Dear Festividder
Dear Festividder,
Sorry for the late letter! And thank you for offering to vid one of these fandoms. You have excellent taste. Or terrible taste? Either way, we have something in common.
I will enjoy any music you choose to use in your vid. No, really, feel free to go as experimental as you like. I've loved plenty of vids to music I'd have hated on its own, as well as vids to audio tracks that were not technically even music. If you want more specific guidance on genre, I like dance music, and I'm partial to vids set to rap.
* Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) [SAFETY]
A frame-by-frame restored version of this odd 1924 Soviet science fiction film is available for free download from Archive.org.
What draws me to this film is firstly, the imaginative and visually distinctive depiction of the Martian world. In the science fiction story in this movie, astronauts build a rock ship and fly to Mars to answer a distress call from Queen Aelita. When they arive in this strange-looking, alien world, they find themselves embroiled in (not exactly symbolically subtle) politics involving the Queen of Mars and her downtrodden workers. However, this is simultaneously a socialist melodrama. The journey to Mars is framed as the dream of the wife of one of the "astronauts", who is a good Soviet woman seduced into the world of the black market by a former member of the bourgeoisie.
I would be interested in a vid that focused solely on the Martian story, or in a vid that explored the film's use of the science fiction story as political allegory/metaphor/dreamscape.
* Dwarf Fortress
(source)
Dwarf Fortress is a free single-player fantasy game for Windows, Mac, or Linux. In it, you control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world. Note that while the world persists, the outposts and adventurers tend not to. Losing is fun! The real joy of the game is found in the strange stories, creatures, and scenarios your game produces. Dwarves whose obsession with socks leads them to run willingly into the maws of a forgotten beast, wagons that worship gods, worlds overrun with weremarmots, and so on.
The catch is that Dwarf Fortress has very, uh, minimalist in-game graphics. I'm requesting this source in part as a challenge: I dare you to make a vid out of this game's graphics, or else to find a different way to approach making a Dwarf Fortress music video. If the in-game graphics don't satisfy you, you could enhance them with plugins and third party visualizers. (Speaking of plugins, autotuning SoundSense for the audio track would be hilarious.) Alternatively, you could treat Dwarf Fortress a source without visuals, and vid it as you'd vid a book, using fan art or footage from unrelated sources.
Since Dwarf Fortress does not have a shared storyline, the story told in the music video is up to you. It could be the story of a particular fortress or adventurer or forgotten beast or civilization. It could be a polemic against elves, a PSA about keas stealing equipment, or a recruitment video to encourage immigration from the Mountainhomes. It could be a vid about the experience of playing Dwarf Fortress. All I ask is that your ☼vid☼ convey something of how ‼fun‼ Dwarf Fortress can be.
* Hungarian Folktales | Magyar népmesék (TV)
I grew up with the third volume (1984-85) of this series of animated fairy tales (available in English on YouTube). These film shorts influenced my ideal of what animation should be. The stories are beautifully drawn, in a style more metaphorical than strictly visually realistic, as is appopriate for fairy tales. I'd love to see a vid celebrating the beauty and cleverness of the animation.
* Jack of All Trades (TV)
I know, how do you make a better vid for Jack of All Trades than the show's own opening credits? It is a conundrum. Bruce Campbell hijinks are what I'm after here. Or Emilia. Jack and/or Emilia hijinks, please. (Season One can be found on YouTube.)
* Tintin and the Golden Fleece | Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d'Or (1961)
If you'd asked me if there could be a live action Tintin that completely captured the spirit of the comics, I would have laughed. But here it is: the athleticism, the feats, the vivid setting (Istanbul in the sixties!), the friendship, and the humor. Really, the only criticism I could have of this film is the fake beard on Captain Haddock. (Seriously, what even is that thing?)
* The Young Pope
I was convinced to watch this artistically shot show by Jude Law's promise that the first shot would be of the pope crawling out of a pyramid of babies. I was not disappointed. By the point of Voiello's confession scene in the first episode, I was head over heels in love with The Young Pope. "Tommasino, don't waste my time. My sins have to do with high finance and diplomacy. Even if I were to confess them, you wouldn't understand a thing." (Voiello is a wonderful mess of a person.)
One of my favorite things about the show is its refreshing clarity on Lenny being the villain, even as it gleefully digs into the faults of the people around him. The title character isn't written to be anyone's power fantasy; he's a nightmare, and the show does not admire him. He drops babies! He has possibly divine powers, but he's a failure of a leader, because everyone hates him for being a fanatical asshole, and he has the emotional maturity of a psychopathic child.
I deeply enjoy Sister Mary and her dysfunctional relationship with Lenny. They have an Alfred & Batman sort of dynamic, where at first you think the younger half of the pair is crazy and the older half of the pair, who supports the younger one selflessly and tries to moderate them, is sane... until you realize the older person is the one who raised the younger person to be this crazy in the first place.
I would love a vid that captures the absurd humor and the sincere scariness of this show.
* Wanted (2008) [SAFETY]
I love dumb action movies, the less plausible the better. I'm pretty sure this spectacularly dumb action movie was written by a 12-year-old boy who thought it was awesome and then given to Timur Bekmambetov (director of Night Watch, Day Watch, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) to make look just as awesome as it was in his imagination:
(spoilers)
So there's this guy who's a nobody, see? And he has anxiety, and his boss bullies him, and his friend and his hot girlfriend are mean to him. But THEN he learns that he's secretly the son of the coolest super-assassin of all time, who was a member of a society of super-assassins trained by an ancient mystical group of, idk, weavers or something, to be so badass that they can shoot the wings off a fly and their bullets can curve around corners! He inherited his dad's powers, and what he thought was anxiety was actually his cool super-assassin powers. Bad guys show up to kill him, but a hot lady super-assassin who looks like Angelina Jolie shows up to save him, and she drives a really fast car and flips it through the air over other cars to shoot the people inside while she's upside down over them! His stupid girlfriend dumps him for his stupid best friend, but then the super-hot assassin kisses him in front of them and they realize they were so wrong about him, but it's too late cuz he's left his old life behind. He learns to be a super-assassin like his dad, and the, idk, mystical cloth gives him orders to kill some guy, but then it turns out the guy he was sent to kill was his real dad and the weavers are actually the bad guys! He breaks into the bad guys' fortress with an army of bomb-carrying rats, and then the lady super-assassin realizes they were the bad guys all along so she shoots them all down at once with a single bullet!
*deep breath*
...What it all comes down to is that Angelina Jolie doing hilariously unrealistic driving stunts fills my heart with unsurpassable joy.
Happy vidding!
[ Original post |
comments | Reply at DWth ]
Sorry for the late letter! And thank you for offering to vid one of these fandoms. You have excellent taste. Or terrible taste? Either way, we have something in common.
I will enjoy any music you choose to use in your vid. No, really, feel free to go as experimental as you like. I've loved plenty of vids to music I'd have hated on its own, as well as vids to audio tracks that were not technically even music. If you want more specific guidance on genre, I like dance music, and I'm partial to vids set to rap.
* Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) [SAFETY]
A frame-by-frame restored version of this odd 1924 Soviet science fiction film is available for free download from Archive.org.
What draws me to this film is firstly, the imaginative and visually distinctive depiction of the Martian world. In the science fiction story in this movie, astronauts build a rock ship and fly to Mars to answer a distress call from Queen Aelita. When they arive in this strange-looking, alien world, they find themselves embroiled in (not exactly symbolically subtle) politics involving the Queen of Mars and her downtrodden workers. However, this is simultaneously a socialist melodrama. The journey to Mars is framed as the dream of the wife of one of the "astronauts", who is a good Soviet woman seduced into the world of the black market by a former member of the bourgeoisie.
I would be interested in a vid that focused solely on the Martian story, or in a vid that explored the film's use of the science fiction story as political allegory/metaphor/dreamscape.
* Dwarf Fortress
(source)
Dwarf Fortress is a free single-player fantasy game for Windows, Mac, or Linux. In it, you control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world. Note that while the world persists, the outposts and adventurers tend not to. Losing is fun! The real joy of the game is found in the strange stories, creatures, and scenarios your game produces. Dwarves whose obsession with socks leads them to run willingly into the maws of a forgotten beast, wagons that worship gods, worlds overrun with weremarmots, and so on.
The catch is that Dwarf Fortress has very, uh, minimalist in-game graphics. I'm requesting this source in part as a challenge: I dare you to make a vid out of this game's graphics, or else to find a different way to approach making a Dwarf Fortress music video. If the in-game graphics don't satisfy you, you could enhance them with plugins and third party visualizers. (Speaking of plugins, autotuning SoundSense for the audio track would be hilarious.) Alternatively, you could treat Dwarf Fortress a source without visuals, and vid it as you'd vid a book, using fan art or footage from unrelated sources.
Since Dwarf Fortress does not have a shared storyline, the story told in the music video is up to you. It could be the story of a particular fortress or adventurer or forgotten beast or civilization. It could be a polemic against elves, a PSA about keas stealing equipment, or a recruitment video to encourage immigration from the Mountainhomes. It could be a vid about the experience of playing Dwarf Fortress. All I ask is that your ☼vid☼ convey something of how ‼fun‼ Dwarf Fortress can be.
* Hungarian Folktales | Magyar népmesék (TV)
I grew up with the third volume (1984-85) of this series of animated fairy tales (available in English on YouTube). These film shorts influenced my ideal of what animation should be. The stories are beautifully drawn, in a style more metaphorical than strictly visually realistic, as is appopriate for fairy tales. I'd love to see a vid celebrating the beauty and cleverness of the animation.
* Jack of All Trades (TV)
Click to view
I know, how do you make a better vid for Jack of All Trades than the show's own opening credits? It is a conundrum. Bruce Campbell hijinks are what I'm after here. Or Emilia. Jack and/or Emilia hijinks, please. (Season One can be found on YouTube.)
* Tintin and the Golden Fleece | Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d'Or (1961)
If you'd asked me if there could be a live action Tintin that completely captured the spirit of the comics, I would have laughed. But here it is: the athleticism, the feats, the vivid setting (Istanbul in the sixties!), the friendship, and the humor. Really, the only criticism I could have of this film is the fake beard on Captain Haddock. (Seriously, what even is that thing?)
* The Young Pope
I was convinced to watch this artistically shot show by Jude Law's promise that the first shot would be of the pope crawling out of a pyramid of babies. I was not disappointed. By the point of Voiello's confession scene in the first episode, I was head over heels in love with The Young Pope. "Tommasino, don't waste my time. My sins have to do with high finance and diplomacy. Even if I were to confess them, you wouldn't understand a thing." (Voiello is a wonderful mess of a person.)
One of my favorite things about the show is its refreshing clarity on Lenny being the villain, even as it gleefully digs into the faults of the people around him. The title character isn't written to be anyone's power fantasy; he's a nightmare, and the show does not admire him. He drops babies! He has possibly divine powers, but he's a failure of a leader, because everyone hates him for being a fanatical asshole, and he has the emotional maturity of a psychopathic child.
I deeply enjoy Sister Mary and her dysfunctional relationship with Lenny. They have an Alfred & Batman sort of dynamic, where at first you think the younger half of the pair is crazy and the older half of the pair, who supports the younger one selflessly and tries to moderate them, is sane... until you realize the older person is the one who raised the younger person to be this crazy in the first place.
I would love a vid that captures the absurd humor and the sincere scariness of this show.
* Wanted (2008) [SAFETY]
I love dumb action movies, the less plausible the better. I'm pretty sure this spectacularly dumb action movie was written by a 12-year-old boy who thought it was awesome and then given to Timur Bekmambetov (director of Night Watch, Day Watch, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) to make look just as awesome as it was in his imagination:
(spoilers)
So there's this guy who's a nobody, see? And he has anxiety, and his boss bullies him, and his friend and his hot girlfriend are mean to him. But THEN he learns that he's secretly the son of the coolest super-assassin of all time, who was a member of a society of super-assassins trained by an ancient mystical group of, idk, weavers or something, to be so badass that they can shoot the wings off a fly and their bullets can curve around corners! He inherited his dad's powers, and what he thought was anxiety was actually his cool super-assassin powers. Bad guys show up to kill him, but a hot lady super-assassin who looks like Angelina Jolie shows up to save him, and she drives a really fast car and flips it through the air over other cars to shoot the people inside while she's upside down over them! His stupid girlfriend dumps him for his stupid best friend, but then the super-hot assassin kisses him in front of them and they realize they were so wrong about him, but it's too late cuz he's left his old life behind. He learns to be a super-assassin like his dad, and the, idk, mystical cloth gives him orders to kill some guy, but then it turns out the guy he was sent to kill was his real dad and the weavers are actually the bad guys! He breaks into the bad guys' fortress with an army of bomb-carrying rats, and then the lady super-assassin realizes they were the bad guys all along so she shoots them all down at once with a single bullet!
*deep breath*
...What it all comes down to is that Angelina Jolie doing hilariously unrealistic driving stunts fills my heart with unsurpassable joy.
Happy vidding!
[ Original post |
comments | Reply at DWth ]