astolat's livejournal

I am very gratefully home! at last, and after successfully staving it off for six weeks, the traveling has finally laid me low and I have what is trying to be a cold, argh. But I am fighting it off with fluids and vitamins, and have gotten the Vividcon vids up. :D

Note: Some players don't recognize the aspect ratio setting on xvid files. If you get squished video from the shiny downloaded versions, try using VLC!

Mandara
Song: Mandara by Vas
Source: Dune (1984 David Lynch movie)
Right-click save XviD (50 MB)
Stream at iMeem

I've been vaguely planning this one since I vidded Twin Peaks last year and reawakened my deep and pure Kyle MacLachlan love, dating from high school. The movie totally caught me at that impressionable age where I love it even though it is sadly and deeply flawed (feochadn tells me there is an EIGHT HOUR rough cut somewhere that I now desperately want to see omg), but it has always frustrated me, because it absolutely looks like Frank Herbert's universe, but it doesn't behave like it -- the terrible and grotesque Harkonnens, which strike me as Lynch temporarily forgetting he wasn't still a twelve-year-old giggling over Garbage Pail Kids cards, and turning the "weirding way" into the stupid and boring sound technology, and losing all of the political subtlety and turning Paul into an action hero instead of a man desperately struggling to avoid messiah-hood and starting a galaxy-wide jihad, before in the end he yields to his own destiny.

So anyway, I really wanted to try and illustrate that story, instead, and I am so gleeful that people got that this is what I was doing. \o/ The piece that I don't think I managed to make quite clear was this idea I had of visions-within-visions-within-memories, trying to capture some feeling of Paul's prescient vision, and I may actually return to this at some point, because I belatedly had a great idea for how to illustrate this better. *g*


Black Black Heart, made with untrue_accounts
Song: Black Black Heart by David Usher
Source: The Revenger's Tragedy
Right-click save XviD (44 MB)
Stream at iMeem

So a while back, untrue_accounts won a vid-of-her-choice in the Vividcon raffle, and I was one of the vidders who had offered to fulfill, and she played me this song and then showed me the movie of The Revenger's Tragedy. Then I said "wow, okay" and made her come over and actually do work on her own vid. *g*

The best I can do to summarize the source is, Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard (yes, the "cake or death?" Eddie Izzard) star in a Jacobean tragedy chock-full of other awesome British actors, all frolicking murderously in a decadent post-apocalyptic dystopia full of voyeuristic imagery and men wearing lots of makeup and frilly clothing and playing competitive foosball. Eccleston plays Vindici, the Revenger of the title, who has come back to post-apocalyptic Liverpool to avenge the murder of his wife by the Duke. To this end, he worms his way into the entourage of the Duke's oldest son, Lussurioso (this is Eddie Izzard) as a procurer, promising to get Lussurioso his latest and has piles of sexy chemistry with him.

I cannot understand how fandom is not all over this movie already, but I hope this spreads the love, although I must point out for the faint of heart that it is a Jacobean tragedy. (Think the end of Hamlet, and in fact, that wasn't quite enough for the director, so he took it a bit further.)

I think it's hard to get what we tried to do in the vid narratively without context, and our main goal was mostly, "Look! You want to watch this! And write it for Yuletide!" But to give you an idea of what we were going for -- Lussurioso starts out as somehow innocently corrupt -- he's a spoiled debauch and a frat-boy jerk, but he doesn't have a kind of larger vision of malice and doesn't plan anything beyond his next seduction. Under Vindici's prodding, he gradually falls into darker schemes, culminating in the murder of his own father the Duke, at which point he inherits and promptly becomes just as bad as the original. Though it's not in the play, in the movie, there is this fabulously slashy reading from the chemistry and the way Eccleston plays Vindici's reaction, where this makes Vindici sorry and bitterly unhappy -- I imagine that he had himself fallen for Lussurioso in the meantime, and perhaps had a secret hope he would replace his father and fix the rottenness of the society, and instead Vindici finds he's destroyed whatever was not already corrupt in Lussurioso in the pursuit of his revenge.

So anyway, our idea was a POV shift halfway through -- that the first "black black heart" is Vindici seen from Lussurioso's POV, and then the second becomes Lussurioso from Vindici's POV instead, and the bridge to the end a sort of wild protesting run in Vindici's POV through the irredeemable decadence of the society, to the end of their relationship. (Um, that is kind of a euphemism there. Jacobean tragedy!)

Technically, the tricky bit in this vid was the screens. All of the screens have had their content replaced with other footage from the movie, using masks in After Effects to cut out what was originally inside, and then using a combination of the 3D Layer and scale/motion effects in Premiere to position replacement clips, plus the Noise HLS and various color correction effects in Premiere to desaturate and tweak the colors and add static.


Meanwhile, I haven't been watching SGA regularly for a while, so the cancellation doesn't hit me in the same gut way it once would have, but wtf, this came out of NOWHERE. What an awful and weird way and time to announce it. Way to let all the air out of the rest of this season, guys, both for us and for the actors. :( *hugs all in the fandom*