Vidding chat: First vids
I was so thrilled by the response to the first vidding chat last week. Thank you to everyone that shared! I was especially pleased to see people chatting among themselves in the comments--please always feel free to do so.
( This week: your first vid )
( This week: your first vid )
In Nov 05, I was in a new job and... well, bored. I'd taken to reading around online, and I'd been watching this cool new reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. Having just moved again, I knew basically no-one where I was working, so I ended up chatting online; ultimately, after a few weeks of silent watching, I joined a Battlestar Galactica RP.
That got me interested in writing about BSG; after all, here was a group of people interested in the show, and I was playing a character (a retired military guy who'd been working as a space-platform construction engineer before the attacks) and chatting a bit. The rp went through a schism around Christmas, and suddenly there were lots of named characters free, including Lee Adama. When I first watched BSG, I was a big fan of Saul Tigh more than anyone else, but looking at the new vacancies (and tipped as someone to play Tigh now the character was vacant) I decided to have a try for that character. I managed to be successful, and suddenly I was writing rp posts as Apollo.
That got me much more involved with the other players, who started putting me on to all sorts of other bits of fandom I knew nothing about - Yahoogroups, Livejournal, fanfic archives. Before long, I was co-authoring fanfic; reading around, I discovered that people were making these music videos about the show. That was... fascinating. I did a little bit of reading, and discovered I had a program on my PC that could make vids - Windows Movie Maker. I was gunshy of chatting on things like Yahoogroups because I was the new kid on the block, but I'd become a serious Lee/Kara shipper, and other people like pandora_576 were making videos, and I thought "I'd like to try that."
I also thought that maybe a nice way to introduce myself on one of the Yahoogroups would be to sit down and make a Lee/Kara vid... so I did. I'd bought the S1 episodes on DVD, and a friend of mine had given me the 2.0 episodes on CD having torrented them (I knew nothing of such things) so I had episodes. I had a song I really, really liked, by an artist I really liked - Ani DiFranco. I'd been reading a lot of Charles de Lint books, and he's always touted Ani as an artist to listen too, and the two sort of combined into the idea that I had to make this vid.
I'd watched episodes like Home a lot because they had bit parts dedicated to characters I was writing about, and I was as big a shipper as I'd ever been - so I stayed up late one night, cutting and pasting clips together in WMM. I'd handwritten out the lyrics to the song and by listening to it in winamp, I'd worked out roughly where I thought each line of lyrics started, down to within a second or so. I knew what I wanted the vid to do - I'd say what the meta I wanted to show was, but my vid is to meta what crayon drawings on a wall are to the Lindisfarne scrolls - so I just kept plugging away until I had all the gaps filled. When I got stuck, I read around on the doom9 website, which was all about backing up DVDs but as a result included bits and pieces on software and problems with it, which led to other places online that talked about making videos.
I used bits of the show I liked, mixing together bits I thought were great because of what'd happened in the episodes and bits that looked emotionally right, and after about six hours I had a video. I was nervous as hell about posting it on the Yahoogroup, but it was a shipper environment, and three people said they liked it - and it got archived on their online video archive. I was in a ridiculously bouncy mood after that. I didn't talk to people much offline at that time - I still don't - but between that and the writing, it felt like there was something I could share around and join in the bouncy feeling that goes with being a shipper on a good day.
And since then, I've just... kept going. I can't turn out a video in an evening any longer, and I've not been able to recapture that mood in a long time, but it got me started.
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my vid is to meta what crayon drawings on a wall are to the Lindisfarne scrolls
Hee! I think I still feel like that on bad days... and not just about my first vid (which wasn't very meta-y at all but was more of a mood piece)!
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Hee! I think I still feel like that on bad days... and not just about my first vid (which wasn't very meta-y at all but was more of a mood piece)!
You agonise a lot about meta in vids :) It's something you craft in your vids to a far higher standard than mine, and I think the degree of care you show in your meta reflects in the amount of frustration it gives you ;)
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Hee! That's how I feel! Some of my vid bunnies are so rare and well, what I like. If three people like them, (or even just one, as you once said) and I like them, then I will be a happy vidder. :-)
Oh, and if WMM doesn't kill me or something. But no, I'm going to start cheating on it soon, so it won't suspect a thing! And I'll be ready to walk when necessary. ;-))
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*applause*
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