That vidmeme what I do every year

My Vids for 2023


Bridges Hailee Steinfeld RPF- Festivid
Sea Fever Space Sweepers- Festivid
Masters of War Space Sweepers- Festivid
20 Years Jumanji- Festivid
The Cartographer Jumanji- Festivid\
when i am laid in earth Floor is Lava- Festivid
Festival Superstore
Crossroads Fringe
Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid Multifandom
The Spinning Plates Reel Star Wars
Bicycle Race Multifandom

11 vids, including some pretty big projects! This year was the year of ambitious vids, between two large multifandom vids and my 9 minute vid.

Favorite

"Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid" is incredibly personal and meaningful. It was great to finally use A Serious Man in a vid, it was great to tell this story about ritual and what it means to me.

Least Favorite

I always hate this question, but this year I feel like every vid I made does what I set out to do, with a lot less compromise than usual. I guess I wish I'd done more thorough canon review before making "Crossroads", it works really well but I feel like it could have more completely captured Broyles's full arc across the show.

Most Successful

By AO3 hits, "20 Years". By YouTube hits, "Bridges".

Most Underappreciated by the Universe
It feels a little ungrateful, because it got a very good response, but "The Spinning Plates Reel" really deserved a con premiere and more attention than it got. I got impatient when Fanworks got delayed and just posted it. Every other vid I made, I am entirely pleased with the response.

Most Fun to Make
"when i am laid in earth" was a joy and a pleasure. Every single little flop into that lava made me a happier human being.

Hardest Vid to Make

"Festival", which is weird because you might think the multifandom vids were more work, but they were easier on the source collection than usual. It was stunning how quickly and easily Bicycle Race came together. "Festival" was hard because the pacing was so different from anything I've done before, and getting it to work for a viewer over such a long viewing time was a true challenge, especially the early slow part.

The Things I Learned This Year

I think this is a thing I learned before, when making my Grey's Anatomy vid- the key to making vids that are about complicated big emotions. But I got a lot more practice at it this year. I always start out thinking about the construction of the vid in chunks with a unified emotional affect, but the reality is that every clip has its own emotional valences and the arrangement of those clips matters a lot not just in terms of how they interact with their neighbors, but in terms of how the viewer feels as the clips accumulate over the course of the vid.

This was really important in thinking about "Festival", because I was crafting such a long, slow build and I wanted to make sure the viewer was always emotionally sticking with me and it took a lot of thought and tuning.

Also, The Spinning Plates Reel was my most ambitious vid to date in Da Vinci Resolve, and it gave me comfort with a lot of techniques in DVR that I am putting to even more substantial use right now in my Festivid.

My Goals from Last Year

Target vids for 2023:

Superstore vid
Festivids, somewhere between 0 and 20
MCU vid
Fringe vid and tSCC vid
third Jews dancing vid

I finished the Superstore vid! 0 to 20 Festivids turned out to be 6. No MCU vids got finished this year, but I did work on some. I didn't manage a TSCC vid, but I did make a Fringe vid. And I didn't make a Jews dancing vid, but i did make a Jews not dancing vid. All in all, not too bad.

Planning for Next Year

Target vids for 2024:

-At least 1 Festivid
-At least 1 Equinox vid
-an MCU vid, but I dunno, last year I deferred my MCU vid until Cap4 comes out and now Cap4 isn't coming out until next year, so...
-a TSCC vid, possibly the Coldplay Suite?
-a The Good Place vid

recent movies seen in the theater

Next Goal Wins

Jews do not dance in this film.

November's mystery movie at the multiplex, it's Taika Waititi's latest and it's a fairly formulaic soccer movie about a down on his luck soccer coach who goes to American Samoa to teach its soccer team how to win, and learns valuable life lessons along the way. It's made by Waititi so it has a lot of great attention to detail that makes the smallest things funny and charming, but it's still just a formulaic sports movie. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Jews do not dance in this film.

I have read the first three Hunger Games books but not seen the movies, and I haven't read the book version of this, but went to see this with R because nothing else in the theater sounded interesting to her. The first part of the movie, which showed Coriolanus Snow as a mentor in an early Hunger Games, was suspenseful and powerfully compelling. After the resolution of that storyline, the film moved on to belatedly set up new storylines in a new setting for the film's conclusion, something that I strongly suspect the novel did a better job of meshing into a single unified whole.

R and I are still arguing about the moral position of Snow in the film, whether the film offers anything redemptive to where Snow ends up in the original trilogy. My sense is that it deepens our understanding of who Snow is as a person and why he makes the choices he does, but doesn't make his actions any more forgivable. R argues, and excuse me if I am not representing her position fairly, that the film shows that Snow is perpetually in survivor mode within a brutal totalitarian regime, so when he betrays people or betrays his own values it's because he had no better option, and thus should not be seen as morally culpable.

The Marvels

Jews do not dance in this film; Muslims do.

I really enjoyed it, especially some of the sillier cosmic stuff like the planet where all language is sung, and especially Iman Vellani's Ms Marvel. But it was clearly hacked together with reshoots and the plot and emotional beats suffered. I don't quite know what a compelling Carol story looks like in this movie, but we didn't really get a satisfying one, we got a jumpy and mismatched stab at a character arc about her sort of learning to become part of a team.

The Boys in the Boat

Jews do not dance in this film.

December's month's mystery movie at the multiplex, it was a satisfyingly paint by numbers sports movie about the University of Washington 1936 rowing team, which competed in and won at the '36 Olympics in Germany as underdogs.