arduinna: a tarot-card version of Linus from Peanuts, carrying a lamp as The Hermit (Default)
One last Saturday vidshow that I managed to write up before the streaming vanished (and then forgot to post). I didn't go to this show at the con; it was up against the Critique panel, which is what I attended. This particular show was paired with a panel, which I also didn't attend, so I'm coming at this completely cold, where attendees would have a lot more context and nuance, fwiw.

I wanted to say one thing outside of the cut, though:

If you ever wondered if one person can make a difference in how things are perceived, I say ye [personal profile] jetpack_monkey, who came to Vividcon for the first time years ago saying "hey, horror and classic film are awesome and totally viddable! we need more of that!" and kept producing more of that himself and cheerfully repeating his mantra and steadily started convincing people. There were five premieres in this show for "source from 1973 or earlier". I can't even imagine that 10 years ago.

(Which, okay, granted, is the confluence of a lot of things, not just [personal profile] jetpack_monkey -- more older source is available all the time, newer vidding tech makes it easier to work with all kinds of source, VVC has started shifting from "let's share big fandoms" to "let's share our fandoms-of-few" -- but the specific older-source shift has a clear beginning, I think!)

Okay, now on to the vidshow itself. Once again, this isn't the full show, just vids that jumped out at me for one reason or another.

Brand New Classic Hits )
arduinna: Snooch (of Eben and Snooch fame) rocking out on a couch in a fab hat (Snooch in the groove)
After the panels came the usual dinner break, which lately has just been the "get ready for Club Vivid" break. The buffet is substantial enough to serve as dinner, so we generally head down and eat and socialize for a bit, then head back to the room to change and glam up for the dance.

The hotel was running a little behind all weekend on setup that involved food of any kind, which is unusual, so the buffet didn't start until 6:30 or so. No biggie, except how I just expect everything Vividcon-related to start on time, so it made me blink a bit.

Which has just reminded me of something I wanted to say: the concom, as usual, was calm and cheerful throughout the con, handling things as they came up, despite coping with even more stress than usual in the face of a hotel staff that was late with all food-related things, right down to water service in the function rooms, and more horribly, a DVD duplicating place that had delayed the delivery of the DVDs till the last possible second. On Friday, no one on staff even knew if the DVDs would arrive by Saturday (!!). If they hadn't, the concom would have had to somehow get hold of the DVDs after the con, and ship out every set individually at huge unexpected cost, not to mention facing the disappointment of more than a hundred people who expected to be able to pick them up on Sunday in person.

Not a trace of that stress showed publicly; to the uninformed eye, everything was running smooth as silk all weekend. So big kudos to the concom for their professionalism throughout. <3

So the buffet was good, as usual, and Mandy and her cohort were back at the bars wearing beaded necklaces and ready to serve up whatever we wanted (seriously, I love how much the bartenders seem to have a good time with us. We're kind of a motley crew, and we are unbelievably loud at Club Vivid, but everyone has a blast and it's great that the bartenders are part of that. It never feels like they're outsiders watching us and silently mocking, which could totally happen with some people. These folks put on their beads and seem to have a great time watching us all have a great time. <3 )

After we ate, we went back to the room to dress up a bit and add some nice bright hair coloring, then headed back down to check out everyone's outfits and start in on the booze. (I brought hair chalk to try this year, too, but you have to put hair spray in first, which I'm not keen on, and forgot to pick up at Dominick's anyway. Oh well, maybe next time.)

During the very first CV, one person came in very tight, very shiny silver pants that impressed everyone. Times have changed; this year, we had a shiny silver bikini-thing that also impressed everyone quite a bit. There was also the usual array, from comfy street clothes to cosplay to cocktail dresses to clubwear; bare feet and sneakers and stilettos and thigh-high laced boots; and glitter and glowsticks EVERYWHERE. I love all of that so much; I can't think of anything else I do all year where someone in a tight-laced pleather corset and killer boots can hang out with someone in loose cotton pajamas and slippers in public, and both of them be appropriately dressed and equally comfortable. ♥

So pre-CV is always fun, with everyone wandering around talking and drinking and eating and admiring each other, then there's a rush for the dance floor as the Joxer Dance starts up, and we're off!

... and then there's a three-hour haze of dancing and drinking and vids. *g* Ian outdoes himself every year on the playlist, and this year was no exception.

But one fabulous addition this year was a tv over on one of the side table in the middle, showing all the vids in addition to the big screens at either end. It made it easier to actually watch the vids, if there was something you particularly wanted to see.

Also awesome this year for anyone who was premiering vids at CV: [personal profile] absolutedestiny had put up a list in the con suite with time codes for each premiering vid, so you could keep track of when yours was going to air without having to count vids off the main playlist.

A handful of vids that jumped out at me through the haze of awesome )
arduinna: a tarot-card version of Linus from Peanuts, carrying a lamp as The Hermit (Default)
This is where I stop reviewing all the vids in the vidshows I saw, and just pick out the ones that stood out strongly to me for one reason or another. (Lines in italics under the vid info are the blurbs chosen by the VJ for the program book.)

So onward to midday Friday! I stuck with vidshows to balance out the panels I was planning on attending for most of the afternoon, which means that next up is:

Glitterguts )

Then there was a lunch break, where I headed back to the room with my roommates and some other folks (I am not naming any names, because at this point everything is a blur, and I no longer remember exactly who was where, when) to eat some of the actual real food we'd bought at the store the day before instead of going out for sandwiches at Spuntino's or whatever. It's kinda fun heading out for lunch and seeing who picked the same place to eat you did and say hi, but it's also kinda really nice not stressing over how much time you have, or standing in line, and just having some nice relaxing cheese and crackers and fruit with a small group.

Although in retrospect, I'm a little facepalm-y, because I specifically didn't take my leftovers the night before because any time I do that, I fail to eat them on accounta going out for every meal. I totally could have had them for lunch. OTOH, if we hadn't started eating the cheese and crackers on Friday, we would have wound up throwing them out on Sunday night, so.

... Anyway! After lunch was one more vidshow for me:

Worlds Collide )

After that was panels for the rest of the afternoon, which will be a different post at some point.
arduinna: a tarot-card version of Linus from Peanuts, carrying a lamp as The Hermit (Default)
Okay, I'm going to be brave here and actually start posting bits of the con report I've been poking at. Usually when I do this it means I stop adding more, because posted=finished in my brain. And I am nowhere near finished. But I'm hoping the post-every-day thing will keep me going (although I doubt I'll be posting bits of con report every day. I write these things slooooowly.)

Relatedly, I had a few days early on when I was determined to do a review on ALL THE VIDS, because yay streaming omg, but then I realized that, er, it would never actually be finished, because that is way too much. So a regular con report with occasional vid commentary it is.

So!

Thursday, travel day )

Friday

I'm not even a breakfast person, but I make it to the hotel's breakfast every day; it's a really nice way to start the day, and feels almost like low-key social programming, since much of the con makes it down at some point, and people join various tables as other people clear out, and wander around chatting with each other. (And most folks have their badges on already, because so many of us suck at facial recognition and have to do the face-badge-face thing all weekend, heh.)

Breakfast closes early on Friday, though, so I headed down before showering to try out the new breakfast menu. No waffles. :( There was so much dismay at the lack of waffles. (Spoiler: there were Weekend Waffles on Saturday and Sunday, to great relief.) But the fresh fruit was a really nice addition, and the eggs were better than I remember (possibly helped by the display of things to put on your eggs, like cheese or salsa). Then I headed back up to take a shower, secure in the knowledge that the con starts at 10.

... Except on Friday, when it starts at 9:45. *facepalm* So I totally missed the opening remarks and first raffle. But I made it in time for the first show, which is always some kind of History of Vidding, with nothing set against it. The past few years have all been 10-year anniversaries of one kind or another for VVC, so the History shows have been very inward-focused, including this year.

History of Challenge )

Next up, hopefully, the other Friday morning vidshows.

(... I have no tags for vid reviews or con reports here. Huh, I must always have done them in [personal profile] flummery before. I'll post there linking back to the tag here or something when I'm done.)
arduinna: a tarot-card version of Linus from Peanuts, carrying a lamp as The Hermit (Default)
I was home sick Thursday - not sick enough to want to stay in bed, just kinda draggy and bleah, and taking advantage of a lull at work. So I decided to watch some old vids, and popped in my home-burned DVD of the VVC 2002 tape. I haven't watched most of these in ages, and I'm having a lot of fun.

Wildly generalized things I have discovered during this:

* Cutting-edge vids from 2002 are generally very comfortably paced to my eyes. Like, I relax right into them. Which is kind of cracking me up, because -- of course they are, that's the era when I learned to vid! I imprinted on that general pacing. At the time, mind you, I thought they were fast, and now they're mostly not -- but they're comfortable. There's time to take in each scene during the vid (which could be more than one clip), connect it to the lyrics or music, place it in the context of the vid, and move on -- maybe ~2-3 seconds? They seemed more likely to use internal motion to drive things, rather than cutting boom-boom-boom.

By comparison, I'd also watched some of the Media Cannibals Tape 3 the night before, and while that has a lot of my favorite vids on it, the late-90s vids overall feel pretty slow to me now. (Not all! But a lot.)

* I think 2002 was one of the only years with a real mix of VCR vids and computer vids in Premieres, and in some cases the VCR vids looked better - because people were still figuring out how to export computer vids for cons. Back then, you uploaded a small version to the web (both reduced frame size -- usually half, sometimes even one-third the original frame size -- and highly compressed), because most people were on dialup and had 800x600 resolution monitors. So that's what "a computer vid" looked like, and that's what some people submitted to the con. There are several vids here that are just tiny squares in the middle of my screen, because they were exported at something like 360x240.

It's the exact opposite of now, when you'd see a smaller square and think, ah, made off old SD analog tv source instead of shiny HD digital source. (There are also plenty of computer vids at full screen on this, of course! But it's really noticeable when a computer vidder hadn't figured it out yet, and this was while VVC was still working out the standards for electronic submission to cons, which had never been done before - people were winging it as best they could.)

* That said, everyone was using analog source, no matter how they were editing it, which made me blink for a minute when I realized it, until I put it all back in context in my head. DVDs weren't common at all (and were incredibly expensive, and if they were put out it was years after a given season ended -- none of this "last season on DVD before next season starts" business, never mind instant high-quality downloads), and everyone had a VCR or three, and knew how to use them. Again, that started changing within a year. None of us had any idea what a watershed period 2002/2003 was.

It actually makes for a fun vidshow, when every vid takes up the whole screen (assuming a 4:3 screen, that is). There's no letterboxing at all on this tape.

* Digital isn't always better. Way back when when people were warning that home-burned discs had a 5-10-year lifespan, they weren't kidding. :( There are black spots throughout this home-burned disc of mine, where the video has just dropped out. But hey, part of the reason I recorded it was so my tape would stay as pristine as possible, so I can re-do it if need be. If I can find my tape. (Analog may be fuzzier, but you also don't lose the entire image if something drops out. It just gets fuzzier and fuzzier, but still watchable for a remarkably long time. As long as you don't pause, or keep watching the same vid over and over...)

Things change so fast, though; last time I backed up this tape, I recorded it using a set-top DVD recorder (which I used to record SO MANY THINGS. Not only old tapes, but also straight off my tivo, using the old "record to tape" function. Which I'm suddenly nostalgic for, for no reason.). I didn't have the ability to capture the tape into my computer -- no pass-through device, no space on the harddrive, not enough processor or RAM to even attempt it. Now? The dvd recorder is long gone, and I can't remember the last time I recorded something off my tv. But I do have a computer that can handle both downloads and capturing, with plenty of space and RAM, and I have my trusty Canopus to hook it up to a VCR. <3 (The DVD recorder I recycled, as I'd used it so much it was burning out. The VCRs I cling to. Don't die, little VCRs!!! I have tapes I can never replace!!)

* Wow, the fandoms on this disc are like a snapshot of my corner of fandom in 2002: Farscape, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Witchblade, X-Files, Buffy, Invisible Man, Forever Knight, Brimstone, Angel, Due South, OZ, The Sentinel, Starsky & Hutch, Xena, The Matrix, Highlander, and one lone American Embassy, which I've never seen. All the rest though; even if I wasn't in the fandom, I knew enough about it to mostly follow the vids.



More specifically, I'm fascinated by how some of my reactions to some of the vids from VVC 2002 have changed, and how some haven't.

The most surprising difference to me was watching the Starsky & Hutch vid 'Help Me Understand' by Recycled Media Station )



The other audio-experiment vid, 'Unforgiven II' by DigiRay (Farscape), hasn't changed for me as much )



The other seriously experimental vid, 'Hero' by T4 Productions (Xena), is also interesting to watch in the wake of my own expanded horizons since I first saw it. )



Other, less detailed stuff I'm noticing:

Man, some of my favorite vids ever are on this tape. Like Solsbury Hill, by [personal profile] astolat. <3 <3 The con was just a few months after S5 of Stargate SG-1, when we'd lost Daniel to ascension and had no idea if he'd ever be back. It was a pretty fraught time to be an SG fan, especially a Jack/Daniel fan, and it was all I could do to watch this vid at VVC that year. But I love this, how it follows Daniel's journey from Abydos to SG-1 to ascension, and all the different people who bring him to his new homes. It made ascension really feel like the next step on his journey, rather than a loss. *happy sigh*

And then the flip side of that, [livejournal.com profile] barkley's Never Die Young, where Jack is left behind over and over again, and finally as Daniel ascends, and my heart just breaks and breaks. I must have watched this at the con way back when, but man, I don't know how I made it through.

... Apparently I am not over Stargate SG-1.

Weirdly, two other favs of mine are for a show I never really watched, other than an episode or two to be fannishly literate at the time: Witchblade. The first few years of VVC tried hard to make me change my mind about this show, starting with these two vids: [personal profile] killa's "Comin' Up From Behind" and [personal profile] bonibaru's "Go" (neither of them online, alas).

Comin' Up From Behind is just a kickass, boot-stompy vid of awesome Sara Pezzini, and the song's been in my walking playlist rotation ever since I saw this. It's sort of a day-in-the-life character study, starting with her getting ready in the morning (jeans! boots! gun! motorcycle helmet!) and then riding her motorcycle out into the dawn, where she very competently deals with all the shit that comes her way, from ordinary stuff to very not-ordinary stuff, including creepy white-haired guy and his creepy dark-haired, ponytailed lackey (the cut to him on "small fry" makes me grin every time, until finally she saves the world by doing a reset on the entire globe, and ends her day by riding away into the evening on her motorcycle.

Go is just as kickass, but starts from the mystical side of Sara's life, her connection to the Witchblade throughout history, rather than the modern-day cop side. ("Grandma was a suffragette" is *perfect*) She comes to grips with this new knowledge and being part of a world she never knew existed, until it's a seamless part of her helping her to do her job. The whole thing is action and motion and woo, with some fantastic mystical stuff going on everywhere.

The two vids are the opposite sides of the show's coin, and combined are an amazing intro to the series. (Spoilery. But amazing.)

Watching them again, man, it's a pity this aired just long enough ago to have fallen off fandom's radar. I think it might have been a bigger fandom if it had aired in the last few years.

I have been writing this post forever already, so won't go into many more vids, except to mention that I was startled to discover that this vid tape included Remi d'Brebant's Sentinel vid, "Possession". This vid made a huge splash in 2002 because it did some very different things -- it used a lot of still shots, particularly on the choruses. But it didn't premiere at VVC; it premiered at Escapade earlier that year, and showed at VVC in the Experimental show, I think. *checks database* Yes, Experimental.

It was incredibly hard to get hold of; Remi never put it up online that I know of, and I didn't think it had made it onto any tape collections. I had completely forgotten it was on this one. \o/ It aired a couple more times at VVC, but it hasn't been shown since 2004.

Fanlore has some of Snady's comments about Possession from when it was being discussed on Vidder after Escapade. IIRC, the still shots weren't just artistic choice (although they worked well that way), but also limits of the source and technology. I can't remember where I saw that being discussed, though (so probably shouldn't say it, but hopefully someone else has a better memory than I).



It's 1:30 am ET heading into a weekend, and if I post this now, almost no one will see it. But if I don't post it now, I'll save it as a draft and then decide it's not good enough to post, like I do with most of what I write. So here, have a post, whoever is up at this hour!
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