancestor in "Home Fires." Dylan conflated the two and treated Telemachus poorly for it--but Telemachus's redemption in Dylan's eyes in turn meant Gaheris Rhade's, also because he couldn't differentiate the two. So Telemachus makes Dylan reevaluate Gaheris and have flashbacks like crazy, so Dylan's back to remembering his final battle with Gaheris for the final chorus--and we close on Dylan in his contemplation from the end of "Home Fires."
And here's the scary realization I had: this is not necessarily slashy. If you wanted to you, you could see it as straight from the text. (Of course,jcalanthe complains, "They do not touch like straight men are supposed to...") But as I was saying. It is about the textual betrayal and Dylan's textual doubts and realizations. Is it also about their subtextual sexual relationship? I think it's all in the eye of the beholder.
jcalanthe suggested I market it as gen and see what happened. I said everybody would call me on it. Hell, he called me on it. The bit from "Forced Perspective," where Dylan throws his head back in pain, cut away to exploding ships? jcalanthe refused to believe I hadn't deliberately been working on orgasm imagery there...
The battle's done and we kind of won, so we sound our victory cheer... Tell me, where do we go from here?4
So what's next for me? I have a whole lot of things half planned but I can't decide which to work on. I do know that for the next two weeks I'm taking a break from vidding to work on the lyric wheel of the Andromerotica Festival--I haven't done any writing for that challenge yet.
After that, I have the merry merry month of December to do something with before I go back to college (There's whoo... and hoo... but also uh-oh, and why now?5) and have to restructure my schedule around that. December will, of course, be very busy with the holidays and the weekend trip back to see some old friends so I'm counting on maybe 18-20 days of actual getting-work-done time for vidding it. I'm thinking I should choose a fairly focused vid that I don't have to run all over the place for source (though this one was only four episodes worth and still took me a couple of months) so I'm leaning towards one of the movie vids, Labyrinth or Utena, not even anything as major as the s1 Witchblade vid to "I Want You," even though I did want to get back into the Costello Collection...
I think I'm probably going to work on the Labyrinth vid, to the Bowie song "Hallo Spaceboy." Some of it's going to be a bit complicated--I blueprinted myself into a corner with visions of effects--but I do know exactly how it's supposed to look, so that's a plus. I'm hoping it will all fall together, and I'll have it out sometime in the middle of January, after I get all those people I respect to look at it and tell me what they think and I tweak it leisurely like in between homework assignments.
Or at least, that's the plan... we'll see if I keep up...
Pithy Quotes Referenced Here:
1. ~Tar Gibbons, Aliens Ate My Homework by Bruce Coville.
2. ~Soul Love, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie.
3. ~P.S. I Love You, from Please Please Me by the Beatles.
4. ~Where Do We Go From Here, from Once More With Feeling, the Buffy Musical.
5. ~Willow, New Moon Rising, Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Kryptonite
song by Three Doors Down
fandom: Andromeda, property of Tribune
vid by Juliette Torres
format: divx .avi, 30.5MB
link (pls ctrl-click or right-click and save as): http://houseoftorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/jmt-andromeda-kryptonite-subs.mp4 (link updated 26 March 2023 to include embedded subtitle track)
description: ...Can I be honest and say I hate writing summaries?
jcalanthe, building on a comment from bonibaru, suggested I call it "Highlander...! In...! Space...!" (Imagine you're watching Muppets Tonight.) But seriously. It's about Rhade. It's about a slew of epic things like loyalty and betrayal and tragic love. It's about Dylan trying to understand.I think the technical word is doohickey.1
Hardware:
VCR (four head, stereo, NTSC, JVC)
Digital Camcorder (Sony DCR-TRV110 NTSC)
Macintosh G4 Powerbook (18.6GB drive, 256MB RAM, DVD drive)
(borrowed) Dell with CD-burner for four CDs worth DVD source in .dv format
Assorted RCA, firewire, and ethernet cables
Software:
DVDExtractor 0.9b
MacMPEG2Decoder
Quicktime 5.0 Pro
Adobe Photoshop 5.0
iTunes
iMovie
Source:
Kryptonite, by Three Doors Down
Andromeda "Under the Night," "Double Helix" (ripped from DVD); "Forced Perspective," "Home Fires" (VHS-->d8-->dv)
Compression:
Video: H.263, 352x208, 15fps, key frame every 60 frames, quality 75%
Audio: MP3, stereo, 64kps/VBR
Wizardry:
I made a few significant alterations to several pieces of footage, those being:
--I trimmed all of the 4:3 footage off the tapes to 16:9 to match the DVD footage. This resulted in lots of foreheadlessness, although some of them were already foreheadless because Andromeda likes its close shots. So somebody lost half an eyebrow at some point.
--I tried to reintroduce color to bronzed over flashback sequences, with some minor success.
--I did some frame rate changes. Um. A lot of frame rate changes. Actually, I should probably be shot for my abuse of frame rate change. I did a lot of it for convenience, stretching a shot an extra second or two to fill the space, but also to get things to work with the beat.
The audio, I trimmed by about ten seconds at the beginning. I also had to jump through a few hoops running it through different programs to get it in mp3 format (guess what format it was in originally?) for the sake of compression (trade 9MB in for 1.7MB--yeah, go with the mp3). This I do not understand: mp3 is one of the most widespread and best compressible audio formats, and yet it is not a standard option in iMovie or Quicktime. Why?
Inspirations have I none--just to touch the flaming dove...2
I have, on occasion, thought that my entire life was one big inside joke. This vid reinforces the impression.
Way back in the day when I used to talk about Smallville, I reviewed Smallville vids. (I made a few people mad at me, too, and I suspect some of them will be disappointed that I'm not putting out a Smallville vid for them to take apart in the same way I did theirs. Of course, they're welcome to do that to this one anyway, but I'm not sure how many SV fans also watch Andromeda and/or worship Steve Bacic. So they may pass.) Back to the story: there were a slew of Smallville vids to Superman songs. I am Superman, the one with the line about "I'm just a man in a silly red cape," Jimmy Olsen's Blues... no, I'm kidding. But I kept thinking, how lame is it to be using songs like these for Smallville vids? How--lazy? Let's be a little more creative.
Which was how the idea of "how about using a Superman song for oh, say, Andromeda" came about. And quickly developed several layers of irony, because the Nietzscheans of Andromeda consider themselves supermen in a more, well, Nietzschean sense, so the idea is more original in the sense that we're back to talking about supermen in the original meaning, and in the sense that it's more original to use a Superman song for something besides a Superman show.
And? I never thought Kryptonite worked for Smallville anyway, really. One, Clark's never really cracked for the "If I go crazy" stuff, just minor things, and two, Will we still call him "Superman" if we've never called him that in the first place, yet?
So that's how Kryptonite came to be about Rhade and Dylan for me. Rhade, the superman who apparently had gone crazy in a very complete and permanent fashion (damn it, no recovering from death) and Dylan, his personal kryptonite, the man whom he wanted to understand that it wasn't as simple as that, that his betrayal was not what it seemed.
And so, for the past couple of months, I have been slaving over a joke.
As I write this letter, send my love to you, remember that I'll always be in love with you.3
The following is an explanation of a fairly complex metaphor I was working with that I know is not easily visible to the casual vidwatcher, or even the obsessive vidwatcher, because there seems to be a swath of my audience who have the vid on loop merely to ogle Rhade...
Here's the thing. This is what I intended in the vid, knowing full well it would not be easily conveyed. You know what they say about how a work should stand on its own and you shouldn't have to explain it? Well, I'm explaining it. But you don't have to read it, and in fact, I encourage you to watch the vid at least once without having read this.
It goes like this: the vid is Rhade POV. He's the "I" in the lyrics, the narrator. And yet, he's dead, and to me, the words indicate he's speaking with the knowledge of his own death. So how is he speaking? Rather than go for the Sixth Sense jokes, I started thinking of it as a letter Rhade had left behind: he knew he was going to betray the Commonwealth, sabotage the ship, try to kill Dylan. He planned to fail at this last objective, and he expected to die. He knew Dylan wouldn't understand his motives at the time, so he left this missive behind for Dylan to someday find.
So it's a letter from Rhade's point of view, but with the reactions of Dylan, the reader, overlaid on it. In the middle of the vid, there's a bridge with ten seconds of Rhade shots, and then he passes the ball (literally, basketball) to Dylan, and you get ten seconds of Dylan, reacting to Rhade and thinking about him. And then, with an upraised hand, Telemachus Rhade redirects Dylan's train of thought, and Telemachus stands in for Gaheris for a chorus. Dylan, it seemed to me, refused to treat Telemachus as a separate entity from his ancestor in "Home Fires." Dylan conflated the two and treated Telemachus poorly for it--but Telemachus's redemption in Dylan's eyes in turn meant Gaheris Rhade's, also because he couldn't differentiate the two. So Telemachus makes Dylan reevaluate Gaheris and have flashbacks like crazy, so Dylan's back to remembering his final battle with Gaheris for the final chorus--and we close on Dylan in his contemplation from the end of "Home Fires."
And here's the scary realization I had: this is not necessarily slashy. If you wanted to you, you could see it as straight from the text. (Of course,
jcalanthe complains, "They do not touch like straight men are supposed to...") But as I was saying. It is about the textual betrayal and Dylan's textual doubts and realizations. Is it also about their subtextual sexual relationship? I think it's all in the eye of the beholder.jcalanthe suggested I market it as gen and see what happened. I said everybody would call me on it. Hell, he called me on it. The bit from "Forced Perspective," where Dylan throws his head back in pain, cut away to exploding ships? jcalanthe refused to believe I hadn't deliberately been working on orgasm imagery there...The battle's done and we kind of won, so we sound our victory cheer... Tell me, where do we go from here?4
So what's next for me? I have a whole lot of things half planned but I can't decide which to work on. I do know that for the next two weeks I'm taking a break from vidding to work on the lyric wheel of the Andromerotica Festival--I haven't done any writing for that challenge yet.
After that, I have the merry merry month of December to do something with before I go back to college (There's whoo... and hoo... but also uh-oh, and why now?5) and have to restructure my schedule around that. December will, of course, be very busy with the holidays and the weekend trip back to see some old friends so I'm counting on maybe 18-20 days of actual getting-work-done time for vidding it. I'm thinking I should choose a fairly focused vid that I don't have to run all over the place for source (though this one was only four episodes worth and still took me a couple of months) so I'm leaning towards one of the movie vids, Labyrinth or Utena, not even anything as major as the s1 Witchblade vid to "I Want You," even though I did want to get back into the Costello Collection...
I think I'm probably going to work on the Labyrinth vid, to the Bowie song "Hallo Spaceboy." Some of it's going to be a bit complicated--I blueprinted myself into a corner with visions of effects--but I do know exactly how it's supposed to look, so that's a plus. I'm hoping it will all fall together, and I'll have it out sometime in the middle of January, after I get all those people I respect to look at it and tell me what they think and I tweak it leisurely like in between homework assignments.
Or at least, that's the plan... we'll see if I keep up...
Pithy Quotes Referenced Here:
1. ~Tar Gibbons, Aliens Ate My Homework by Bruce Coville.
2. ~Soul Love, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie.
3. ~P.S. I Love You, from Please Please Me by the Beatles.
4. ~Where Do We Go From Here, from Once More With Feeling, the Buffy Musical.
5. ~Willow, New Moon Rising, Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
no subject
Okay, that has nothing to do with the vid, but! One of the best books ever!
no subject
And yea, sure you didn't intend that clip of Dylan throwing his head back in ecstasy while clutching a gun to be sexual. Uh huh. *g*
Yay, it's done! Congrats
Re:
Re:
For some reason this reminds me of a bizarre conversation I had with BN & his roomie last year which I concluded by uttering the words "Do I look like the federal government?" in a Texas accent and cracking them up.
I was just surprised by the amount of extended physical contact you could find between Rhade and Dylan.
Heh. Even with the throwing-of-arms-round-shoulders being dropped from the final cut. Bwee.
However, I do think you're exaggerating just a tad. Possibly because you're sexualizing their hand-to-hand combat. I mean, the bit when Telemachus has Dylan pinned? Hot, yes, but, uh, mostly about fighting.
Although they were still doing it, yeah.
And yea, sure you didn't intend that clip of Dylan throwing his head back in ecstasy while clutching a gun to be sexual. Uh huh. *g*
Pain. Not ecstasy. Pain.
Er, that suddenly sounds very kinky and no less sexual.
I should cut my losses here.
Yay, it's done! Congrats
*g* *hugs*
Yay! This vid made me happy
Re: Yay! This vid made me happy
Oh, it's not just for slashers. It happens with het, too. Seriously--you make a vid about two characters, and many, many people will assume you're 'shipping them.
(But also, the bit where Dylan grabs Rhades hand and forces him to reveal the hidden chess piece was slashy as hell *g*)
Well, yes. *laughing*
And, I think I need to send you feedback at some time when I'm not crashing 'cause it's 5AM.
Aww, get some rest. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
*actually watches the vid*
Very nice vid, anyhow, despite my ignorance.
Re: *actually watches the vid*
Rhade is played by Steve Bacic, who has played minor characters in dozens of shows, all of whom invariably die. (X-files, self-immolation. Smallville, fried by mutant-of-the-Pilot. Beastmaster, Earth: Final Conflict, Sentinel, Highlander, Millennium, Outer Limits, Dark Angel... more.)
Tyr is played by Keith Hamilton Cobb, of All My Children fame. And a few other things, but that's his main other role...
Re: *actually watches the vid*
"We need a good actor who will die in this first episode!"
No long term jobs there.
Re: *actually watches the vid*
I do highly suspect that he's often hired for his talent at dying, though.
And now, I'm not going to quote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. No, really, I won't.
I'm not much of a vid person...
The first time I watched it, I had only skimmed through the things you had written about it, past and present. I noticed a lot of things, but mainly, "I like this."
I watched it the second time after having found the lyrics and read some of your thoughts on it. About it being gen? No. Not with the whole cut to Sara, which definitely has romantic connotations and the assumption that it would be something Rhade would mind. The rest of it, though... if one thinks that they're not involved, maybe they could take at face value. Maybe.
The third time, I just watched for the enjoyment of it, and I noticed a few things. First of all, I had completely forgotten that Dylan actually took Rhade's hand to get the go piece. Right before Dylan picks up the picture, I loved the connection with Rhade's gaze just dropping, briefly on "secrets I will keep." On the surface, I got the impression that it was about loyalty and friendship/love and betrayal and Dylan's confusion. I still don't so much see the color symbolism (it all goes by so fast!), but I got a very good look at Rhade's character in a very condensed, all-together vid.
I hope that made some sense. *g* Because I very much enjoyed this vid, and I have no doubt that I'll be watching it again and noticing even more about it that I hadn't seen.
Re: *actually watches the vid*
This is Juls' evil underlign helping her...
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
But I'm not quoting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, am I? I said so...
vid reaction
(Anonymous) 2002-11-15 02:38 pm (UTC)(link)I really enjoyed your vid. You did a really good job of telling a story - and I don't even watch Andromeda, and I got a lot of the subtext that was going on.
Thanks! I hope your next projects go well!
-Tray
Re: I'm not much of a vid person...
About it being gen? No. Not with the whole cut to Sara, which definitely has romantic connotations and the assumption that it would be something Rhade would mind.
Oh, frell.
Maybe my mom will forget.
Maybe my mom will be okay with the fact that her lesbian daughter thinks everyone on the shows she watches is gay.
Re: vid reaction
Re: I'm not much of a vid person...
Re: I'm not much of a vid person...
Yeah.
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
You know, I was just reading a fic in which Dylan suffered from "Hornblower's syndrome," which meant the AG fields made him "seasick," so now I have images in my head of Dylan and Rhade in tricorner hats on a sailing ship ala the TNG beginning of Generations.
Or maybe he wears a black hat, like from Buffy? What kind of hats was Giles talking about? I always imagined hats like the Cat In the Hat had.
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
Uhm, I mean... Narf.
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
And why are all the Wishverse folk familiar with the metaphor?
no subject
don't worry about its classification- and certainly not about watching shows and exclaiming over the clear relationships.
my sister- v. straight- sits with me and watches mutant x- yelling 'just go have sex already, it'd make more sense! there is no story! they're all sleeping together!'
to paraphrase anyhow.
*g*
will show vid to a helpless- er, willing friend who has never seen the show and doesn't know about it- will get her opinion.
again, great job.
scy
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
The Wishverse people are stalking Giles. Or something.
Re:
*G* My mom will be cool. My mom will be cool. This is my mantra.
Re: This is Juls' evil underling helping her...
Well, clearly. I mean, who wouldn't? He's all hot and they're all horny.
Re:
that might help.
my mum would watch and say 'who are those people.'
father: 'is that andromeda, that thing you are rotting your brain with?'
reasons i try not to share my programs with padre.
scy
Oh dear.
http://www.rebeccasmusings.com/jmtorres/kryptnet.mov
anymore. Where is it now?
Re: Oh dear.
(For future reference--to save a vid to your hard drive:
Right-click the link on a PC, click and hold down on a Mac
From the menu that drops down, choose Download link to disk if you're in IE, Save link if you're in Netscape.)