New vid! Book trailer for "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie

[bironic]

Title: "Ancillary Justice" book trailer
Fandom: Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie
Music: "Nad Dunaem" by DakhaBrakha and "Epic Drums" by Immediate Music (edited)
Length: 1:28
Summary: Nineteen years, three months, and one week ago, I was a troop carrier.
Content notes: Several people get shot or are threatened with guns by members of a military force.
Physical notes: Zoom effects on some of the titles and clips.

A/N: A labor of love, nine months in the making. I watched or scanned through about 50 movies and TV shows (plus endless YouTube videos) in the hunt for clips that looked like my headcanon of critical moments, places and characters from the books, while trying not to use hugely recognizable actors and actresses. Not that you'd know it from the final source list, but the research process involved reading and learning a lot about the history of black characters in Western science fiction film and television as well as a crash course in modern African SF/F independent filmmaking, both of which were fascinating.

I ended up short in some areas and with more footage than I needed in others, and had to make some tough decisions, not all of which I'm perfectly happy with -- but when faced with the choice to either piece together what I had and turn it in for the perfect themed vidshow at Vividcon ("No source? No problem," curated by revolutionaryjo, highlighting fanvids for canons without obvious visual material, like books and podcasts) or to obsess over it for another nine months, I chose the former. And here we are.

If you've read Ancillary Justice, I hope this brings you joy. If you haven't, maybe this will pique your interest.

Thank you to everyone who helped out with brainstorming, source ideas, file acquisition, soundboarding, script revisions, translation and beta watching, including: stultiloquentia, thedeadparrot, jjhunter, jetpack_monkey, chagrined, alpheratz, nightdog_barks, eruthros, violace, futuransky, no_detective, cosmic_llin, thingswithwings, sholio, kabal42, cinco, zulu, deelaundry, thirdblindmouse, kiki_miserychic, grammarwoman, ghost_lingering, daasgrrl, R. and J. It took a village. I hope you agree the results were worth it.


Streaming on Vimeo | YouTube | AO3 | Twitter | Tumblr | Download mp4

"Ancillary Justice" book trailer from bironic on Vimeo.

SCRIPT (adapted from the source text)

19 years, 3 months, and 1 week ago, I was a troop carrier
An artificial intelligence linked to an army of ancillaries
Until the Lord of the Radch destroyed all but one body

I've followed the trail from planet to planet
Risked failure and death
To obtain justice
Before everything falls to pieces

LYRICS

I listened to a lot of polyphony and shape-note singing before settling on a single female voice blended with more traditional trailer music. Something just makes me think Justice of Toren would enjoy DakhaBrakha's harmonies. The excerpted lyrics aren't important for understanding the vid, but they are:

Над Дунаєм стояла
Над Дунаєм стояла
Косу русу чесал(а)

Which a collaborative of friends settled on a translation of: "Standing over the Danube, she combed out her golden hair."

SOURCES

In order of appearance: Halo/UNSC Infinity, Total Recall (2012), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, The Expanse, Pumzi, Killjoys, Planet Earth (BBC), Stargate: Continuum, Interstellar, "Bowl Tea" by Wu De, Only Lovers Left Alive, "Brave Man's Bridge" in Shiniuzhai National Geological Park/China, Men in Black III, Doctor Who, bronze statue of Kali, Blade II, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Firefly, Ascension, Gravity, Virtuality, Sunshine, After Earth, Une Africaine dans l'Espace


ETA: Okay, for the record, because wow: Ann Leckie's blog post/Tumblr post/tweet, Metafilter, Tor.com

Comments

[jjhunter]

HOLY SHIT.

Um, yes. Yes yes yes. Some fragmentary first impression highlights:

- the bolding / lingering of the text "one body" in context of single voice singing works really well

- that pace change! where the drums kick in / up and the clips start pounding by and then the moment there's a hint at breathing space again you've got Breq | One Esk Nineteen spinning out into the dark - as a viewer I started to draw breath, spotted the significant of 'oh shit that part' and gasped / held in sympathetic mirroring of the predicament well into the blanking (blacking out?) of the screen to give the credits.

- overall, there's this sense of going from a more remote POV (quite literally, in seeing ship body from distances where the ship is moving but the POV itself seems almost fixed) with isolated flashes / flash-backs interspersed with text and that haunting, haunting voice - that one note in particular being held and the singer leaning into it even more, hot damn — and then the ship destruction, where the intense blueness of it is almost as striking as the whiting out bit — and suddenly the camera quite literally drops us into a singular embodied POV, and rather than having isolated flashes we go straight from one action to another, and the camera is constantly moving even as the clips with people in them are constantly struggling. The shift from guns / bodies holding guns to the clip evoking the temple massacre where the focus is very much on the person who will be shot.

So good.

oh man, now I really want to see what you'd do for Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. There's such evocative sense of place throughout this - space itself, and spaceships as the bodies that belong to space (vs. Breq's human body spiraling out, which viscerally does not belong to space and in immediate peril of dying of it); the planets, and the way green and swampy is shown as a plane or a satellite might see it vs. ice / snow world hits us at ground level as Breq and Seivarden struggle through it; and all the references to Radch culture - the glimpse of tea, the omen coins, the gloves - and to Breq (the statue! eeeee - also, given the text that comes immediately after, it comes across as 'the moral weather today is justice, and by justice I mean head whacking').

Which is to say, this is great and I really like it and I would love to hear more about all the stuff you learned in the course of your research for it. Thank you for making this, and for sharing it with us!

(HOLY SHIT.)

[jjhunter]

On rewatching (and er, rewatching and rewatching) - one minor amendment to the above. That box with the red cloth doesn't have omen coins in it; it appears, when I froze the frame and really looked it, to have a gun in it (the Presger gun? :D).

I'm always a little surprised on rewatching just how fast the clips go by - I get so much out of the choices you made, and the way they're instantly recognizable / evocative of particular moments or thematic elements of the book that they expand in my memory.

Also, switching back to the initial solo singer after the screen blacking / final definitive drumbeat is just exquisite, experience-wise. I like how it both brings us full circle back to space (and suggests that's what's going through Breq's head too) and also full contrast between the human body in space peril still lingering as an afterimage in our eyes (the glow and gone of the white uniform) and what we saw the last time we heard the singer, i.e. all the spaceships, and in particular one spaceship - Justice of Toren - blowing up (will Breq's final human body expire or explode like her spaceship body and all her other ancillaries did? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT).

[bironic]

Ahh, I accidentally opened a link in the same tab and lost my comment draft. Let's try this again:

:) :) I was hoping this would please you after our initial conversations! Thank you for sharing these observations and expressions of joy.

>> and the singer leaning into it even more, hot damn

Yesss. I love the quality of her voice and how it sounds like breaking with grief at that point, even though the lyrics describe an innocuous image.

Re: research, here are some links:

http://www.thebritishblacklist.com/tbb-presents-case-black-women-science-fiction-fantasy-screen-part-2/

http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2013/02/eric-s-blog/fear-of-a-black-galaxy-black-people-in-science-fiction.html

http://www.firsttvdrama.com/central/bgirls.php3

http://www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com/a-crash-course-in-the-history-of-black-science-fiction/

http://indiechannel.co.za/future-myths-an-intro-to-african-sci-fi-films/

http://www.vice.com/read/black-sci-fi-documentary-speculative-fiction

(Obv. more on those themes, plus TV tropes stuff ["literal cliffhanger," "escape pods"], specific shows, landscapes...)

[jjhunter]

You, Stulti, and thedeadparrot were such wonderful soundboards / partners in brainstorming re: figuring out key bits of Radchaai culture / philosophy / symbolism etc. I could incorporate into writing Radchaai-style poetry for last Yuletide; I'm thrilled you found anything of use in that for this project too. (I was not at all expecting to be included in the credits for this trailer; it really made my week.)

Aw, yessss - thank you for all these research links! *starts ordering books from the library and queuing up YouTube shorts to watch over the weekend* This is especially timely since I was just starting to think about what I might want to nominate for Yuletide this year - 'Pumzi' in particular looks like it hits a lot of my near future speculative fiction buttons.

That last VICE article reminds me of a fantastic essay by Rebecca Wanzo in Transformative Works & Cultures last year: African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies. I highly, highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

[bironic]

Thanks!

Add the Afronauts trailer to your list, too - really cool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS6rBBtXFkg

Pumzi is a beautiful and powerful short film. I owe my familiarity with it to at least one Festivid, but I think it's offline now (http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/155647.html). There are a few ficlets on the AO3...

[jjhunter]

Ooooooo, ALL the riches! You spoil me. :D :D :D

[jjhunter]

Coming back to tell you I watched Pumzi earlier this week, and it was so good. Definitely requesting it for Yuletide!

Would also recommend every talk I've found online so far (all of two) by Pumzi's writer/director, Wanuri Kahiu:

Africa and science fiction: Wanuri Kahiu’s “Pumzi”, 2009 | Interview: https://vimeo.com/104147918

Afrofuturism in popular culture: Wanuri Kahiu at TEDxNairobi: http://tedxnairobi.com/speaker/wanuri-kahiu/

The sound quality on the latter is not as good, but if you click over to the YouTube page there's a good transcript to go with it. One of my favorite bits, from when she's talking more specifically about Pumzi near the end:

[12:15] In "Pumzi", what I did is I created this idea [...] about how we use different layers of technology in order to communicate and the thought process of that is that we're looking for more efficient ways of communicating rather than finding emotive ways of communicating.

[bironic]

P.S.

>>the statue! eeeee - also, given the text that comes immediately after, it comes across as 'the moral weather today is justice, and by justice I mean head whacking'

Ha, I hadn't thought of it that way. I like it! My original idea was for it to represent another facet of the "risk everything" concept along with the bridge incident.

[jjhunter]

Well, it does call to mind both the kinds of statues to the gods evoked by all those canonical references to divine icons in shrines / temples (and gives yet another iteration within your trailer of 'there ought to be lots of gods/icons/bodies/embodied aspects present, but instead of a crowd the multifacteted whole has been reduced / distilled to a single incarnation / aspect / motivation' — you could say that Breq's state of single-bodiness is mirrored in her single-mindedness) and, albeit inexactly, her Itran Tetrarchy icon as described in Ancillary Mercy:

Five opened the bench it was stored in and drew it out, a golden disk five centimeters in diameter and one and a half centimeters high. I took it from her and triggered it, and it opened out, the image rising from the center. The figure wore only short trousers and a wreath of tiny jeweled flowers. One of its four arms held a severed head that smiled serenely and dripped jeweled blood on the figure's bare feet. Two more hands held a knife, and a ball. The fourth hand was empty, the forearm encased in a cylindrical guard.

I rather like that there's a subtle implication afoot in the books that 'Justice of Toren' the ship+ancillaries, in becoming the single-bodiment 'Breq', has an icon of herself in the act of another key moment of enacting justice / system adjustment* as if she has become in her distilled single-minded focus some new embodied aspect of the universe, a force of nature in her own right.

Did I ever write up my theories about omen casting in Radchaai culture as consulting the moral weather (since the actual weather / environmental conditions would be controlled by Ship / Station / planetary satellite programming)? I think we talked about it at one point - or maybe I asked Ann Leckie at the Pandemonium Books event? - but I have a somewhat ridiculous backlog of meta bits I keep meaning to post publicly at some point, and watching and rewatching your fabulous trailer is making me excited to get back to it.

* I love the concept of haronniin, from Cherryh's Foreigner universe: "a system under stress, needing adjustment".

[bironic]

Yes, that's the icon it's meant to evoke. I'm glad the trailer is reinvigorating your motivations to write about the series -- I look forward to reading your thoughts.

[jjhunter]

*several hours later*

To start, have an expanded writeup of meta re: enhanced counters game between Sphene and Translator Zeiat.