2007: my year in fandom
At the end of last year, I didn't have much in the way of specific plans for this year; I wanted to finish "In the Mirror" (which I did) and a Firefly vid (which I did, although the one I finished is not the one I was thinking of at the time). I wanted to have a premiering vid at VVC, which I did (two, even!). I was already considering volunteering for the VVC auction, which I did, although I hardly anticipated (and in fact didn't anticipate even when I volunteered) that I would end up vidding Heroes.
I also wanted to revise "Tre Sorelle," which I didn't get around to. On the other hand, I did finally put together a vid DVD, which wasn't explicitly one of my plans. And though I haven't yet finished the two vids I'd hoped to complete between VVC and year's end, part of the reason for that is that I fell in love with two new shows - and I did still complete three vids this year, which is one more than my (admittedly conservative) goal. I have accepted that, although I am getting better at drafting vids quickly, I still tend to complete them very slowly; more than three vids a year would be nice, and may even be possible some years, but is probably not to be counted on by me or anyone else.
general fannishness
I continue to post less than I did a few years ago - less in general, and less fannish content in particular. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think. One is that I am no longer monofannish; I am watching more than one show at a time these days, and often rewatching DVDs as well, and thus am not delving as deeply into or getting as obsessive about any of these shows as I did into XF and BtVS and Firefly. Another is that I still enjoy my shows, and enjoy talking about them with other like-minded people, but I find that I am not inclined to seek out like-minded people whom I don't already know, which to me is what defines "fannish involvement." When I got obsessed with BtVS and started vidding in the Buffyverse, everybody (except renenet and truepenny) was somebody I didn't already know! What's made me happiest in the last few months has been the re-intersection of my fannish interests with the interests of some of the people I met through BtVS. But my priority in recent months has been pulling local friends into the fannish experience, even if in limited ways. One of the joys of this year has been watching Wonderfalls with some non-fannish friends who'd never seen (or even heard of) the show, and who have fallen completely in love with it; another has been introducing those same friends to vids - one used to watch Highlander, the other loves due South, and both are slash-sympathetic, so I've been having great fun showing them all kinds of stuff.
My main fandom at this point is vidding, in the sense that that's what I have in common with most of the folks with whom I interact fannishly on a regular basis. (Or maybe I should say that that's ostensibly what we have in common; mostly they're just people I've come to love and with whom I want to maintain personal ties.) But my participation in vidding as a fandom has been severely hampered by three mutually-reinforcing factors:
my shows
This has been an unusually busy (and volatile) year for me in terms of TV.
I started out the year still watching Battlestar Galactica and Veronica Mars even though I'd become increasingly dissatisfied with both of them. BSG went so far off the deep end that I won't be watching S4 until and unless people I trust indicate that the show has recovered. VMars went out with a pretty good final ep, and didn't go so terribly off the rails as to sour me on the earlier seasons. I have vid ideas for both these shows, which are now so far down in the queue that they may not ever get made, but who knows.
Doctor Who was a lot of fun for me this year; I love Martha, and I think there were some truly terrific individual eps this season. The various DW vids I saw this year, especially the three by fan_eunice, made me unbelievably happy. At the same time, I'm not feeling particularly fannish about the show in an ongoing way; I'm happy when it's there, but tend to forget about it when it's not. No vid ideas here yet, although I have an ear out for Martha-appropriate songs.
I jumped on the Heroes bandwagon late (last March) but whole-heartedly, and felt briefly in tune with the various LJ folks I know whose enthusiasm had inspired me to pick it up in the first place. But the finale disappointed me, and S2 dismayed me. Tim Kring's comments on the failures of this season have convinced me to give the show another try when it returns, in the hope that the show can in fact climb out of the various holes into which it's dug itself, but I will be watching much more cautiously and less fannishly.
Pushing Daisies is definitely filling my recommended weekly allowance for "quirky"; I enjoy the characters, the visuals, and the general off-beatness of the whole endeavor. (Emerson's gun cozies FTW, seriously.) I'm not as wildly enthusiastic about the show as a lot of the folks I know, but I'm certainly enjoying the experience of watching a currently-airing show about which several of my favorite TV commentators are waxing rhapsodic.
In October, disenchanted with Heroes and anxious to start work on a new vid, I rewatched the first three seasons of Gilmore Girls, and fell for the show all over again.
renenet and I watched 15 eps of Charlie Jade when she was here for Thanksgiving, and I finished out the series in the week that followed. I'm happy that I watched it, if only because I can now appreciate more of the layers in gwyn_r's remarkable vid "I Remember", but I wasn't entirely satisfied with it as a show. The premise interests me, and the visuals are terrific, but I never felt particularly emotionally involved. I'm glad we marathoned it, because the momentum kept us going and kept me engaged; I'm not at all sure I would have finished out the series if I'd been watching slowly and/or by myself.
Around the same time, spurred largely by kassrachel's enthusiasm, I started watching Friday Night Lights from the beginning. My feelings about the show are sufficiently messy and expansive to require a post of their own, so here I'll just say that I adore S1, and S2, although a bit more of a mixed bag, has absolutely held my attention. I'm already looking forward to a rewatch, and I have a couple of vid ideas (although they're not pressing enough to be at the top of the queue, at least for now).
Most recently, I returned to The Wire (the first three eps of which I sampled and liked very much more than a year ago) and watched the first four seasons in less than six weeks at a point in the semester when I probably shouldn't have been watching any TV at all. I haven't fallen this hard for a show in a really long time. I loved it from the get-go, and then it just kept getting better. Well, okay, S2 is probably my least favorite season - but even that season, looking back, does some absolutely masterful stuff in terms of setting up S3, so no real complaints here. At some point I want to post smart thinky thoughts about the show, but at this point I am just so overwhelmed with love that I start to type something and almost immediately wander off into capslock flailing about KIMA GREGGS and LESTER FREAMON and STRINGER BELL and OMAR and PREZ OH HOLY SHIT PREZ and WHEN DID I START TO LOVE CARVER THIS MUCH and I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVEN'T MENTIONED DANIELS YET and... well, you get the idea. So much love for this show. So. much. love. I just... ::flails incoherently::
my vids
" In the Mirror" (due South)
" Nothing New" (Firefly)
" People Get Ready" (Heroes)
I also remastered Atropine (BtVS) as part of my preparation for releasing a vid DVD.
I had the idea for "In the Mirror" the first time I watched due South (I was listening to Nada Surf's The Weight Is A Gift pretty much nonstop at the time). I kept hoping for it to go away. It didn't. I made the vid in self-defense.
I'm not sure I have anything to say about this vid that can't be summed up by "Oh, RAY." It was a remarkably drama-free vid to make; not unstressful, of course, because vidding is always stressful for me (mostly in good or least manageable ways, which is why I keep doing it), but relatively quick (because I had the clip database in place already). katallison, bless her, betaed again, and that is always a treat. I'm still a little bummed out that I finished it just a couple of weeks too late to meet the Escapade deadline; this is probably the most Escapade-appropriate vid I will ever make in my entire life. Heh. It is also the vid that lays out most obviously the extent to which my heart is, in fact, made of pudding. And it has silliness in it that still makes me smile. "Kinda Skywalker" - oh, RAY.
The idea for "Nothing New" hit me like a ton of bricks in early February; I already had the whole show loaded up on the computer because I'd just started another (still unfinished) Firefly vid, so I edited the audio and threw down some clips and proceeded to fiddle with it every now and then for months - not at all my usual modus operandi, which involves freaky obsessiveness for several weeks. This vid just sort of... happened. Because it was never my top priority project, I would export a sucky draft, watch it, make some notes about things I should change / add / delete / rethink, and then I'd just... stop worrying about it until the next time I opened the file. So, once again, remarkably drama-free.
"Nothing New" is never going to be my favorite of my Firefly vids, and it's certainly not an I R SERIOUS CAT vid in the way that both "Thistledown Tears" and "New Frontier" are, so I can't say I'm surprised that it got so little attention, relatively speaking; but I had fun making it, and I had a terrific conversation about it with absolutedestiny the day after the Premieres show, and the song still makes me clutch my heart and say "OH MAL," with or without the vid attached. So I'm still calling this one a win.
If you've been wondering where all my vidding angst went this year... that would be "People Get Ready," which was a joy to vid and at the same time almost killed me. I've written about the vid at excruciating length already, so I won't rehash all that again; I will say that at the beginning of the year my plan was to finish several of the vid ideas in my ever-increasing backlog, and instead I rushed a couple of new ideas (including this one) to the front of the queue, simply because they're what I was most thrilled about, and I'm really glad I did; I'm so frustrated with Heroes in the wake of S2 that if I'd put off "People Get Ready" I'm not sure I could make it now.
And that would be sad, because it's my favorite of my vids this year; it's the vid that helped me clarify in my own mind what I loved about the show and how I thought its various pieces fit together. More than once this fall I rewatched that vid to remind myself why I'd fallen for the show in the first place.
new things I tried
Not many, compared to some years; this was a year of small experiments and new configurations of established skills.
I did mess around a little with After Effects for the "People Get Ready" credits with reasonably good results, I think, although I realized by the end of the process that there were simpler ways to do a lot of the things I did (go figure). And I played with using blurs rather than dissolves to soften some shots in "Nothing New" - an idea I stole quite shamelessly from dualbunny. I manipulated color more than I have in previous vids, although that's not saying much.
I made a relatively lighthearted slash vid; "Out Here" has a happy ending, but I can't in good conscience call it "lighthearted," whereas "In the Mirror," despite the moments of pain embedded in it, is basically pretty upbeat. Looking back, I can see that one of the things I did this year (without articulating it quite this way to myself at the time) was experiment with bittersweetness; in "In the Mirror" the emphasis is ultimately on the sweet, and in "Nothing New" it's ultimately on the bitter, but in both I was trying to punch up the overall mood by putting in some contrasting moments.
And, in "People Get Ready," I tried to combine everything I'd learned about ensemble vidding in "Thistledown Tears" with everything I'd learned about pacing in "Cat-Scan," "New Frontier," and "Out Here."
stuff I learned
I learned that I can run a vid on internal motion as well as external motion. I learned that After Effects will not actually bite me. I learned that I really am exactly as much of a control freak as I suspected, and I re-learned that I vid very slowly, and I learned that the combination of those two things makes vidding for auction very stressful - although not as stressful as if I'd been vidding someone else's idea, so the choice to offer to bump one of my existing ideas up the queue was a good one.
Actually, I think the most important things I learned have to do with my vidding process, and I'm still trying to articulate what they are. It's easy for me to forget, after the craziness and chaos of trying to finish "People Get Ready," that most of the vidding I did this year was pretty laid back. I learned to let drafts sit (when time permitted), and I learned that when I do that I can catch a lot of bad choices myself, and then if I let the draft sit a little more I can maybe even figure out what choices would be better. And as a result, the beta process becomes a lot less fraught, and also a lot more productive, because the beta viewer doesn't have to start from ground zero in terms of what's wrong; I've already reworked the worst of the problems (and moved on to new problems, but hey, that's how I roll). I still need that feedback in order to progress, but I'm learning to move myself a little further down that path before I start begging my betas to carry me.
Also, making a vid DVD is hard. But definitely not as hard as vidding. And it's kinda fun.
notes for the coming year
One of my vidding goals for 2007 was " to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak." Which really did happen, although not quite in the way I envisioned. I didn't make any more vids in 2007 than I did in 2006, but I did indeed make them faster, and I did let myself be messier, at least in two of the three. But one of the things that I learned from that experiment is that it is much, much easier for me to be fast and messy if I a) know the source really well, and/or b) have a detailed clip database ready to go. "In the Mirror" went MUCH faster than "Out Here," and while admittedly this is partly because the song is shorter, it's also because I had a backup of the due-South-watching part of my brain in the form of that clip database. Ditto for "Nothing New" and Firefly. So a lot of the second half of the year was spent doing the prep work that will enable me to continue vidding quickly and messily - to sail through the initial draft of the vid rather than stalling out in the middle.
One of my process goals for 2008, then, is to continue that trend: to do the prep work I need to do, and accept that that will take time, but then to zoom through the drafting process. Another process goal is to continue to work on more than one vid at once, and to try, where possible, to stagger where I am in each vid: rewatching the source for one vid, drafting another, letting a third one sit while I rethink it and consider revision options. One of the things I most struggle with is starting a new vid after posting a finished one; I really believe that it might be easier to turn to an in-progress vid rather than to start from scratch.
More concretely: I have two partially-filled-in timelines that I'd like complete drafts of by the end of February. I have a collaboration with laurashapiro on tap that I'm really excited about. Once I have my second dedicated vidding drive installed, I can start on the long-delayed Gilmore Girls vid. I have a vid idea for The Wire that I'd like to at least start work on by the end of the year. And I'd like to rewatch Farscape this year with an eye towards vidding.
And I want to make some time every week for watching vids and sending feedback. I make time for plenty of other things in my life - I put them in my calendar, like appointments, and I keep them. I'm going to try that system with vidwatching and see how it goes. Even if I only managed feedback on one vid per week, I'm pretty sure I'd be waaaaay ahead of what I sent this year.
I also wanted to revise "Tre Sorelle," which I didn't get around to. On the other hand, I did finally put together a vid DVD, which wasn't explicitly one of my plans. And though I haven't yet finished the two vids I'd hoped to complete between VVC and year's end, part of the reason for that is that I fell in love with two new shows - and I did still complete three vids this year, which is one more than my (admittedly conservative) goal. I have accepted that, although I am getting better at drafting vids quickly, I still tend to complete them very slowly; more than three vids a year would be nice, and may even be possible some years, but is probably not to be counted on by me or anyone else.
general fannishness
I continue to post less than I did a few years ago - less in general, and less fannish content in particular. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think. One is that I am no longer monofannish; I am watching more than one show at a time these days, and often rewatching DVDs as well, and thus am not delving as deeply into or getting as obsessive about any of these shows as I did into XF and BtVS and Firefly. Another is that I still enjoy my shows, and enjoy talking about them with other like-minded people, but I find that I am not inclined to seek out like-minded people whom I don't already know, which to me is what defines "fannish involvement." When I got obsessed with BtVS and started vidding in the Buffyverse, everybody (except renenet and truepenny) was somebody I didn't already know! What's made me happiest in the last few months has been the re-intersection of my fannish interests with the interests of some of the people I met through BtVS. But my priority in recent months has been pulling local friends into the fannish experience, even if in limited ways. One of the joys of this year has been watching Wonderfalls with some non-fannish friends who'd never seen (or even heard of) the show, and who have fallen completely in love with it; another has been introducing those same friends to vids - one used to watch Highlander, the other loves due South, and both are slash-sympathetic, so I've been having great fun showing them all kinds of stuff.
My main fandom at this point is vidding, in the sense that that's what I have in common with most of the folks with whom I interact fannishly on a regular basis. (Or maybe I should say that that's ostensibly what we have in common; mostly they're just people I've come to love and with whom I want to maintain personal ties.) But my participation in vidding as a fandom has been severely hampered by three mutually-reinforcing factors:
- Hermit-like tendencies. See above re: not seeking out like-minded people. I saw a lot of terrific vids at VVC this year by people I don't know at all, and have seen recs for many more such vids in other folks' LJ posts all year long. And some of these people are thinking and posting and conversing about vidding much more than I am, or than the folks whose LJs I read currently are. Which is wonderful! But I find myself mostly thinking "Go you!" and nodding from the sidelines rather than joining the conversations. I'm sure at some point I'll swing back around to posting vidding meta more frequently than I have in recent months; I don't know whether I'll go seeking out new people to discuss with, though, at least outside of VVC. I'm not entirely happy about my tendency to hunker down and ignore the world outside my little bubble; on the other hand, I have a limited amount of energy and emotional resources for meeting and befriending new people, and most of those resources are currently directed towards starting and developing relationships with local friends and colleagues and neighbors (an area of my life in which I have been reaching out more often than is my wont). If things slow down on that front, my level of fannish involvement might change significantly.
- Selfishness. More often than not, in any given week or month, my time is limited enough that I have to choose between watching vids, writing about vids and vidding, and actually working on my own vids. These days, I'm inclined to focus on the actual vidding. Which is not inherently bad, I think, but which has led to...
- Massive guilt about not sending feedback on vids. The one way in which this was an abysmal year for me is that I was utterly made of fail in terms of sending feedback on vids - and for that matter in terms of watching vids in the first place. I have downloaded literally dozens of vids that I haven't even watched yet. I sent a bit of feedback on a few VVC vids right after the con, but failed to follow up on many of the vids that moved and delighted me. I have a couple of unfinished feedback emails dating back to APRIL. I defaulted on beta feedback to two different people - some blame for which can be placed on circumstances of timing not under my control, but most of which must be chalked up to my being a pinhead. Given how exceptionally generous people have been with me this year, both in beta comments and in post-vid feedback, my karmic balance is so completely out of whack that I'm mildly surprised I haven't been struck by lightning.
my shows
This has been an unusually busy (and volatile) year for me in terms of TV.
I started out the year still watching Battlestar Galactica and Veronica Mars even though I'd become increasingly dissatisfied with both of them. BSG went so far off the deep end that I won't be watching S4 until and unless people I trust indicate that the show has recovered. VMars went out with a pretty good final ep, and didn't go so terribly off the rails as to sour me on the earlier seasons. I have vid ideas for both these shows, which are now so far down in the queue that they may not ever get made, but who knows.
Doctor Who was a lot of fun for me this year; I love Martha, and I think there were some truly terrific individual eps this season. The various DW vids I saw this year, especially the three by fan_eunice, made me unbelievably happy. At the same time, I'm not feeling particularly fannish about the show in an ongoing way; I'm happy when it's there, but tend to forget about it when it's not. No vid ideas here yet, although I have an ear out for Martha-appropriate songs.
I jumped on the Heroes bandwagon late (last March) but whole-heartedly, and felt briefly in tune with the various LJ folks I know whose enthusiasm had inspired me to pick it up in the first place. But the finale disappointed me, and S2 dismayed me. Tim Kring's comments on the failures of this season have convinced me to give the show another try when it returns, in the hope that the show can in fact climb out of the various holes into which it's dug itself, but I will be watching much more cautiously and less fannishly.
Pushing Daisies is definitely filling my recommended weekly allowance for "quirky"; I enjoy the characters, the visuals, and the general off-beatness of the whole endeavor. (Emerson's gun cozies FTW, seriously.) I'm not as wildly enthusiastic about the show as a lot of the folks I know, but I'm certainly enjoying the experience of watching a currently-airing show about which several of my favorite TV commentators are waxing rhapsodic.
In October, disenchanted with Heroes and anxious to start work on a new vid, I rewatched the first three seasons of Gilmore Girls, and fell for the show all over again.
renenet and I watched 15 eps of Charlie Jade when she was here for Thanksgiving, and I finished out the series in the week that followed. I'm happy that I watched it, if only because I can now appreciate more of the layers in gwyn_r's remarkable vid "I Remember", but I wasn't entirely satisfied with it as a show. The premise interests me, and the visuals are terrific, but I never felt particularly emotionally involved. I'm glad we marathoned it, because the momentum kept us going and kept me engaged; I'm not at all sure I would have finished out the series if I'd been watching slowly and/or by myself.
Around the same time, spurred largely by kassrachel's enthusiasm, I started watching Friday Night Lights from the beginning. My feelings about the show are sufficiently messy and expansive to require a post of their own, so here I'll just say that I adore S1, and S2, although a bit more of a mixed bag, has absolutely held my attention. I'm already looking forward to a rewatch, and I have a couple of vid ideas (although they're not pressing enough to be at the top of the queue, at least for now).
Most recently, I returned to The Wire (the first three eps of which I sampled and liked very much more than a year ago) and watched the first four seasons in less than six weeks at a point in the semester when I probably shouldn't have been watching any TV at all. I haven't fallen this hard for a show in a really long time. I loved it from the get-go, and then it just kept getting better. Well, okay, S2 is probably my least favorite season - but even that season, looking back, does some absolutely masterful stuff in terms of setting up S3, so no real complaints here. At some point I want to post smart thinky thoughts about the show, but at this point I am just so overwhelmed with love that I start to type something and almost immediately wander off into capslock flailing about KIMA GREGGS and LESTER FREAMON and STRINGER BELL and OMAR and PREZ OH HOLY SHIT PREZ and WHEN DID I START TO LOVE CARVER THIS MUCH and I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVEN'T MENTIONED DANIELS YET and... well, you get the idea. So much love for this show. So. much. love. I just... ::flails incoherently::
my vids
" In the Mirror" (due South)
" Nothing New" (Firefly)
" People Get Ready" (Heroes)
I also remastered Atropine (BtVS) as part of my preparation for releasing a vid DVD.
I had the idea for "In the Mirror" the first time I watched due South (I was listening to Nada Surf's The Weight Is A Gift pretty much nonstop at the time). I kept hoping for it to go away. It didn't. I made the vid in self-defense.
I'm not sure I have anything to say about this vid that can't be summed up by "Oh, RAY." It was a remarkably drama-free vid to make; not unstressful, of course, because vidding is always stressful for me (mostly in good or least manageable ways, which is why I keep doing it), but relatively quick (because I had the clip database in place already). katallison, bless her, betaed again, and that is always a treat. I'm still a little bummed out that I finished it just a couple of weeks too late to meet the Escapade deadline; this is probably the most Escapade-appropriate vid I will ever make in my entire life. Heh. It is also the vid that lays out most obviously the extent to which my heart is, in fact, made of pudding. And it has silliness in it that still makes me smile. "Kinda Skywalker" - oh, RAY.
The idea for "Nothing New" hit me like a ton of bricks in early February; I already had the whole show loaded up on the computer because I'd just started another (still unfinished) Firefly vid, so I edited the audio and threw down some clips and proceeded to fiddle with it every now and then for months - not at all my usual modus operandi, which involves freaky obsessiveness for several weeks. This vid just sort of... happened. Because it was never my top priority project, I would export a sucky draft, watch it, make some notes about things I should change / add / delete / rethink, and then I'd just... stop worrying about it until the next time I opened the file. So, once again, remarkably drama-free.
"Nothing New" is never going to be my favorite of my Firefly vids, and it's certainly not an I R SERIOUS CAT vid in the way that both "Thistledown Tears" and "New Frontier" are, so I can't say I'm surprised that it got so little attention, relatively speaking; but I had fun making it, and I had a terrific conversation about it with absolutedestiny the day after the Premieres show, and the song still makes me clutch my heart and say "OH MAL," with or without the vid attached. So I'm still calling this one a win.
If you've been wondering where all my vidding angst went this year... that would be "People Get Ready," which was a joy to vid and at the same time almost killed me. I've written about the vid at excruciating length already, so I won't rehash all that again; I will say that at the beginning of the year my plan was to finish several of the vid ideas in my ever-increasing backlog, and instead I rushed a couple of new ideas (including this one) to the front of the queue, simply because they're what I was most thrilled about, and I'm really glad I did; I'm so frustrated with Heroes in the wake of S2 that if I'd put off "People Get Ready" I'm not sure I could make it now.
And that would be sad, because it's my favorite of my vids this year; it's the vid that helped me clarify in my own mind what I loved about the show and how I thought its various pieces fit together. More than once this fall I rewatched that vid to remind myself why I'd fallen for the show in the first place.
new things I tried
Not many, compared to some years; this was a year of small experiments and new configurations of established skills.
I did mess around a little with After Effects for the "People Get Ready" credits with reasonably good results, I think, although I realized by the end of the process that there were simpler ways to do a lot of the things I did (go figure). And I played with using blurs rather than dissolves to soften some shots in "Nothing New" - an idea I stole quite shamelessly from dualbunny. I manipulated color more than I have in previous vids, although that's not saying much.
I made a relatively lighthearted slash vid; "Out Here" has a happy ending, but I can't in good conscience call it "lighthearted," whereas "In the Mirror," despite the moments of pain embedded in it, is basically pretty upbeat. Looking back, I can see that one of the things I did this year (without articulating it quite this way to myself at the time) was experiment with bittersweetness; in "In the Mirror" the emphasis is ultimately on the sweet, and in "Nothing New" it's ultimately on the bitter, but in both I was trying to punch up the overall mood by putting in some contrasting moments.
And, in "People Get Ready," I tried to combine everything I'd learned about ensemble vidding in "Thistledown Tears" with everything I'd learned about pacing in "Cat-Scan," "New Frontier," and "Out Here."
stuff I learned
I learned that I can run a vid on internal motion as well as external motion. I learned that After Effects will not actually bite me. I learned that I really am exactly as much of a control freak as I suspected, and I re-learned that I vid very slowly, and I learned that the combination of those two things makes vidding for auction very stressful - although not as stressful as if I'd been vidding someone else's idea, so the choice to offer to bump one of my existing ideas up the queue was a good one.
Actually, I think the most important things I learned have to do with my vidding process, and I'm still trying to articulate what they are. It's easy for me to forget, after the craziness and chaos of trying to finish "People Get Ready," that most of the vidding I did this year was pretty laid back. I learned to let drafts sit (when time permitted), and I learned that when I do that I can catch a lot of bad choices myself, and then if I let the draft sit a little more I can maybe even figure out what choices would be better. And as a result, the beta process becomes a lot less fraught, and also a lot more productive, because the beta viewer doesn't have to start from ground zero in terms of what's wrong; I've already reworked the worst of the problems (and moved on to new problems, but hey, that's how I roll). I still need that feedback in order to progress, but I'm learning to move myself a little further down that path before I start begging my betas to carry me.
Also, making a vid DVD is hard. But definitely not as hard as vidding. And it's kinda fun.
notes for the coming year
One of my vidding goals for 2007 was " to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak." Which really did happen, although not quite in the way I envisioned. I didn't make any more vids in 2007 than I did in 2006, but I did indeed make them faster, and I did let myself be messier, at least in two of the three. But one of the things that I learned from that experiment is that it is much, much easier for me to be fast and messy if I a) know the source really well, and/or b) have a detailed clip database ready to go. "In the Mirror" went MUCH faster than "Out Here," and while admittedly this is partly because the song is shorter, it's also because I had a backup of the due-South-watching part of my brain in the form of that clip database. Ditto for "Nothing New" and Firefly. So a lot of the second half of the year was spent doing the prep work that will enable me to continue vidding quickly and messily - to sail through the initial draft of the vid rather than stalling out in the middle.
One of my process goals for 2008, then, is to continue that trend: to do the prep work I need to do, and accept that that will take time, but then to zoom through the drafting process. Another process goal is to continue to work on more than one vid at once, and to try, where possible, to stagger where I am in each vid: rewatching the source for one vid, drafting another, letting a third one sit while I rethink it and consider revision options. One of the things I most struggle with is starting a new vid after posting a finished one; I really believe that it might be easier to turn to an in-progress vid rather than to start from scratch.
More concretely: I have two partially-filled-in timelines that I'd like complete drafts of by the end of February. I have a collaboration with laurashapiro on tap that I'm really excited about. Once I have my second dedicated vidding drive installed, I can start on the long-delayed Gilmore Girls vid. I have a vid idea for The Wire that I'd like to at least start work on by the end of the year. And I'd like to rewatch Farscape this year with an eye towards vidding.
And I want to make some time every week for watching vids and sending feedback. I make time for plenty of other things in my life - I put them in my calendar, like appointments, and I keep them. I'm going to try that system with vidwatching and see how it goes. Even if I only managed feedback on one vid per week, I'm pretty sure I'd be waaaaay ahead of what I sent this year.