Viddy thoughts
I have some thoughts on some vids. First thought is about sisabet’s Comfortably Numb , which I am discomforted to have to admit to not recognizing as a cover of a Pink Floyd song (seriously, listening to prog rock was practically illegal in the peri-post punk era). Suddenly it makes so much sense (and I wish I’d seen it on a big screen because that grid work needs scale to fully appreciate - it’s a *big* vid).
Second though is about Land by sweetestdrain. Because the sea of possibilities isn’t just about the in-story, no fate but what we make, but also about this being a story that’s constantly retold. Harlan Ellison successfully sued Cameron for allegedly basing the first movie on two episodes he wrote for The Outer Limits (Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier) but the only connection I can see is that they all use the idea of soldiers (who may or may as well be robots) traveling back in time. I don’t think that counts any more than the JC allusions, maybe the apostles should sue. By contrast, the second story directly transforms the central conceit of first. The third and the TV series both do the same for the second - it’s growing exponentially. And the vid weaves them all together and makes its own retelling in the process. It feels as if there’s also something being said in the way the first half of the vid, before Sarah enters left, while it’s still just a John story, is actually quite linear. As if *his* story, the hero/saviour myth, has been retold so often that it’s worked itself into a rut but her story, Mary’s in the New Testament source, is something still new and alive and diversifying in infinite combinations.
My third thought is a rewrite of some old thoughts on another sisabet vid Icebound Stream. The original post was made for the Tea at the Ford site but that’s been down so long I thought it might be an idea to back it up here.
One part of the mathematical definition of a fractal is “a set for which the Hausdorff Desicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.” Also, and more comprehensibly to the layperson, fractals are “sets which, when magnified over and over, always resemble the original image. The closer you look at a fractal, the more you see exactly the same object.” A fractal is made when you take a basic shape and fragment every part of it to duplicate the original shape (in the case below, a bump on a line) in infinitely repeating smaller scale:
Simple Fractal Progression, Von Koch Curve
Fractals are easier to identify in extended series. The topmost element of the Von Koch curve, the single unit of the repeat, doesn't form a fractal pattern by itself but clearly becomes part of one as you focus down to see more. Vids are generally such ephemeral creations that fractal analysis might seem inappropriate. There’s not enough of them to be sure that what you think you’re seeing is a fractal and not a sampling error or a wallpaper effect. Nevertheless, when I first watched sisabet’s Due South vid, Icebound Stream , suddenly there they were. Fractals!
The vid is based on the S1 two-parter, Victoria’s Secret, which involves Frasier, the nobly stoic main character, re-encountering a femme fatale, jewel thief, Victoria. The premise of Due South is that Frasier, the Mountie, is living and working in Chicago for reasons that don’t concern this particular story. He bumps into Victoria who’s planning a heist, they reconnect, she betrays him, she escapes, he’s torn between attraction and duty. Icebound Streamretells this story through the fractal expansion of a metaphor encapsulated in a single scene of the show, an encounter between Frasier and Victoria at the polar bear enclosure of the City Zoo.
In the vid fragments of this scene occur at three locations all in the first half. The left side, where the heart is:
The first fragment shows Victoria in shadow while the great bear swims towards her. In the second Frasier has joined her and the bear is between them. The third contains some rapid movement difficult to convey in a single frame but essentially Frasier moves as if to catch Victoria as she leaves but she's too quick and both fall out of frame leaving the bear swimming alone.
Real life polar bears are predators, stone cold killers. Clips of bears punctuate the vid, initially juxtaposed with shots of Victoria thereby marking her as their metaphorical equivalent:
face to camera
or stepping back satiated from a seduction.
In the following section things change as the bear appears followed by a shot of Frasier dreaming before cutting to the woman:
After this, and as the action between the two protagonists peaks Frasier is also a bear as they grapple, whether embracing or fighting:
Finally Victoria escapes leaving Frasier injured and the vid ends with a shot of a single bear running free across an arctic wasteland:
In my reading that bear is Victoria, who looks back once at Frasier but doesn’t turn to salt, the call of the wild proving stronger than love. It could also be Frasier, in his own mind still following her. Either way the overall story of the source episodes is repeated at two levels in the vid. At high magnification in the zoo clip triptych and on an intermediate level via the bear story, a plot fractal.
Moving from plot to character, the POV character for the vid is Frasier a man of infinite reserve, emotionally so buttoned down he's practically frozen, trapped behind an invisible wall. The vid uses the metaphor of a snowglobe both to express this quality of Frasier's mind and to evoke memories of his previous encounter with Victoria in the snowy wastes of his homeland.
Its image is introduced in shots such as the one below, which subsequently zooms in to focus on Frasier himself sitting shadowy in the distance:
The literal snowglobe crashes as Victoria's spell is broken along with Frasier’s reserve. It becomes all too clear what she is (and he wants her):
It continues to be alluded to in clips of snow falling on Frasier in his cabin and or in the use of a morphing effect to make scenes appear as if observed from within a curved glass:
Focusing down, the image of a separating glass illustrates not only the barriers Frasier maintains between himself, his past and the world in general but on a smaller scale those that exist between him and Victoria. He first sees her approaching through the glass of a revolving hotel door, an image used repeatedly to great effect, while in the final chase scenes he catches sight of her through the window of a curious star-ceilinged booth:
Down once more to the ur-image and there's the glass again, framing the captive polar bear:
Fractal-like, the glass metaphor is repeated at three different levels but retains the same meaning in all.
Finally taking the fractalisation concept to an absurd extreme what if we break down that core scene yet further, split it through a prism into its component colours. Dark shadows, white bear, ice blue water and red painted lips. Focusing up and the piece as a whole remains utterly faithful to the colour scheme of the original pattern element:
Dark encounters framed by brilliant white snowscapes under arctic skies but punctuated with red - Frasier's borrowed jacket, blood on the maw, fiery passion.
Second though is about Land by sweetestdrain. Because the sea of possibilities isn’t just about the in-story, no fate but what we make, but also about this being a story that’s constantly retold. Harlan Ellison successfully sued Cameron for allegedly basing the first movie on two episodes he wrote for The Outer Limits (Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier) but the only connection I can see is that they all use the idea of soldiers (who may or may as well be robots) traveling back in time. I don’t think that counts any more than the JC allusions, maybe the apostles should sue. By contrast, the second story directly transforms the central conceit of first. The third and the TV series both do the same for the second - it’s growing exponentially. And the vid weaves them all together and makes its own retelling in the process. It feels as if there’s also something being said in the way the first half of the vid, before Sarah enters left, while it’s still just a John story, is actually quite linear. As if *his* story, the hero/saviour myth, has been retold so often that it’s worked itself into a rut but her story, Mary’s in the New Testament source, is something still new and alive and diversifying in infinite combinations.
My third thought is a rewrite of some old thoughts on another sisabet vid Icebound Stream. The original post was made for the Tea at the Ford site but that’s been down so long I thought it might be an idea to back it up here.
One part of the mathematical definition of a fractal is “a set for which the Hausdorff Desicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.” Also, and more comprehensibly to the layperson, fractals are “sets which, when magnified over and over, always resemble the original image. The closer you look at a fractal, the more you see exactly the same object.” A fractal is made when you take a basic shape and fragment every part of it to duplicate the original shape (in the case below, a bump on a line) in infinitely repeating smaller scale:
Simple Fractal Progression, Von Koch Curve
Fractals are easier to identify in extended series. The topmost element of the Von Koch curve, the single unit of the repeat, doesn't form a fractal pattern by itself but clearly becomes part of one as you focus down to see more. Vids are generally such ephemeral creations that fractal analysis might seem inappropriate. There’s not enough of them to be sure that what you think you’re seeing is a fractal and not a sampling error or a wallpaper effect. Nevertheless, when I first watched sisabet’s Due South vid, Icebound Stream , suddenly there they were. Fractals!
The vid is based on the S1 two-parter, Victoria’s Secret, which involves Frasier, the nobly stoic main character, re-encountering a femme fatale, jewel thief, Victoria. The premise of Due South is that Frasier, the Mountie, is living and working in Chicago for reasons that don’t concern this particular story. He bumps into Victoria who’s planning a heist, they reconnect, she betrays him, she escapes, he’s torn between attraction and duty. Icebound Streamretells this story through the fractal expansion of a metaphor encapsulated in a single scene of the show, an encounter between Frasier and Victoria at the polar bear enclosure of the City Zoo.
In the vid fragments of this scene occur at three locations all in the first half. The left side, where the heart is:
The first fragment shows Victoria in shadow while the great bear swims towards her. In the second Frasier has joined her and the bear is between them. The third contains some rapid movement difficult to convey in a single frame but essentially Frasier moves as if to catch Victoria as she leaves but she's too quick and both fall out of frame leaving the bear swimming alone.
Real life polar bears are predators, stone cold killers. Clips of bears punctuate the vid, initially juxtaposed with shots of Victoria thereby marking her as their metaphorical equivalent:
face to camera
or stepping back satiated from a seduction.
In the following section things change as the bear appears followed by a shot of Frasier dreaming before cutting to the woman:
After this, and as the action between the two protagonists peaks Frasier is also a bear as they grapple, whether embracing or fighting:
Finally Victoria escapes leaving Frasier injured and the vid ends with a shot of a single bear running free across an arctic wasteland:
In my reading that bear is Victoria, who looks back once at Frasier but doesn’t turn to salt, the call of the wild proving stronger than love. It could also be Frasier, in his own mind still following her. Either way the overall story of the source episodes is repeated at two levels in the vid. At high magnification in the zoo clip triptych and on an intermediate level via the bear story, a plot fractal.
Moving from plot to character, the POV character for the vid is Frasier a man of infinite reserve, emotionally so buttoned down he's practically frozen, trapped behind an invisible wall. The vid uses the metaphor of a snowglobe both to express this quality of Frasier's mind and to evoke memories of his previous encounter with Victoria in the snowy wastes of his homeland.
Its image is introduced in shots such as the one below, which subsequently zooms in to focus on Frasier himself sitting shadowy in the distance:
The literal snowglobe crashes as Victoria's spell is broken along with Frasier’s reserve. It becomes all too clear what she is (and he wants her):
It continues to be alluded to in clips of snow falling on Frasier in his cabin and or in the use of a morphing effect to make scenes appear as if observed from within a curved glass:
Focusing down, the image of a separating glass illustrates not only the barriers Frasier maintains between himself, his past and the world in general but on a smaller scale those that exist between him and Victoria. He first sees her approaching through the glass of a revolving hotel door, an image used repeatedly to great effect, while in the final chase scenes he catches sight of her through the window of a curious star-ceilinged booth:
Down once more to the ur-image and there's the glass again, framing the captive polar bear:
Fractal-like, the glass metaphor is repeated at three different levels but retains the same meaning in all.
Finally taking the fractalisation concept to an absurd extreme what if we break down that core scene yet further, split it through a prism into its component colours. Dark shadows, white bear, ice blue water and red painted lips. Focusing up and the piece as a whole remains utterly faithful to the colour scheme of the original pattern element:
Dark encounters framed by brilliant white snowscapes under arctic skies but punctuated with red - Frasier's borrowed jacket, blood on the maw, fiery passion.