2011 fannish year in review
Past years: 2010 | 2008-09 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
general fannishness
I said in my 2010 review post that I was feeling more settled, fannishly; this year I felt sort of adrift again, for various reasons. Friday Night Lights ended, which was a big deal for me (more on that below), and most of the other shows I watched, even the ones I most enjoyed, didn't spur me to fannishness. Glee was the exception, and Glee... my relationship with Glee is -- let's be generous and say "complicated" (again, more on that below).
I didn't vid much this year, by which I mean both that my output was very small (for multiple values of "small") and that I didn't spend very much time vidding. I started a number of projects that I didn't finish, some of which I do actually hope to finish, uh, eventually. I very seldom lose interest in projects permanently; I just sort of... wander away from them for long periods of time.
The big thing that happened, I guess -- and it kind of snuck up on me -- was that in 2011 I began to feel sort of out of sync, fannishly, with a good deal of the folks whose journals I subscribe to. What's interesting about this is that upon reflection I think it's been true for quite a while; many of us are posting less, many of us aren't watching the same shows anymore. These changes haven't really bothered me; as a matter of fact, they still don't bother me, because while I may come to care about people through fandom, the caring doesn't stop just because our interests have diverged. (I should add that in some cases these changes have worked in the other direction: I finally have fannish interests in common with people I've always enjoyed but haven't until recently shared a fandom with, and that's been fun.) But for the first time in years -- possibly because some important things in my offline life have finally settled down -- I've begun to feel like branching out a bit. And because some of my longtime fandom friends are posting less, I think I actually have room in my day to read posts by more people. So I'm going into 2012 expecting to subscribe to some new-to-me journals.
my shows
I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2010 and couldn't get into it, but based on reassurances from
oyceter and
sdwolfpup I gave it another try, and this time I liked it! I... pretty much have nothing to say about it beyond that. Heh.
Castle is still my happy snack food show. The will they/won't they is starting to get a bit wearying, but because it's not the show's sole engine, I'm still enjoying the show overall.
Still not fannish about Doctor Who, but I've really been enjoying Eleven, Amy, Rory, and River, and I like feeling up-to-date with something that makes so many of my friends so happy.
Friday Night Lights was, once again, where most of my emotional investment went this year. I love this show so much, you guys -- so, so much. I think, in retrospect, that the intensity of my emotional relationship with this show is part of why I got so little vidding done this year; the vid ideas that felt most pressing were all FNL ideas, so much so that I really didn't have brainspace for anything else, and at the same time I couldn't bring myself to vid the show because that would mean admitting it was over, and I just wasn't ready to say goodbye. So I spent most of the year with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, creatively speaking. Now, almost a year after the finale, I think I'm finally ready to start processing; I've got all the eps ripped and ready to go, and I really want to see these vids, so... I think it's time.
I have no idea where Fringe is going, and right now I feel fine about that. I mean, it's possible that this season is going to be a giant letdown, but for the moment I'm just enjoying the ride.
I thoroughly enjoyed Game of Thrones (well, except for how the direwolves are insufficiently dire) and am looking forward to the next season. No particular fannishness; if I had any, it would go toward the books, and GRRM's recent pace of production makes that prospect too exhausting to contemplate.
Glee is my big new fandom for the year, which... IDEK. I mainlined the first two seasons in a month, and have been keeping up with S3 week to week -- which is frustrating, because I enjoy the show a good deal more when I can watch it several eps at a time, but I don't have the willpower to save them up when they're airing weekly. There's a lot about the show that I like, and there are also a lot of character and storyline elements that make me want to throw things, and I just want fandom to fix it -- which is why I've been accumulating fic recs and am going to be diving into those this week. That said, I find Glee fandom at large sort of terrifying;
stultiloquentia characterized it as "there are a lot of shrieky teenagers," which is true and not my bag, but really the more pressing difficulty for me is that I don't think I have ever seen a fandom so obsessed with spoilers (and getting really exercised over spoilers in ways that frequently turn out to be unnecessary after the fact), which means that the spoiler-avoidant among us have to tread fairly carefully. But obviously in a fandom that size there are going to be people more my speed; it's just a matter of finding them, and the vid I posted last week has resulted in comments from some people in whose somewhat quieter corner of the fandom I think I will be happy to hang out.
I started watching Haven because of vonniek. It is pretty much the ultimate laundry-folding show for me: I enjoy it because Audrey/Nathan totally pushes a bunch of my fannish buttons (oh, X-Files, you have so much to answer for) and the actors are charming, but everything else,.. Let's just say that, as a rule, my viewing experience is enhanced by paying more attention to my laundry than to what's onscreen.
I made it through four episodes of Ringer. I think it was four. Maybe three. And that's already more words than the show deserves. Moving on!
I said last year that "whatever their similarities, Southland lacks The Wire's rigorous commitment to thematic coherence and, frequently, its understanding that narratives, even narratives modeled on 'real life,' need beginnings and ends in order to give us a way to read the middles, which means that the show is frustratingly uneven structurally in ways that the individual actors' performances can't always offset. Also, in [S3] the showrunners seem determined to make as many of the characters as possible as unlikeable as possible." Which pretty much sums up why I am done with the show.
S2 of Treme was, I thought, terrific: messier than S1, riskier, and ultimately even better, which is impressive because S1 was some damn good TV. I love that David Simon is using new narrative means to explore his favorite thematic terrain.
I rewatched all of The Wire as
sdwolfpup was getting ready to work on "The Beautiful Struggle." God, what a show.
my vids
Life is Fatal (Trust)
Love at First Sight (Glee)
So, uh. Two 'shipper vids! That otherwise have pretty much nothing in common. *facepalm*
I'd had the idea for "Life is Fatal" for years, and in fact I started prep work on the vid in February 2009, and then other projects took over my brain for, oh, two years. Then, right around the turn of 2011, I started actually vidding. I posted the vid about ten days later. It's a weird little vid, very obscure and very personal. But it does what I wanted it to do, so I'm pleased with it.
"Love at First Sight," on the other hand... Look, I am totally *__* about Kurt/Blaine, but I had no plans to vid them; I didn't have a song, and I didn't have anything to say, really, besides "Behold the adorableness of these teenaged boys in love! Canonically, even!" which is entirely self-evident (see above re: right there in canon) and thus not really in need of vidding. Over Thanksgiving break, I started ripping all of S1 and S2 for vidding purposes because I was planning to work on a completely different vid (an ensemble vid -- I know, you're shocked). While working on that, I had dance music on shuffle. This song came up. Halfway through it, I went back and listened from the beginning. Then I went and dug out the CD and ripped and edited the song. By midnight, I'd vidded 35 seconds. By the end of the next day, I'd vidded another 45 seconds and was halfway done. Then the end of the semester happened and I didn't get back to it until the end of December, but really the whole thing came together astonishingly quickly.
Vidding Glee is sort of a silly thing to do, really, because the show essentially vids itself (sometimes beautifully, sometimes bafflingly) several times an episode, but while making this vid I found that I didn't really care; I love these characters, I love their relationship, I love the song for Kurt, so -- fuck it, I made a vid, and both making and watching the vid have made me absurdly happy. I can already tell that watching it is going to be my pick-me-up for the foreseeable future; it's everything I love about that S2 storyline condensed into two minutes and thirty seconds.
Ultimately, though, I think my greatest vid-related experience this year was getting to watch
sdwolfpup work on "The Beautiful Struggle." My love for that vid is epic, and the fact that I got to see it in progress, to see the pieces coming together, to see SDW work through the process of making something so complex and moving... I get chills just thinking about it. Having a ringside seat for that endeavor is truly one of the greatest experiences I've ever had in fandom. I can't claim to have beta'ed the vid in any meaningful way, but I reacted to it all over the place, and since SDW claims to have found that instrumental in nudging the vid toward completion, I can safely say that I contributed to vidding fandom in 2011.
new things I tried
Somewhat to my surprise, given the peculiarity of my output, I did end up trying new things this year. My original vid idea for Glee was an ensemble vid, as I've mentioned, intended for Club Vivid; basically, I wanted to work with dance footage, lots of internal motion, lots of landing things on the beat. I mean, I've been learning for years to work with internal and external motion in source, and I like to think I've gotten pretty good at it, but I've never built an entire vid around it using mostly dance-oriented footage, and it was something I wanted to try. And, as it turned out, some of that intention bled over into how I worked on "Love at First Sight," especially because the first clips I laid were from the "Teenage Dream" sequence (and it turns out that the two songs have essentially the same BPM).
So working with dance-y footage was the first new thing. The second was playing around with adding a lot of pans and zooms to source. Again, I've done this before, but in a much more limited way, whereas in "Love at First Sight" I added (or exaggerated) pans and zooms for about 80% of the clips. It's the sort of thing that isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly noticeable when watching, but when I watch the before-and-after exports side by side, I can really see the difference. It's not something I'd do for every vid, but because of the way Glee's shot -- lots of motion during the musical numbers, very little the rest of the time -- it really helped make the vid visually cohesive, and that's a trick I can probably use elsewhere as well.
stuff I learned
The big thing I learned this year is that I need specific goals re: vidding, because otherwise I don't get much done. I don't necessarily have to fulfill all the goals, because sometimes I need to dump a long-planned project to work on something that has for whatever reason become more pressing, but I do have to have the goals in the first place. My goal for last year was way too vague: "Just keep vidding!" Yeah, that didn't work. And the goal of having "something" for VividCon also doesn't work very well; I need to have a particular vid (or vids) in mind.
The other thing I learned, though, is that I really can vid spontaneously -- and (this is important) I can enjoy it. I noted last year that I am not good with spontaneity (it makes me nervous!), and broadly speaking this is still true, but "Love at First Sight" gave me the unexpected gift of showing me how much joy I can get out of winging it, and I mean really winging it -- no notes, no clip databases, nothing but a printout of the lyrics and a terrifying amount of enthusiasm. I am usually a very careful vidder, which I think is fairly evident in my work, for good or ill; it's why one of my vidding goals for 2007 was " to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak." I ended up reapplying myself to that goal in the last few weeks of 2011, and I'm hoping that messiness and looseness is something I can retain even as I work on less silly vids.
goals for the coming year
So, okay -- my main process goal for 2012 is, once again, to be open to the possibility of spontaneity. But I do also have some very specific vids I want to try to make by particular deadlines:
All of these goals and plans are subject to change, but I think -- I hope, anyway! -- that keeping them in mind will help me stay focused and be more productive than I was this year. I hope that recent developments in my offline life will also help in this regard, but even if they don't, I am re-dedicating myself to the idea that I need (and that I am allowed to prioritize) time to create things.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
general fannishness
I said in my 2010 review post that I was feeling more settled, fannishly; this year I felt sort of adrift again, for various reasons. Friday Night Lights ended, which was a big deal for me (more on that below), and most of the other shows I watched, even the ones I most enjoyed, didn't spur me to fannishness. Glee was the exception, and Glee... my relationship with Glee is -- let's be generous and say "complicated" (again, more on that below).
I didn't vid much this year, by which I mean both that my output was very small (for multiple values of "small") and that I didn't spend very much time vidding. I started a number of projects that I didn't finish, some of which I do actually hope to finish, uh, eventually. I very seldom lose interest in projects permanently; I just sort of... wander away from them for long periods of time.
The big thing that happened, I guess -- and it kind of snuck up on me -- was that in 2011 I began to feel sort of out of sync, fannishly, with a good deal of the folks whose journals I subscribe to. What's interesting about this is that upon reflection I think it's been true for quite a while; many of us are posting less, many of us aren't watching the same shows anymore. These changes haven't really bothered me; as a matter of fact, they still don't bother me, because while I may come to care about people through fandom, the caring doesn't stop just because our interests have diverged. (I should add that in some cases these changes have worked in the other direction: I finally have fannish interests in common with people I've always enjoyed but haven't until recently shared a fandom with, and that's been fun.) But for the first time in years -- possibly because some important things in my offline life have finally settled down -- I've begun to feel like branching out a bit. And because some of my longtime fandom friends are posting less, I think I actually have room in my day to read posts by more people. So I'm going into 2012 expecting to subscribe to some new-to-me journals.
my shows
I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2010 and couldn't get into it, but based on reassurances from
oyceter and
sdwolfpup I gave it another try, and this time I liked it! I... pretty much have nothing to say about it beyond that. Heh.
Castle is still my happy snack food show. The will they/won't they is starting to get a bit wearying, but because it's not the show's sole engine, I'm still enjoying the show overall.
Still not fannish about Doctor Who, but I've really been enjoying Eleven, Amy, Rory, and River, and I like feeling up-to-date with something that makes so many of my friends so happy.
Friday Night Lights was, once again, where most of my emotional investment went this year. I love this show so much, you guys -- so, so much. I think, in retrospect, that the intensity of my emotional relationship with this show is part of why I got so little vidding done this year; the vid ideas that felt most pressing were all FNL ideas, so much so that I really didn't have brainspace for anything else, and at the same time I couldn't bring myself to vid the show because that would mean admitting it was over, and I just wasn't ready to say goodbye. So I spent most of the year with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, creatively speaking. Now, almost a year after the finale, I think I'm finally ready to start processing; I've got all the eps ripped and ready to go, and I really want to see these vids, so... I think it's time.
I have no idea where Fringe is going, and right now I feel fine about that. I mean, it's possible that this season is going to be a giant letdown, but for the moment I'm just enjoying the ride.
I thoroughly enjoyed Game of Thrones (well, except for how the direwolves are insufficiently dire) and am looking forward to the next season. No particular fannishness; if I had any, it would go toward the books, and GRRM's recent pace of production makes that prospect too exhausting to contemplate.
Glee is my big new fandom for the year, which... IDEK. I mainlined the first two seasons in a month, and have been keeping up with S3 week to week -- which is frustrating, because I enjoy the show a good deal more when I can watch it several eps at a time, but I don't have the willpower to save them up when they're airing weekly. There's a lot about the show that I like, and there are also a lot of character and storyline elements that make me want to throw things, and I just want fandom to fix it -- which is why I've been accumulating fic recs and am going to be diving into those this week. That said, I find Glee fandom at large sort of terrifying;
stultiloquentia characterized it as "there are a lot of shrieky teenagers," which is true and not my bag, but really the more pressing difficulty for me is that I don't think I have ever seen a fandom so obsessed with spoilers (and getting really exercised over spoilers in ways that frequently turn out to be unnecessary after the fact), which means that the spoiler-avoidant among us have to tread fairly carefully. But obviously in a fandom that size there are going to be people more my speed; it's just a matter of finding them, and the vid I posted last week has resulted in comments from some people in whose somewhat quieter corner of the fandom I think I will be happy to hang out.
I started watching Haven because of vonniek. It is pretty much the ultimate laundry-folding show for me: I enjoy it because Audrey/Nathan totally pushes a bunch of my fannish buttons (oh, X-Files, you have so much to answer for) and the actors are charming, but everything else,.. Let's just say that, as a rule, my viewing experience is enhanced by paying more attention to my laundry than to what's onscreen.
I made it through four episodes of Ringer. I think it was four. Maybe three. And that's already more words than the show deserves. Moving on!
I said last year that "whatever their similarities, Southland lacks The Wire's rigorous commitment to thematic coherence and, frequently, its understanding that narratives, even narratives modeled on 'real life,' need beginnings and ends in order to give us a way to read the middles, which means that the show is frustratingly uneven structurally in ways that the individual actors' performances can't always offset. Also, in [S3] the showrunners seem determined to make as many of the characters as possible as unlikeable as possible." Which pretty much sums up why I am done with the show.
S2 of Treme was, I thought, terrific: messier than S1, riskier, and ultimately even better, which is impressive because S1 was some damn good TV. I love that David Simon is using new narrative means to explore his favorite thematic terrain.
I rewatched all of The Wire as
sdwolfpup was getting ready to work on "The Beautiful Struggle." God, what a show.
my vids
Life is Fatal (Trust)
Love at First Sight (Glee)
So, uh. Two 'shipper vids! That otherwise have pretty much nothing in common. *facepalm*
I'd had the idea for "Life is Fatal" for years, and in fact I started prep work on the vid in February 2009, and then other projects took over my brain for, oh, two years. Then, right around the turn of 2011, I started actually vidding. I posted the vid about ten days later. It's a weird little vid, very obscure and very personal. But it does what I wanted it to do, so I'm pleased with it.
"Love at First Sight," on the other hand... Look, I am totally *__* about Kurt/Blaine, but I had no plans to vid them; I didn't have a song, and I didn't have anything to say, really, besides "Behold the adorableness of these teenaged boys in love! Canonically, even!" which is entirely self-evident (see above re: right there in canon) and thus not really in need of vidding. Over Thanksgiving break, I started ripping all of S1 and S2 for vidding purposes because I was planning to work on a completely different vid (an ensemble vid -- I know, you're shocked). While working on that, I had dance music on shuffle. This song came up. Halfway through it, I went back and listened from the beginning. Then I went and dug out the CD and ripped and edited the song. By midnight, I'd vidded 35 seconds. By the end of the next day, I'd vidded another 45 seconds and was halfway done. Then the end of the semester happened and I didn't get back to it until the end of December, but really the whole thing came together astonishingly quickly.
Vidding Glee is sort of a silly thing to do, really, because the show essentially vids itself (sometimes beautifully, sometimes bafflingly) several times an episode, but while making this vid I found that I didn't really care; I love these characters, I love their relationship, I love the song for Kurt, so -- fuck it, I made a vid, and both making and watching the vid have made me absurdly happy. I can already tell that watching it is going to be my pick-me-up for the foreseeable future; it's everything I love about that S2 storyline condensed into two minutes and thirty seconds.
Ultimately, though, I think my greatest vid-related experience this year was getting to watch
sdwolfpup work on "The Beautiful Struggle." My love for that vid is epic, and the fact that I got to see it in progress, to see the pieces coming together, to see SDW work through the process of making something so complex and moving... I get chills just thinking about it. Having a ringside seat for that endeavor is truly one of the greatest experiences I've ever had in fandom. I can't claim to have beta'ed the vid in any meaningful way, but I reacted to it all over the place, and since SDW claims to have found that instrumental in nudging the vid toward completion, I can safely say that I contributed to vidding fandom in 2011.
new things I tried
Somewhat to my surprise, given the peculiarity of my output, I did end up trying new things this year. My original vid idea for Glee was an ensemble vid, as I've mentioned, intended for Club Vivid; basically, I wanted to work with dance footage, lots of internal motion, lots of landing things on the beat. I mean, I've been learning for years to work with internal and external motion in source, and I like to think I've gotten pretty good at it, but I've never built an entire vid around it using mostly dance-oriented footage, and it was something I wanted to try. And, as it turned out, some of that intention bled over into how I worked on "Love at First Sight," especially because the first clips I laid were from the "Teenage Dream" sequence (and it turns out that the two songs have essentially the same BPM).
So working with dance-y footage was the first new thing. The second was playing around with adding a lot of pans and zooms to source. Again, I've done this before, but in a much more limited way, whereas in "Love at First Sight" I added (or exaggerated) pans and zooms for about 80% of the clips. It's the sort of thing that isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly noticeable when watching, but when I watch the before-and-after exports side by side, I can really see the difference. It's not something I'd do for every vid, but because of the way Glee's shot -- lots of motion during the musical numbers, very little the rest of the time -- it really helped make the vid visually cohesive, and that's a trick I can probably use elsewhere as well.
stuff I learned
The big thing I learned this year is that I need specific goals re: vidding, because otherwise I don't get much done. I don't necessarily have to fulfill all the goals, because sometimes I need to dump a long-planned project to work on something that has for whatever reason become more pressing, but I do have to have the goals in the first place. My goal for last year was way too vague: "Just keep vidding!" Yeah, that didn't work. And the goal of having "something" for VividCon also doesn't work very well; I need to have a particular vid (or vids) in mind.
The other thing I learned, though, is that I really can vid spontaneously -- and (this is important) I can enjoy it. I noted last year that I am not good with spontaneity (it makes me nervous!), and broadly speaking this is still true, but "Love at First Sight" gave me the unexpected gift of showing me how much joy I can get out of winging it, and I mean really winging it -- no notes, no clip databases, nothing but a printout of the lyrics and a terrifying amount of enthusiasm. I am usually a very careful vidder, which I think is fairly evident in my work, for good or ill; it's why one of my vidding goals for 2007 was " to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak." I ended up reapplying myself to that goal in the last few weeks of 2011, and I'm hoping that messiness and looseness is something I can retain even as I work on less silly vids.
goals for the coming year
So, okay -- my main process goal for 2012 is, once again, to be open to the possibility of spontaneity. But I do also have some very specific vids I want to try to make by particular deadlines:
- Finish a vid (already in progress) for Escapade.
- Finish a Friday Night Lights vid or Firefly vid (both already in progress) for VVC Premieres.
- Finish my other two FNL vid ideas.
- Work on another Glee vid if S3 turns out to have enough of the footage I need for the song I have in mind (and let go of the idea if S3 does not have enough of the footage I need).
- Start work on a big vid project that I abandoned years ago because a) I didn't have the skill to pull it off and b) the fannish moment for it seemed to have passed -- both conditions that have changed, I think.
- Make one of two Festivids-appropriate ideas by the end of 2012, which might or might not get deployed as a treat depending on what my favorite Festivids participants ask for.
All of these goals and plans are subject to change, but I think -- I hope, anyway! -- that keeping them in mind will help me stay focused and be more productive than I was this year. I hope that recent developments in my offline life will also help in this regard, but even if they don't, I am re-dedicating myself to the idea that I need (and that I am allowed to prioritize) time to create things.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth