adventures in pre-vidding
So it turns out that if you want to make a vid, there's a whole lot of other stuff you have to do first. If the source for said vid consists of five 22-ep seasons, three of which you've never seen, there's a whole lot of stuff you have to do before you can even start doing the stuff you have to do before vidding. So far, I've yet to encounter the learning curve of vidding, but the labour and time curves? Very high. It's not so difficult to write fic when you haven't seen all of a canon--that's why God made episode summaries and transcripts--but vidding requires actually watching (or at least running one's eyes over) all the episodes.
For the record: the decision that baby's first vid was going to be The Story of Sydney Bristow, when there are vast swaths of this show that I just really don't care about? That was kind of dumb.
(But oh, this vid! It's so vivid in my head! All of what I want where, and I know exactly what I want it to do, and I'm not going to rest until I make it, time curve, labour curve, learning curve, and stupid completist approach to these things notwithstanding.)
Anyway, sometime before the end of the summer, there will be a vid, I swear.
In the meantime, I'm watching loads of Alias and remain fairly firmly of the opinion that seasons 1 and 2 are mostly awesome, and the rest of it, perhaps excepting the last two episodes of season 4 (at least if you love Irina and Jack, as I so obviously do), probably not really worth fussing over. Except I am fussing over it, because the nature of what I want to do means I can't ignore it (though I may ignore season 5, for many reasons), and the parts of those seasons I like are still rather great.
One thing about this show, though: when it misses, it misses swinging. There's such a consistent effort to experiment with the storytelling, and also a willingness to do a bit of a reboot if the experiment fails. I respect that in a show. Another show might have tried to maintain the whole "double agent trying to take down SD-6" thing for years; instead, it's run its course by the middle of season 2.
Then the whole missing years thing. And season 3 was, I think, the swing and the miss. I respect the effort to make it darker and grittier. They succeeded, but along the way, they lost some of the necessary fun and lightheartedness that had made the first two seasons so successful: Sydney works, in many ways, because she comes home from her job and laughs with her friends, and by season 3 there were hardly any friends to laugh with. It follows from the story, but it was a little much. Also, the way the show itself turned on Lauren was kind of appalling. I was spoiled for all that, of course, and I knew via the fannish grapevine that there was a large Lauren-hating fan contingent (*sigh*), but she started out rather awesome: complicated relationship with Sydney, unclear but interesting motives, etc. Then once she's revealed as a bad guy, it's like any amount of nuance is just gone: she's evil and horrible and must be brutally punished. Exceedingly squicky. And if I'd been watching in real time and hadn't known how the whole Jack-killed-Irina thing turns out, I suspect I would have bailed with the double dose of Betrayed Men Killing their Evil Wives.
Cue season 4 reboot. Suddenly narrative plausibility goes out the window, and the premise is basically, "let's construct an artificial scenario in which all of Our People get to do spy hijinks together all the time." Sydney has friends again. There's even a joke about Dixon no longer being a robot in a suit (though I really, really miss Sydney and Dixon as partners). It's more episodic than season 1 but has more of that flavor: Sydney has gone back to implausibly kickboxing all of her adversaries into unconsciousness, rather than just shooting them (in season 3 she did a whole lot of shooting). And it's maybe a different kind of swing and miss, or, to continue to flog the metaphor, perhaps a long pop fly that gives you just that little bit of hope before the center fielder does his job. (In this case, the center fielder is boredom: after some initial fun, season 4 has a certain sameness to it, largely because of the shift to a more episodic format.)
I will not be watching season 5, because we all know how I feel about babies. And about Jack and Irina losing their delicious, murky ambiguity. And because there's only so much I feel obligated to take into consideration for this vid, even at my most completist.
Anyway. I have no idea why I felt the need to write up my feelings about a show that no one else has cared about for years, but it's by far the predominant fannish thing on my brain right now. Mostly, Spy!Family=WIN, and much of the rest of it is a bit hit and miss. And I continue to be deeply curious how the series would have played out if Lena Olin had been available for regular guest spots throughout. Alas.
Apparently I do need a Sydney icon, though.
**
In other news, I'm moving across the country in two weeks, so that's occupying most of my time just now.
Fannishly, I've been a little underwhelmed with the first two eps of the new season of Leverage (they've been enjoyable enough, but if we can't have characterization, can we at least have remotely plausible plotting? and I'm really losing tolerance for Nate's manpain), and I'm about to burst anticipating the return of Rizzoli and Isles (please, please, please continue to be my happy place, show!). And that's about it. *hugs and smooches*
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments. Comment here or there.
For the record: the decision that baby's first vid was going to be The Story of Sydney Bristow, when there are vast swaths of this show that I just really don't care about? That was kind of dumb.
(But oh, this vid! It's so vivid in my head! All of what I want where, and I know exactly what I want it to do, and I'm not going to rest until I make it, time curve, labour curve, learning curve, and stupid completist approach to these things notwithstanding.)
Anyway, sometime before the end of the summer, there will be a vid, I swear.
In the meantime, I'm watching loads of Alias and remain fairly firmly of the opinion that seasons 1 and 2 are mostly awesome, and the rest of it, perhaps excepting the last two episodes of season 4 (at least if you love Irina and Jack, as I so obviously do), probably not really worth fussing over. Except I am fussing over it, because the nature of what I want to do means I can't ignore it (though I may ignore season 5, for many reasons), and the parts of those seasons I like are still rather great.
One thing about this show, though: when it misses, it misses swinging. There's such a consistent effort to experiment with the storytelling, and also a willingness to do a bit of a reboot if the experiment fails. I respect that in a show. Another show might have tried to maintain the whole "double agent trying to take down SD-6" thing for years; instead, it's run its course by the middle of season 2.
Then the whole missing years thing. And season 3 was, I think, the swing and the miss. I respect the effort to make it darker and grittier. They succeeded, but along the way, they lost some of the necessary fun and lightheartedness that had made the first two seasons so successful: Sydney works, in many ways, because she comes home from her job and laughs with her friends, and by season 3 there were hardly any friends to laugh with. It follows from the story, but it was a little much. Also, the way the show itself turned on Lauren was kind of appalling. I was spoiled for all that, of course, and I knew via the fannish grapevine that there was a large Lauren-hating fan contingent (*sigh*), but she started out rather awesome: complicated relationship with Sydney, unclear but interesting motives, etc. Then once she's revealed as a bad guy, it's like any amount of nuance is just gone: she's evil and horrible and must be brutally punished. Exceedingly squicky. And if I'd been watching in real time and hadn't known how the whole Jack-killed-Irina thing turns out, I suspect I would have bailed with the double dose of Betrayed Men Killing their Evil Wives.
Cue season 4 reboot. Suddenly narrative plausibility goes out the window, and the premise is basically, "let's construct an artificial scenario in which all of Our People get to do spy hijinks together all the time." Sydney has friends again. There's even a joke about Dixon no longer being a robot in a suit (though I really, really miss Sydney and Dixon as partners). It's more episodic than season 1 but has more of that flavor: Sydney has gone back to implausibly kickboxing all of her adversaries into unconsciousness, rather than just shooting them (in season 3 she did a whole lot of shooting). And it's maybe a different kind of swing and miss, or, to continue to flog the metaphor, perhaps a long pop fly that gives you just that little bit of hope before the center fielder does his job. (In this case, the center fielder is boredom: after some initial fun, season 4 has a certain sameness to it, largely because of the shift to a more episodic format.)
I will not be watching season 5, because we all know how I feel about babies. And about Jack and Irina losing their delicious, murky ambiguity. And because there's only so much I feel obligated to take into consideration for this vid, even at my most completist.
Anyway. I have no idea why I felt the need to write up my feelings about a show that no one else has cared about for years, but it's by far the predominant fannish thing on my brain right now. Mostly, Spy!Family=WIN, and much of the rest of it is a bit hit and miss. And I continue to be deeply curious how the series would have played out if Lena Olin had been available for regular guest spots throughout. Alas.
Apparently I do need a Sydney icon, though.
**
In other news, I'm moving across the country in two weeks, so that's occupying most of my time just now.
Fannishly, I've been a little underwhelmed with the first two eps of the new season of Leverage (they've been enjoyable enough, but if we can't have characterization, can we at least have remotely plausible plotting? and I'm really losing tolerance for Nate's manpain), and I'm about to burst anticipating the return of Rizzoli and Isles (please, please, please continue to be my happy place, show!). And that's about it. *hugs and smooches*
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments. Comment here or there.