Off the prompt "cuddles."

collecting sg vids to show my brother, am hitting some walls with imeem links now all go to myspace and youtube stuff is frequently DMCA'd and megaupload does not exist anymore.

anyway, stuff I totally want to show him and haven't found and would be super grateful if someone knew something I didn't like where the vidder went after abandoning LJ 6 years ago...

Codemonkey (McKay/Zelinka) by mousewrites and snarkitty (showed in 2007 vvc as non-premiere)

Teal'c, PI and Boom-de-yada by nibikko

Welcome Home by permetaform

I want to make another booze vid and complete that trilogy. I'm not sure where I'm going with it yet, though, because the sequence has been "we drink to get through the day" (Industrial Strength Tranquilizer), "my drinking has reached problematic levels" (I Drink Alone), so in terms of progression the third vid in the trilogy should be something like "I was on the wagon but I've fallen off again" or possibly "I'll just have one more but I can quit anytime." So I need a song on that theme and a fandom to attach it to. I'm avoiding thinking about the fandom that suggested itself last night by uh related incident below. Also I'm telling myself not to use "I'll just have one beer then I'll be right home" because it's by the Austin Lounge Lizards and I already used them for Industrial Strength Tranquilizer.

(Tony Stark had a conversation with me about my drinking last night, which was deeply disturbing and I think I hurt his feelings when I announced I wanted Steve instead. I mean, let's start with my Steve is already an independent personality in my head and I hadn't realized Tony was and I sort of hope he goes back to minding his own business because jfc. But also, he has an atypical perspective on drinking so I do not know how I feel about the advice he gave me.)(The two pieces of advice were: drinking had not made me feel better, so that was empirically a bad reason to have been drinking; and drinking was not why I felt bad in the first place, so I shouldn't beat myself up about it.)

The other trilogy I'm playing around with is uh, the one I hadn't realized wanted to be a trilogy. And I only have two parts of it bunnied. It's the dystopian trilogy; the final part would be the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel (there is paradise beyond the city walls) vid to "Woodstock." Either the first or second part would be "2000 light years from home," (I'm thinking first, it's the journey from here to the depths intro?) about when space exploration is mind-bending and breaking instead of exciting: like, Solaris, 2001, ha Planet of the Apes would fit on this list, Sunshine *might*, Alien, gosh, even Pitch Black, Event Horizon, Forbidden Planet, maybe Mission to Mars (which, like Solaris, felt very 2001 to me, though it's worth noting Solaris the novel predates 2001, something I didn't realize when watching the 2002 film), possibly parts of Farscape, maybe a smidgeon of the pilots in Dune. I'm still pulling this concept together; it's like, space horror, but a specific corner of space horror that overlaps with some other things? And then I have no idea what the song or theme of the middle vid should be; logically it would be a "when things have gotten as bad as they can possibly get" piece, but I need a specific genre pull that resonates with me a certain way. Even if it looks amorphous to outsiders. I'm sort of considering declaring "Dancer," the Tron/women refusing to be objects vid bunny, to be the middle one, but there's ways it doesn't fit (The Killers are not 60s psychedelic rock; it's not a lowest of low concept, it's a fighting back concept). On the other hand, it's in a angry feminist critique continuum with She Walks, to which the Woodstock vid was originally going to be a the spiritual successor.

Actually, I've just had an idea for the specific genre/trope of the third one (thought process: was contemplating David Bowie's song about 2001, then David Bowie in the Man Who Fell to Earth): the dystopic aspects of society on Earth, paranoia and distrust that when well-meaning aliens end up here, it goes badly for them or people who help them (like, the turn around FLIP from the outgoing journey in 2000 Light Years). Still need a song, but my brain is starting to pile up films: ET, god the whole hazmat suit sequence in ET, Man Who Fell to Earth, District 9, The Day the Earth Stood Still, things like K-Pax and 12 Monkeys and Martian Child might be relevant, Starman (ha, I was trying to figure out why my mother like that one, she's not usually a scifi fan, but Jeff Bridges really), Flight of the Navigator, parts of Close Encounters. I might even start putting in specific interpretations of the Frankenstein mythology, where the "monster" is justified and the villagers have pitchforks (The Island?). No idea what song I would be using for the detained/lab rat/distrust. Well, I know what ~5 years of material I need to be listening to.

So niqaeli and I found that two songs, which we had learned from vids, helped us greatly in not completely losing our minds during the third season of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Whenever we found ourselves compelled to ask, "Why is there a train crossing on the penis balcony" or other similar questions, we determined that the answer was A Metaphor Is a Glorious Thing.

Whenever her efforts to set Akio on fire with her mind seemed inadequate, or there were suddenly a surplus of little red convertibles, or, randomly, a carrot coming out of Touga's head, it cheered us greatly to sing, Too Many Dicks On the Dance Floor! (too many dicks!)

In related news, it turns out what I thought was my season 3 Utena pack is actually an entire series pack. So my season 1 + movie and season 2 packs are superfluous. Would anyone be interested in buying them for like, I dunno, $5 a season + shipping? They're the old versions, not the new remaster versions, but they still go for like $40 and they're pretty bright and shiny (it is not like Utena is a monochromatic or dull show). ETA: CLAIMED.

A fun-filled weekend of fun has been had! And it's still a holiday tomorrow!

On Thursday night after niqaeli got off work, we drove out to LA to visit echan and jetpack_monkey. An all-night trip; we hoped to get there before the morning rush so I left 21 minutes from the end of the first episode of BBC's Sherlock, which traykor had put on while niq was still at work. Because those 21 minutes might actually matter to whether the freeways were totally clogged or just impenetrably labeled. Never mind spoilers, imagine being 3/4 of the way into any iteration of any Sherlock Holmes story and having to walk away. We arrived on echan's doorstep and despite being dead tired, I asked if we could put it on (I figured we'd watch it from Netflix, turns out they own the DVD). So we did. I have now seen Sherlock. Whoo.

On Friday, niqaeli and I slept in weird bits on and off but not at the same time as one another mostly, and echan came out as genderqueer on the internet, which I had known about for some time and niqaeli hadn't and wow, it was a relief to be on the same page as my braintwin finally. (jetpack_monkey's reaction, which echan IMed me about a couple weeks ago, was an adorable sleepy "Not that surprised. Still my echan." *heart* He is a sweet husband.) Also on Friday, we went out for sushi! At some point, we watched the Tik Tok vid for vampire Nikola Tesla from last year's Club Vivid and I explained in detail what was going on for echan, who has seen about five Sanctuary episodes, out of order. There was dinner from their favorite 24-hour delivery service because apparently most things in downtown LA close at like, six (including Starbucks! I've never known a Starbucks that closed that early!). Then the household (which also includes diannelamerc and lizbetann) decided to watch Being Human UK while niq and I variously went to sleep and passed out. Naturally, having fallen over before midnight, I woke up at about one in the morning and put some Dresden Files on (I watched three episodes! I remember what happened in some of them! I laughed at Netflix's description of Harry as ethics-challenged, because he seems to have a fairly strong personal ethical code to me! but maybe he fails it up later? who even knows).

On Saturday I did not wake at six in the morning like niq, who had fallen down and stayed down instead of Netflixing in the middle of the night, but I did manage to pull myself out of couch for trip to Little Tokyo with her and echan. I had a honeydew melon smoothie, then we went to bookstore and niq got lots of origami paper, then we had enormous bowls of noodles and niq forgot that my tolerance for alcohol is significantly lower than hers, so yes, half a bottle of sake will get me tipsy.

After that we went to Santa Monica: I had expressed interest in beach (any beach) and niq wanted to go to British import shops/a restaurant for tea in the area. Both beach and tea were lovely. Like, half an hour on the freeway + forty minutes finding parking + a good ten minutes of walking across the deepest beach on the coast to dunk myself in the ocean for fifteen minutes (priceless). Neither niq nor echan came in more than knee-high with me (though I full-body hugged echan when soaked to hear zir squawk), both feeling that the water was much too cold for my shenanigans, and it was cold? but I'd been expecting it to be cold and had sort of over-anticipated it so it wasn't as cold as I actually thought it would be? So for me it was pleasant. And wave-diving is fun. Mostly if you dive under waves right it rolls over you and you come back up behind it a few seconds later. Once I hit my dive wrong and got tossed around in the turbulence of the breaker a bit more and came up laughing in glee, so much so that I startled a woman nearby that I hadn't known I'd washed up next to into laughing with me. I, I sometimes forget other people are there when I'm staring out at the wild, wide ocean. On a wading beach, no one much comes out as far as me (you have to be waist-to-chest deep to get waves big enough to dive under), and also I have sort of um. Great transcendental fierce pagan joy that possibly puts me in an altered state with the ocean? Although part of that is wave-diving related endorphins. Even when you do the dive right, you end up with sore shoulders, and when you're standing there letting the little ones hit you waiting for the big ones, you end up with sore thighs. The ocean's like, big. It's all-encompassing and humans are so tiny and you get a bit battered. Endorphins: apparently I was kind of stoned for tea.

(For the record: it is possible I am not a traditionally sane person. Don't try this at home?)

I have always thought I would like to live by the sea. I think I must be part selkie. And I currently live in a desert and my families of blood and choice both live here so I don't know if I'll ever leave, really. But we fantasized about everywhere we would have residences if we won the lottery during tea and I think having a villa on the Mediterranean would be nice.

After that, we went to see My Chemical Romance. Apparently people had been standing in line since like, noon, and so we got there after the line had gone in, around eight, resigned to standing nowhere near the stage but frankly okay with with having done other things besides camp out for the show. echan noted that the mass of people in front of the stage was very tightly packed and not moving at all, no one leaving for drinks or food or bathroom or anything, fairly completely impermeable. Then during the opening number Gerard Way went crowd-surfing and I yelled in zir ear, "Now you know why." They'd been waiting for their opportunity to touch him.

Since I am apparently incapable of not snarking to the internet, I tweeted a fair amount during the show. Er, so I have a twitter account? It is decontextual, I um. Never mind. Here:

[Re the opening act] "Get that girl up onstage, I'm gonna eat her!" "Performance would probably be improved by onstage cunnilingus."
Friendly fans. At top of stair letting people coming up pass before I go down. A dude hugs me and says I smell nice. Seems stoned not scary.
The song "the only hope for me is you" sounds slightly less creepily psychotic when sung in concert to fans.
As per your request: you're a bad bad bad bad man, G-way. #mcr [I actually like House of Wolves a lot, but hahahaha I just. Watching him crawling all over the mic stand...]
"you ready *mumble*" is part of the song permanently in performance??? #mcr [re "Vampire Money"]
E says re Destroya: they burned the dictionaries first? #mcr
Okay sometimes I enjoy them unironically. #mcr [Re Teenagers]

Lost my bet on what their encore would be; they went back to Black Parade to close out the show rather than pulling out Sing.

We tried to go to a bar with food after the show, but that didn't work out well. We ended up getting food from Famima!! which I wish we could have in Valley of Hell, but wiki says they closed like half their test sites and now exist solely in downtown LA. Then we fell down.

Come Sunday morning, brunch was delivery, much hugging was hugged, and niq and I got on the road about 1:30. We plotted many terrible things to do to Ivan on the way, which also involved doing terrible things to Gregor. Having Illyan in my head is oh, my God, a trip and a half. *flail* I cannot even describe. Eventually there will be fic. I hope. The shortish snippet I was going to try for wants to be about 8-12K because Ilyan's going to cross-reference everything. Cry. Yay. Something.

My calves, my thighs, and my shoulders are all sore and tired. When I lay down I can feel my legs vibrating. When I get up it hurts. Muscle aches everywhere. I mean, I was expecting this? Walking, walking in sand, swimming, more walking in sand, more walking, standing at a concert for two and a half hours, then driving several hours will do that to you. (Interestingly my legs didn't hurt while I was driving, only when I stopped. Yet I kept stopping to stretch them out, because I was afraid they would like, calcify in driving stance.) Also that whole paragraph up there about endorphins is pretty hilarious to me now. But I've almost entirely gotten my hearing back after only a day! (Concerts. Concerts are loud.)

Plotting for future trips in both directions proceeds apace. OCEAN. In related news: I am interested in becoming a touring fangirl and driving to visit people I have met on the internet. Contemplate this entry and imagine all the fun you could have with me!

Lists are almost as good as doing things. Because lists help me figure out what to do.

house
--cooking food. I've decided the cooking of food, esp for immediate/next day eating, counts as doing things around the house. Relatedly, the dishes
--taking books back to main library (since this will also clean up the back room a lot)
--laundry
--building the CD shelves
--taking trash and/or recycling out
--mopping/vacuuming
--mending clothes

stab the cat
--go to bank and set up checking account
--go to camera place to look at potential equipment
--budget spreadsheet
--clothes sorting for costume budget
--lyric writing and storyboarding
--pulling the particle accelerator .wavs for sampling
--location scouting
--building the landsail

writing
--I don't know what to put here other than writing. It just needs to get done. I mean, I could list stories, but that doesn't seem useful
--although I was considering writing up things about my yuletide fandoms now as I reread them. btw this year: all out of print books. And possibly Girl Genius as the safety

vidding
--get lyrics and music to n and d for glee vid
--video n and d singing glee vid for lip sync reference
--get clean copies of Enterprise blooper reels for T'Pol adorbs
--...possibly reacquire Enterprise vidding copies. damn it
--force self to rewatch Adam Worth episodes
--finish cleaning the TV ads out of the s1 Sanctuary clips
--and also I just have to sit down and vid

homework
--NOTHING RIGHT NOW
--although possibly I should talk to my advisor. DNW.

I, I think my fannish brain is back online? My finals are all over except the waiting (the only class that hasn't graded stuff yet is the only one where there was any question what my grade was, DAMN IT). But I am out from under stress mountain in terms of needing to do stuff and not feeling guilty for sleeping for the first time in like, two months.

In the interest of getting some fannish (& house) stuff done, I am making myself the following daily to-do list for the summer. I will spend a minimum of one hour a day on the following, in this order of priority:

--homework, unless I'm absolutely completely caught up on homework, nothing available to get ahead on
--housework (cleaning, sorting, unpacking)
--plotting the music video (writing, storyboarding, budgeting, scouting, building the land sail)
--writing fanfiction (an hour or 300 words)
--vidding

In other news, fannish things in my brain lately:

Vorkosigan. I probably won't be writing the White Collar/Vorkosigan time travel story, but there's a chance reference to it may fall into Secret Agent Ivan 'verse, because Illyan turned The Vanishing Man into a psych test problem. In the fast-penta interrogation Neal said he was a time traveler, by which the interrogators concluded he was delusional, but fairly high functioning, since he hadn't tried to claim it without fast-penta. Then he vanished out of a cell without a trace. The psych test is to ask the testee how he did it, hand them any data they want, and see how long it takes them to get to, "Well, maybe time travel is possible?" Too fast, and they're too credulous for ImpSec work. Too slow, and they're too inflexible. Miles is the only one who came up with data to ask for that ImpSec had not actually collected. Ivan got handed the problem unofficially when he was fifteen or so, and later on when he was tested for Service aptitudes officially at the Academy he blew threw it a little fast. Later Illyan asked him if he'd forgotten how the test worked or was just trying to fake incompetence. And this is Ivan. It was totally to fake incompetence.

Ivan-muse is annoyed with me for brainstorming about wee-him, it's harder for him to weasel out of. *grin*

Today the "Diplomatic Relations" bunny woke up in my head, which is the one where Serg's mother survives childbirth but sadly her mothering doesn't actually make Serg saner since her life has made her kind of shit at connecting, so thirty years later she kills Serg personally, thus bypassing the necessity whole Escobaran War fiasco. So when Aral meets Cordelia, under similar circumstances to Cordelia's Honor, the War Party is still banging the gong for war but without really having the most influential member they did and not having the emperor handing the rope to hang themselves, so Aral feels free to say "fuck it" and just open diplomatic relations with Escobar. My brain was running around "what would be marginally different about Aral and Cordelia's meeting" and the answer is, he's afraid this is a succession thing. With Serg no longer in the picture, an attempt on Aral's life is much more likely to be related to Imperial Succession. He's also kind of terrified that when they get back to civilization there'll be news that the boy Gregor has been killed and he needs to go wrest power back from whoever was trying to kill enough people close to the throne to get in. So he's actually laughing his ass of in relief when it turns out to be a War Party thing.

Sanctuary. I have an active Sanctuary plotbunny and an active Sanctury vid. The plotbunny is *facepalm* terrifyingly idfic, wherein ( s1/s2 spoilers )

Okay, everyone raise you hand if your get why this is idfic. grey_bard didn't, because he's not using his power for evil, right? Hilariously, niqaeli is so telepathic with me that not only did she get it right away, she started telling me his stance on powers before I had gotten to it.



I'm also working on a vid about Helen's exes/stalkers. It's to a JoCo song, and last night I became concerned that the visuals were not over the top enough for the song. On close review, it would appear Nikola is totally over the top enough, but I may need to hunt for more Johnny. echan told me he comes off looking reasonable aside from the murders, which makes Helen look judgmental for rejecting him. Ha. Haha. Oh my god. Fannish logic, you guys.

I have about 1520% of a vid and Johnny's smug face is mocking me. I keep cracking up. This is good for me.

You know what might be better for me?

Sleep.

Just sayin'.

PS The hunt for Sanctuary betas will be hot shortly.

ETA: My god, there's a lot of women pulling guns in this. Should I call it a motif or just admit that the vid is 90% Helen pointing a gun at people (and 10% Ashley pointing a gun at people)?

E's Otherwise
07-Ghost
Galaxy Railways (2?)
Gintama
Darker than Black?
Sakura Wars?
Planetes

So I'm um. Constructing vid source for a book series out of anime. At present I am actually mostly shopping uniforms; I have a sufficient number of soldier characters to cast that you know, I really ought to get them matching? Later I'll look for other things. Anime Characters Database unexpected boon--you can search by like, hair and eye color.

I seem to be gravitating towards the pointy chin, tiny nose, ENORMOUS EYES anime style. Galaxy Railways looks like it might be too realistic to match other footage, but it has SPACE, so I'm hanging onto it for now.

I am trying to walk the line between "so rare it's impossible to find copies" and "so popular even I've heard of it and viewers will recognize it and get thrown out of constructed reality."

Um. Yes.

ETA: okay, going nowhere in vid, but I am totally adopting this lady as the illustration to philomytha's story Grey. And then Ivan's head exploding a lot.

Pro animation software that usually runs $500-1200 currently selling for $10-$40 with the catch that the company has to hit the quota where this becomes financially viable before they hand out licenses (if they don't hit their mark, they will refund everyone). I figured, this would be a good tool to have in my kit, professionally and with some of the vidding ideas I've been contemplating trying lately, so I went ahead and dropped $40 on it.

Do you ever just wanna whip out the clip from the due South blooper reel where they're like 'Brace yourself.' 'I think he likes you too, Ray.' 'UNH' (about 2 minutes in) and stick it in everything?

I am 2/3 of the way through my class, and 38 seconds (plus intro and topper) done with my festivid. I will not stay up another three hours for either of those. I did write some notes down on the vid to help keep track of which bits go where in sequences since I've decided to vid out of order...

I'm about 24% done with the vid by timeline so maybe by Wednesday or Thursday I'll have a full draft, which will at least give me a day or so for beta? Oh my god, I'm terrified I'm not going to have enough footage. Must finish throwing what I have at the timeline before I freak out about that, because honestly, so far ACTUAL problem has been "OH NO THIS INSTRUMENTAL STRETCHES ON FOREVER wait what do you mean that's only about five clips worth? I can't do that amount of story in five clips!"

*FLAIL* OH MY GOD VID

Raise your hand if you want to be on a festivids filter and be in the know about my subject matter so I can flail more specifically.

I have no good way of looking up vids being made during the run of X-Files, since vidding fandom was still mostly vcr in that era. So does anyone recall if anyone did a vid to the Byrds' Mr. Spaceman? (I found a slideshow on youtube, and while in general I feel this counts as a vid, it is not quite what I am asking about.)

There appears to be a French graphic novel adaptation of Warrior's Apprentice.

YOU GUYS. VISUAL SOURCE.

SOMEONE KILL ME IN THE FACE NOW.

ETA: I MAY HAVE PURCHASED IT. AND ALSO A COUPLE OF THE NOVELS IN FRENCH. DAMN YOU AMAZON.FR. Because what I really deeply need is to reacquaint myself with a foreign language by reading books I've memorized, for a ridiculous I don't even want to talk about it price.

I will say I like a lot of the French covers better. OH MY GOD I DO NOT NEED TO COLLECT THE SET.

There IS a canonical riding crop.

Dear show: stop giving me everything I ask for, it's creepy.

I went on a song search re niqaeli's current favorite thing, Sorcerer's Apprentice, and I appear to have instead discovered that across three decades, [artist's redacted]'s snark is a match for [character redacted]'s in an entirely different fandom which I may or may not be vidding for festivids--for a treat if nothing else.

Hey, does anyone else vid from bed? I just moved my desk over expressly for that purpose--possibly this is a function of me and deadlines and "I can keep working if I don't have to be upright for it." But bafflement has been offered by two of my hausmates, so I'm wondering, am I completely atypical?

Every time I go to work on the White Collar vid I get sucked into "It's so pretty!" Which is partly the principles' faults and partly that I'm far enough removed from when last I was working on it--I laid this part of the track down last December (AND I'M STILL NOT JOSSED)--that instead of being frantically insecure I can appreciate my own artistry. See how he jerks his head on "deftly"! Whoever made this was smart! Yeah. And, I mean, I'm remastering, so I get to appreciate exactly how, technically, I caused that effect (some speed changes I wasn't expecting and wouldn't notice otherwise! I'm badass).

Why is everything all tangled up in memory, and in record? I had the urge today, because I keep getting comments on Boy King, to check how close it was to Long Spear (Boy King has a ways to go, the counts stand 82 to 113, but I keep getting comments on Boy King drifting in!) and in the process I looked at what last year's Vividcon was like for me (so boozy) and found a comment of sympathy someone left about my brother, and all of the post Vividcon entries I wrote had the element of start-of-school stress (I work long hours start-of-school) but also my brother's tragic failure to cope and--

The things I make and write fannishly, vids, fiction, meta, are always connected to, reflections of, marked by, my real life and emotions. I can never go back and just look at the vid I made or the story I wrote, I also end up going back and finding who I was then. And maybe it's an effect of how and why I create or maybe it's just that I'm always in a pressure cooker, but every time I do this I think of that line from Fight Club, you met me at a very strange time in my life.

I have echan's vid stuck in my head, and I don't even have a copy of her draft to watch here. Very frustrating!

festivids is being mirrored from festivids! It is now possible to participate without wandering over to LJ! I am very happy. I think I might play this year.

Stuff other than Final Cut and Quicktime I use in the course of vidding on my mac (and forget the names of between vids sometimes)

(most of these do way more than I do with it, yay multitools)

--MacTheRipper, for directly-off-the-dvd-minus-DRM rips (as opposed to transcodes)
--MPEGStreamClip--multipurpose, the two big things I do with it are fix broken timecode on DVD rip files (this is another form of DRM) and switch containers on final files for the interwebs (the free/trial DivX codec I use in Quicktime for my interwebs encodes pops out a .divx file, but I prefer to put that data in a .avi container, because that's like, fandom standard)
--xACT--converts .flac files to .aiffs or .wavs, which are more Final Cut friendly

And then of course codec packs so Quicktime and therefore Final Cut will read .avi episode files the internet provides (and if I didn't have that particular neead I would just watch everything in VLC):
--Perian (if you use mac's ichat videochat Perian interferes with it, but other than that is brilliant)
--DivX for making fandom-friendly interwebs final vid files (from Quicktime, because for some reason it doesn't play nice directly with Final Cut, even though in theory Final Cut is built on and has all the capabilities of Quicktime)

I am probably forgetting some things I use. There's something I don't need every time, like FFMpegX was the app we used to get a semi-useable file out of a very old realmedia file for remaster last year (and echan, if MpegStreamClip doesn't do what you want to your .flvs, you might try FFMpegX).

I have been burning the candle at both ends, hit the ground running at six thirty in the morning, never off work on time because it's goddamn rush season, all week long. And it's only Wednesday Thursday, and my classes start tomorrow some four hours after I have to get up, and next week I am working until 9 every night per schedule.

I keep thinking of entries I want to write and never being at a computer to write them. I want to write vidding meta. There was a entry in my head today about how vidders (ones I know anyway) choose songs, and how some songs are obvious to everyone and some are only obvious in retrospect once the brilliant vid is made. And I keep thinking about writing up some really basic Final Cut stuff, because things like markers OMG SO USEFUL yet news to some friends.

Anyway, since I am failing at getting those entries started on my own, I would like to put it out there, is there any part of vidding as a process or my vids in particular that you would like me to talk about? I am now taking questions from the audience. seperis, I am looking at you.

This is not a vid I made for Vividcon, this is a vid I made (primarily) at Vividcon. It's taken me a couple of days to finish it up because, you know, work, real life, family, and so forth, but I started paper-vidding on the plane to Chicago Thursday evening and it was 80% on the timeline when I left the badfic reading Sunday night. If you saw me vidding at con? This is what I was working on.

Vid: I Drink Alone
Vidder: jmtorres
Fandom: Leverage
Song: by George Thorogood
Warnings: Gunshot including muzzle flash; brief blood; five frame clips at 24fps (slightly longer than 1/5 of a second); alcoholism; jump cuts.
Summary: Manpain is funny.

Download link (please right-click/save-as): I Drink Alone (28.7MB avi) (link updated 24 March 2019)

( embedded from youtube )

Most modern vidders primarily release vids online, and if that's the only place you release, this probably doesn't apply to you. But if you ever release vids to be viewed on a television screen (like a DVD of your vids) or to be projected (such as at a convention), you should know about Action Safe Lines and Title Safe lines.

Televisions do not display the entirety of the frame. This is standard and accepted. Hollywood media is filmed/taped with the expectation that not everything at the edges will be seen--not that things at the edges shouldn't be clean, but that if something important is going on at the edge of the screen, it needs to be drawn in a little bit to make certain it will actually be seen.

The "Action Safe" line is 10% into the frame (5% from each side). We're even more cautious about making sure text won't fall off the edge, so the "Title Safe" line is 20% into the frame (10% from each side). Professional editing software will display those guides for you--for example, in Final Cut, you can show the Action and Title Safe guides on the Canvas window by going to menu:View>Show Title Safe or by clicking the button on the top of the Canvas window that looks like the corners of a box and from the drop-down menu selecting Show Title Safe. "Title Safe" is not just a Final Cut term, it is an industry term, so if you have a searchable help menu for your editing software, you can search for it.

If your software doesn't have a way to show the guides automatically, it's a fairly simple calculation. If your frame is, say 720x480, you want to make sure your text is at least 72px from the sides and 48px from the top and bottom.

Here is an image of the Action Safe and Title Safe guides displayed on the Canvas window in Final Cut: ( Read more... )

And that is how you position your credits to be certain they will be visible on television and at con.

I made a vid. It premiered at Vividcon tonight.

Title: The Boy King
Vidder: jmtorres (with an assist from niqaeli)
Fandom: Supernatural
Song: Sheep Marketing Ploy by Tom Smith
Warnings: Dude, it's Supernatural. Specific warnings here.
Summary: Sam Winchester, the Death Sheep from Hell.

Download link (please right-click/save-as): The Boy King. (27MB avi) (Link updated 18 April 2019)

( embedded on youtube )