beccatoria | Five Things Meme!

Okay - that meme is going around again! The one where you comment on a post and get given five things the poster associates with you, then you get to talk about those five things on your LJ, and invite other people to comment on your post and ask for five things you associate with them!

So yes,

chaila43 gave me the following five things! Comment on this post and I will give YOU five things! An endless cycle of things!

#1 - Vidding

OH VIDDING.

I vid sometimes. If you have ever been on this LJ before, you probably know that I make vids. They are all here!

I'm actually suffering from a slight amount of existential vidder angst at the moment because I'm just not vidding all that much and I have been trying to motivate myself to finish the 85% done vid that's sat on my harddrive for weeks now but the end just doesn't work and it's almost stopped being fun. Which sucks because I both want to finish something and want the vid to exist.

I think my slower vidding pace is partially because I'm just watching fewer shows right now, and that's been the case for about 18 months, and the shows I am watching I'm less passionate about and the new areas I've found to direct my fannishness aren't necessarily visual.

However, that's starting to reverse a little now as I'm finding a couple more shows that may be vidworthy and...yeah. I'm now moving into a phase where I have more hypothetical vids I want to exist. Although somehow, either because I don't know the shows as well or I don't listen to enough music or something? But I used to vid by having visual associations for all the lyrics, or at least enough of them, but now I tend to have a much less defined storyboard than I used to, even in fluid form in my head (because I stopped actually writing them out after my first couple of vids). I don't know, I just find myself with less defined ideas as I start, like I said, I think partly because I'm less familiar with the shows but also because I don't wait as long before I start? And there are benefits to working that fluidly and that readily, but also sometimes it can make it feel overwhelming and too undefined and that's where I am right now:

Lots of vague ideas for vids, none that seem easy to start. But hey, that's better than a month or two ago when I just didn't have many ideas.

Bottom line, I can't seem me stopping vidding. But I would like my muse to kick in now, please. ;) END ANGST!

#2 - Project CAPSLOCK - a.k.a. Hands Away, the Sarah/Olivia vid

OH LOOK MAYBE I'LL EMBED IT RIGHT HERE:

RIGHT SO, THAT DONE WITH:

This is a vid that me and

chaila43 made. We didn't have an actual title for it for the longest time, so we still tend to refer to it by our working title of Project CAPSLOCK. Because, you know, dude, Sarah Connor/Olivia Dunham. It's awesome.

I really love this vid more than I can possibly express, which is possibly a little arrogant since I helped make it, but really, you know how sometimes you look back on stuff you made and only see the flaws? But sometimes you're like, shit, how the fuck did I manage to do that cus that's actually pretty awesome? Yeah, the second one.

So since I'm sposed to be talking about it here, I will indulge and talk a little about the part of this that I made. Essentially I created extra footage for

chaila43 to use while doing the actual vidding part, and we both brainstormed parallels, sequences, storyboards, etc. It was awesome and I honestly can no longer remember which bits were whose idea in places. The awesome song choice was all

chaila43's though.

I actually did a lot in here that I wonder, sometimes, if people will ever notice? Which isn't to say I necessarily want them to because a lot of the stuff I did I was trying to make a seamless as possible - short moments designed to be almost overlooked but subtly add to the sense of verisimilitude.

I feel like probably people would be more interested in how to make the actual snogging manips and more obvious stuff, but honestly, that would be longer and take more effort than is reasonable for a short meme-based babble, so instead of getting anything approaching an actual commentary, here are half a dozenish pieces of trivia about some of the parts I made! :D

- 0:43, most of the bar sequence is just intercutting, but here you can actually see Sarah walking up to Olivia at the bar for half a second. I can't remember who I masked her over, but I hope it was some dude in a trucker hat.

- All the night-tinted shots of Sarah and Olivia making out/in bed talking, weren't actually made using Terminator, they're Lena Headey from 300. Equal opportunities homoeroticism!

- 0:47, the three dots on the paper that Olivia's holding are actually a manip rather than a cut away, even though her face isn't visible and it looks totally generic. I just couldn't find anything I could cut to or mask in from TSCC that would look right, so I actually made the "three dots on lined paper" image myself, then masked the .png image into the shot over Peter's exploding prophecy face.

- 2:07, I think Sarah smashing the screen on Olivia's laptop is one of my favourite images that I contributed - it's so striking, but so small and in the corner. The trivia though, is that I'm absurdly pleased with myself for matching the same amount of blur that was on the original screen, even though no one will ever notice because, um, you can't see what was originally on the screen, and if I'd left it unblurred it might have been clearer to viewers (but I think subconsciously it would also have looked more fake).

- 2:40, hardest color-correcting shot EVAR. We were really fortunate with a lot of the colouring in the scenes in that they looked very similar (THESE SHOWS, MAN), but in this shot, with Sarah walking through the door, the flowers behind her were so distractingly red, and it was really hard to bleach that out a bit without losing the tiny amount of colour that was in the rest of the shot and making it look weird. So now I notice it every single time.

- 2:44, the composite shot of Sarah and Olivia driving was the first time I ever had to learn to use the motion tracker in Cinelerra (to keep them steady and counteract the motion in the original shots). I HOPE TO NEVER DO SO AGAIN.

- 2:44, the shot of the car driving away was originally in the daytime (from TSCC 1x01 actually), so I fiddled with it til it was night. Making things night is easy, it's keeping the tail lights bright that's fiddly.

- 2:50, Sarah waking up was also originally a daytime shot, but much easy to colour-correct to night time as there were no light sources.

#3 - Olivia Dunham

OH OLIVIA. I love her. On a serious level, I love her determination, her lack of melodrama, I love her understatement, I love her conviction. I love watching her face when she has to deal with Emotional Stuff, because how she feels is all there, in such subtlety, even as she does not allow herself to express it in any other way - to anyone not bothering to pay attention.

I love how Anna Torv manages to differentiate between so many different characters. I'm even starting to be able to tell the difference between Blue Olivia and New Timeline Blue Olivia (I refuse to believe Peter's apparent theory that this is actually someplace else).

I also have a dilemma whereby I have developed a kink for terrible stuff happening to Olivia and her just sucking it up and continuing to try and love the world and trust in people anyway, very quietly. But I absolutely hate that I don't think that's the response I'm supposed to be having to the Peter/Olivia relationship. I just...I really wish I was supposed to see that as Peter fundamentally not understanding her, even though he loves her, and that being tragic. But I don't believe that's the case, so it's just more objectively sad for me.

Like how sometimes people complain that the show is too much about her and not enough about BOYS. Which no one would complain about if she were the top-billed lead and a dude. They really wouldn't.

Mostly I guess I just love how competent and practical and unmelodramatic she is while not being characterised as heartless or as having a lack of compassion. Like, even when they are characterising her as someone who has been damaged by her childhood and does now have an actual block to connecting with people, or responding the way most do to irrational events, they never start acting like that means she has to be taught how to love someone or how to care for someone or how to be a decent human being. She's withdrawn, not cold and that's a difference I love the show for adhering to strictly even as I might whine about a billion other things they do, particularly with her love life.

At which point, I'm out of things to say. FOR NOW.

#4 - Wonder Woman

Okay, so I wrote my SRS LOVE LETTER to her, and posted me SRS PICSPAM of her, and made my SRS VID BECAUSE I NEEDED A HERO of her, so I kind of feel the only thing left is to post is this:

You're welcome, internet, your life is now complete.

#5 - Wales

In this case, the non-shoe-stealing kind!

Right, Wales! I am from there. Most of you probably know this, but for those who may not, it's part of the United Kingdom, but isn't actually part of England. England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales all make up the UK. I suppose the easiest conceptual way to describe it is that if the USA has fifty states, the UK has four. Except the devolution of power is not the same as it is in the USA, nor is it standard across the four nations, nor do we view it in quite the same way, culturally.

Anyway, you might have seen me ranting about this in my LJ before as I'm something of a Welsh politics dork. Which it's kind of fun to be right now since the last 12ish years have been pretty interesting because we finally got a National Assembly and devolved political power that's been slowly increasing throughout my adult life. It's been interesting, at times inspiring and at times depressing, to see.

The thing other than the Welsh Assembly that I occasionally rant about on my LJ is Welsh, the language, which I speak fluently on account of having been sent to Welsh language school as a very small child (we were all fluent in English and did things like English Lit in English but everything else, til I left high school, was in Welsh). This is another thing I have Feelings about, though largely they are expressed here through screaming about how no one on Torchwood (or Wales-based Who episodes) ever speaks Welsh, even when I know damn well the actors can. RARGH.

As a piece of trivia that a lot of people don't know, the number of fluent Welsh-speakers in Wales is actually rising due to the popularity of the Welsh-language immersion education system. This produces lots of kids like me - fluent, unaccented speakers, who are nonetheless second language, which produces a range of social anxieties tied to expectation, ability, opportunities to exercise vocabulary as adults, assumptions about our abilities (yes, thank you, I know my accent is "brilliant"; I struggle to remember a time when I wasn't fluent), and assimilation into the first-language culture that we don't quite fit in. Which isn't intended to denigrate the experiences of first-language speakers who have a whole different set of no less painful social and practical issues to deal with in terms of not feeling marginalised and, indeed, the survival of a culture, nor that of non-speakers and/or learners being made to feel that they are somehow less "Welsh" because of their linguistic skills. It's kind of a giant fucking mess, not helped by the lack of clarity of who's even in what group. I kind of wish we would have a national discussion about it like...ever, because it's brutal, it hurts us, and we pretend it doesn't, and huddle and get angry in isolation rather than addressing it nationally. I feel. Sometimes.

Finally, I shall put away my tiny violin, because Wales is awesome and rainy and tiny and kind of poor and doesn't have almost any coal mines left thanks to Maggie Thatcher and was one of the first places in the country to ban smoking in public indoor places, and the first to eliminate prescription charges (err, since they were introduced way back, I mean), and is one of the only places in the world where the minority language isn't dying, and was the first place in the world to elect a legislative body (though not a full government - it was the national assembly) that was 50% female (in fairness we were all very surprised), and is currently paying for me to go to some kind of secretary school thing because I lost my job. And it's boring as fuck, but at least I can afford it, because I live in Wales. Also, one day, MARK MY WORDS, we will totally win back some of that "wild, mysterious, romantic Celt" credibility and stop being the ones that only ever get sheep jokes made about them! MARK MY WORDS!

Yay, Wales!

And I'm done. Who wants five things from me?!