2009 end of year vid meme
Happy 2010 to all who made it this far. And it’s vid meme time.
2009 turned out to be a year of record productivity. I made four vids and a vid commentary vid. Which is somewhere between one and a half and double the number I usually get to make. In order of release they were:
Nobody Loves You T:SCC (Ellison and Weaver mostly)
Youkali and Mandalay Dollhouse (contrasting doll and client manifestos to Kurt Weill songs)
Babies commentary Battlestar Galactica, Pulp and biology porn (spoken commentary with accompanying visuals on my first BSG vid)
Riots Black Narcissus (nuns on the run)
My favorite video this year (of my own): Riots. Because I only made it a month ago and it only took 4 days, (not counting clipping). It almost vidded itself. And I think of all my vids it most resembles what I thought it would look like in my head. I think all I was trying to do was to recreate the memory of a film I hadn’t seen for twenty years. Usually memories are deceptive, you remember scenes that never happened or ones that did as being much less choppy than they really are and the colours being brighter and the movement more fluid but with this movie none of that turned out to be a problem. The good stuff was just as good as I remembered it.
My least favorite: Youkali. Because it’s not quite finished but I released it anyway because I had finished Mandalay and wanted to be done with them both. I do like the first three quarters of Youkali but the ending needs serious work still. If I ever get around to remastering I might do that but remastering is all the tedious clipping related parts of viding and none of the fun so it probably won’t happen. Which is a shame because I still like the concept behind both of those vids a lot.
Most successful video: Nobody Loves You. I had a period in the summer of being dissatisfied with this vid although the response was orders of magnitude bigger than any of the others this year. Possibly because of that but more because there were so many brilliant SCC/Terminator vids being released and it wasn’t any of them. Now though I’ve finally got the S2 DVDs and re-watching brings back all the memories of why I made this particular vid so I like it again.
Video most under appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: In terms of comment numbers that would be Riots but in terms of downloads:comments ratio they’re probably all quite similar. I don’t feel any of my vids were under appreciated this year, someone had something interesting to say about each of them.
Most fun video to make: Mandalay. It was nasty and funny, at least I thought it was funny. There was a being a bad, bad person rush to a lot of the making of it and also I felt like I got lucky with how Epitaph One turned out. I made the vid gambling that it would give me an ending I could use and in the end it paid off.
Hardest video to make: They were all hard. Nobody was hard because I made it while the series was running and never knew how it was going to end. Also technically because it involved masks, which I have real trouble grasping for some reason. Youkali was hard because I’ve never vidded tango and came close to giving up two bars in because I just couldn’t get anything to flow. Mandalay was hard because comedy is always hard and even Riots, which wasn’t funny at all, had major codec issues in the clipping phase. I just couldn’t get the dvd files to demux to anything usable.
The things I've learned this year: It’s been an experimental/self-indulgent year. A year of not getting betaed because I mostly just wanted to play with stuff. So I learned that without betas things are less good than they could be. I’ve learned what it’s like to work with lots of different music and even with me talking substituting for music, which was weird. I’ve learned some tech -I think I’m OK with masks now as long as I stick to simple geometric shapes. With the possible exception of Nobody it’s been an emotionally detached year, a year in the comfort zone. I think I’ve grown destructively, I’ve got better at dissecting the source and reassembling it to make pretty patterns, but not creatively.
Things to work on in 2010: Growing creatively, being less about the clever and more about emotions again. I have three ideas for vids. One I love the song and it’s another old(ish) movie source but very violent and quite manly which may be hard. The second works out a long standing obsession with Hollywood so although it’s kind of meta it’s personal as well. And thirdly a Sarah Connor vid. My Sarah and therefore a little too personal. Also scary because there are such good, definitive Sarah vids out there already. Sarah Connor is Patti Smith QED and she can be Mary and Judy Garland but I think Sarah contains multitudes. I think she could be Amelia Earhart too.
2009 turned out to be a year of record productivity. I made four vids and a vid commentary vid. Which is somewhere between one and a half and double the number I usually get to make. In order of release they were:
Nobody Loves You T:SCC (Ellison and Weaver mostly)
Youkali and Mandalay Dollhouse (contrasting doll and client manifestos to Kurt Weill songs)
Babies commentary Battlestar Galactica, Pulp and biology porn (spoken commentary with accompanying visuals on my first BSG vid)
Riots Black Narcissus (nuns on the run)
My favorite video this year (of my own): Riots. Because I only made it a month ago and it only took 4 days, (not counting clipping). It almost vidded itself. And I think of all my vids it most resembles what I thought it would look like in my head. I think all I was trying to do was to recreate the memory of a film I hadn’t seen for twenty years. Usually memories are deceptive, you remember scenes that never happened or ones that did as being much less choppy than they really are and the colours being brighter and the movement more fluid but with this movie none of that turned out to be a problem. The good stuff was just as good as I remembered it.
My least favorite: Youkali. Because it’s not quite finished but I released it anyway because I had finished Mandalay and wanted to be done with them both. I do like the first three quarters of Youkali but the ending needs serious work still. If I ever get around to remastering I might do that but remastering is all the tedious clipping related parts of viding and none of the fun so it probably won’t happen. Which is a shame because I still like the concept behind both of those vids a lot.
Most successful video: Nobody Loves You. I had a period in the summer of being dissatisfied with this vid although the response was orders of magnitude bigger than any of the others this year. Possibly because of that but more because there were so many brilliant SCC/Terminator vids being released and it wasn’t any of them. Now though I’ve finally got the S2 DVDs and re-watching brings back all the memories of why I made this particular vid so I like it again.
Video most under appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: In terms of comment numbers that would be Riots but in terms of downloads:comments ratio they’re probably all quite similar. I don’t feel any of my vids were under appreciated this year, someone had something interesting to say about each of them.
Most fun video to make: Mandalay. It was nasty and funny, at least I thought it was funny. There was a being a bad, bad person rush to a lot of the making of it and also I felt like I got lucky with how Epitaph One turned out. I made the vid gambling that it would give me an ending I could use and in the end it paid off.
Hardest video to make: They were all hard. Nobody was hard because I made it while the series was running and never knew how it was going to end. Also technically because it involved masks, which I have real trouble grasping for some reason. Youkali was hard because I’ve never vidded tango and came close to giving up two bars in because I just couldn’t get anything to flow. Mandalay was hard because comedy is always hard and even Riots, which wasn’t funny at all, had major codec issues in the clipping phase. I just couldn’t get the dvd files to demux to anything usable.
The things I've learned this year: It’s been an experimental/self-indulgent year. A year of not getting betaed because I mostly just wanted to play with stuff. So I learned that without betas things are less good than they could be. I’ve learned what it’s like to work with lots of different music and even with me talking substituting for music, which was weird. I’ve learned some tech -I think I’m OK with masks now as long as I stick to simple geometric shapes. With the possible exception of Nobody it’s been an emotionally detached year, a year in the comfort zone. I think I’ve grown destructively, I’ve got better at dissecting the source and reassembling it to make pretty patterns, but not creatively.
Things to work on in 2010: Growing creatively, being less about the clever and more about emotions again. I have three ideas for vids. One I love the song and it’s another old(ish) movie source but very violent and quite manly which may be hard. The second works out a long standing obsession with Hollywood so although it’s kind of meta it’s personal as well. And thirdly a Sarah Connor vid. My Sarah and therefore a little too personal. Also scary because there are such good, definitive Sarah vids out there already. Sarah Connor is Patti Smith QED and she can be Mary and Judy Garland but I think Sarah contains multitudes. I think she could be Amelia Earhart too.