new vid - "Weapon" - Narnia - Edmund
Weapon
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; Prince Caspian
Song/Artist: Weapon by Matthew Good Band
Duration: 3:08 minutes
Summary: Edmund character. How it makes you a weapon.
Spoilers: Both films.
Click to viewPassword: Aslan
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
narnia_weapon from Nicky on Vimeo.
Here by my side, an angel
Here by my side, the devil
Never turn your back on it
Never turn your back on it again
Here by my side, it's heaven
Careful, be careful
This is where the world drops off
Careful, be careful
You breathe in and you breathe out
For it ain't so weird how it makes you a weapon
And you give in, and you give out
For it ain't so weird how it makes you a weapon
Never turn your back on it
Never turn your back on it again
Vid notes contain further spoilers for book events from The Last Battle and film events from Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I never read Narnia as a child as I didn’t grow up in an English-speaking country, and reading it for the first time as an adult was certainly an experience. Each character merits their own in-depth study. I remember a fantastic short story by Neil Gaiman about Susan, who alone was barred from heaven in the end - quite a brutal punishment for taking an interest in parties and nylons.
But I digress from Edmund, who’s always been my favourite character. Each of his key relationships - with Aslan, with Jadis and with Peter - is so beautifully precarious, with or without the Christian allegory. Here is a boy who once sold himself (and Aslan) for a bowl of sweets, and in some ways the redemption path for him will never end.
Another thing that wowed me about the Narnia series is that it’s so ready to make children fight, even die, for the right cause. You could argue that they were no longer children the second time they set foot in Narnia, but hell, they sure looked like children to me. I don’t necessarily find this problematic - not when the enemy is so great and where, arguably, there is no choice but to fight - but I do find it interesting that the books and films were so ready to go there, even if it wasn't depicted as particularly bloody.
And let’s not forget that throughout all this WWII is waging in the other world. It’s hard to know what to say when the first movie opened with The Blitz, and we see exactly the same bomb-dropping technique used later by the Narnian birds in the battle against Jadis.
Dawn Treader is probably my favourite book of the series, but I didn’t include it in this vid because I wanted to maintain focus on Edmund and Peter’s relationship. Certainly in the film adaptation of Dawn Treader you could see the same themes being explored for Edmund - about how desperately he wants to join the war, and how Jadis continues to haunt him, long after her death.
Tech
This is my first project using Vegas. Teething issues aside, I found the program to be very intuitive. Just trying to decide whether to go with Pro or Movie Studio HD. I’m leaning toward the latter. Not sure all the bells and whistles of Pro are going to be all that relevant for me.
I also had to switch WMV encoding software as my old one started demanding money. The current one doesn’t encode VBR audio, which is annoying and makes much larger files at poorer quality. Recs of better freeware gladly received.