The Making of the Yuletide Vid
Oct. 27th, 2009 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thingswithwingsLast year, eruthros and I released One Night Fandoms: A Tribute to Yuletide, which was a labour of love showcasing all the things that we love about the challenge. But it took us a little over eight months to make it, looking at so many different fandoms that we actually lost count.
Now that Yuletide is rolling around again, we've been getting nostalgic about the making of the vid. And thanks to googledocs, IM conversations, and my digital camera, we have a record of the whole process. I thought I'd make a Making Of post, talking about all the hilarious things that happened and all the stuff we learned in those eight months - mostly for my own archival purposes, so that I can reminisce about the experience at one handy place. But with copious cut-tags for your reading pleasure, if you want to hear about it! Just be warned that there are some images and embedded videos under the cuts.
eta: I just wanted to mention, as well, that I feel kind of ashamed about the number of times we use the words "crazy" and "insane" in the IM conversations and stuff . . . that's ablist language that I am now attempting to keep out of my mouth, but that I wasn't thinking about at the time, so I'm sorry for it. /eta
a Googledoc called "Hilarious Things We Did/Said While Making the Yuletide Vid
. . . this list is sadly quite incomplete. But here are some hilarious things. Note: #13 contains major spoilers for The Wire.
1) We went to an lj community that was talking about Full House and asked for a specific imagined BDSM scene from the show as if it were real and we had just forgotten it. This didn't work, but we did end up finding the imaginary scene anyway.
2) I torrented the 59th Annual Emmy Awards
-eruthros: "Well, I'd really prefer the 58th, I think they have better footage."
-twings: "Okay, so I'm torrenting the emmys to make this vid. But what I want to know is, why are the other people on the torrent trying to download the emmys from two years ago?"
3) We watched the Care Bears films for porn footage outdoors on the porch
4) We occasionally realised how far gone we were:
-eruthros: "Hey, is Monty Python a YT fandom?"
-twings: "Well, at the very least, there must be Monty Python RPS on Yuletide, right? I mean, we do have standards!"
5) I watched Julie Andrews musicals looking for dirty pictures:
-twings: "I almost clipped the "everyone on the bed" scene from The Sound of Music, when they're doing A Few Of My Favourite Things. Then I hated myself."
6) We started to feel like "fast forwarding through a show" was the same as "watching" it:
-eruthros: "I downloaded 1776 looking for Jefferson/Hamilton slash. I downloaded it, and I even watched it!"
-twings, horrified: "You watched it?"
-eruthros: "No!"
7) Made shit up:
-eruthros: "Look, I swear to you, there is no pillow fight in Dead Poet's Society."
-twings: "No, there totally is!"
-eruthros: "They smoke pipes, they jump around in circles, they play the drums and the saxophone, but they don't have a pillow fight."
-twings: "There is! I can see it in my head! ... oh my god."
-eruthros: "What?"
-twings: "I think there might be a pillow fight in the DPS fic I wrote for Yuletide a few years ago." *goes to check* "Uh, yeah. There's a pillow fight here."
-eruthros: "I'm taking the last twenty minutes of my LIFE back from you."
8) We watched children's shows WAY too closely:
-eruthros: "No, Tigger doesn't like honey."
-twings: "See, because Tigger is the representative of the homoerotic who comes in and tells Pooh to stop it with the yonic honeypot symbols, and offers his tail instead, which he flirts out from under the table at Pooh."
-eruthros: [long pause]
-twings: "Tell me I'm wrong."
-eruthros: ". . . I can't."
it's true, she can't:
9) The project basically compressed fandoms into three-day highs of "yay fandom!" "okay done."
-twings: I could've taken YEARS watching all this stuff. The good parts, at least.
-eruthros: Right! I've compressed years of fannish life into months. I have no idea what I'm going to do in hiatus next year. Usually, I watch something from 1984 that everyone told me was awesome. But now I've seen that. We'll have to swap lists.
-twings: right, that'll be the answer! This is like your friend who got the clit piercing. And was like YAYYYYYYY for a short time, and now the rest of her life, she's just sitting around.
10) We began to feel personally responsible for uncooperative footage:
While watching the end of Independence Day, we're hoping for some good smoke-and-swagger for the end of the vid. Only it's all one shots! As Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom start getting emotional about impending death:
-eruthros: come on, shake hands or something!
*they shake hands ... but their hands are out of frame, and therefore unviddable for our purposes*
-eruthros: NOOOOO! I blame me.
-twings: You have to be more specific! You've ruined everything!
11) To the extent that I sometimes talked as if the footage was my child:
-twings: "Do you want me to put you in uncooperative footage? Is that what you want? Go to your room!"
12) Eruthros spent way too much time looking at Napoleonic-era sources:
-eruthros: "Jesus, the Sharpe producers have a thing for the younguns getting whipped. I keep accidentally finding, like, sixteen year old ensigns being flogged. And then the officers will say things like "lay it on him hard, man! and keep it above his trousers!" And I'm like "oh god"
-twings: "Great homosocial but nonphysical love + lots of young men getting whipped + clearly homoerotic evildoers. Awesome."
-eruthros: "I KNOW. I mean, mostly it's the evil officers who don't understand battle who order the floggings. But the camera is not under their command, and need not linger so."
13) We used cynicism to our advantage!
-eruthros, watching The Wire: "Omar and his boyfriend don't ever kiss. Or hug. Or, like, touch. But I'll keep looking."
-twings: "Not to be cynical, but . . . just try skipping ahead to the episode where Omar's boyfriend gets killed. I bet they make out in that one." [N.B.: THIS TOTALLY WORKED.]
how we selected fandoms, and some of the ridiculous places we went to find them
Generally, we had RULES about what kinds of fandoms could be in the vid - they had to be proper Yuletide fandoms in our eyes. Like, in the first year rare pairings were allowed for big fandoms, and so technically Angel: The Series is a Yuletide Fandom (in the sense that it's on the quicksearch page that lists all the fandoms that have been written), but we weren't going to put Angel in, obv. So if something had only been a YTF (yuletide fandom) the first year and then got too big, or sometimes if there was only one story for it (we tried to go for the medium-popular YTFs so that more people would recognize them), or if it had only ever been written as a crossover pairing, we didn't let it in. And, for the most part, we also tried to only vid characters and pairings that people had written about - so while I desperately wanted to put Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the "childhood-ruining" section of the vid, we couldn't, because the only TMNT fic on Yuletide is about Shredder. Which is weird, there really should be TMNT orgy OT4.
And for a long time it was really hard to think of fandoms to fill our needs, because we're so used to culling examples from big fandoms - we know Buffy really well, and X-Files, and SGA, and due South, and so on, and so one of us would say "we need a shot of a kiss on the cheek" and the other one would say, "Oh, how about that episode of . . . uh . . . The Sentinel . . . never mind." But eventually we trained ourselves to think mostly of films and tv shows we watched in the eighties or that we'd never seen discussed in fandom, as an automatic reflex. Which is why when we got to the hugs section, I was like, "Let's use Drop Dead Fred!" rather than "Let's use Buffy!" There were fandoms we especially wanted to get in the vid because they were famous yuletide fandoms (the first things I downloaded were Care Bears and Sesame Street, and the first things eruthros downloaded were Penny Arcade and Peanuts), fandoms we recruited for specific purposes ("I think Animal House has paddling in it!" "Look, Terminator is a Yuletide fandom, I'm using it to fill the hole in the sex scene montage"), and fandoms that fell somewhere inbetween.
Here's a picture I took of our big board of fandoms - but bear in mind that we didn't make this board until we'd already vidded half the vid. We made the board to remind ourselves of the fandoms we had yet to vid, and to suggest categories they might fit under - the smoking montage, the doors-closing montage, the BDSM section, etc.
Even with this stringent criteria, though, the list of fandoms grew pretty quickly - when we started out, we were saying "sixty, maybe eighty fandoms," and by the end of the vid, well, it was 191, plus probably another 50 or 100 that didn't make it into the vid in the end. It happened like this, according to googledocs:
CURRENT FANDOM COUNT:
118 I just did a recount. Um. -eruthros 8/27/08 7:21 PM // Okay, you're right, we need to stop adding fandoms. FOR REALS THIS TIME. -twings 8/27/08 8:28 PM
128 FAIIIIIIIIIL -twings 8/29/08 10:16 PM
132 FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIILLLLL
137 SO MUCH FACEPALM -twings 9/14/08 4:59 PM Did you seriously just add, like, FOUR MORE fandoms to your side? -eruthros 9/14/08 8:59 PM // I was weak! -twings 9/14/08 10:53 PM
140 FYI? 140 fandoms now. Counting Casanova and Blade Runner. -eruthros 9/15/08 9:55 AM
142 okay, I added "Threesome," but only because we already knew we were using it and it wasn't on the list for some reason. PS, we're INSANE. -twings 9/17/08 9:19 AM
148 I have no idea what you're talking about. Also, I added Captain Blood. -eruthros 9/17/08 5:25 PM
151 Dude, how did we not notice that BOUND is a yt fandom? -eruthros 9/18/08 11:27 PM //
WHAT? I go away for a few days and you add another four fandoms for yourself? We are so dead. -twings 9/24/08 8:42 AM // Hey, no, not just for me! Notice that I also added Bill and Ted for you. Also, it's largely because I donwanna watch some of the still unstarred things. PS: I added Mad Men, since I'm watching it anyway. -eruthros 9/24/08 11:01 AM
166 AH HA HA HA HA. And to think it's mostly stuff you just added because you'd already clipped it. -eruthros 10/4/08 2:02 PM
. . . after that, we stopped keeping count in that googledoc, possibly because there really was no way of stopping new fandoms from getting into the vid.
Here are a few more pictures of our organizational aides:
places we went for source:
The problem was that these are obscure fandoms, a lot of them! So for example the anime fandoms in particular suffered, because neither of us knows anime that well, and the obscure ones are often not findable in download communities (at least the ones with which we're familiar and where we have memberships), on torrents, or even on netflix. So I had to get what anime I could from netflix, four episodes at a time, which really slowed the process down and eventually meant that there was less of an anime presence in the vid than there is on yuletide. But in some cases we were able to get creative:
1) we used blooper reels and making-ofs and DVD extras and documentaries for footage: the Escaflowne music videos on the DVDs, the Red Dwarf and Indiana Jones making-of featurettes, the Black Books blooper reel, a random Sherlock Holmes documentary about how Holmes and Watson are BFFs . . . although IIRC eruthros went through SEVERAL different iterations of the Sherlock Holmes movies before she hit on the Granada TV series.
2) we spent SO much time at gametrailers.com , because the game trailers there are actually in hi-def downloadable video files. This is why we were able to get Penny Arcade into the vid - because at the time we were vidding, the Penny Arcade game wasn't out yet, but they had released a trailer. We were quite proud of managing to find moving-images of a still-image fandom. I spent literally hours watching Final Fantasy and Zelda retrospective editorial videos on gametrailers.com as well, which was a lot of fun for me because I loved those games as a teenager - but was also rather silly, as a vid source.
3) We enlisted the help of fans we didn't know: I asked one person on youtube about her Red Dwarf vid ("where did you get that extended kiss footage!") in order to learn about the making-of DVD; we got permission from a Calvin and Hobbes fan who made a C&H animation, that we found on youtube, to use his animation in our vid (another "moving images of still-frame fandom" problem); we used VHS-rips of The Babysitter's Club that someone was kind enough to post at our request.
4) Up until mid december, there were still placeholders in the vid, footage we'd downloaded from Youtube. I think that was the case with Hornblower, and Hercules, and something else as well. Because if something was at least up on youtube, we could look at it and figure out whether we wanted to put it in, and then order a DVD from netflix with confidence that it would work - often, if something wasn't available anywhere for download or pre-viewing (netflix instant watch was also useful for this) we didn't have the time to order one 4-episode DVD at a time to go through something HOPING for a helpful shot.
What this boils down to, though, is that this vid could not have been made ten years ago - heck, even five years ago! - at least, not in the form it's in here. We were only able to blast through the number and variety of fandoms that we did because of cable internet bandwidth and download communities/torrent sites, plus things like netflix and youtube.
a slightly more serious part: things we learned about race, representation, media and fandom
1) We learned that people of colour are actually filmed differently, in terms of framing, than white people, or at least this was our anecdotal experience; it was often easy to get two white characters, especially two white male characters, in the same frame, but people of colour are by comparison much more isolated, cinematographically - often appearing in one-shots. This is how eruthros felt DESPAIR trying to get Jeremiah into the vid, because even though Kurdy and Jeremiah are BFF save-the-world-together types, they seldom get to share a frame even when they're fistbumping. And the problem with this vid is that we seldom had enough space to give any fandom more than one shot - in a lot of cases, fandoms got 17 frames and that was it, so we couldn't use two oneshots in place of one twoshot.
2) And even when people of colour get to have kisses, it's often framed differently - mostly, the camera is much further away, and you don't get closeups. When we vidded the first chorus, just putting together kisses that looked the same in terms of framing and blocking, we ended up with an all-white kissing montage; we had to go back and edit it to be a little less uniform aesthetically in order to make it less whitewashed. Although, unsurprisingly, it was very easy to get people of colour in on the sad line just following the chorus - "just touch my cheek before you leave me" originally had Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar, Pembleton from Homicide: Life on the Street, and Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and coming after the all-white kisses it sort of felt like a section called "people of colour are SAD!" This is a story about how easy it is to make a racist piece of art without ever intending to do any such thing. So, the big change we made there was Homicide, which went from a sad clip to a happy clip (more on that later), and putting in RENT (which we had to zoom the heck in on), and so forth. But yes: people of colour are often visually segregated from white people on tv, and since there aren't a lot of shows with lots of people of colour on them, this often means they're visually isolated as well.
3) We learned that fandom squicks us out sometimes. See, the thing was, we were trying to make the vid as wide-ranging as possible, with gay boys and lesbians and transgender folks and het makeouts, with people of all different races/ethnicities, etc. And combinations thereof - which is why The Wire is in the vid twice, because it was the only source we could find where two men of colour make out and two women of colour make out. So anyway, eruthros took it upon herself to go through the yuletide archive for characters of colour, looking up every single yuletide fandom that had moving pictures on imdb. And she found that there wasn't a great amount of people of colour, and what there was was Western media - so there is, I think, only one Bollywood film in Yuletide (Sholay!), and other than anime, very few films produced in Japan or China or Korea, etc. But the part that really weirded us out was that, over and over again, she would find a fandom with POC in it, and get excited, and then learn that the fic on yuletide didn't focus on the POC. Oh look, she'd say, a tv show starring Gina Torres! A cool fandom-actor of colour is the main character in this show! And it's a yuletide fandom! But . . . Gina Torres's character isn't in the fic. Or there'd be a show or a film even with more than one POC, even, but nonetheless the focus of the fic would be overwhelmingly on the white characters. This happened over and over and over again, well past the point of coincidence.
This is why I don't believe people who say that fandom doesn't have its own race problems, that it's just echoing the race problems of popular media. Because yes, it's one problem that POC don't get represented nearly enough on TV, and/or don't get represented positively - it's a whole nother problem that, when they do, we don't write about them. Anyway, this isn't really news, but it certainly brought this problem of systemic, institutionalized, often-invisible racism in fandom home to me.
some talk about Homicide: Life on the Street, which became my nemesis briefly
There are a lot of sources that vexed me or eruthros at various points, but I think Homicide is the only one where I ended up spitefully clipping unusable footage because the show had been mean to me. The thing about Homicide is that it's not just "these characters don't ever hug" it's like, "these characters are offered hugs and REFUSE in order to demonstrate how Pembleton and Bayliss can never have love." Like this:
Or like this:
I swear, I watched all six seasons of Homicide that have Frank Pembleton in them, plus the movie, looking for SOMETHING happy happening between my Homicide OTP. (I eventually found 17 frames we could use.) The truth is that they are NEVER EVER HAPPY. Sometimes they touch, like, when one of them is CRYING. And then even when they DO manage to touch one or the other of them gets immediately angry and is like, "don't touch me." So one of the things I was on the lookout for was smoking scenes, because everyone on the show smokes constantly and we were doing a smoking montage at the end of the vid, and indeed there is one great scene where Bayliss inhales the smoke from Pembleton's mouth (but it didn't work for our limited-time-frame purposes, and also b/c of the actors' height difference it didn't fit when we clipped it from 4:3 to 16:9). ANYWAY, there I am looking for something where one of them lights the other's cigarette or something, and what does the show deliver but:
IT IS AS IF IT WANTED TO VEX ME PARTICULARLY. Anyway, that kind of thing happened a lot with Homicide. As evidenced by this IM conversation:
stories about how we fell accidentally in love with fandoms while trying to clip them
(these bits contain spoilers for the fandoms being discussed)
eta: Bear in mind that we were often going through these fandoms in fast-forward, that eruthros watched Sholay for the first time while sitting in an airport waiting for a plane (that's the conversation below), that we never did figure out which Full House uncle is which, that eruthros referred to every character in Toy Soldiers as "Billy, or possibly Joey," and generally that we weren't exactly stopping to engage with these fandoms in depth. That's to say that the name of the awesome lady in Sholay who dances on glass is actually Basanti, that the main dude of Angel Sanctuary spells his name Setsuna, and probably there are other errors in here as well. It's not that we didn't love these fandoms - just that we loved them so fast that we often didn't stop to be careful about the names, especially in our IM conversations. I leave the typos as they are, though, because they make me feel fondness - aw, I loved that show so much, and didn't even know the major characters' names! Such was the process of creating the yuletide vid. /eta
I got rather into Angel Sanctuary, while eruthros discovered Hustle:
It's true that, for every fandom we fell in love with, we fast forwarded through ten others - and, as the deadline approached, we started fast forwarding even the fandoms that we liked:
And eruthros also fell pretty hard for Sholay, as she later posted:
Anyway, that also happened over and over, the three-day love-affair with a new fandom. It was quite exhausting, really.
as a result of loving our little fandoms so much, we put in all sorts of little in-jokes that are probably only noticeable to us
-like the fact that, in the "baby baby baby baby" section (which is intentionally a bunch of iconic yuletide fandoms with uncooperative footage - I'm looking at you, The Simpsons) we put the Neil Gaiman fandom and the Terry Pratchett fandom next to each other. So it's Discworld and then Neverwhere. This is mostly because there IS Neil Gaiman RPF on yuletide, and we spent a bunch of time looking for Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett footage, but couldn't find any. So it made us happy to put their fandoms next to each other, like secret Neil/Terry slash
-like the place in the second chorus, where the Pride and Prejudice Colin Firth kiss is followed immediately by the Bridget Jones's Diary Colin Firth kiss, the original and the transformative nearly indistinguishable from each other
-like the fact that, in the "threesomes" section in the second chorus, there are actually two Ben Stiller threesome scenes in a row (from Keeping the Faith and Zoolander)
-like all the actors who bizarrely kept recurring - all B-list quasi-fandom actors: Keanu Reeves is in the vid twice, Paul Bettany is in the vid three times, Julie Andrews is in there twice (would've been three times if there was only Victor/Victoria fic on Yuletide! Sigh!), Owen Wilson is in twice, Stephen Fry is in twice (although we could've had him in four times - in addition to Jeeves & Wooster and Wilde, which are in the vid, we looked at QI and Blackadder). And there were actors who ended up only being in the vid once, but who kept showing up in our source - Angelina Jolie, James Spader, Donald Faison, Emilio Estevez, Wil Wheaton, there were a bunch. We expected to run into, like, Callum Keith Rennie and Johnny Depp all the time, but didn't, and so it was weird when it was just James Spader all over the place
-like the time we were editing the BDSM section at the end, and I was all for putting in the thing from Gladiator where Joaquin Phoenix tortures Russell Crowe, but then realised that it would have to go right next to the Quills clip where . . . Joaquin Phoenix tortures Geoffrey Rush. Jeez, Joaquin.
-like the section that we called "long-term porridge," or sometimes "long-term historical porridge," which began because we didn't know what to put on the lyric "maybe the sun's light will be dim, but it won't matter anyhow." We eventually decided that it could be for fandoms where maybe things are sad but people are together anyway - and those pairings ended up being the Age of Sail and Victorian ones, Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Hornblower and Sharpe and Lawrence of Arabia and Master and Commander. The "porridge" designation came because, originally, the best Horatio Hornblower clip we could think to put in was this one of Horatio feeding Archie porridge, I kid you not. And then the Sherlock Holmes clip that we had to go with it was one in which it really looked like Holmes was dead and Watson was covering him up. You should all be glad that we eventually found better clips, and that there were no dead consulting detectives and no porridge in the final version. Because early on, it looked like this:
and sometimes we had technical problems
1) eruthros's computer was, at the time, quite old and infirm, and at some point in mid-november, when we were in the most crucial stage of vidding, her power cord decided to start dying. But in order to replace the cord, the company said she had to mail it to them - and thus she'd be without her computer for several days. So she had to put it on a chair, tape the cord in place, and NOT MOVE THE COMPUTER EVER, in order to wring a little more life out of it, and transfer clips to my computer VERY CAREFULLY via external drives/flash drives.
2) In mid-September, my external drive Also George, which had been holding allllll the vid stuff I had so far, decided to die. Just, die. I was so upset I wrote angstfic about it. And then I had the harrowing experience that all people who don't back up their data must suffer - I sent it in to the place, and they gave me an estimate, and I shelled out in order to recover the data. (Thankfully, there was workstuff on there too, so I got the university to cover half the cost of the data recovery). When they returned it to me, I backed things up FANATICALLY. Although it meant that I had to buy a few new external drives, which was quite a process. I found this in the IM archives:
. . . which actually doesn't have much to do with the vid, but does amuse me. Since this post is now a billion words long, it doesn't seem to matter much.
but mostly we had fun: excerpts from emails
twings: PS, I checked: Lenny and Carl do NOT slow dance in the Simpsons movie. They are in the background, and Lenny has his arm around Carl's shoulders, while Marge and Homer slow dance in the foreground. That wikipedia page is a lying liar.
eruthros: Okay, so you wanted to know why we had Top Gun on the list. And I
figured it out. EVEN IF THAT MEANT WATCHING TOP GUN.
Note: without the flight scenes and the Tom-Cruise-in-a-lecture-hall
scenes? The movie appears to be approximately 30 minutes long. I
watched it in 18 or so on fast forward.
Also note: I stripped the sound here BE GRATEFUL. Tom Cruise is icky
enough without, you know, 80s ballads.
eruthros: MEGAN. Shakespeare and Marlowe are never in the same FRAME in
Shakespeare in Love! It's all shots over each other's shoulders! I am
distraught! [NB: we were going to use this for RPF Shakespeare/Marlowe]
twings: OMG, we were so ROBBED. Because, okay, I had the best idea EVER: CASANOVA. It's a sexy movie with David Tennant! And an amazing queer female character! And seven thousand one night stands! AND YET IT IS NOT A YULETIDE FANDOM, I AM SO UPSET. HENCE THE CAPSLOCK.
Because, Claire, it would've been so perfect! Just. So perfect. But no.
SADFACE
[NB: this is what I ended up requesting, and receiving, for Yuletide last year. Yay!]
twings: okay
Bringing Up Baby is HILARIOUS. I laughed and laughed all the way through the film. AND I desperately want a reel_sga AU of it. The plot hinges around lost dinosaur bones and escaped leopards and yes, Cary Grant DOES totally rock that negligee. As would Rodney McKay, were he in the Cary Grant role (which he would be).
ETA: oh god, there TOTALLY ALREADY IS an SGA AU to Bringing Up Baby. DANCE
eruthros: So, okay, now I can tell you that K and J touch exactly THREE TIMES in
Men in Black 1. And one of those times they are covered in bug goo.
Life is hard.
twings: H:LotS continues to be a show where people talk a lot. I can see why Gianduja put it in A Little Less Conversation - it is the king of that.
[talk about overlays]
PS I WISH I COULD CHOOSE MYSELF
FRANK AND TIM CAN NEVER HAVE LOVE
eruthros: Jeremiah continues to be a show where people talk a lot that I watch
in fast-forward, but let me tell you: there are few things in the
world that are more hilarious than the episode I am currently
watching-in-fast-forward, where Luke Perry plays Jeremiah and JASON
PRIESTLY plays some, like, evil warlord or something that captures
them and wants to convert Jeremiah and Kurdy to his side. Jason
Priestly and Luke Perry have intense conversations at each other while
wearing flak jackets. It's like Beverly Hills Post-Apocalyptic.
Yuletide Madness: how we foolishly decided to change the vid at the last minute on the 24th of December
So, we'd finished the vid by the tenth or eleventh of december, or something, and eruthros had flown to California for the holidays (throughout the process of making the vid, we lived a block away from each other, which is helpful). But then on like the 23rd we both were confronted with the urge to include a fandom that we had previously forgotten about:
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/23/08
I have now moved entirely into the regrets portion of the post-vid-making time. Because I just watched Waldo's "Polka Party," and realised, my GOD, we should've had M.A.S.H. in the vid! What's wrong with us omg.
what's wrong with meeeeeeeeee
TO: twings
FROM: eruthros
12/23/08
YOU ARE CRAZY
AND SO AM I
now I also want to know why we didn't look at MASH, because someone on
my flist JUST NOW embedded this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjeAKrmu
AND look at how it parallels the Sholay AND the Psych! With the same
hand-on-head! THANKS, asshole flister, don't you know I can't see any
source right now?
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/24/08 9:49 AM
so far this morning, some minor setbacks with the MASH - the mkv wouldn't open in mpeg streamclip, nor would it work in my mkv converter program, because it hadn't been tracked properly or something, who even knows. But I managed to export it to avi using good old quicktime pro/perian - omg yay perian - and get it to dv. Then the dv aspect ratio wouldn't export right, no clue why actually, but I managed to get to the right aspect ratio eventually. now I am trying to figure out which part of the hug to use - because while I agree that the bit that looks like psych is beautiful, there's also the bit where they come together, full-body, from the side, which is so pretty and would be a nice transition to the angel sanctuary. anyway, you probably won't be up for another few hours, I'm guessing, so I'll play around in final cut and maybe make a few different versions, and then we'll see where we're at.
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/25/08 10:39 AM
I henceforth declare this the end of the yuletide gmail thread! though, knowing us, probably not.
But it's all uploaded as of 9:30ish (I forgot that imeem takes for-ever to upload). It's on fanvidders and vidding and yuletide and my journal omg done. COLLAPSES
TO: twings
FROM: eruthros
12/25/08 10:43 AM
I declare us DONE! FOR REALS THIS TIME.
that squeaky-door sound at the end of the vid
Pretty early on, I had the idea to put the shot of the Care Bear opening the door again after the credits, and so when we had vidded the whole thing we put that in, and realised that it needed some sort of door-opening sound to go with it (especially since I had clipped the Care Bears films with the sound stripped out, and those DVDs had long since been returned to netflix).
We spent literally hours surfing around the web and listening to halloween-style creaky door noises before I remembered that, hey, my back door squeaks! This is so typical of both of us, trying to find a digital sound file online rather than thinking to just record a door ourselves. So anyhow, eventually this solution dawned on us, and thus the sound at the very end of the vid is the porch door on my old apartment, recorded on my laptop one late night after lots of vidding. I like that a lot; I think about it whenever I watch the vid. It's like a marker of how much the vid was grounded in my life, of how the vid was such a big part of my life for a long time.
There's so much that comes rushing back to me when I go through these old IM conversations and look at the clips that I clipped last year; every one of those 191 fandoms in the vid, plus all the fandoms that didn't make it into the vid, comes with its own story, has its own history with me or eruthros. Yuletide was, for eight months last year, our way of looking at the world - there were few things we watched or saw mentioned or noticed on downloads communities that didn't make us stop and say, "hey, is that a yuletide fandom? Can we vid it?" Any conversation about favourite childhood books, multivids, old tv shows - automatically became a conversation about how to get those beloved little fandoms into the vid.
Looking back on it, I can't believe that we did it.
eruthros and I released One Night Fandoms: A Tribute to Yuletide, which was a labour of love showcasing all the things that we love about the challenge. But it took us a little over eight months to make it, looking at so many different fandoms that we actually lost count. Now that Yuletide is rolling around again, we've been getting nostalgic about the making of the vid. And thanks to googledocs, IM conversations, and my digital camera, we have a record of the whole process. I thought I'd make a Making Of post, talking about all the hilarious things that happened and all the stuff we learned in those eight months - mostly for my own archival purposes, so that I can reminisce about the experience at one handy place. But with copious cut-tags for your reading pleasure, if you want to hear about it! Just be warned that there are some images and embedded videos under the cuts.
eta: I just wanted to mention, as well, that I feel kind of ashamed about the number of times we use the words "crazy" and "insane" in the IM conversations and stuff . . . that's ablist language that I am now attempting to keep out of my mouth, but that I wasn't thinking about at the time, so I'm sorry for it. /eta
a Googledoc called "Hilarious Things We Did/Said While Making the Yuletide Vid
. . . this list is sadly quite incomplete. But here are some hilarious things. Note: #13 contains major spoilers for The Wire.
1) We went to an lj community that was talking about Full House and asked for a specific imagined BDSM scene from the show as if it were real and we had just forgotten it. This didn't work, but we did end up finding the imaginary scene anyway.
2) I torrented the 59th Annual Emmy Awards
-eruthros: "Well, I'd really prefer the 58th, I think they have better footage."
-twings: "Okay, so I'm torrenting the emmys to make this vid. But what I want to know is, why are the other people on the torrent trying to download the emmys from two years ago?"
3) We watched the Care Bears films for porn footage outdoors on the porch
4) We occasionally realised how far gone we were:
-eruthros: "Hey, is Monty Python a YT fandom?"
-twings: "Well, at the very least, there must be Monty Python RPS on Yuletide, right? I mean, we do have standards!"
5) I watched Julie Andrews musicals looking for dirty pictures:
-twings: "I almost clipped the "everyone on the bed" scene from The Sound of Music, when they're doing A Few Of My Favourite Things. Then I hated myself."
6) We started to feel like "fast forwarding through a show" was the same as "watching" it:
-eruthros: "I downloaded 1776 looking for Jefferson/Hamilton slash. I downloaded it, and I even watched it!"
-twings, horrified: "You watched it?"
-eruthros: "No!"
7) Made shit up:
-eruthros: "Look, I swear to you, there is no pillow fight in Dead Poet's Society."
-twings: "No, there totally is!"
-eruthros: "They smoke pipes, they jump around in circles, they play the drums and the saxophone, but they don't have a pillow fight."
-twings: "There is! I can see it in my head! ... oh my god."
-eruthros: "What?"
-twings: "I think there might be a pillow fight in the DPS fic I wrote for Yuletide a few years ago." *goes to check* "Uh, yeah. There's a pillow fight here."
-eruthros: "I'm taking the last twenty minutes of my LIFE back from you."
8) We watched children's shows WAY too closely:
-eruthros: "No, Tigger doesn't like honey."
-twings: "See, because Tigger is the representative of the homoerotic who comes in and tells Pooh to stop it with the yonic honeypot symbols, and offers his tail instead, which he flirts out from under the table at Pooh."
-eruthros: [long pause]
-twings: "Tell me I'm wrong."
-eruthros: ". . . I can't."
it's true, she can't:
9) The project basically compressed fandoms into three-day highs of "yay fandom!" "okay done."
-twings: I could've taken YEARS watching all this stuff. The good parts, at least.
-eruthros: Right! I've compressed years of fannish life into months. I have no idea what I'm going to do in hiatus next year. Usually, I watch something from 1984 that everyone told me was awesome. But now I've seen that. We'll have to swap lists.
-twings: right, that'll be the answer! This is like your friend who got the clit piercing. And was like YAYYYYYYY for a short time, and now the rest of her life, she's just sitting around.
10) We began to feel personally responsible for uncooperative footage:
While watching the end of Independence Day, we're hoping for some good smoke-and-swagger for the end of the vid. Only it's all one shots! As Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom start getting emotional about impending death:
-eruthros: come on, shake hands or something!
*they shake hands ... but their hands are out of frame, and therefore unviddable for our purposes*
-eruthros: NOOOOO! I blame me.
-twings: You have to be more specific! You've ruined everything!
11) To the extent that I sometimes talked as if the footage was my child:
-twings: "Do you want me to put you in uncooperative footage? Is that what you want? Go to your room!"
12) Eruthros spent way too much time looking at Napoleonic-era sources:
-eruthros: "Jesus, the Sharpe producers have a thing for the younguns getting whipped. I keep accidentally finding, like, sixteen year old ensigns being flogged. And then the officers will say things like "lay it on him hard, man! and keep it above his trousers!" And I'm like "oh god"
-twings: "Great homosocial but nonphysical love + lots of young men getting whipped + clearly homoerotic evildoers. Awesome."
-eruthros: "I KNOW. I mean, mostly it's the evil officers who don't understand battle who order the floggings. But the camera is not under their command, and need not linger so."
13) We used cynicism to our advantage!
-eruthros, watching The Wire: "Omar and his boyfriend don't ever kiss. Or hug. Or, like, touch. But I'll keep looking."
-twings: "Not to be cynical, but . . . just try skipping ahead to the episode where Omar's boyfriend gets killed. I bet they make out in that one." [N.B.: THIS TOTALLY WORKED.]
how we selected fandoms, and some of the ridiculous places we went to find them
Generally, we had RULES about what kinds of fandoms could be in the vid - they had to be proper Yuletide fandoms in our eyes. Like, in the first year rare pairings were allowed for big fandoms, and so technically Angel: The Series is a Yuletide Fandom (in the sense that it's on the quicksearch page that lists all the fandoms that have been written), but we weren't going to put Angel in, obv. So if something had only been a YTF (yuletide fandom) the first year and then got too big, or sometimes if there was only one story for it (we tried to go for the medium-popular YTFs so that more people would recognize them), or if it had only ever been written as a crossover pairing, we didn't let it in. And, for the most part, we also tried to only vid characters and pairings that people had written about - so while I desperately wanted to put Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the "childhood-ruining" section of the vid, we couldn't, because the only TMNT fic on Yuletide is about Shredder. Which is weird, there really should be TMNT orgy OT4.
And for a long time it was really hard to think of fandoms to fill our needs, because we're so used to culling examples from big fandoms - we know Buffy really well, and X-Files, and SGA, and due South, and so on, and so one of us would say "we need a shot of a kiss on the cheek" and the other one would say, "Oh, how about that episode of . . . uh . . . The Sentinel . . . never mind." But eventually we trained ourselves to think mostly of films and tv shows we watched in the eighties or that we'd never seen discussed in fandom, as an automatic reflex. Which is why when we got to the hugs section, I was like, "Let's use Drop Dead Fred!" rather than "Let's use Buffy!" There were fandoms we especially wanted to get in the vid because they were famous yuletide fandoms (the first things I downloaded were Care Bears and Sesame Street, and the first things eruthros downloaded were Penny Arcade and Peanuts), fandoms we recruited for specific purposes ("I think Animal House has paddling in it!" "Look, Terminator is a Yuletide fandom, I'm using it to fill the hole in the sex scene montage"), and fandoms that fell somewhere inbetween.
Here's a picture I took of our big board of fandoms - but bear in mind that we didn't make this board until we'd already vidded half the vid. We made the board to remind ourselves of the fandoms we had yet to vid, and to suggest categories they might fit under - the smoking montage, the doors-closing montage, the BDSM section, etc.
Even with this stringent criteria, though, the list of fandoms grew pretty quickly - when we started out, we were saying "sixty, maybe eighty fandoms," and by the end of the vid, well, it was 191, plus probably another 50 or 100 that didn't make it into the vid in the end. It happened like this, according to googledocs:
CURRENT FANDOM COUNT:
118 I just did a recount. Um. -eruthros 8/27/08 7:21 PM // Okay, you're right, we need to stop adding fandoms. FOR REALS THIS TIME. -twings 8/27/08 8:28 PM
128 FAIIIIIIIIIL -twings 8/29/08 10:16 PM
132 FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIILLLLL
137 SO MUCH FACEPALM -twings 9/14/08 4:59 PM Did you seriously just add, like, FOUR MORE fandoms to your side? -eruthros 9/14/08 8:59 PM // I was weak! -twings 9/14/08 10:53 PM
140 FYI? 140 fandoms now. Counting Casanova and Blade Runner. -eruthros 9/15/08 9:55 AM
142 okay, I added "Threesome," but only because we already knew we were using it and it wasn't on the list for some reason. PS, we're INSANE. -twings 9/17/08 9:19 AM
148 I have no idea what you're talking about. Also, I added Captain Blood. -eruthros 9/17/08 5:25 PM
151 Dude, how did we not notice that BOUND is a yt fandom? -eruthros 9/18/08 11:27 PM //
WHAT? I go away for a few days and you add another four fandoms for yourself? We are so dead. -twings 9/24/08 8:42 AM // Hey, no, not just for me! Notice that I also added Bill and Ted for you. Also, it's largely because I donwanna watch some of the still unstarred things. PS: I added Mad Men, since I'm watching it anyway. -eruthros 9/24/08 11:01 AM
166 AH HA HA HA HA. And to think it's mostly stuff you just added because you'd already clipped it. -eruthros 10/4/08 2:02 PM
. . . after that, we stopped keeping count in that googledoc, possibly because there really was no way of stopping new fandoms from getting into the vid.
Here are a few more pictures of our organizational aides:
places we went for source:
The problem was that these are obscure fandoms, a lot of them! So for example the anime fandoms in particular suffered, because neither of us knows anime that well, and the obscure ones are often not findable in download communities (at least the ones with which we're familiar and where we have memberships), on torrents, or even on netflix. So I had to get what anime I could from netflix, four episodes at a time, which really slowed the process down and eventually meant that there was less of an anime presence in the vid than there is on yuletide. But in some cases we were able to get creative:
1) we used blooper reels and making-ofs and DVD extras and documentaries for footage: the Escaflowne music videos on the DVDs, the Red Dwarf and Indiana Jones making-of featurettes, the Black Books blooper reel, a random Sherlock Holmes documentary about how Holmes and Watson are BFFs . . . although IIRC eruthros went through SEVERAL different iterations of the Sherlock Holmes movies before she hit on the Granada TV series.
2) we spent SO much time at gametrailers.com , because the game trailers there are actually in hi-def downloadable video files. This is why we were able to get Penny Arcade into the vid - because at the time we were vidding, the Penny Arcade game wasn't out yet, but they had released a trailer. We were quite proud of managing to find moving-images of a still-image fandom. I spent literally hours watching Final Fantasy and Zelda retrospective editorial videos on gametrailers.com as well, which was a lot of fun for me because I loved those games as a teenager - but was also rather silly, as a vid source.
3) We enlisted the help of fans we didn't know: I asked one person on youtube about her Red Dwarf vid ("where did you get that extended kiss footage!") in order to learn about the making-of DVD; we got permission from a Calvin and Hobbes fan who made a C&H animation, that we found on youtube, to use his animation in our vid (another "moving images of still-frame fandom" problem); we used VHS-rips of The Babysitter's Club that someone was kind enough to post at our request.
4) Up until mid december, there were still placeholders in the vid, footage we'd downloaded from Youtube. I think that was the case with Hornblower, and Hercules, and something else as well. Because if something was at least up on youtube, we could look at it and figure out whether we wanted to put it in, and then order a DVD from netflix with confidence that it would work - often, if something wasn't available anywhere for download or pre-viewing (netflix instant watch was also useful for this) we didn't have the time to order one 4-episode DVD at a time to go through something HOPING for a helpful shot.
What this boils down to, though, is that this vid could not have been made ten years ago - heck, even five years ago! - at least, not in the form it's in here. We were only able to blast through the number and variety of fandoms that we did because of cable internet bandwidth and download communities/torrent sites, plus things like netflix and youtube.
a slightly more serious part: things we learned about race, representation, media and fandom
1) We learned that people of colour are actually filmed differently, in terms of framing, than white people, or at least this was our anecdotal experience; it was often easy to get two white characters, especially two white male characters, in the same frame, but people of colour are by comparison much more isolated, cinematographically - often appearing in one-shots. This is how eruthros felt DESPAIR trying to get Jeremiah into the vid, because even though Kurdy and Jeremiah are BFF save-the-world-together types, they seldom get to share a frame even when they're fistbumping. And the problem with this vid is that we seldom had enough space to give any fandom more than one shot - in a lot of cases, fandoms got 17 frames and that was it, so we couldn't use two oneshots in place of one twoshot.
2) And even when people of colour get to have kisses, it's often framed differently - mostly, the camera is much further away, and you don't get closeups. When we vidded the first chorus, just putting together kisses that looked the same in terms of framing and blocking, we ended up with an all-white kissing montage; we had to go back and edit it to be a little less uniform aesthetically in order to make it less whitewashed. Although, unsurprisingly, it was very easy to get people of colour in on the sad line just following the chorus - "just touch my cheek before you leave me" originally had Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar, Pembleton from Homicide: Life on the Street, and Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and coming after the all-white kisses it sort of felt like a section called "people of colour are SAD!" This is a story about how easy it is to make a racist piece of art without ever intending to do any such thing. So, the big change we made there was Homicide, which went from a sad clip to a happy clip (more on that later), and putting in RENT (which we had to zoom the heck in on), and so forth. But yes: people of colour are often visually segregated from white people on tv, and since there aren't a lot of shows with lots of people of colour on them, this often means they're visually isolated as well.
3) We learned that fandom squicks us out sometimes. See, the thing was, we were trying to make the vid as wide-ranging as possible, with gay boys and lesbians and transgender folks and het makeouts, with people of all different races/ethnicities, etc. And combinations thereof - which is why The Wire is in the vid twice, because it was the only source we could find where two men of colour make out and two women of colour make out. So anyway, eruthros took it upon herself to go through the yuletide archive for characters of colour, looking up every single yuletide fandom that had moving pictures on imdb. And she found that there wasn't a great amount of people of colour, and what there was was Western media - so there is, I think, only one Bollywood film in Yuletide (Sholay!), and other than anime, very few films produced in Japan or China or Korea, etc. But the part that really weirded us out was that, over and over again, she would find a fandom with POC in it, and get excited, and then learn that the fic on yuletide didn't focus on the POC. Oh look, she'd say, a tv show starring Gina Torres! A cool fandom-actor of colour is the main character in this show! And it's a yuletide fandom! But . . . Gina Torres's character isn't in the fic. Or there'd be a show or a film even with more than one POC, even, but nonetheless the focus of the fic would be overwhelmingly on the white characters. This happened over and over and over again, well past the point of coincidence.
This is why I don't believe people who say that fandom doesn't have its own race problems, that it's just echoing the race problems of popular media. Because yes, it's one problem that POC don't get represented nearly enough on TV, and/or don't get represented positively - it's a whole nother problem that, when they do, we don't write about them. Anyway, this isn't really news, but it certainly brought this problem of systemic, institutionalized, often-invisible racism in fandom home to me.
some talk about Homicide: Life on the Street, which became my nemesis briefly
There are a lot of sources that vexed me or eruthros at various points, but I think Homicide is the only one where I ended up spitefully clipping unusable footage because the show had been mean to me. The thing about Homicide is that it's not just "these characters don't ever hug" it's like, "these characters are offered hugs and REFUSE in order to demonstrate how Pembleton and Bayliss can never have love." Like this:
Or like this:
I swear, I watched all six seasons of Homicide that have Frank Pembleton in them, plus the movie, looking for SOMETHING happy happening between my Homicide OTP. (I eventually found 17 frames we could use.) The truth is that they are NEVER EVER HAPPY. Sometimes they touch, like, when one of them is CRYING. And then even when they DO manage to touch one or the other of them gets immediately angry and is like, "don't touch me." So one of the things I was on the lookout for was smoking scenes, because everyone on the show smokes constantly and we were doing a smoking montage at the end of the vid, and indeed there is one great scene where Bayliss inhales the smoke from Pembleton's mouth (but it didn't work for our limited-time-frame purposes, and also b/c of the actors' height difference it didn't fit when we clipped it from 4:3 to 16:9). ANYWAY, there I am looking for something where one of them lights the other's cigarette or something, and what does the show deliver but:
IT IS AS IF IT WANTED TO VEX ME PARTICULARLY. Anyway, that kind of thing happened a lot with Homicide. As evidenced by this IM conversation:
(10:48:51 AM) twings: I was just amusing myself with the idea
(10:49:01 AM) twings: that I should try to write a happy, 500-word
Pembleton/Bayliss story
(10:49:12 AM) eruthros: hahaha
(10:49:22 AM) twings: I think it would require amnesia
(10:49:24 AM) twings: or a crack au
(10:49:33 AM) eruthros: double-amnesia story
(10:49:38 AM) eruthros: where they think they're fry cooks!
(10:49:44 AM) twings: exaaaactly.
(10:49:47 AM) eruthros: It's like a crack AU wrapped
inside an amnesia story!
(10:49:57 AM) twings: aw
(10:50:08 AM) twings: the hilarious thing is, even in a happy
amnesia story, it would be tragic
(10:50:14 AM) twings: because they would eventually get their memories back!
(10:50:17 AM) twings: and be saaaaad.
(10:50:55 AM) eruthros: BUT maybe then they would quit
(10:51:01 AM) eruthros: and go be fry cooks together
(10:51:07 AM) eruthros: bickering about the eggs!
(10:51:10 AM) twings: . . . maybe?
(10:51:11 AM) eruthros: They saw a BETTER LIFE.
(10:51:25 AM) twings: "Gosh, Tim, I'm so glad we gave up all that
detective stuff to become fry cooks."
(10:51:33 AM) twings: "Me too, Frank. Merry Christmas!"
(10:51:36 AM) twings: I should just write that.
(10:51:47 AM) eruthros: .... YES.
stories about how we fell accidentally in love with fandoms while trying to clip them
(these bits contain spoilers for the fandoms being discussed)
eta: Bear in mind that we were often going through these fandoms in fast-forward, that eruthros watched Sholay for the first time while sitting in an airport waiting for a plane (that's the conversation below), that we never did figure out which Full House uncle is which, that eruthros referred to every character in Toy Soldiers as "Billy, or possibly Joey," and generally that we weren't exactly stopping to engage with these fandoms in depth. That's to say that the name of the awesome lady in Sholay who dances on glass is actually Basanti, that the main dude of Angel Sanctuary spells his name Setsuna, and probably there are other errors in here as well. It's not that we didn't love these fandoms - just that we loved them so fast that we often didn't stop to be careful about the names, especially in our IM conversations. I leave the typos as they are, though, because they make me feel fondness - aw, I loved that show so much, and didn't even know the major characters' names! Such was the process of creating the yuletide vid. /eta
I got rather into Angel Sanctuary, while eruthros discovered Hustle:
11:20:49 PM twings: okay, Angel Sanctuary = still the weirdest show ever.
11:20:54 PM eruthros: HA.
11:21:01 PM eruthros: What has happened since you last described it?
11:21:08 PM twings: I think Satsuna just destroyed Tokyo
11:21:14 PM twings: he had sex with his sister
11:21:19 PM twings: and then a bad angel found them
11:21:24 PM twings: and she threw herself in front of him
11:21:49 PM eruthros: ... destroyed Tokyo?
11:21:49 PM twings: and died, and so he freaked out and grew a third wing and destroyed tokyo
11:21:53 PM eruthros: That's a big step in a relationship.
11:21:56 PM eruthros: HA.
11:23:02 PM twings: it is!
11:23:07 PM twings: and now there's some other guy
11:23:11 PM twings: who I think is the same BFF guy from before
11:23:16 PM twings: and I guess we're getting his backstory?
11:41:14 PM eruthros: Back! Now with computer that runs ... at least a little better.
11:41:22 PM twings: hi!
11:42:12 PM eruthros: SO it was a good idea to clip drag!Mulan/whatsisname
11:42:21 PM twings: yes/
11:42:23 PM twings: ?
11:42:23 PM eruthros: Because as it turns out, their big romantic denoument with her in girl clothes?
11:42:35 PM eruthros: Involves standing next to each other while he turns a helmet over in his hands.
11:42:37 PM eruthros: I mean, wtf.
11:42:42 PM twings: jeez.
11:42:44 PM twings: c'mon.
11:55:30 PM twings: okay, so, on angel sanctuary: Kira is now the seven-bladed sword of the angry spirit
11:55:47 PM twings: but he got crushed by some debris when Satsuna destroyed Tokyo
11:55:56 PM eruthros: *snickers*
11:56:03 PM twings: should satsuna revive him with the amulet that the incredibly gay angel gave him?
11:56:16 PM twings: it's a puzzler
11:56:37 PM eruthros: I think he should!
11:56:45 PM twings: he's totally gay for him
11:57:04 PM twings: !!! but gay angel is now blaming sara mudo's death on kira
11:57:20 PM twings: to encourage satsuna to let him die
11:57:26 PM twings: don't listen, satsuna!
11:57:37 PM twings: don't use the power of the three wings!
11:58:19 PM eruthros: I have no idea what you're talking about.
11:58:30 PM twings: neither do I
11:58:50 PM eruthros: I probably can't do Improptu as a yuletide fandom since the only story was in 2004, huh?
11:59:09 PM eruthros: Er, Impromptu.
11:59:35 PM eruthros: (For George Sand, you see.)
11:59:50 PM twings: ahhhh
11:59:51 PM twings: probably not
11:59:55 PM eruthros: (Or, to put it another way, thinking about vidding Mulan made me sad about the lack of women in drag.)
11:59:57 PM twings: I think you have the vid-crazies right now
12:00:07 AM twings: I'll do Tipping the Velvet for you!
12:00:13 AM eruthros: Right!
12:00:23 AM eruthros: And there's the double-drag kiss of Hedwig.
12:00:48 AM twings: right.
12:00:52 AM twings: so, don't despair.
12:03:41 AM eruthros: Also, apparently there was new Heroes tonight.
12:03:55 AM eruthros: And I predict -- based entirely on what is outside of cuttags -- that it was awful.
12:04:15 AM twings: I haven't even watched last week's yet.
12:04:28 AM eruthros: GOOD.
12:04:32 AM eruthros: This is GOOD FOR YOU.
12:04:37 AM eruthros: Watch Angel Sanctuary instead.
12:05:29 AM twings: oh god, this is so typical of Angel Sanctuary: "Serafida! I've heard about you! You're the highest celestial being God created! You're the only adamcadamom who can manipulate time-magic!" "Indeed! I changed the flow of time and froze it just moments before the catastrophe, to make it seem nothing had happened."
12:05:39 AM twings: you're probably right that it is necessary.
12:05:49 AM eruthros: I have no idea what's going on there.
12:05:55 AM eruthros: Do you?
12:06:14 AM twings: yes, actually.
12:06:21 AM twings: it's a literal deus ex machina
12:06:47 AM twings: they invented a random new angel character to fix the fact that Satsuna destroyed Tokyo.
12:06:48 AM eruthros: ah.
12:06:52 AM eruthros: Handy!
12:08:08 AM twings: oh man, the translation is also great: "Where is Sara's soul?" "In Hades, the land of the dead." "Well y'know, I'm just gonna scoot on over there to look for Sara."
12:08:39 AM eruthros: That's awesome.
12:09:21 AM eruthros: Man, there's nothing like watching bad youtube vids to convince you that the show you're contemplating looking at has no redeeming qualities.
12:09:28 AM twings: srsly.
12:09:55 AM eruthros: I thought I'd look at that Hustle thing that there was a vividcon vid for
12:10:05 AM eruthros: Because there looked to be interracial boyslash.
12:10:09 AM eruthros: And, omg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of-eMlRbQ6A
12:12:40 AM twings: aw, there's a nice hug
12:12:53 AM eruthros: yeah, now I'm trying to track that down.
12:13:10 AM eruthros: I've discovered, among other things, an episode where Danny thinks Mickey is DEAD but then he's NOT.
12:13:17 AM twings: ahaha
12:13:17 AM eruthros: And he is all SAD and CONFLICTED.
12:13:30 AM eruthros: But nobody indicates whether there are hugs.
12:13:34 AM twings: oh, actually, you should try to find the episode where he puts his hand on the back of the other guy's neck.
12:13:49 AM eruthros: That sort of thing is nearly impossible to google, though
12:13:52 AM twings: true.
12:13:52 AM eruthros: Unlike hugging :)
12:13:59 AM eruthros: And it's FIVE seasons, apparently.
12:14:04 AM eruthros: British seasons, but still.
12:14:08 AM twings: what? who's ever even heard of this show?
12:14:14 AM eruthros: I don't even KNOW.
12:14:22 AM twings: oh, that explains why they both look like That Guy from That Thing. they're british actors.
12:14:26 AM eruthros: Yes.
12:14:32 AM eruthros: The white guy is the guy from LINDA.
12:14:35 AM twings: yes
12:14:39 AM eruthros: Or possibly the one about shoes.
12:14:45 AM eruthros: Anyway, a not-the-doctor episode :)
12:14:53 AM twings: no, LINDA, def.
12:14:57 AM twings: but I know the black guy, too.
12:15:10 AM twings: um
12:15:30 AM twings: Angel Sanctuary Update: to save Sara's soul from Hades, Kira must penetrate Satsuna's heart with a sword
12:15:32 AM eruthros: b/c he's Adrian Lester
12:15:32 AM twings: wtf
12:15:42 AM eruthros: He's actually moderately famous -- he was in The Day After Tomorrow
12:15:43 AM twings: Adrian Lester?
12:15:47 AM eruthros: As The British Guy.
12:15:56 AM twings: riiiiight
12:16:00 AM eruthros: And Primary Colors.
12:16:04 AM eruthros: Again, as The British Guy.
12:16:14 AM twings: I must've seen him in many things. I saw The Day After Tomorrow, but I didn't think I remembered it.
12:16:41 AM eruthros: Me neither.
12:16:46 AM eruthros: There were some hurricanes.
12:16:52 AM eruthros: And ice storms.
12:16:57 AM twings: I cried when the guy saved the Guttenberg Bible.
12:17:10 AM eruthros: awwww
12:17:35 AM twings: ahahaha, Angel Sanctuary: "Hey God, wait till you see what happens when you make a bunch of dopes angry!"
12:17:43 AM twings: it's like SGA in Japan with angels.
12:17:45 AM twings: and incest.
12:18:12 AM eruthros: ... omg, apparently in Hustle, Danny (white guy) and Mickey (black guy) challenge each other to who can do the best con in six hours starting from ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
12:18:21 AM eruthros: And so they start absolutely bare-ass naked.
12:18:22 AM twings: that sounds like so much fun.
12:18:27 AM twings: AHAHAHA
12:18:31 AM eruthros: YEAH.
12:18:32 AM twings: great!
12:18:36 AM eruthros: Sadly, unclippable
12:18:45 AM eruthros: (Too much other stuff in the frame
12:19:13 AM eruthros: SGA in Japan with angels, except it makes even less sense
12:19:53 AM twings: amazingly
12:20:07 AM eruthros: Seriously, I kinda want to watch this show now. BARE ASS NAKED.
12:21:04 AM twings: this is why this vid is BAD FOR US
12:21:09 AM twings: it gives us a hundred new fandoms!
12:21:14 AM eruthros: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26o_moUkXFw&NR=1
12:21:17 AM eruthros: It so does.
12:21:31 AM eruthros: Most of them, the first flush lasts all of ten seconds and then I hate them.
12:22:00 AM eruthros: So it's not a long term danger. :)
12:22:05 AM twings: true enough.
12:34:31 AM eruthros: Though, I mean, you did watch four seasons of Boston Legal
12:34:45 AM twings: I knooooooow
12:34:51 AM twings: I'll never get those brain cells back
12:35:03 AM eruthros: WOE.
It's true that, for every fandom we fell in love with, we fast forwarded through ten others - and, as the deadline approached, we started fast forwarding even the fandoms that we liked:
7:45:45 PM eruthros: Yeah, I plan to watch The Golden Compass v.v. fast-forwardy.
7:45:52 PM twings: right, good call.
7:46:23 PM eruthros: Fortunately, I've read the books, so I don't even have to deal with the establishing-the-characters part where you sometimes have to let bad movies play with the sound on at normal speed for fifteen whole minutes.
7:46:50 PM twings: yays!
7:47:05 PM twings: I can't believe I watched Dark is Rising all the way through like a CHUMP
7:47:16 PM twings: that was back when I watched things for this vid
7:47:17 PM eruthros: HA
7:47:19 PM eruthros: I know
7:47:22 PM eruthros: Man, those were the days
7:47:29 PM eruthros: We only had, like, fifty fandoms total.
7:47:32 PM twings: ha
7:47:34 PM eruthros: And we could watch things for reals.
7:47:35 PM twings: back in the golden times
7:47:37 PM twings: four months ago
7:47:48 PM eruthros: *nostalgic tear*
And eruthros also fell pretty hard for Sholay, as she later posted:
7:14:22 PM twings: I was thinking about looking at Deadwood
7:14:25 PM twings: except I don't want to.
7:14:31 PM twings: I could do Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
7:14:34 PM twings: I was going to do Ed Wood
7:14:40 PM twings: but then there's no good download, so . . . netflix.
7:15:13 PM eruthros: stupid netflixing slowing everyone down
7:15:27 PM eruthros: I have a bunch of stuff left to look at actually
7:15:49 PM eruthros: Ha, you want to look at Thoughtcrimes?
7:16:31 PM eruthros: *g*
7:16:55 PM eruthros: (srsly, this Sholay thing? still going on. It's longer than Lawrence of Arabia.)
7:17:21 PM eruthros: (Best line in the last ten minutes: "So I've been thinking ..." "you, thinking?" "Yes, and I was thinking, when you're into it, I'd like to do it." "Do it?"
7:17:41 PM twings: ahaha
7:17:42 PM twings: awesome
7:17:48 PM twings: I do not want to look at thoughtcrimes
7:17:49 PM twings: thank you
7:17:58 PM twings: WHY is Century Hotel not a yuletide fandom why.
7:18:02 PM eruthros: And the it, as it turns out, is "get married."
7:18:09 PM twings: sweeeet
7:18:20 PM eruthros: I don't know! Century Hotel should totally be a yt fandom.
7:19:25 PM twings: it has all the markings of a yuletide fandom
7:19:42 PM eruthros: By which we mean, David Hewlett's ass.
7:19:43 PM twings: gay scenes, fandom actor in it
7:19:49 PM twings: david hewlett's ass
7:19:55 PM twings: totally.
7:20:01 PM eruthros: And yet!
7:20:07 PM twings: there IS century hotel fic
7:20:12 PM twings: I have read of it.
7:20:16 PM eruthros: Me tooooo
7:20:34 PM twings: because, it would be so great to do that scene with thoughtcrimes.
7:20:44 PM twings: BUDDY, what must it be like to make a vid using any sources you can think of? Even if they weren't yuletide fandoms?
7:20:47 PM eruthros: It would represent Hewligan fandom.
7:20:49 PM eruthros: I don't know!
7:20:53 PM eruthros: It would be amazing!
7:20:57 PM twings: imagine!
7:21:01 PM eruthros: You'd be able to do anything!
ANYTHING, I tell you!
7:21:07 PM twings: anything; indeed.
7:21:19 PM eruthros: Oh no! Now they've captured Veeru and Basmanti!
7:21:29 PM eruthros: And they have Veeru chained up to kill him!
7:21:29 PM twings: will they escape?!?!?!
7:21:49 PM twings: . . . I like chains!
7:21:50 PM eruthros: And Basmanti (the girl) has offered the evil bandit a dirty dance to save Veeru's life!
7:22:08 PM twings: but he protests that her honour is more important than his life!
7:22:13 PM eruthros: EXACTLY.
7:22:25 PM eruthros: (I assume. The song had already started by that point, and the songs don't have subtitles.)
7:22:29 PM twings: right
7:22:35 PM eruthros: But now she's dancing
7:22:55 PM eruthros: And Veeru is SAD. AND chained up.
7:23:15 PM eruthros: But she's distracting all the bandits who were told to point their swords at Veeru and kill him if she tried anything.
7:23:19 PM eruthros: So I predict dramatic rescue.
7:23:41 PM twings: well predicted.
7:23:42 PM eruthros: The amazing thing, Megan?
7:23:52 PM eruthros: Is that Basmanti is like a size twelve or fourteen
7:23:56 PM twings: oooooh
7:24:11 PM eruthros: And nonethless is considered the most beautiful woman in the village.
7:24:13 PM eruthros: Oh no!
7:24:54 PM eruthros: Now the evil bandit has thrown glass at her feet to stop her dance so that he can have her and also kill Veeru because of how she broke her word!
7:25:06 PM eruthros: But she just danced right over it and now her feet are all bloody and she's fainting!
7:25:47 PM eruthros: But the sound of the gun being cocked makes her keep dancing.
7:25:55 PM twings: she is a HERO
7:26:03 PM eruthros: She is a hero!
7:26:15 PM eruthros: She has been dacing for like half an hour now in the hot sun.
7:26:45 PM eruthros: But she distracted them for long enough for Jai to come save them.
7:26:51 PM twings: hoorah!
7:26:58 PM twings: hey, I didn't know veronica mars was a yuletide fandom.
7:27:06 PM eruthros: It was in 2004, I think
7:27:12 PM eruthros: I don't think it's been one since
7:27:15 PM twings: 2004/2005
7:27:18 PM eruthros: Ahhh
7:27:42 PM eruthros: I think it's probably too big now
7:27:43 PM twings: I was trying to think of shows I like that have people of colour having sex
7:27:44 PM eruthros: Don't you?
7:27:52 PM twings: it probably is too big, yes
7:28:24 PM eruthros: WOE.
7:29:25 PM eruthros: Oh no!
7:29:31 PM eruthros: Now Jai is dying!
7:29:34 PM twings: !!!
7:29:41 PM twings: death of the homosocial to facilitate the heterosexual!
7:29:44 PM eruthros: (As we were talking, lots of plot happened, and he held off the bandits all by himself)
7:30:02 PM eruthros: Veeru is cuddling him
7:30:21 PM eruthros: And he says "But I have no regrets, Veeru. I have lived for my friend, and I am dying before him."
7:30:43 PM eruthros: "But there is something I'm leaving unfinished, Veeru. I won't be able to tell stories to your children."
7:30:51 PM twings: woah
7:31:03 PM twings: liek
7:31:04 PM twings: woah
7:31:09 PM eruthros: And Veeru is all "No, Jai! No! You can't leave me like this!"
7:31:23 PM eruthros: "You can't do this to me!"
7:31:33 PM twings: that's because veeru loves him fyi
7:31:41 PM eruthros: And they're rolling around in the sand together with Veeru crying and clutching at the dead Jai.
7:31:52 PM twings: rough.
7:31:56 PM eruthros: NOBODY TOLD ME THIS WAS A DEATH STORY.
7:32:11 PM eruthros: I asked wikipedia what it was about
7:32:13 PM twings: you thought it was a happy story about songs and bandits and homos on motorcycles
7:32:19 PM eruthros: And wikipedia said it was a story about rough-and-tumble bandits.
7:32:23 PM twings: and then you accidentally broke your own rule!
7:32:25 PM eruthros: Oh my god
7:32:28 PM twings: about not watching the queer figures die
7:32:34 PM eruthros: Now Veeru is petting Jai's hair and crying.
7:32:53 PM eruthros: I didn't mean to accidentally watch a four hour film about the dying homosocial.
7:32:57 PM twings: I hope in the YT fic Jai springs to his feet and says "gotcha!"
7:33:03 PM twings: "Let's all go get ice cream!"
7:33:07 PM eruthros: wait, wait, hang on...
7:33:13 PM eruthros: ... I sense some more magical realism coming on.
7:33:21 PM twings: oooooh
7:33:23 PM eruthros: Because Jai and Veeru have always decided their fate by coin toss
7:33:24 PM twings: queer magical realism can save us!
7:33:34 PM eruthros: And Jai's hand opens in his death to show the coin
7:33:39 PM eruthros: So, come on, magical realism!
7:33:56 PM eruthros: I hope it's magical realism and not just a symbol of their love is what I'm saying.
7:34:02 PM twings: man, if people could only know what our lives were like while we were making this vid
7:34:14 PM eruthros: Oh, shit, no. It's not magical realism. It's a sign of how Jai sacrificed himself to save Veeru.
7:34:19 PM twings: noooooooooooo
7:34:36 PM eruthros: Because they did a coin toss to see who was going to take Basmanti back to the village and get more ammunition to hold off the evil bandits
7:34:43 PM twings: but OMG LOOK
7:34:44 PM twings: http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/50/subvertingthe.html
7:34:53 PM eruthros: And Veeru lost, so he had to leave Jai behind at the pass to hold them off
7:35:11 PM eruthros: But it turns out that it was a fake coin and both sides were heads!
7:35:19 PM eruthros: So "Jai! You have cheated me to save my life?" etc
7:35:42 PM eruthros: HA that's awesome. Go "solvent90," whoever you are.
7:35:48 PM twings: solvent90 is an SGA writer
7:35:49 PM twings: I like her
7:36:09 PM eruthros: kewl
7:36:39 PM eruthros: "I swear by the blood you have shed I shall find each one of the bandits and take their lives!" Veeru says, and rides off crazy with grief.
7:36:50 PM eruthros: What I'm saying is: this is a sad movie.
7:39:20 PM eruthros: (Okay, but otoh, the armless guy is now thrashing the evil bandit leader, because Jai promised to deliver him alive, and Veeru would have broken his own word but not that of his friend. And so Veeru delievered Evil Bandit to Armless Dude, who is now kicking ass with nails in his shoes.)
7:39:40 PM eruthros: And there's an extended armless-guy fight scene.
7:42:11 PM eruthros: But, yes, totally killing the homosocial to make room for the chick
7:42:21 PM twings: gross
7:42:23 PM eruthros: Because the end of the movie is Veeru getting on the train, alone, all sad at his aloneness
7:42:28 PM eruthros: To find Basmanti waiting for him there
7:42:30 PM twings: after you finish the movie, def. go read the solvent90 story
7:42:31 PM eruthros: And they hug. The end!
7:42:32 PM twings: it will help.
7:42:38 PM eruthros: I am reading it now.
7:42:42 PM twings: gross, movie
7:42:56 PM twings: I think I shall watch some Red Dwarf
7:43:00 PM twings: be back later
7:43:05 PM eruthros: mmkay byes
Anyway, that also happened over and over, the three-day love-affair with a new fandom. It was quite exhausting, really.
as a result of loving our little fandoms so much, we put in all sorts of little in-jokes that are probably only noticeable to us
-like the fact that, in the "baby baby baby baby" section (which is intentionally a bunch of iconic yuletide fandoms with uncooperative footage - I'm looking at you, The Simpsons) we put the Neil Gaiman fandom and the Terry Pratchett fandom next to each other. So it's Discworld and then Neverwhere. This is mostly because there IS Neil Gaiman RPF on yuletide, and we spent a bunch of time looking for Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett footage, but couldn't find any. So it made us happy to put their fandoms next to each other, like secret Neil/Terry slash
-like the place in the second chorus, where the Pride and Prejudice Colin Firth kiss is followed immediately by the Bridget Jones's Diary Colin Firth kiss, the original and the transformative nearly indistinguishable from each other
-like the fact that, in the "threesomes" section in the second chorus, there are actually two Ben Stiller threesome scenes in a row (from Keeping the Faith and Zoolander)
-like all the actors who bizarrely kept recurring - all B-list quasi-fandom actors: Keanu Reeves is in the vid twice, Paul Bettany is in the vid three times, Julie Andrews is in there twice (would've been three times if there was only Victor/Victoria fic on Yuletide! Sigh!), Owen Wilson is in twice, Stephen Fry is in twice (although we could've had him in four times - in addition to Jeeves & Wooster and Wilde, which are in the vid, we looked at QI and Blackadder). And there were actors who ended up only being in the vid once, but who kept showing up in our source - Angelina Jolie, James Spader, Donald Faison, Emilio Estevez, Wil Wheaton, there were a bunch. We expected to run into, like, Callum Keith Rennie and Johnny Depp all the time, but didn't, and so it was weird when it was just James Spader all over the place
-like the time we were editing the BDSM section at the end, and I was all for putting in the thing from Gladiator where Joaquin Phoenix tortures Russell Crowe, but then realised that it would have to go right next to the Quills clip where . . . Joaquin Phoenix tortures Geoffrey Rush. Jeez, Joaquin.
-like the section that we called "long-term porridge," or sometimes "long-term historical porridge," which began because we didn't know what to put on the lyric "maybe the sun's light will be dim, but it won't matter anyhow." We eventually decided that it could be for fandoms where maybe things are sad but people are together anyway - and those pairings ended up being the Age of Sail and Victorian ones, Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Hornblower and Sharpe and Lawrence of Arabia and Master and Commander. The "porridge" designation came because, originally, the best Horatio Hornblower clip we could think to put in was this one of Horatio feeding Archie porridge, I kid you not. And then the Sherlock Holmes clip that we had to go with it was one in which it really looked like Holmes was dead and Watson was covering him up. You should all be glad that we eventually found better clips, and that there were no dead consulting detectives and no porridge in the final version. Because early on, it looked like this:
and sometimes we had technical problems
1) eruthros's computer was, at the time, quite old and infirm, and at some point in mid-november, when we were in the most crucial stage of vidding, her power cord decided to start dying. But in order to replace the cord, the company said she had to mail it to them - and thus she'd be without her computer for several days. So she had to put it on a chair, tape the cord in place, and NOT MOVE THE COMPUTER EVER, in order to wring a little more life out of it, and transfer clips to my computer VERY CAREFULLY via external drives/flash drives.
2) In mid-September, my external drive Also George, which had been holding allllll the vid stuff I had so far, decided to die. Just, die. I was so upset I wrote angstfic about it. And then I had the harrowing experience that all people who don't back up their data must suffer - I sent it in to the place, and they gave me an estimate, and I shelled out in order to recover the data. (Thankfully, there was workstuff on there too, so I got the university to cover half the cost of the data recovery). When they returned it to me, I backed things up FANATICALLY. Although it meant that I had to buy a few new external drives, which was quite a process. I found this in the IM archives:
9:51:00 PM twings: actually, now I am reading a lot of bad reviews for simpletech drives
9:51:09 PM twings: apparently they have mounting problems (heh)
9:51:16 PM twings: like John Sheppard
9:51:35 PM twings: and they aren't internally shielded from EMI or static discharge
9:51:40 PM twings: like John Sheppard
. . . which actually doesn't have much to do with the vid, but does amuse me. Since this post is now a billion words long, it doesn't seem to matter much.
but mostly we had fun: excerpts from emails
twings: PS, I checked: Lenny and Carl do NOT slow dance in the Simpsons movie. They are in the background, and Lenny has his arm around Carl's shoulders, while Marge and Homer slow dance in the foreground. That wikipedia page is a lying liar.
eruthros: Okay, so you wanted to know why we had Top Gun on the list. And I
figured it out. EVEN IF THAT MEANT WATCHING TOP GUN.
Note: without the flight scenes and the Tom-Cruise-in-a-lecture-hall
scenes? The movie appears to be approximately 30 minutes long. I
watched it in 18 or so on fast forward.
Also note: I stripped the sound here BE GRATEFUL. Tom Cruise is icky
enough without, you know, 80s ballads.
eruthros: MEGAN. Shakespeare and Marlowe are never in the same FRAME in
Shakespeare in Love! It's all shots over each other's shoulders! I am
distraught! [NB: we were going to use this for RPF Shakespeare/Marlowe]
twings: OMG, we were so ROBBED. Because, okay, I had the best idea EVER: CASANOVA. It's a sexy movie with David Tennant! And an amazing queer female character! And seven thousand one night stands! AND YET IT IS NOT A YULETIDE FANDOM, I AM SO UPSET. HENCE THE CAPSLOCK.
Because, Claire, it would've been so perfect! Just. So perfect. But no.
SADFACE
[NB: this is what I ended up requesting, and receiving, for Yuletide last year. Yay!]
twings: okay
Bringing Up Baby is HILARIOUS. I laughed and laughed all the way through the film. AND I desperately want a reel_sga AU of it. The plot hinges around lost dinosaur bones and escaped leopards and yes, Cary Grant DOES totally rock that negligee. As would Rodney McKay, were he in the Cary Grant role (which he would be).
ETA: oh god, there TOTALLY ALREADY IS an SGA AU to Bringing Up Baby. DANCE
eruthros: So, okay, now I can tell you that K and J touch exactly THREE TIMES in
Men in Black 1. And one of those times they are covered in bug goo.
Life is hard.
twings: H:LotS continues to be a show where people talk a lot. I can see why Gianduja put it in A Little Less Conversation - it is the king of that.
[talk about overlays]
PS I WISH I COULD CHOOSE MYSELF
FRANK AND TIM CAN NEVER HAVE LOVE
eruthros: Jeremiah continues to be a show where people talk a lot that I watch
in fast-forward, but let me tell you: there are few things in the
world that are more hilarious than the episode I am currently
watching-in-fast-forward, where Luke Perry plays Jeremiah and JASON
PRIESTLY plays some, like, evil warlord or something that captures
them and wants to convert Jeremiah and Kurdy to his side. Jason
Priestly and Luke Perry have intense conversations at each other while
wearing flak jackets. It's like Beverly Hills Post-Apocalyptic.
Yuletide Madness: how we foolishly decided to change the vid at the last minute on the 24th of December
So, we'd finished the vid by the tenth or eleventh of december, or something, and eruthros had flown to California for the holidays (throughout the process of making the vid, we lived a block away from each other, which is helpful). But then on like the 23rd we both were confronted with the urge to include a fandom that we had previously forgotten about:
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/23/08
I have now moved entirely into the regrets portion of the post-vid-making time. Because I just watched Waldo's "Polka Party," and realised, my GOD, we should've had M.A.S.H. in the vid! What's wrong with us omg.
what's wrong with meeeeeeeeee
TO: twings
FROM: eruthros
12/23/08
YOU ARE CRAZY
AND SO AM I
now I also want to know why we didn't look at MASH, because someone on
my flist JUST NOW embedded this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjeAKrmu
AND look at how it parallels the Sholay AND the Psych! With the same
hand-on-head! THANKS, asshole flister, don't you know I can't see any
source right now?
December 23rd:
(5:35:15 PM) eruthros: ALSO
(5:35:22 PM) eruthros: I emailed you re: MASH
(5:36:12 PM) twings: I am watching it now
(5:37:52 PM) twings: jesus god.
(5:37:57 PM) twings: do . . . do you want me to put it in the vid?
(5:38:42 PM) twings: (also, I had forgotten how much I loved that
ending. I used to watch MASH when I was a kid)
(5:38:42 PM) eruthros: I don't see how we CAN.
(5:39:01 PM) eruthros: BUT I was like "FUCK shit
damn" when Juni posted it today.
(5:39:05 PM) eruthros: BECAUSE SRSLY
(5:39:08 PM) eruthros: THAT HUG WITH HAND.
(5:39:26 PM) twings: that hug!
(5:40:04 PM) eruthros: SIGH
(5:40:31 PM) eruthros: I KNOW
(5:40:33 PM) eruthros: GOD
(5:40:37 PM) twings: I just checked
(5:40:44 PM) twings: and that episode of MASH isn't on [download place]
(5:41:28 PM) eruthros: haha
(5:41:34 PM) eruthros: Thank heavens?
(5:41:35 PM) eruthros: Probably?
(5:43:16 PM) twings: but
(5:43:18 PM) twings: now I WANT IT
(5:43:33 PM) eruthros: Um.
(5:43:34 PM) eruthros: Well.
(5:43:41 PM) eruthros: How fast could it torrent?
(5:43:56 PM) twings: right now, the torrent I just downloaded is
going at 200kb/s
(5:44:02 PM) twings: and will be done in two hours
(5:44:14 PM) eruthros: (This is totally going to be
one of the Hilarious Stories from This Vid in a couple weeks.)
(5:44:21 PM) twings: it's just, that HUG!
(5:44:29 PM) eruthros: It will be like: first fandom
found, Care Bears, April 13th.
(5:44:35 PM) twings: ahahaha
(5:44:40 PM) eruthros: (Well, simultaneously with Peanuts.)
(5:44:45 PM) twings: oh god
(5:44:47 PM) eruthros: (And Penny Arcade.)
(5:44:47 PM) twings: we are so insane
(5:44:54 PM) twings: and sesame street!
(5:45:03 PM) eruthros: Last fandom: MASH, December
23rd, 9 pm Eastern Standard Time.
(5:46:12 PM) twings: what are we even THINKING
(5:46:14 PM) twings: okay, okay
(5:46:16 PM) twings: hypothetically
(5:46:22 PM) eruthros: hypthetically?
(5:46:24 PM) twings: where in the hugging section does it go.
(5:46:29 PM) eruthros: Hang on
(5:47:35 PM) eruthros: Okay
(5:47:46 PM) eruthros: I think it goes between Hustle and Psych
(5:47:59 PM) eruthros: Or, wait, no
(5:48:05 PM) eruthros: We use the part where his hand goes down
(5:48:09 PM) eruthros: And it goes after psych
(5:48:44 PM) eruthros: And we cut into ... is that Tactics?
(5:49:06 PM) twings: we can probably cut into tactics a little
(5:49:15 PM) twings: maybe speed up psych and hustle a bit?
(5:49:41 PM) eruthros: Maaaaybe
(5:49:43 PM) eruthros: I love them so!
(5:49:49 PM) twings: facepalm.
(5:49:52 PM) twings: I will play with it
(5:49:58 PM) twings: and maybe export a few versions
(5:50:04 PM) eruthros: We could prbably also cut a
bit out of Drop Dead Fred?
(5:50:08 PM) twings: yes, for sure
(5:50:16 PM) twings: actually, really, if it comes to it, we could
just cut drop dead fred
(5:50:19 PM) twings: I'm not married to it
(5:50:26 PM) twings: it's just that it's so strange and obscure,
and it's a sweet hug.
(5:51:01 PM) eruthros: I think we won't have to cut it!
(5:51:10 PM) eruthros: Just, cut from the front a bit
or speed it up?
(5:51:32 PM) twings: I'll make everything budge up a bit
(5:51:43 PM) twings: like at christmas dinner when someone needs
to sit on the corner on a footstool
(5:51:51 PM) eruthros: I feel like the Tactics also
comes in a little early
(5:51:58 PM) twings: oh, okay!
(5:52:00 PM) twings: I can see that
(5:52:05 PM) eruthros: Like, it's already not on the beat?
(5:52:07 PM) twings: I like it on the little music-y trill thing
(5:52:12 PM) eruthros: Yes
(5:52:22 PM) twings: but I think you're right that it could come
later and still hit it
(5:52:22 PM) eruthros: But I think it's early for
that, actually?
(5:52:26 PM) eruthros: Right!
(5:52:45 PM) eruthros: I think it can squish back a
little, and still be on the beat -- so maybe we can get a bunch of
frames from it
(5:52:56 PM) eruthros: Anyway.
(5:52:58 PM) twings: sure, sure
(5:53:10 PM) twings: you know, two versions ago, I called the vid "last cut"
(5:53:14 PM) eruthros: I KNOW
(5:53:15 PM) eruthros: ALSO
(5:53:17 PM) eruthros: WE SAID
(5:53:20 PM) twings: and then last version, I called it "last cut FOR REALS"
(5:53:29 PM) eruthros: WE WOULD BE DONE WHEN I LEFT
(5:53:30 PM) eruthros: AND YET.
(5:53:36 PM) eruthros: It's Juni's fault.
(5:53:38 PM) eruthros: I blame her!
(5:53:41 PM) eruthros: Stupid embedding!
(5:54:15 PM) twings: that is just cruel
(5:54:24 PM) eruthros: AGREE
(5:54:29 PM) eruthros: But I can't say:
(5:54:40 PM) eruthros: Dear Flist, please stop
posting source for the next few days
(5:54:50 PM) eruthros: As I have just made a huge vid
that will be posted Thursday
(5:54:57 PM) twings: ha, no
(5:55:01 PM) eruthros: And don't need the temptation.
(5:55:01 PM) twings: also, it's kind of fate
(5:55:04 PM) eruthros: TRUE
(5:55:06 PM) twings: we both got hit with MASH on the same day
(5:55:10 PM) eruthros: CLEARLY
(5:55:18 PM) twings: it's the spirit of christmas slash hugs
(5:55:20 PM) twings: speaking to us
(5:55:32 PM) eruthros: OBVIOUSLY.
[stuff removed]
(6:15:22 PM) twings: I made eighteen frames!
(6:23:55 PM) eruthros: WOW
(6:24:02 PM) eruthros: 18 frames is a lot of frames!
(6:24:15 PM) twings: it is a frame cornucopia
[stuff removed]
(7:00:30 PM) twings: things are coming together
(7:00:34 PM) eruthros: last-minute
(7:00:35 PM) twings: you have to admit that there's kismet in the air
(7:00:40 PM) eruthros: but then, is that not the
spirit of yuletide?
(7:00:46 PM) twings: it is!
(7:00:52 PM) twings: it's like our own little vidder's christmas special
(7:00:53 PM) twings: omg
(7:00:57 PM) eruthros: Last-minute crazy kismet!
(7:01:00 PM) eruthros: omg?
(7:01:02 PM) twings: the episode where permission to use the
source comes in at the last minute [re: Calvin and Hobbes animation]
(7:01:11 PM) twings: and we find a last-minute perfect hug to add
(7:01:19 PM) twings: it's a christmas miracle
(7:01:20 PM) eruthros: AND people wear Santa Hats?
(7:01:27 PM) twings: totally they do
(7:01:29 PM) eruthros: And we learn about giving and sharing?
(7:01:37 PM) twings: WE DO
[stiuff removed]
(7:03:44 PM) twings: . . . . uh oh
(7:03:48 PM) twings: download slowed down
(7:03:53 PM) eruthros: no!
(7:03:58 PM) eruthros: But it was a Christmas Special!
(7:03:58 PM) twings: now it wants another three hours
(7:04:02 PM) twings: I know!
(7:04:09 PM) twings: perhaps this is the part where we think
christmas is ruined?
(7:04:11 PM) eruthros: Maybe it's your internet connection
(7:04:12 PM) twings: and then it gets saved!
(7:04:16 PM) eruthros: This might be that part!
(7:04:26 PM) twings: well, it's still downloading at 50kb/s
(7:04:30 PM) twings: which isn't bad for a torrent
(7:04:39 PM) twings: but it was going around 190, before.
(7:04:50 PM) twings: oh, I see what happened
(7:04:56 PM) twings: some people stopped uploading
(7:05:20 PM) twings: that's okay
(7:05:26 PM) twings: I have all night and all day tomorrow
(7:05:38 PM) eruthros: NO YOU DON'T.
(7:05:46 PM) eruthros: We have to send it to astolat and elynross!
(7:05:54 PM) twings: right, but tomorrow evening!
(7:05:59 PM) eruthros: okay, fair.
(7:06:04 PM) twings: so if it has to download over night
(7:06:08 PM) twings: I can vid it first thing in the morning
(7:06:16 PM) twings: and then export it and send it to you for looking at
(7:06:34 PM) twings: this, buddy, is why you should never ever
finish anything early
(7:06:37 PM) twings: fyi.
(7:07:47 PM) eruthros: We didn't finish it early!
(7:07:51 PM) eruthros: I was leaving!
(7:08:03 PM) twings: we totally had a workable draft done, like,
two weeks early
(7:08:08 PM) twings: then we were just fucking around
(7:08:14 PM) twings: and remastering.
(7:08:19 PM) eruthros: We should've watched MASH.
(7:08:27 PM) twings: well, yes
(7:08:43 PM) twings: probably, you know, there are a lot of
fandoms where people hug
(7:08:47 PM) twings: that are yuletide fandoms
(7:08:49 PM) twings: that we didn't vid
(7:09:00 PM) twings: I mean, I think MASH is a very yuletidey
yuletide fandom
(7:09:03 PM) twings: and that is a very famous hug
(7:09:04 PM) twings: but still.
(7:09:08 PM) eruthros: don't tell me about them.
(7:09:15 PM) eruthros: The other fandoms, I mean.
(7:09:22 PM) eruthros: I have been steadfastly watching nothing
(7:09:27 PM) eruthros: Except Mythbusters.
(7:09:46 PM) eruthros: But still?
(7:10:04 PM) twings: I mean, but even though MASH is a very
special fandom, it isn't that special.
(7:10:11 PM) twings: I mean, this could've been anything
(7:10:17 PM) twings: there's lots of stuff we didn't watch that we could've
(7:10:25 PM) eruthros: YOU were the one who just said
we had to do it, though.
(7:10:30 PM) eruthros: So, I mean.
(7:10:34 PM) twings: I believe it was a mutual decision
(7:10:38 PM) twings: don't even pretend.
(7:10:39 PM) eruthros: We had to have some last-minute thing.
(7:10:50 PM) twings: well, last-minute is fun!
(7:11:20 PM) eruthros: TRUE.
(7:11:26 PM) eruthros: That is the spirit of yuletide madness!
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/24/08 9:49 AM
so far this morning, some minor setbacks with the MASH - the mkv wouldn't open in mpeg streamclip, nor would it work in my mkv converter program, because it hadn't been tracked properly or something, who even knows. But I managed to export it to avi using good old quicktime pro/perian - omg yay perian - and get it to dv. Then the dv aspect ratio wouldn't export right, no clue why actually, but I managed to get to the right aspect ratio eventually. now I am trying to figure out which part of the hug to use - because while I agree that the bit that looks like psych is beautiful, there's also the bit where they come together, full-body, from the side, which is so pretty and would be a nice transition to the angel sanctuary. anyway, you probably won't be up for another few hours, I'm guessing, so I'll play around in final cut and maybe make a few different versions, and then we'll see where we're at.
December 24th:
(10:14:36 AM) twings: I have some possible vid cuts for you
(10:14:49 AM) twings: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=V1EOGO2F
(10:15:01 AM) twings: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CPTXD8SX
(10:15:13 AM) twings: give me five minutes, I'll have a third
(10:15:24 AM) twings: probably another hour for the fourth
(10:17:10 AM) eruthros: wow
(10:17:36 AM) twings: the third and the fourth use the same MASH footage
(10:17:51 AM) twings: but the four takes a few frames from
arrested development to give to angel sanctuary and drop dead fred.
(10:18:23 AM) eruthros: ahhh
(10:18:24 AM) eruthros: check
(10:19:48 AM) eruthros: This just in: we are completely crazy.
(10:19:59 AM) twings: yup
(10:20:03 AM) twings: mostly me, in this case
(10:20:07 AM) twings: but you too.
(10:20:51 AM) eruthros: CLEARLY.
(10:21:01 AM) eruthros: Like, we decided the vid ALSO
had to have yuletide madness in it.
(10:22:12 AM) twings: it's just so appropriate
(10:22:18 AM) twings: it really does encapsulate the fandom
(10:22:32 AM) twings: PS go here right now: http://yuletidetreasure.org/
(10:22:36 AM) eruthros: We might be crazy, but we're
good at genre?
(10:22:41 AM) twings: oops, never mind
(10:22:43 AM) twings: I was 1970
(10:22:49 AM) twings: we ARE good at genre.
(10:22:53 AM) eruthros: Wow, a third?
(10:22:56 AM) eruthros: GO YOU.
(10:22:57 AM) twings: yeah
(10:23:02 AM) twings: I felt bad about having no Miracles in the vid
(10:23:06 AM) twings: so I wrote Miracles fic.
(10:23:15 AM) eruthros: WELL
(10:23:26 AM) eruthros: If you have to do that for
all the fandoms that aren't in the vid
(10:23:32 AM) twings: ha
(10:23:33 AM) twings: I'll be here a while, yeah.
(10:23:40 AM) eruthros: sad but true
[...]
(10:33:13 AM) twings: I spent the hours from 7 to 9 trying to
convert that goddam mkv file
(10:33:17 AM) twings: which had SUBTITLES, btw
(10:33:23 AM) twings: thank god they're not talking while they're hugging.
(10:33:51 AM) eruthros: FUCKERS
(10:34:06 AM) eruthros: What is that EVEN.
(10:35:04 AM) twings: I knoooooow
(10:35:15 AM) eruthros: We're trying to make a VID here
(10:35:19 AM) eruthros: Don't they know that?
(10:35:21 AM) twings: helloooo
(10:35:27 AM) twings: srsly
[...]
(11:11:18 AM) twings: man, given our other "adventures", I'm sad
we didn't include The Adventures of Brisco County Jr
(11:11:44 AM) eruthros: I thought of it
(11:11:49 AM) eruthros: On, like, December 10th
(11:11:56 AM) eruthros: And decided that was too late.
(11:11:59 AM) eruthros: HAHAHA
(11:12:45 AM) twings: oh, goodness, the hilarity
(11:13:20 AM) eruthros: I just mean.
(11:14:35 AM) twings: indeeeeed.
(11:14:39 AM) twings: you thought we were X crazy
(11:14:44 AM) twings: turns out we're X +7 crazy
[...]
(11:59:43 AM) eruthros: Okay, so I think I like cut 4 best
(11:59:49 AM) eruthros: What is your feeling?
(11:59:57 AM) twings: me too
(12:00:06 PM) twings: I am currently exporting a cut 5
(12:00:10 PM) eruthros: HAHAHA
(12:00:17 PM) twings: which is the same as cut 4, but with the
coming together instead of the hand on head
(12:00:25 PM) twings: it is right that you mock
(12:00:31 PM) twings: but you said you liked the coming together better!
(12:00:39 PM) eruthros: No, I know
(12:00:44 PM) eruthros: I just was about to ask, see
(12:00:52 PM) eruthros: If you'd tried it with the
coming-together
(12:00:56 PM) eruthros: and you pre-empted me!
(12:01:05 PM) twings: in ur brane.
(12:01:06 PM) eruthros: I think we have a shared brain problem!
(12:01:11 PM) twings: stealin ur thoughts.
[...]
(1:10:14 PM) eruthros: I can't believe we made this.
(1:10:26 PM) twings: I know, right?
(1:10:29 PM) twings: did it download?
(1:10:32 PM) eruthros: yup
(1:10:38 PM) twings: is it okay?
(1:10:38 PM) twings: y/n?
(1:10:46 PM) eruthros: Y!
(1:10:50 PM) eruthros: you feeling y?
(1:10:52 PM) twings: yay!
(1:10:54 PM) twings: and yea.
(1:11:05 PM) twings: okay, I declare it over FOR REALS THIS TIME NO REALLY
(1:11:10 PM) eruthros: hahaha
TO: eruthros
FROM: twings
12/25/08 10:39 AM
I henceforth declare this the end of the yuletide gmail thread! though, knowing us, probably not.
But it's all uploaded as of 9:30ish (I forgot that imeem takes for-ever to upload). It's on fanvidders and vidding and yuletide and my journal omg done. COLLAPSES
TO: twings
FROM: eruthros
12/25/08 10:43 AM
I declare us DONE! FOR REALS THIS TIME.
that squeaky-door sound at the end of the vid
Pretty early on, I had the idea to put the shot of the Care Bear opening the door again after the credits, and so when we had vidded the whole thing we put that in, and realised that it needed some sort of door-opening sound to go with it (especially since I had clipped the Care Bears films with the sound stripped out, and those DVDs had long since been returned to netflix).
We spent literally hours surfing around the web and listening to halloween-style creaky door noises before I remembered that, hey, my back door squeaks! This is so typical of both of us, trying to find a digital sound file online rather than thinking to just record a door ourselves. So anyhow, eventually this solution dawned on us, and thus the sound at the very end of the vid is the porch door on my old apartment, recorded on my laptop one late night after lots of vidding. I like that a lot; I think about it whenever I watch the vid. It's like a marker of how much the vid was grounded in my life, of how the vid was such a big part of my life for a long time.
There's so much that comes rushing back to me when I go through these old IM conversations and look at the clips that I clipped last year; every one of those 191 fandoms in the vid, plus all the fandoms that didn't make it into the vid, comes with its own story, has its own history with me or eruthros. Yuletide was, for eight months last year, our way of looking at the world - there were few things we watched or saw mentioned or noticed on downloads communities that didn't make us stop and say, "hey, is that a yuletide fandom? Can we vid it?" Any conversation about favourite childhood books, multivids, old tv shows - automatically became a conversation about how to get those beloved little fandoms into the vid.
Looking back on it, I can't believe that we did it.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Also: please yes do write that Pembleton/Bayliss fry cook AU. OMG YES.
I really do feel like what's missing from H:LotS fandom (such as it is) is crack AUs. Luckily, that is a specialty of mine.
Reading the bit on chromatic characters/characters of color and how they're presented differently made me sad. Thank you for the analysis there. Here by way of
I do just try to remind myself that fandom has this great recuperative potential, too, and can make anything out of the tiniest scraps - even vids for characters who aren't there.
backatcha.
yuletide is my yuletide hero! or, really, elynross is. When I think about organizing that kind of mess, I become still and terrified like a deer in the headlights.
I'm so glad the MASH clip made it in! It was the first fandom I ever really participated in, so it is dear to me. Extra warm fuzzies seeing it here!
This is fascinating -- showing how difficult the whole process was, showing how much thought you put into it. Thank you again for the wonderful vid, and also now for the commentary.
(and I sympathise about the lost hard drive - best of luck with the replacement, eeep)
I would also like to read that Frank/Tim fry cook AU.
I really think we should have a little crack AU fest for Homicide! I do love the idea of Pembleton VERY SERIOUSLY stirring eggs. Maybe wearing a paper hat of some kind.
The gambling vid has made me very familiar with the "watch a source in fast forward and feel like you've actually watched it" phenomenon. I think it's the only way to make a seriously multi-source vid and not go crazy. But then you wish you actually had time to watch all the parts of X classic from 1936 that don't take place in a casino. And then you get sidetracked into watching ten episodes in a row of Remington Steele even after you've cut your gambling scenes, and your time management plan is blown to hell, anyway.
I think the act of actively making yourself look for footage of people of colour doing the same specific things as white people is extremely educational, and an inevitable eye-opener. (My own multi-vid experience has made me a) form a theory about how PoCs and women rarely lose limbs in Western cinema because their bodies are viewed as already flawed, so there's no point, and b) realize that if there are black people at a casino, it's only to try and stop their cool and charmingly insane white friends from making crazy bets (unless said black people are Original Cindy)) If everyone had to make a multi-vid and were not allowed to settle for footage of white men, we might end up with a different discussion than the ones we seem to be having all the time. (Although, of course, now I just opened the door to the "why are people trying to evilly force me to vid people of colour?" argument.)
(ETA: I just did a count out of curiosity. Out of the 70 sources I currently have listed for the gambling vid, 16 may have usable footage of people of colour. And that's after I've made a concerted effort and gone looking for Asian movies.)
Let me tell you that your struggles with H: LotS were entirely worth it: every single time I watch the vid, my heart makes this crazy somersault clenching thing at that perfect clip of Frank and Tim. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH!
And the vid just wouldn't have been complete without M*A*S*H.
And Sholay! OMG! I didn't expect it to be a tragedy either. It has this insane mix of genres that you would never see in modern Western story-telling, and it's pure genius. And I had the exact same reaction to Basanti's body size.
Beverly Hills Post-Apocalyptic is now a real AU fandom inside my head, and I love it.
The squeaky door story is possibly the best thing ever. It makes me love the vid impossibly more.
Thank you for taking the time to make this wonderful post and letting us have a peak at the vidding process. :D
I remember you saying that about flawed bodies while making the amputees-vid . . . it's all horrifyingly Freudian, and horrifyingly plausible, women and people of colour perceived as already castrated/sullied, etc. And I think it's also the frighteningly pervasive idea that, when our bodies are wounded, it's no big deal, unexceptional, not to be empathized with. We're the victims on every crime procedural, after all, and audiences are used to seeing us bleed. White men's bodies are the ones we should be concerned about!
When we were making the YT vid (or when I was making The Glass, or the Prison Break vid, for that matter) I often wanted to grab people and say LOOK, LOOK AT HOW IT'S NOT EVEN FRAMED THE SAME WAY. There were dozens of little moments where even with good intentions and education and effort and care we couldn't help the whitewashing and the boy-dominance as much as we would've liked . . . I mean, it was while making the YT vid that I got upset about Ferd's vid "Strip" and made a post about it. But yeah, it really is an education when you pay attention to it, and I wish more people would do so. Luckily there are vidders like Shati or lierdumoa who vid in the face of poor footage or no footage - these kinds of things give me hope.
FRANK/TIM 4EVER!
I really loved seeing Sholay in your amputees-vid, especially because the scene where the old man whose name I forget literally kicks the bandits' asses is just so AMAZING.
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing it!
Btw, I don't know how useful it would be in terms of vid fodder, but this post made me think of this obscure drag/genderfuck scene. In one scene of the movie (500) Days of Summer there's a reference to the main characters being like Sid & Nancy, and in an extra for the movie, the two main actors do a mashup of 500 Days and Sid & Nancy: Zooey Deschanel plays Sid and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Nancy. I don't know that it's really drag, since Gordon-Levitt's got serious beard scruff going on, but it's something.
thank you!
i hope so day i can have a vidding partner in crime and have such a great relationship like you two seem to. :-)
Thank you!!!
Oh, and the insanity too. Very important.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
:) that's very true, yes. We had an awful lot of fun together on the project, and created this little bizarre community of two to make it happen (I doubt either of us could've done anything like it alone).
(ps- The Angel Sanctuary anime is confusing as hell and makes no sense. The manga is vastly superior.)