Some meta and notes on "Hourglass"
or, why the vid was dedicated to cathexys.
This was supposed to be a really quick post on my basic reasons for wanting to make this vid, but then it stopped being brief and got long, and then it got longer, because apparently I find nothing so fascinating as myself, so, you know what? Don't even read it, seriously. Go away.
The vid summary for Hourglass is "All this has happened before and will happen again," a line that refers both to the idea of a repeating day, and to the idea of a repeating genre trope.
(In case anyone is unaware, the summary is actually a quote from BSG - which is a bit misleading, because BSG is not in the vid, but I found it too perfect to resist.)
One of the issues that interests cathexys is the artistry of repetition. In artistic criticism generally, there is a tendency to praise originality as a good in and of itself, and repetition as itself a sign of poor quality. This type of criticism is particularly acute when it comes to fan art; fan art is devalued for being derivative, unoriginal, and repetitive, as though these terms by themselves were sufficient to establish that it has no artistic merit.
cathexys argues that repetition - with variation - is itself aesthetically pleasing, and has its own artistry. And this is in fact the aesthetic on which much fan art is built. Across fandoms you see the sex pollen story, the hurt/comfort story, wing!fic, the first time, the undercover-as-lovers. (Where would spnstoryfinders be without easily identifiable tropes?) Within fandoms, you see countless stories about Dean getting out of hell, Hutch detoxing, Methos and Duncan reconciling after Byron's death -- and we love that. We love a good new hooker!fic (well, I do), we love seeing the old trope with a new twist. This is a feature, not a bug.
Hourglass was essentially meant as a rebuttal to those who criticize fanworks as unoriginal, as though that fact in and of itself was enough to condemn them.
For starters, the vid is meant illustrate critics' hypocrisy - "professional" art isn't exactly brimming with originality.
The vid is also meant to demonstrate the pleasure that comes from repetition-with-variation. Time loop stories are about the aesthetics of repetition - the minor variations take on significance precisely because everything else is the same. So, in this vid, I tried to capture the fun of a time loop story arc - and for me, that appeal is the emotional toll it takes on the people within the loop. The vid thus roughly tracks the emotional distintegration typically seen in a time loop story - it starts with the characters' initial confusion, then runs through various stages of frustration, desperation, and resignation.
(By the way, an added bit of navel-gazing: Something that I was conscious of while creating the vid was that it uses humor differently than in my previous humor vids. Ordinarily, I create humor by recontextualizing clips. That is, in my previous humor vids, the joke comes from presenting the clips in a way other than their presentation in the source. In this vid, by contrast, much of the humor comes from the humor in the original sources, without alteration. So, for example, the Buffy section is (I hope!) funny, but it's funny in the same way and for the same reasons that those clips were funny in the Life Serial episode.)
Time loop stories are also fun as a recognizable trope - again, demonstrating the value of repetition. Viewers can enjoy a time loop story - and, I hope, enjoy the vid - precisely because they know what's coming and they're in on the joke.
(This is proved by the fact that commenters overwhelmingly have mentioned how much they "love" time loop stories. One said she actually collects them.)
The vid itself assumes, and depends on, viewers' understanding of the typical path of a time loop story. For example, if you didn't know what a time loop story was, the Buffy section would be incomprehensible because there's very little repetition there; the section depends almost entirely on the viewer's understanding of the trope.
Some notes:
For the vid, I had my own internal definition of what counted as a time loop story. Among other things, I excluded episodes where someone goes back and repeats the day a single time. I figured "repeat the day" stories are about a fantasy of "putting right what once went wrong"; time loop stories, by contrast, are about existential crises. So every episode featured in the vid contained multiple repetitions of a single day.
When I first started vidding Hourglass, I thought it would be fairly easy to do. Though there are a lot of fandoms represented - I think it's like 14 different shows - for each show (except Day Break) I only used a single episode, so the amount of source was actually quite limited.
Turns out, it was a lot tougher than I expected. What I hadn't realized was that a lot of time loop stories play out aurally - repetition is signaled by dialogue and sound effects. Characters say the same things, crashes and spills are heard offscreen but not seen, etc. Obviously, that can't be vidded.
Additionally, time loop stories sometimes use literally identical footage. The actors don't run the scene twice - the editor does. I didn't want to use identical clips, even if they appeared twice in the episode, because it felt like that would be no different than if I just "constructed" a fake time loop story by using the same clips over and over. I felt as though the proof that all these shows really did have time loop stories came from using varying clips.
So once I weeded out repetition-through-sound, and reptition-through-identical-shots, there actually wasn't very much left to work with. It was one of the most intense clipping jobs I've ever done, because I felt I had to be attentive to every little moment onscreen, no matter how mundane.
And, one final bit of trivia. In this post, I call them "time loop" stories and not "Groundhog Day" stories because, as it turns out, one episode in the vid actually predated Groundhog Day by about a year - Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect." I'm even beginning to wonder whether the TNG episode was the first TV time loop story ever; the idea might have appeared in other media before, but I couldn't find any earlier TV examples of the time loop. (Anyone know for sure?)
Because of this, I was actually hesitant at first to include the Groundhog Day clip at the end of the vid, because I didn't want to falsely imply that all the episodes in the vid were copying the movie. But, then I said screw it, it's funny, so in it went.
btw, I don't know if this is the sort of post that might get picked up by metafandom, but just in case, please do not link.
This was supposed to be a really quick post on my basic reasons for wanting to make this vid, but then it stopped being brief and got long, and then it got longer, because apparently I find nothing so fascinating as myself, so, you know what? Don't even read it, seriously. Go away.
The vid summary for Hourglass is "All this has happened before and will happen again," a line that refers both to the idea of a repeating day, and to the idea of a repeating genre trope.
(In case anyone is unaware, the summary is actually a quote from BSG - which is a bit misleading, because BSG is not in the vid, but I found it too perfect to resist.)
One of the issues that interests cathexys is the artistry of repetition. In artistic criticism generally, there is a tendency to praise originality as a good in and of itself, and repetition as itself a sign of poor quality. This type of criticism is particularly acute when it comes to fan art; fan art is devalued for being derivative, unoriginal, and repetitive, as though these terms by themselves were sufficient to establish that it has no artistic merit.
cathexys argues that repetition - with variation - is itself aesthetically pleasing, and has its own artistry. And this is in fact the aesthetic on which much fan art is built. Across fandoms you see the sex pollen story, the hurt/comfort story, wing!fic, the first time, the undercover-as-lovers. (Where would spnstoryfinders be without easily identifiable tropes?) Within fandoms, you see countless stories about Dean getting out of hell, Hutch detoxing, Methos and Duncan reconciling after Byron's death -- and we love that. We love a good new hooker!fic (well, I do), we love seeing the old trope with a new twist. This is a feature, not a bug.
Hourglass was essentially meant as a rebuttal to those who criticize fanworks as unoriginal, as though that fact in and of itself was enough to condemn them.
For starters, the vid is meant illustrate critics' hypocrisy - "professional" art isn't exactly brimming with originality.
The vid is also meant to demonstrate the pleasure that comes from repetition-with-variation. Time loop stories are about the aesthetics of repetition - the minor variations take on significance precisely because everything else is the same. So, in this vid, I tried to capture the fun of a time loop story arc - and for me, that appeal is the emotional toll it takes on the people within the loop. The vid thus roughly tracks the emotional distintegration typically seen in a time loop story - it starts with the characters' initial confusion, then runs through various stages of frustration, desperation, and resignation.
(By the way, an added bit of navel-gazing: Something that I was conscious of while creating the vid was that it uses humor differently than in my previous humor vids. Ordinarily, I create humor by recontextualizing clips. That is, in my previous humor vids, the joke comes from presenting the clips in a way other than their presentation in the source. In this vid, by contrast, much of the humor comes from the humor in the original sources, without alteration. So, for example, the Buffy section is (I hope!) funny, but it's funny in the same way and for the same reasons that those clips were funny in the Life Serial episode.)
Time loop stories are also fun as a recognizable trope - again, demonstrating the value of repetition. Viewers can enjoy a time loop story - and, I hope, enjoy the vid - precisely because they know what's coming and they're in on the joke.
(This is proved by the fact that commenters overwhelmingly have mentioned how much they "love" time loop stories. One said she actually collects them.)
The vid itself assumes, and depends on, viewers' understanding of the typical path of a time loop story. For example, if you didn't know what a time loop story was, the Buffy section would be incomprehensible because there's very little repetition there; the section depends almost entirely on the viewer's understanding of the trope.
Some notes:
For the vid, I had my own internal definition of what counted as a time loop story. Among other things, I excluded episodes where someone goes back and repeats the day a single time. I figured "repeat the day" stories are about a fantasy of "putting right what once went wrong"; time loop stories, by contrast, are about existential crises. So every episode featured in the vid contained multiple repetitions of a single day.
When I first started vidding Hourglass, I thought it would be fairly easy to do. Though there are a lot of fandoms represented - I think it's like 14 different shows - for each show (except Day Break) I only used a single episode, so the amount of source was actually quite limited.
Turns out, it was a lot tougher than I expected. What I hadn't realized was that a lot of time loop stories play out aurally - repetition is signaled by dialogue and sound effects. Characters say the same things, crashes and spills are heard offscreen but not seen, etc. Obviously, that can't be vidded.
Additionally, time loop stories sometimes use literally identical footage. The actors don't run the scene twice - the editor does. I didn't want to use identical clips, even if they appeared twice in the episode, because it felt like that would be no different than if I just "constructed" a fake time loop story by using the same clips over and over. I felt as though the proof that all these shows really did have time loop stories came from using varying clips.
So once I weeded out repetition-through-sound, and reptition-through-identical-shots, there actually wasn't very much left to work with. It was one of the most intense clipping jobs I've ever done, because I felt I had to be attentive to every little moment onscreen, no matter how mundane.
And, one final bit of trivia. In this post, I call them "time loop" stories and not "Groundhog Day" stories because, as it turns out, one episode in the vid actually predated Groundhog Day by about a year - Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect." I'm even beginning to wonder whether the TNG episode was the first TV time loop story ever; the idea might have appeared in other media before, but I couldn't find any earlier TV examples of the time loop. (Anyone know for sure?)
Because of this, I was actually hesitant at first to include the Groundhog Day clip at the end of the vid, because I didn't want to falsely imply that all the episodes in the vid were copying the movie. But, then I said screw it, it's funny, so in it went.
btw, I don't know if this is the sort of post that might get picked up by metafandom, but just in case, please do not link.