Vividcon vid reviews
I'm not going to try to do Club Vivid (I don't think that "sitting in front of my computer at home" is a good place from which to try to evaluate thirty-seven vids designed to be danced to), so this'll be my last VVC post. Playlists with links can be found here.
Red Cliff, by obsessive24 (Red Cliff): I don’t know the music or the movie (apparently about internal strife in China toward the end of the Han Dynasty) so all I can comment on here is the pretty. It is, indeed, very pretty; obviously the movie itself paid a lot of attention to the visual elements, but the vidder kept me interested throughout despite having nothing much to latch onto plot or character-wise. (I got that there was a war, but, uh, that was about it.)
Land, by sweetestdrain (the Terminator universe): This vid mostly makes me want to flap my hands and point and say “yes, that, right there, that’s it.” That’s one of the big things that got me about TSCC: the twisty timetravel story, the way it trapped the characters inside of itself, the way things change but not enough, and the use of all the different Johns, the different Sarahs, really worked for me. The song really supported that aspect of the vid, too; it's a twisty-turny-double-back-on-itself kind of song.
I was really impressed that the vidder even tried to bring the movies and the show together-I know a lot of people are very hesitant about trying to make vids in which multiple actors play the same character, which is understandable but does sometimes make it impossible to tell stories that would be otherwise awesome. Sweetestdrain turns that problem to her advantage very cleverly here.
I do think it’s interesting that Cameron appears so little. (Weaver and Ellison are both also missing, except for a brief appearance by Weaver, but as they weren’t as intimately tied to John’s story, I’m less surprised by that.) She doesn’t appear at all in the first “horses” section with the other Terminators; she does show up a little bit toward the end, in what is actually about the point where the vid starts to lose me a little (look, it’s nearly ten minutes long, I think 8 minutes before I start feeling the length is pretty good). If she’s not in the beginning Terminator section, there’s a reason for that, but I don’t know what it is.
Also: I think this is as close as anyone is ever going to be able to come to the “Future!John Connor is a crazy bastard” vid of my heart.
Right in Two, by Anonymous (Supernatural): My comment afterward was that this vid reminded me of the thing with Dean and Sam going to the Killing Fields in Cambodia to give them a reason to have healing, life-affirming sex. Scenes of real-world violence! Castiel looks sad! More scenes of real-world violence! More Castiel looking sad! I mean, I don’t actually think that it’s disrespectful to use real-world events in fic or in vids (I was fine with the WWI footage used in Marble House, for instance) but all I really got out of this was that it was there to make Castiel sad, which, eh.
When You Wish…, by keewick (Battlestar Galactica): It’s like nine tenths of everything that was ever depressing about BSG rolled up in a Disney song. That’s a lot of depressing. (There’s some interesting discussion of keewick’s intentions when making this vid in the comments of her post on it; I didn’t actually catch most of that myself, but I did at least get the right mood, apparently.)
Internet Porn, vidder unknown (Multifandom): Hee hee hee cute.
Convenient Parking, by cherryice (Criminal Minds/Dexter): A very smoothly done crossover vid between Criminal Minds and Dexter. If I didn’t know better, I would totally have believed that all of these clips came from the same show, and the vidder was smart enough to get in, create the crossover, and get out rather than trying to bring their story to a non-canonical conclusion.
This is one of the vids that came up after the con as being difficult to fit to the IDIC challenge (in context of the question of whether the challenge was or should have been directed toward human diversity in the “this employer does not discriminate on the basis of” sense) and I have to admit I had some trouble with fitting it to “diversity” as well (which I did not for, say, Internet Porn, which was clearly about a kind of diversity). It makes more sense now having re-watched it and thought of it more in terms of the “combinations” part of the prompt, though.
Choose Life by kiki_miserychic (Supernatural): The many possible lives of Dean Winchester. I think this probably would have done more for me if I had an emotional connection to Dean, but I don’t, really.
Swing by marycrawford (Star Trek TOS): A loving tribute to the pure crack-addledness that was the original Star Trek. (I particularly enjoyed the Tribute to the Dead Redshirts.) While this isn’t an Uhura vid, it left me with a definite sense of her as the amused viewpoint character.
Red Cliff, by obsessive24 (Red Cliff): I don’t know the music or the movie (apparently about internal strife in China toward the end of the Han Dynasty) so all I can comment on here is the pretty. It is, indeed, very pretty; obviously the movie itself paid a lot of attention to the visual elements, but the vidder kept me interested throughout despite having nothing much to latch onto plot or character-wise. (I got that there was a war, but, uh, that was about it.)
Land, by sweetestdrain (the Terminator universe): This vid mostly makes me want to flap my hands and point and say “yes, that, right there, that’s it.” That’s one of the big things that got me about TSCC: the twisty timetravel story, the way it trapped the characters inside of itself, the way things change but not enough, and the use of all the different Johns, the different Sarahs, really worked for me. The song really supported that aspect of the vid, too; it's a twisty-turny-double-back-on-itself kind of song.
I was really impressed that the vidder even tried to bring the movies and the show together-I know a lot of people are very hesitant about trying to make vids in which multiple actors play the same character, which is understandable but does sometimes make it impossible to tell stories that would be otherwise awesome. Sweetestdrain turns that problem to her advantage very cleverly here.
I do think it’s interesting that Cameron appears so little. (Weaver and Ellison are both also missing, except for a brief appearance by Weaver, but as they weren’t as intimately tied to John’s story, I’m less surprised by that.) She doesn’t appear at all in the first “horses” section with the other Terminators; she does show up a little bit toward the end, in what is actually about the point where the vid starts to lose me a little (look, it’s nearly ten minutes long, I think 8 minutes before I start feeling the length is pretty good). If she’s not in the beginning Terminator section, there’s a reason for that, but I don’t know what it is.
Also: I think this is as close as anyone is ever going to be able to come to the “Future!John Connor is a crazy bastard” vid of my heart.
Right in Two, by Anonymous (Supernatural): My comment afterward was that this vid reminded me of the thing with Dean and Sam going to the Killing Fields in Cambodia to give them a reason to have healing, life-affirming sex. Scenes of real-world violence! Castiel looks sad! More scenes of real-world violence! More Castiel looking sad! I mean, I don’t actually think that it’s disrespectful to use real-world events in fic or in vids (I was fine with the WWI footage used in Marble House, for instance) but all I really got out of this was that it was there to make Castiel sad, which, eh.
When You Wish…, by keewick (Battlestar Galactica): It’s like nine tenths of everything that was ever depressing about BSG rolled up in a Disney song. That’s a lot of depressing. (There’s some interesting discussion of keewick’s intentions when making this vid in the comments of her post on it; I didn’t actually catch most of that myself, but I did at least get the right mood, apparently.)
Internet Porn, vidder unknown (Multifandom): Hee hee hee cute.
Convenient Parking, by cherryice (Criminal Minds/Dexter): A very smoothly done crossover vid between Criminal Minds and Dexter. If I didn’t know better, I would totally have believed that all of these clips came from the same show, and the vidder was smart enough to get in, create the crossover, and get out rather than trying to bring their story to a non-canonical conclusion.
This is one of the vids that came up after the con as being difficult to fit to the IDIC challenge (in context of the question of whether the challenge was or should have been directed toward human diversity in the “this employer does not discriminate on the basis of” sense) and I have to admit I had some trouble with fitting it to “diversity” as well (which I did not for, say, Internet Porn, which was clearly about a kind of diversity). It makes more sense now having re-watched it and thought of it more in terms of the “combinations” part of the prompt, though.
Choose Life by kiki_miserychic (Supernatural): The many possible lives of Dean Winchester. I think this probably would have done more for me if I had an emotional connection to Dean, but I don’t, really.
Swing by marycrawford (Star Trek TOS): A loving tribute to the pure crack-addledness that was the original Star Trek. (I particularly enjoyed the Tribute to the Dead Redshirts.) While this isn’t an Uhura vid, it left me with a definite sense of her as the amused viewpoint character.