Boppy's Journal

I just realised the vid connection point for a song I've been listening to for over a year obsessively. *FLASH* Suddenly the entire vid is brought to life before my eyes... and of course it's for a source I would loooooove to vid but never have. *heart thud*

If only I could take time off from the world and make it... at least my inner mind can build castles ...

ETA: *relistening* HOLY SHIT, this is THE song for this source!!! *immediately YouTube searches to see if it exists*

Hello LJ/Dreamwidth peoples! I have been extremely absent of late... eaten alive by work and guilt about work... which isn't at all fun and must be rectified soon!

Breaking internet silence for selfish reasons, but I can't overlook this because it is so precious and rare and beautiful to be given such a gift:

tree has compiled an incredible vid commentary of Some Time Around Midnight. It's beautiful (visually and emotionally!) and very thoughtfully put together and gives me that extraordinary gift of being able to see my own work through someone else's eyes.

I hope you are all well and that your lives are rich, creatively and otherwise. ;)

This, my fourth vidding year, was far and away the hardest, the best, the worst, the most fun and the most ridiculous since I started. I learnt more this year than I did since my first year (I pretty much feel I learnt nothing for a good three years--I just languished around feeling dissatisfied--which probably explains the cranky malaise with which I entered this year). It's definitely a weird (and interesting!) year to look back on, but it doesn't really show in the vids I actually released... :p

Previous years: 2007, 2008, 2009 <<--watch me get more and more miserable

At the start of the year I thought I would give up vidding. I should remember that because it is a sign of how far I came in a year. I started fiddling with a few vids privately as a last-try to see if I cared enough to continue.

( cut for details )

Just writing my way through some creative issues... may not be of interest to anyone but me. ( saying more with less )

I'm at that stage with my current vid project where I have a nearly full timeline and things are starting to come together structurally. My brain's desperately trying to play catch-up with all the decisions I've made based on intuition, kind of trying to hunt them down and detect whether they are actually sound or don't serve the vid well at all. No doubt when I play back my vid over breakfast tomorrow I'll realise I'm a lot further off target than I think I am ... but... I love this stage of a project. My head buzzes, I can't really think about anything but vidding, I'm constantly tossing things over in my mind to make sense of them.

( You should hear the way my brain works sometimes (thoughts on Lee, anger and Kara, late S2 )

( brief additional thoughts on vidding problematic source )

Can I just stay here forever and not do the boring horrible months of polishing and reediting and tweaking colour and making horrible fucking credits?! Please? (Hee! No, I want it finished for myself too but I do love this stage and it's fun to wallow while it lasts.)

Recently I've been noticing and trying to trying to deconstruct the many layers of fear I have wrapped around vidding. ( cut for boring introspective stuff )

To prove that I learnt something at Vividcon, I am finally getting round to posting my notes on watching vids on a large screen with an audience for the first time. While hopefully more widely interesting than my tl;dr social rambles about the con (part 1 and part 2), these notes are still highly subjective. I am sure other people's relationship with vids differs from my own (even surer of this after the con than I was before) and I suspect to those more acclimatised to watching vids in group settings these notes may seem naive and obviously 'newbie'. However, I remember searching for an explanation somewhere of the differences in viewing experience and coming up terribly short. While I found lots of 'oh, it's very different' statements from congoers, there was little in the way of an actual explanation of how for someone a) thinking of attending and b) trying to work out how to make a vid that would work in this context. So hopefully someone out there will find this useful.

If nothing else, you can be amused at my naivety again.

( Quick background on my own viewing habits at home (for context) )

( Things I noticed about viewing vids in a con setting )

Summary: I didn't feel like viewing at the con invalidated the choices I make at home as a viewer; I feel it expanded my possibilities and freed me up in a positive way, as well as teaching me more about myself and others as viewers.

Squeezing in under the bell for 2009...

Summary: My third year of vidding was a bitch. :(

( cut for details )

So my one week holiday from Melbourne turned into a couple of weeks away from Livejournal. When I got back, all my online time went into writing commentaries for vid_commentary. Speaking of which, it's quite the commentary explosion there at the moment. And now that I'm finished mine I get to READ/WATCH OTHER PEOPLE's. \o/ \o/ *throws streamers around* I CAN'T WAIT.

acridnym wrote an incredible commentary for Clint Eastwood which has allowed me to achieve ZEN about it at last. (My own blatherings on it are here.)

And I got to write a commentary for 45 by bananainpjyamas, and I am proud to say achieved unprecedented levels of non-hatred for Bill Adama. (Aside: Does anyone else have the thing after writing a commentary of someone else's vid that it makes them want to watch it even more times?! You'd think watching a vid 100+ times for commmentary purposes would max you out, but nooooooooo! The opposite seems to happen for me: regardless of how much I liked it before, it rockets up my 'most likely to watch when have a random few mins to kill' list after writing about it.) Dragonchic's own commentary is here and it has cute graphics and vidding formulas!

Less excitingly, I made my first audio commentary: for Middleman. Quite honestly, I'm never likely to make one again. It was sort of hell and I got to say way less than I would have liked, which is pretty funny seeing I struggled to cut it to under 18 minutes. Sigh. I need to work on that tl;dr (or is it tl;dl?) thing. Dragonchic, I envy you your succinctness: I guess 'chic' isn't in your name for nothing. ;)

Other vidding-related announcement: vidding chats will recommence in November. The first chat, the weekend of 7-8 November, will be hosted in my journal but co-moderated by lim and it will be on visualising effects. (Seriously, you would be mad to miss that!)
The weekend of 14-15 November, heresluck will host a chat on creative growth.
The following weekend, 21-22 Nov, I'll host one on audience.
And I have several other chats almost confirmed--hopefully there will be one a week up until Xmas!

Reminder: Suggestions for topics gratefully received (from anyone!) here and sign-ups eagerly pounced on here.

So what did I miss? How is everyone? Chillaxed? I will be very grateful to anyone who links me to Stuff I Probably Wish I Hadn't Missed (vids released? important personal newses of friends? lolarious things?).

I have watched a lot of TV (duh!) and will post on that soon, no doubt.

If you ever wanted to hear me crap on more than I already have about one of my vids, now's a good time to ask. vid_commentary's new challenge is for combined vidder and viewer commmentaries. I'm hopefully going to be doing viewer components for a couple of vidders, but if you'd like a vidder commentary on anything, let me know. :)

ETA: I appear to be sorted for E's and wizz commentary.