Clint Eastwood, commentary by bop_radar
Title: Clint Eastwood
Vidder: bop_radar
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Link to vid: here
Commentary by: bop_radar
This is one of my most popular/successful vids and one of my least favourite personally, which is an interesting paradox to me. I am INCREDIBLY grateful that so many people liked the vid, and it taught me that viewer interest can not be predicted in any way by whether or not the vid was 'successful' in my eyes. So I hope that nothing I say here will dissuade anyone who liked the vid. That would be very sad! If anything, I'd love to borrow your eyes and find out what you saw in it! I've now achieved a place of zen where I can watch the vid without digging my nails into the palms of my hands in frustration, though I still grimace occasionally. ;)
Aims
wisteria_ fed the idea to me originally and I thought the song was a perfect match for Gaius's schizophrenic, comedic mania. It matched well because:
- it was comedic in tone (good match for Gaius's surface goofiness)
- it had two voices in competition with one another (to capture Gaius's split identity and inner conflict)
- the themes are contentious (if you want a laugh read the comments war at SongMeanings ('it's about God!' 'no, it's about drugs!' 'God!' 'DRUGS!') but that in itself is a good fit with Gaius's storyline ('he's a prophet!' 'no, he's insane!' 'prophet!' 'insane!').
I wanted the vid to:
a) be accessible and fun and not necessarily rely on in-depth canon knowledge to be enjoyable
b) make people laugh (Gaius is very funny yet I'd never really seen a Gaius vid that made me LOL)
c) have an undercurrent of (smart) meta commentary about Gaius, and specifically the way he evolves through various identities--as soon as his survival in one is jeopardised he metamorphises into somebody else. I thought the 'future coming on' lyric would be perfect to show these evolutions.
d) capture the true Gaius 'essesce'. His Gaiusness.
So essentially I wanted surface humour/entertainment and underlying meta and intellectual interest--much like Gaius himself. For me, it strikes a kind of mediocre middle ground between the two but doesn't manage to fully have either, let alone both. But that's me, and I suspect I was influenced by the obstacles faced in making it (see next section).
Obstacles
I held off on making this vid for ages because I felt I couldn't do the song/premise justice. I still don't think I did and I worry that it suffers from lack of tech know-how. I didn't know what keyframes were (I'd read a bazillion descriptions but none that made sense) so I was unable to use any zooms or panning and relied solely on hard cuts as well. I did do a little bit of colour work to clean up some of the ugly downloaded footage but I'm still sure this vid makes technical purists tear their eyeballs out in despair. I can't say I'm losing sleep at night about that but it's still a bit humiliating.
I also had a lot of fears around the fact that I never was a big Gaius fan. In fact, I hated him in Season 1, and not even in a love-to-hate-you kind of way. I used to throw things at the screen when he came on. But I did soften to him over the years and I did find his character intellectually fascinating. But still, I knew it was going to be a hard task to make a vid that was completely true to him without knowing him from the inside out.
So, I went to a lot of effort in rewatching and clipping him, and this is where things started to go awry. Unexpectedly I became very sympathetic to Gaius. I guess because I'd always found him a despicable human being and because for ages I thought Head!Six was an aspect of his personality, not a part of a grander supernatural plot (*eyeroll*), I'd never really stopped to consider how abusive and terrifiying his relationship with Head!Six is. What I discovered on rewatch was that Head!Six abuses Gaius, emotionally and physically. Yeah, he's complicit and you might say it's ok because he's sexually attracted to her, but it reads a lot more like Stockholm Syndrome to me now. And don't get me started on his torture at the hands of Three... basically, imho, Gaius is raped and tortured physically and emotionally by the Cylons and used as a pawn on their chessboard. He may be a despicable human being, but no one deserves what they put him through.
I also started wondering why I hadn't seen this discussed more, and I started REALLY wanting to make a vid, a serious vid, about the abusive dynamic between him and the Cylon women (predominantly Head!Six and Three). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING that kills comedy more than spending the whole time wishing you were making a serious, political statement / angst vid! *g*
However, I was stuck. I'd committed to submitting this vid to Vidukon, and it was to be my first premiere. I was determined. But clipping did not go as I had hoped. Where I'd hoped to stick to a linear structure, showing Gaius evolving through the seasons, I quickly discovered that some of the material in Gaius's storyline was so horrible and confronting that there was no way it fit tonally with the light comedy of the rest of the vid. Can you imagine Gina in this vid? Can you imagine Three's torture of Gaius or Roslin and Adama messing with his subconscious? Or him bleeding to death while Roslin watches? And then there was all the basestar footage from Season 3. Not only was it far too serious in tone (even when Gaius's lines were funny), it is visually incredibly dull.
What happened in the first draft of the vid is that my beta laughed uproariously through the first minute of the vid and then her face flopped, just like Gaius's at 0.53. One second LOLZ, the next second, nada.
And this was a Very Bad Sign. She'd started to go into the emotion of Gaius's journey, just as I had when making the vid. We talked it through and quickly realised that in order for the vid to not be tonally dissonant (i.e. for it to remain true in tone to the track) we had to remain at the surface level of Gaius's journey.
That was great in theory! But I then had 48 hours to fix the vid before deadline and less than half a vid in complete form. A great deal of emergency vid surgery ensued. I think in part my dissatisfaction with the vid is due to the fact that I had to vid faster than I could intellectually process what I was doing. I took a bazillion leaps of faith that it would all hang together in the end, had no time to acquire distance, flung it in front of my beta, said 'is it good enough?' and took her word for it that it was passable.
Introduction
The intro is the part I worked on longest and it shows. I still like it. I liked to show aspects of Gaius's personality rather than 'tell' them, so here we see he's an attention whore through the way he sticks his hand up in the air desperately, we see he's a womaniser, we see he wants to survive at all costs (literally falling over himself to get to a raptor) and we see he's smugly happy with himself before the bombs come.
I went for the 'big' shot on 'sunshine in a bag' because one thing about the fast lyrics is that there's no time to mess around. I could use that as a strength in one way, by not giving the viewer much time to react to things, which results in a kind of cumulative emotional effect/impact. But on the other hand it meant there was not much time for subtlety. The song is heavy with irony, in my opinion, so I felt that matching 'sunshine' to a nuclear explosion would draw direct attention to that and establish the tone. And of course the 'in a bag' points out Gaius's personal responsibility.
The glasses shot is not comedic in isolation, but timed to the beat and the lyric it becomes very funny and captures Gaius's self-importance. These small moments of visual physical comedy wind up being one of its strengths, I think.
This is the best reaction shot of all time and I am very glad I was able to use it.
Immediately we see Gaius's 'future' 'coming on': he gets off the planet. The fact that we jump forward in time here is meant to represent that Gaius always manages to have an escape plan, a next life to jump to as one ends.
Six is Gaius's sunshine, or that's how he thinks about her initially. She is his fantasy woman who he tries to take comfort from, even while curling up in his chair like a little boy. It is, however, creepy that he keeps visualising her against his will. I've been told this section is creepy. I've been told it's funny. I'm glad it works as either/both.
The 'poof!' in the lyric was too good an opportunity to pass up--we see Six disappear right on that lyric, reminding us that she's not real, and playing with the canon comedy of Gaius jolting out of his visions.
As the rougher, more masculine voice kicks in, I think of it as Gaius 'getting off' on Six in his head, this seems to strengthen him and he returns to form in throwing himself forward (startling Roslin!) and presenting himself as the revered scientist. It takes him back to a place of importance within his community (now the fleet), which is what he feels comfortable with. This voice is actually most strongly linked with Six in the vid--it's the controller that connects to Gaius's ego.
This is a direct reference ('I couldn't be there!') to Gaius coming under suspicion for his actions before the Cylon attacks. He feigns ignorance.
Gaius has control--he cheats on Sharon's Cylon results--he has control over everyone in the fleet, which is quite the power trip.
I managed to get in a little of Six as puppet master, while keeping it light.
'Chicks and dudes' is a little fandom shoutout I figured would be popular. While Gaius hooks up with Kara in canon, Felix is arguably his biggest fanon ship. Felix started out so enamoured with Gaius. Gaius's reaction is priceless.
Lee crept into my vid (inevitable). This section is a straight retelling of Hand of God, with the spin being Gaius's jealousy that a Viper pilot gets any credit for something he sees himself as being responsible for (having pointed the way). Even though he has conflicted feelings about the source of his 'authority' (Head!Six's mysticism), he still wants all the credit.
What are his visions? Are they mystical? Spiritual? Real? Gaius doesn't know himself and he fights the idea that they are real spiritual visions. But Six does play the role of 'clearing his view', influencing his ideas in such a way that ensures his survival, and it's ultimately hard for Gaius to turn away from that, since that's what he cares about more than anything. Here we see him contemplate whether or not he might be a Cylon (one of the identities he toys with)--and he decides that it could be a good thing. (Incidentally, I'm sure RDM thinks the 'meaning of life' IS sex with three Tricias.)
I do love Roslin trying to follow Gaius's crazy hand motions here, unaware that he's battling off a vision. It's a great visual metaphor of the way Gaius obscures things with scientific gobbledygook and self-inflation.
Of course Gaius thinks everyone has the hots for him.
The shift from the nod to the shake of the head (right after this) works to capture Gaius's malleability--the way he will do or say whatever other people want in order to survive.
Here we see Gaius's fake humility as an electoral candidate. That won't last long, he's on his way up as he so unsubtly points out. Soon he will be President and have a poncy portrait painted of himself. As you do. :)
Thankfully there's not much time to dwell here! It's at this point that it becomes near impossible to maintain the tone of the vid. It was surprisingly hard to make the debauched presidency comedic. But Gaius's pill-popping helped me out and I relied on a quick acceleration of the footage to show the juxtaposition.
I never really found the right spot for this shot of Six drawing Gaius through the flames--it's out of linear sequence here and I find this section to be quite weak. The rest of it is really just filler, reiterating the idea of Six as the one who leads him forward.
The vid kind of gets its mojo back a bit with the section I call 'Gaius's penis ain't got rhythm'. This was one of the most obvious clip-lyric matches and I just had to get the timing right.
You'll notice that I've skipped swathes of timeline here, leaping straight into Gaius as spiritual leader. This works far better tonally and thematically with the song than the basestar/Cylon material, and it gets back to the idea of Gaius reinventing himself, possibly/probably insincerely to survive.
I loved the lyrics here ('corruption in the skies from this fucking enterprise') but it was really hard to show corruption visually. At first I wanted to show Roslin herself but in the end it was far more effective to show Gaius being strip searched for his anti-establishment writing. The weakness here is that it's far more powerful if you have the canon awareness about what Gaius's writing entailed, but not all viewers will have that.
Here I get to play with the way Gaius draws Lee into his plot. Gaius views Lee as a bit incidental. Providing 'percussion' that Gaius doesn't really 'get' but which proves invaluable nonetheless. The shot of Gaius staring at Lee here is one of the funniest in the whole vid, imo.
Despite the fact that Lee saves Gaius, Gaius still views himself as the 'guide'.
Gaius is scathing of his religious minions... with pretty good reason! And he's cynical about the religious process until he starts to see all the benefits it brings him. The shrine is there to be loltastic. 'I brought all this' returns us to Gaius really having embraced the idea that he is a prophet. In the temple-smashing scene, he really seems to believe his own PR bullshit. The fact that he does 'cure' and 'save' people really works for his ego. And it's convenient to cast the authorities as the enemy.
It was still very hard to avoid getting too deep in this end section, but I remember clearly that my beta said that 'more leaning' on 'Russ' would help. She was right.
I play with the idea of the sensations he thought were dead here... first physical sensations (torture, here comedic, though frighteningly reminiscent of other Cylon women, I'm just saying) and then religious belief... something Gaius probably never expected to feel again. Now his 'sunshine' has become religious ecstasy.
The 'all in your head' line had to be a BIG payoff moment. It was tough to get something that was as strong as the actual lyric but Gaius seeing himself and freaking out was the best I could find.
The sequence of Gaius talking to the Hybrid was not as funny as I wanted it to be because so much of Gaius's comedy is in the verbal delivery. It's a very funny scene in canon. The shot of him covering his face as he is tugged forward, which is lifted out of context, IS visually funny, and is there for no other reason. It was this difficulty of balancing comedy with connection to the canon that was my undoing in my own eyes at least.
Other than matching the two headtilts--one of the Cylon and one of Head!Gaius, I do very little with the end of the vid. It looks pretty and the explosion works musically, as does Gaius flopping down in the grass, but I feel the vid lacks a focused narrative endpoint. In part that was a reflection of the fact that I we were halfway through season 4 and I didn't know where Gaius would end up, in part it's a weakness of vision as a vidder.
And there you have it. It was, undoubtedly an interesting journey, and changed forever my views on Gaius (though totally not in a way that shows in the vid!). I do wonder if people find it comedic. Unfortunately (or fortunately) my beta laughed a lot while watching it... but she has my sense of humour and I realise now I should have tested it on someone a little less in tune with me. Very few people mentioned finding it funny, even if they enjoyed it. Of course I'm happy that people enjoyed it at ANY level, but I am curious about that.
Vidder: bop_radar
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Link to vid: here
Commentary by: bop_radar
This is one of my most popular/successful vids and one of my least favourite personally, which is an interesting paradox to me. I am INCREDIBLY grateful that so many people liked the vid, and it taught me that viewer interest can not be predicted in any way by whether or not the vid was 'successful' in my eyes. So I hope that nothing I say here will dissuade anyone who liked the vid. That would be very sad! If anything, I'd love to borrow your eyes and find out what you saw in it! I've now achieved a place of zen where I can watch the vid without digging my nails into the palms of my hands in frustration, though I still grimace occasionally. ;)
Aims
wisteria_ fed the idea to me originally and I thought the song was a perfect match for Gaius's schizophrenic, comedic mania. It matched well because:
- it was comedic in tone (good match for Gaius's surface goofiness)
- it had two voices in competition with one another (to capture Gaius's split identity and inner conflict)
- the themes are contentious (if you want a laugh read the comments war at SongMeanings ('it's about God!' 'no, it's about drugs!' 'God!' 'DRUGS!') but that in itself is a good fit with Gaius's storyline ('he's a prophet!' 'no, he's insane!' 'prophet!' 'insane!').
I wanted the vid to:
a) be accessible and fun and not necessarily rely on in-depth canon knowledge to be enjoyable
b) make people laugh (Gaius is very funny yet I'd never really seen a Gaius vid that made me LOL)
c) have an undercurrent of (smart) meta commentary about Gaius, and specifically the way he evolves through various identities--as soon as his survival in one is jeopardised he metamorphises into somebody else. I thought the 'future coming on' lyric would be perfect to show these evolutions.
d) capture the true Gaius 'essesce'. His Gaiusness.
So essentially I wanted surface humour/entertainment and underlying meta and intellectual interest--much like Gaius himself. For me, it strikes a kind of mediocre middle ground between the two but doesn't manage to fully have either, let alone both. But that's me, and I suspect I was influenced by the obstacles faced in making it (see next section).
Obstacles
I held off on making this vid for ages because I felt I couldn't do the song/premise justice. I still don't think I did and I worry that it suffers from lack of tech know-how. I didn't know what keyframes were (I'd read a bazillion descriptions but none that made sense) so I was unable to use any zooms or panning and relied solely on hard cuts as well. I did do a little bit of colour work to clean up some of the ugly downloaded footage but I'm still sure this vid makes technical purists tear their eyeballs out in despair. I can't say I'm losing sleep at night about that but it's still a bit humiliating.
I also had a lot of fears around the fact that I never was a big Gaius fan. In fact, I hated him in Season 1, and not even in a love-to-hate-you kind of way. I used to throw things at the screen when he came on. But I did soften to him over the years and I did find his character intellectually fascinating. But still, I knew it was going to be a hard task to make a vid that was completely true to him without knowing him from the inside out.
So, I went to a lot of effort in rewatching and clipping him, and this is where things started to go awry. Unexpectedly I became very sympathetic to Gaius. I guess because I'd always found him a despicable human being and because for ages I thought Head!Six was an aspect of his personality, not a part of a grander supernatural plot (*eyeroll*), I'd never really stopped to consider how abusive and terrifiying his relationship with Head!Six is. What I discovered on rewatch was that Head!Six abuses Gaius, emotionally and physically. Yeah, he's complicit and you might say it's ok because he's sexually attracted to her, but it reads a lot more like Stockholm Syndrome to me now. And don't get me started on his torture at the hands of Three... basically, imho, Gaius is raped and tortured physically and emotionally by the Cylons and used as a pawn on their chessboard. He may be a despicable human being, but no one deserves what they put him through.
I also started wondering why I hadn't seen this discussed more, and I started REALLY wanting to make a vid, a serious vid, about the abusive dynamic between him and the Cylon women (predominantly Head!Six and Three). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING that kills comedy more than spending the whole time wishing you were making a serious, political statement / angst vid! *g*
However, I was stuck. I'd committed to submitting this vid to Vidukon, and it was to be my first premiere. I was determined. But clipping did not go as I had hoped. Where I'd hoped to stick to a linear structure, showing Gaius evolving through the seasons, I quickly discovered that some of the material in Gaius's storyline was so horrible and confronting that there was no way it fit tonally with the light comedy of the rest of the vid. Can you imagine Gina in this vid? Can you imagine Three's torture of Gaius or Roslin and Adama messing with his subconscious? Or him bleeding to death while Roslin watches? And then there was all the basestar footage from Season 3. Not only was it far too serious in tone (even when Gaius's lines were funny), it is visually incredibly dull.
What happened in the first draft of the vid is that my beta laughed uproariously through the first minute of the vid and then her face flopped, just like Gaius's at 0.53. One second LOLZ, the next second, nada.
And this was a Very Bad Sign. She'd started to go into the emotion of Gaius's journey, just as I had when making the vid. We talked it through and quickly realised that in order for the vid to not be tonally dissonant (i.e. for it to remain true in tone to the track) we had to remain at the surface level of Gaius's journey.
That was great in theory! But I then had 48 hours to fix the vid before deadline and less than half a vid in complete form. A great deal of emergency vid surgery ensued. I think in part my dissatisfaction with the vid is due to the fact that I had to vid faster than I could intellectually process what I was doing. I took a bazillion leaps of faith that it would all hang together in the end, had no time to acquire distance, flung it in front of my beta, said 'is it good enough?' and took her word for it that it was passable.
Introduction
The intro is the part I worked on longest and it shows. I still like it. I liked to show aspects of Gaius's personality rather than 'tell' them, so here we see he's an attention whore through the way he sticks his hand up in the air desperately, we see he's a womaniser, we see he wants to survive at all costs (literally falling over himself to get to a raptor) and we see he's smugly happy with himself before the bombs come.
I went for the 'big' shot on 'sunshine in a bag' because one thing about the fast lyrics is that there's no time to mess around. I could use that as a strength in one way, by not giving the viewer much time to react to things, which results in a kind of cumulative emotional effect/impact. But on the other hand it meant there was not much time for subtlety. The song is heavy with irony, in my opinion, so I felt that matching 'sunshine' to a nuclear explosion would draw direct attention to that and establish the tone. And of course the 'in a bag' points out Gaius's personal responsibility.
The glasses shot is not comedic in isolation, but timed to the beat and the lyric it becomes very funny and captures Gaius's self-importance. These small moments of visual physical comedy wind up being one of its strengths, I think.
This is the best reaction shot of all time and I am very glad I was able to use it.
Immediately we see Gaius's 'future' 'coming on': he gets off the planet. The fact that we jump forward in time here is meant to represent that Gaius always manages to have an escape plan, a next life to jump to as one ends.
Six is Gaius's sunshine, or that's how he thinks about her initially. She is his fantasy woman who he tries to take comfort from, even while curling up in his chair like a little boy. It is, however, creepy that he keeps visualising her against his will. I've been told this section is creepy. I've been told it's funny. I'm glad it works as either/both.
The 'poof!' in the lyric was too good an opportunity to pass up--we see Six disappear right on that lyric, reminding us that she's not real, and playing with the canon comedy of Gaius jolting out of his visions.
As the rougher, more masculine voice kicks in, I think of it as Gaius 'getting off' on Six in his head, this seems to strengthen him and he returns to form in throwing himself forward (startling Roslin!) and presenting himself as the revered scientist. It takes him back to a place of importance within his community (now the fleet), which is what he feels comfortable with. This voice is actually most strongly linked with Six in the vid--it's the controller that connects to Gaius's ego.
This is a direct reference ('I couldn't be there!') to Gaius coming under suspicion for his actions before the Cylon attacks. He feigns ignorance.
Gaius has control--he cheats on Sharon's Cylon results--he has control over everyone in the fleet, which is quite the power trip.
I managed to get in a little of Six as puppet master, while keeping it light.
'Chicks and dudes' is a little fandom shoutout I figured would be popular. While Gaius hooks up with Kara in canon, Felix is arguably his biggest fanon ship. Felix started out so enamoured with Gaius. Gaius's reaction is priceless.
Lee crept into my vid (inevitable). This section is a straight retelling of Hand of God, with the spin being Gaius's jealousy that a Viper pilot gets any credit for something he sees himself as being responsible for (having pointed the way). Even though he has conflicted feelings about the source of his 'authority' (Head!Six's mysticism), he still wants all the credit.
What are his visions? Are they mystical? Spiritual? Real? Gaius doesn't know himself and he fights the idea that they are real spiritual visions. But Six does play the role of 'clearing his view', influencing his ideas in such a way that ensures his survival, and it's ultimately hard for Gaius to turn away from that, since that's what he cares about more than anything. Here we see him contemplate whether or not he might be a Cylon (one of the identities he toys with)--and he decides that it could be a good thing. (Incidentally, I'm sure RDM thinks the 'meaning of life' IS sex with three Tricias.)
I do love Roslin trying to follow Gaius's crazy hand motions here, unaware that he's battling off a vision. It's a great visual metaphor of the way Gaius obscures things with scientific gobbledygook and self-inflation.
Of course Gaius thinks everyone has the hots for him.
The shift from the nod to the shake of the head (right after this) works to capture Gaius's malleability--the way he will do or say whatever other people want in order to survive.
Here we see Gaius's fake humility as an electoral candidate. That won't last long, he's on his way up as he so unsubtly points out. Soon he will be President and have a poncy portrait painted of himself. As you do. :)
Thankfully there's not much time to dwell here! It's at this point that it becomes near impossible to maintain the tone of the vid. It was surprisingly hard to make the debauched presidency comedic. But Gaius's pill-popping helped me out and I relied on a quick acceleration of the footage to show the juxtaposition.
I never really found the right spot for this shot of Six drawing Gaius through the flames--it's out of linear sequence here and I find this section to be quite weak. The rest of it is really just filler, reiterating the idea of Six as the one who leads him forward.
The vid kind of gets its mojo back a bit with the section I call 'Gaius's penis ain't got rhythm'. This was one of the most obvious clip-lyric matches and I just had to get the timing right.
You'll notice that I've skipped swathes of timeline here, leaping straight into Gaius as spiritual leader. This works far better tonally and thematically with the song than the basestar/Cylon material, and it gets back to the idea of Gaius reinventing himself, possibly/probably insincerely to survive.
I loved the lyrics here ('corruption in the skies from this fucking enterprise') but it was really hard to show corruption visually. At first I wanted to show Roslin herself but in the end it was far more effective to show Gaius being strip searched for his anti-establishment writing. The weakness here is that it's far more powerful if you have the canon awareness about what Gaius's writing entailed, but not all viewers will have that.
Here I get to play with the way Gaius draws Lee into his plot. Gaius views Lee as a bit incidental. Providing 'percussion' that Gaius doesn't really 'get' but which proves invaluable nonetheless. The shot of Gaius staring at Lee here is one of the funniest in the whole vid, imo.
Despite the fact that Lee saves Gaius, Gaius still views himself as the 'guide'.
Gaius is scathing of his religious minions... with pretty good reason! And he's cynical about the religious process until he starts to see all the benefits it brings him. The shrine is there to be loltastic. 'I brought all this' returns us to Gaius really having embraced the idea that he is a prophet. In the temple-smashing scene, he really seems to believe his own PR bullshit. The fact that he does 'cure' and 'save' people really works for his ego. And it's convenient to cast the authorities as the enemy.
It was still very hard to avoid getting too deep in this end section, but I remember clearly that my beta said that 'more leaning' on 'Russ' would help. She was right.
I play with the idea of the sensations he thought were dead here... first physical sensations (torture, here comedic, though frighteningly reminiscent of other Cylon women, I'm just saying) and then religious belief... something Gaius probably never expected to feel again. Now his 'sunshine' has become religious ecstasy.
The 'all in your head' line had to be a BIG payoff moment. It was tough to get something that was as strong as the actual lyric but Gaius seeing himself and freaking out was the best I could find.
The sequence of Gaius talking to the Hybrid was not as funny as I wanted it to be because so much of Gaius's comedy is in the verbal delivery. It's a very funny scene in canon. The shot of him covering his face as he is tugged forward, which is lifted out of context, IS visually funny, and is there for no other reason. It was this difficulty of balancing comedy with connection to the canon that was my undoing in my own eyes at least.
Other than matching the two headtilts--one of the Cylon and one of Head!Gaius, I do very little with the end of the vid. It looks pretty and the explosion works musically, as does Gaius flopping down in the grass, but I feel the vid lacks a focused narrative endpoint. In part that was a reflection of the fact that I we were halfway through season 4 and I didn't know where Gaius would end up, in part it's a weakness of vision as a vidder.
And there you have it. It was, undoubtedly an interesting journey, and changed forever my views on Gaius (though totally not in a way that shows in the vid!). I do wonder if people find it comedic. Unfortunately (or fortunately) my beta laughed a lot while watching it... but she has my sense of humour and I realise now I should have tested it on someone a little less in tune with me. Very few people mentioned finding it funny, even if they enjoyed it. Of course I'm happy that people enjoyed it at ANY level, but I am curious about that.