Festivids reveals #1-2 of 5: Aniara and Los Espookys

Five! Five festivids this round, ah ah ah. This would not have been possible without a two-week winter break at work and, you know, not being able to go anywhere or see anyone.


absternr and I matched on two fandoms, so I was excited to vid for her.


Death Is the New Sex

I knew straight off that I wanted to try vidding Aniara, the existentialist Swedish sci fi film I loved last year, hard as it might be. The opportunity was extra sweet because absternr said in her letter that she'd requested the movie after seeing it on the nominations list, which was my doing. I just needed a song and the confidence to try editing something that needed to descend into a frenzy of different emotions and actions. Spotify paid off in the song hunt; it had introduced me to "Death Is the New Sex" not long before and thought it might work for this project.

It was a bit tough to sit with these characters' existential crises day after day while dealing with my own and, uh, the world during a pandemic, but the editing itself went really well. There was more storytelling up front than expected. Although the frenzy part didn't turn out as frenetically paced as envisioned—I'd been thinking something more like Long Night's Journey Into Day—I'm happy with how things came together.

With immense thanks to marginaliana for finding clean footage. Making the first draft when half the clips had hard-coded captions was difficult because they distracted the eye and made the footage seem busier than it really was.

P.S. Gotta love a project with clip categories like "screaming," "cults," "dancing" and "makeouts."

P.P.S. Although there are many spoilers in the vid, the ending is not among them. Clips from the end of the movie do not appear anywhere in the vid, and the end of the vid is taken from several different places in the movie.

Watch on the AO3 or ( behind the cut. )

Calling All the Monsters

I'd also been playing with the idea of vidding Los Espookys, an HBO comedy miniseries about a group of delightfully morbid friends in Mexico who do horror special effects and come to discover that the supernatural is more real than they knew. (Well, Andrés and Tati knew.) I didn't have any song ideas, but Spotify came to the rescue again with playlists of Halloween songs. mollyamory and arduinna were kind enough to provide files so I didn't have to screen-grab the whole show, and I was able to draft the vid in a day. Just a fun little romp through Renaldo's geeky love of horror and the team's adventures in staged and not-so-staged effects. My one regret is that I couldn't crop out the subtitles on the shot of the werewolf makeup reveal because they were right over her hand/mouth.

Watch on the AO3 or ( behind the cut. )

Festivids reveals #3-4 of 5: Black Girl in a Big Dress and The Halloween Tree

In Want of a Gentleman

After vidding Aniara, it was time for something fluffy. I'd watched and offered the super charming web series Black Girl in a Big Dress after hearing about it in sandalwoodbox's Dear Festividder letter and thought it would be fun to try. It only needed some music. From somewhere or other came the idea to look up Black classical composers. The Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a.k.a. "the Black Mozart," went on the list. I liked an album on YouTube of pieces by African American musician-composer Francis Johnson, but they were so short, I didn't know how to make any one of them work for a whole vid. Then the brainwave came to use individual dances to match each of Adrienne's would-be suitors, and boom, the concept and the music came together perfectly. It took maybe two days to lay down the draft, followed by some fiddling around.

The title cards were fun to make. It was my graphic designer coworker M.'s idea to add Victorian-flavored frames. I'm especially pleased with the trumpet/bugle fanfare announcing Colin's entrance.

(Hope no one minds that Johnson wrote his music just after the Victorian era in which Adrienne's cosplay is set. I figure if she's living in modern times and reenacting the past, she and we can enjoy a slightly anachronistic soundtrack. :) )

Watch on the AO3 or ( behind the cut. )

This Is Halloween

But wait, there's more. After taking a break from Festivids to make deelaundry's extremely overdue Fandom Trumps Hate vid, I still had the vidding itch and a lot of time on my hands. One of my only other offers had been The Halloween Tree, the Hanna-Barbera adaptation of the Ray Bradbury book that I'd read two years ago, which I knew feedingonwind has been asking for. So I rented the movie and got cranking on music ideas.

A children's song on YouTube about the Halloween tree seemed like it would work, except it got too repetitive too fast, so I went with my first thought, "This is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Chopping out most of the verses helped (1) separate the song a bit from the original movie and (2) focus the theme on global and historical contributions to what the U.S. today calls Halloween, as per what Moundshroud teaches the kids in the movie. P.S. Did you know Moundshroud was voiced by Leonard Nimoy?

Again, the whole thing came together in a day or two, including remastering a handful of clips when the draft was complete because the screen capture program I use, OBS Studio, often gets choppy. It was fun to make, to give feedingonwind a treat after they'd missed the signup deadline, and to add another Halloween vid to my collection.

This one couldn't be added to the official festivids collection because feedingonwind didn't sign up, so it slipped under the radar. I hope more people see it now.

Watch on the AO3 or ( behind the cut. )

Festivids reveal #5 of 5: See You Yesterday

Try, Try Again

Last but not least. All these vids were done and there were still two weeks until go-live. Surely time for one more treat? It wasn't like I had anything else to do. So I surfed people's Dear Festividder letters for ideas and found thingswithwings's request for the Netflix Black-teens-invent-a-time-machine movie See You Yesterday, about which she wrote, "I really hope someone makes a vid for this one."

I watched the movie, I liked the movie, the themes were timely and important—the seeming inescapability of police brutality for Black communities, the generational loss of family and friends to violence, the enduring passion to effect change—and it's always nice to vid science geeks and non-white characters. Plus, thingswithwings didn't have any treats at that point, although by the time this got done, she had three others. So it goes.

Straightaway I grabbed the footage and a ticking clock sound effect, which I thought would be good for the time trope and for building a sense of suspense or urgency. I imagined a vid in which all the loops built and built and mixed and repeated and worked with and against the relentless tick tick tick. I laid down the first sequence. I laid down a second, then ripped it up. Again. Again. Something wasn't working. I didn't know how to get from setup to climax. The monotonous clock necessitated using as few clips as possible, lest people (read: I) get bored or impatient. The project stalled.

For a week and a half, I kept opening the Premiere file and closing it again. I wanted the vid to exist, but my brain didn't want to make it. Finally, the day before go-live, I threw out the clock and dumped in this slow-build piano track from the "maybe vid this one day" pile. I'd always figured I'd use it for a murder mystery or something, but it did the trick here. Suddenly the sequences started working. I didn't even have to adjust the existing clips much. The piano drove the narrative instead of fighting with it. I snipped lots of little pieces from the music to suit the pace the vid wanted to follow. And the draft got done at 8 or 9 p.m., hallelujah.

Internal critic: Could the movie's themes have been made more apparent in the vid? Could the vid have benefited from clearer editing or more powerful statements? Could it have balanced the pain and violence with more clips of support and love? Could I have found uses for cyclical symbols like Sebastian's whirling power saw? Yes. But it exists in the world, and I got a little better at problem solving. I like how the last sequence recontextualizes scenes from the movie to hinge on that pivotal moment when someone has the choice between violence and de-escalation. It's a different way of depicting the ambiguity of the movie's final images between hope/optimism and despair/pessimism that thingswithwings said she likes.

(It's just as well the clock didn't work out, since I later learned the official trailer used one. But it's too bad I didn't leave myself enough time to search for—and haven't cultivated enough working knowledge to have at the ready—perfect music by a Black artist.)

Watch on the AO3 or ( behind the cut. )

I'm glad livrelibre made a See You Yesterday vid for the collection, too: Rise Up. They work nicely as a pair, I think. Hers lets the footage breathe, and she gives more attention to the love and support between CJ & friend Sebastian and CJ & her brother Calvin & their mother.