Vidpost: Baptism
Title: Baptism
Artist: Crystal Castles
Neon Genesis Evangelion
TW for strobe effects, sexualized violence, and suicide
Blurb (from program): "Take care of yourself"
Download (50.9 MB): here
Click to viewMade for Club Vivid, Vividcon 2013.
Huge, staggering, unbelievable thanks to
absolutedestiny /
absolutedestiny for repeated beta, and constant support and encouragement. Some day I will let you teach me masking! SOME DAY!
Thanks also to a rag-tag band of vidding misfits who said "OMG FINISH THAT EVA VID I WANT IT" It was the push I needed to get it in this year.
Hold your head under the water
Take a breath for the father
Learn to love lessons repeated
The chronicles are so misleading
This is your baptism
And you can't forgive 'em
This is your baptism
And you can't forgive 'em
Okay. I have a lot of feelings about this vid. I first got it while on the bus to London back in 2012, before I moved back. I had rewatched all of the first series, End of Evangelion, and the first two new movies fairly recently. The whole structure just kind of popped into my head while listening to the song. It was ALL. SO. OBVIOUS. And extremely intimidating. HOORAY!
I felt like it was important to focus on the kids, and their motivations. Eva is a huge fandom with a ton of love, and attention and fan work, but one of the things that bothers me is how quickly the kids themselves are dismissed, or reduced to archetypes. Shinji's a whiny baby, Asuka's a total bitch. Rei is...a fantasy passive WAIFU-type that is a good part of why I don't actively seek out anime fandoms. And when the girls are showcased, it's in this creepy "sexy" way that's really out of sync with the direction that show takes after the first half. I have a lot of thoughts.
Anyway, this vid was a big pile of "firsts" for me. First Club Vivid vid, first anime vid, first use of fast cuts and first loooooooong term vid. First vid with extreme emotional investment in the source. It took me 18 months from the time I actually started the project, but I knew this one was a long burn. When I started, I had only ever finished two vids. I did not know how to do most of the editing that was done in this vid, and I decided early on that this was a vid I was going to work on until it felt *right*. I'm still not 100% sure about the editing. I still feel like it looks kinda shifty on first viewing on the small screen, which is not a position I personally like to be in with con vids.
BUT THEN...it showed on the dance floor. I was totally BESIDE MYSELF. I couldn't believe how good it looked up there. It was made as a dance vid partially because I wanted to make flashy things to a song I'd love to dance to, but also so I could experiment with style and structure and PATHOS. Hell of pathos. Good god, guys, this show.
Did you know I pulled some punches? I really did. JFC. This show.
Oh, and for the record: I love these kids. All 3 of them. Even you Shinji (you little shit). These are three children who've been done wrong by all the adults in their lives. Some of those adults just don't know how to do any better, because Eva is, on some level, an exploration of what happens when broken people turn around and break the next round of people (among a whole bunch of other themes, natch).
Eva is a beautiful, surreal, messed up pile of screaming-at-the-universe with a lot of fascinating elements. Like the enthusiastic appropriation of Abrahamic religious iconography and myth. I even like the original last two episodes. I am weird.
I hope you enjoy it.
There is some kanji, katakana and hiragana. There is also some mangled German, but other than NEIN it isn't actually real words. Just mentally fill it in with "ARGH DO NOT WANT" because that is honestly the jist.
Anywho:
"敵 " or テキ in katakana, is "teki": enemy.
つづく is "tsuzuku", and appears in the final frame. It's a common way of saying "to be continued" in shows.
This entry is also posted at http://joyo.dreamwidth.org/9863.html