Festivid #3: "Hack the Binary"

[bironic]

I'd wanted to see the Afrofuturist cyberpunk musical movie Neptune Frost since hearing about it last year, and eruthros requesting it for Festivids provided extra motivation.

The film was sometimes confusing but definitely memorable. So much interesting stuff happened visually and thematically that I really wanted to turn it into a treat for eruthros, yet the prospect was also intimidating. And there was only a week or so until go-live. So the first draft was pretty much the final draft. Does it make any sense? Who knows! But hey, the vid exists now.

It didn't turn out as organic as I'd envisioned. The first sequence, of the miners, wanted to be cut to the beat, one action per drum strike. But that did suggest an editing style in which the beginning of the vid, about oppression in a police state and capitalism and feeling trapped within prescribed gender identities, holds to its own rigid structure, and then as the main character transforms into her ideal self and the people around her break free and wake up and resist, the cuts begin to fall outside that rhythm. Neptune's own clips, you may notice, don't hold to the drumbeat from the start.

Hack the Binary on AO3

I'm super pleased that eruthros responded positively and that a few others found the story compelling. Particular gratitude to thingswithwings for checking visual triggers and providing pre-go-live feedback that it did, in fact, make some sense even for someone who was only passingly familiar with the film.

Of note: There's cool stuff in the movie that doesn't appear in the vid, most notably some dream sequences involving fluorescent makeup. One of the two main characters is only glancingly featured. And the ending of the vid does not reflect the ending of the movie. It's a more streamlined (and Westernized?) version of the movie narrative.

Comments

[selki]

I saw the movie a few months ago, and I thought it was great, though I know I didn't grok all of it. I like your vid!