Festivids Reveal 2
Feb. 2nd, 2019 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretWhen I was a kid, I liked the Carmen Sandiego video games and was obsessed with the PBS gameshow. And because of my love for Carmen, I occasionally but not consistently watched the animated show Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego. I saw cosmic_llin's request go out for pinch hit and after a little thought decided it would be fun to see if I could vid it.
It is a different experience reviewing the whole canon as compared to just dipping into occasional episodes. The didacticism kind of rolls over you and you can recognize the overall character arcs they were building. And you end up with an awful lot of Carmen Sandiego feels. She was an orphan with nobody in the world who cared about her! She built these new friendships at the ACME detective agency, and then lost them all to her ambition, and we see a repeated thread in her thefts of trying to reach back to her old colleagues for human connection- leaving clues, re-enacting old crimes she solved with her old partners, recruiting criminal partners from within the agency. And then in the finale we learn that her father is still alive and they almost reunite, but in the end it falls through again and for the first time in the series, we see Carmen Sandiego cry. It's so beautifully operatic.
I love Carmen's sense of ambition. She's a thief but she's not in it for the money. She gets repeatedly furious when her henchmen do a crime without her because of their greed. For Carmen Sandiego, a theft has the potential to be a work of art. It's an idea that's set up from the very first episode, where she steals the eyes of a Van Gogh painting, the nose from a Picasso, and the Mona Lisa smile, in order to craft them into the world's most artistically meaningful face. I think for Carmen Sandiego, there's something criminal about seeing an object of cultural significance being underused, only consumed passively, and this is what motivates her crime. How could you let a Van Gogh just sit on a museum wall for people to passively stare at? It could be so much more than that!
There's something unsettlingly beautiful about that conception of art. It merges the idea of visual art with the idea of performance art- all visual art is a performance, too, and if that performance is carefully staged in a museum it inherently is rendered more dull. Art is about narrative, motion, change. Carmen the artist is an agent of transformation. No canons too holy to be violated. No artwork too locked up to be liberated by the great Carmen Sandiego. There's something extremely Dada about the whole thing.
Skimming throughcosmic_llin's list of preferred musicians I spotted Regina Spektor and "All the Rowboats" almost instantly popped into my head. It's a song about this very conception of art, museums as prisons, with the figurations in the artwork yearning to be free of their cages. It was an amazingly fortuitous alignment to tumble to, and of course Spektor's music is candy to a vidder, the way she never performs the same line twice the same way.
Making this vid was a frantic two week effort, but it was joyfully frantic because it came together so neatly. How often are you going to find a fandom with this many 'glass coffins' to pair with that lyric? How lucky was I to literally find images of notable landmarks in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, AND Ancient Rome to pair with "Hear them whispering French and German/ Dutch, Italian, and Latin"? The literalist vidder in me had such a field day with this vid. And yet at its core, this vid revolves around the series's two part finale and the story of Carmen's parents, a story that is itself activated by a piece of artwork that Carmen herself keeps locked up in a locket on her neck. I loved how I got to explore conceptions of art and at the same time I got to tell a personal story about Carmen and how she experiences the world.
Technically, I'm also proud that I was able to figure out enough about Blackmagic Fusion to mask out some Carmen talkyface in a key shot. That was one of the most sophisticated effects I've ever done for a vid. Of course then I got lazy and left in another bit of talkyface I probably should get around to removing. :P
Thanks forstarlady for beta!
Glass Coffins (21 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carmen Sandiego, Malcolm Avalon, The Woman in the Locket
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:
posted to Critical Commons here
In much less thoughtful terms, I dumped a bunch of the excess Carmen Sandiego feels I had into "Talent", a vidlet to the opening chorus of Taylor Swift's "I Did Something Bad". This one is all about Carmen's thieving swagger and I make no apologies for it because Carmen Sandiego is bad AF.
Talent (18 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carmen Sandiego
Summary:
cosmic_llin's request go out for pinch hit and after a little thought decided it would be fun to see if I could vid it.It is a different experience reviewing the whole canon as compared to just dipping into occasional episodes. The didacticism kind of rolls over you and you can recognize the overall character arcs they were building. And you end up with an awful lot of Carmen Sandiego feels. She was an orphan with nobody in the world who cared about her! She built these new friendships at the ACME detective agency, and then lost them all to her ambition, and we see a repeated thread in her thefts of trying to reach back to her old colleagues for human connection- leaving clues, re-enacting old crimes she solved with her old partners, recruiting criminal partners from within the agency. And then in the finale we learn that her father is still alive and they almost reunite, but in the end it falls through again and for the first time in the series, we see Carmen Sandiego cry. It's so beautifully operatic.
I love Carmen's sense of ambition. She's a thief but she's not in it for the money. She gets repeatedly furious when her henchmen do a crime without her because of their greed. For Carmen Sandiego, a theft has the potential to be a work of art. It's an idea that's set up from the very first episode, where she steals the eyes of a Van Gogh painting, the nose from a Picasso, and the Mona Lisa smile, in order to craft them into the world's most artistically meaningful face. I think for Carmen Sandiego, there's something criminal about seeing an object of cultural significance being underused, only consumed passively, and this is what motivates her crime. How could you let a Van Gogh just sit on a museum wall for people to passively stare at? It could be so much more than that!
There's something unsettlingly beautiful about that conception of art. It merges the idea of visual art with the idea of performance art- all visual art is a performance, too, and if that performance is carefully staged in a museum it inherently is rendered more dull. Art is about narrative, motion, change. Carmen the artist is an agent of transformation. No canons too holy to be violated. No artwork too locked up to be liberated by the great Carmen Sandiego. There's something extremely Dada about the whole thing.
Skimming through
cosmic_llin's list of preferred musicians I spotted Regina Spektor and "All the Rowboats" almost instantly popped into my head. It's a song about this very conception of art, museums as prisons, with the figurations in the artwork yearning to be free of their cages. It was an amazingly fortuitous alignment to tumble to, and of course Spektor's music is candy to a vidder, the way she never performs the same line twice the same way. Making this vid was a frantic two week effort, but it was joyfully frantic because it came together so neatly. How often are you going to find a fandom with this many 'glass coffins' to pair with that lyric? How lucky was I to literally find images of notable landmarks in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, AND Ancient Rome to pair with "Hear them whispering French and German/ Dutch, Italian, and Latin"? The literalist vidder in me had such a field day with this vid. And yet at its core, this vid revolves around the series's two part finale and the story of Carmen's parents, a story that is itself activated by a piece of artwork that Carmen herself keeps locked up in a locket on her neck. I loved how I got to explore conceptions of art and at the same time I got to tell a personal story about Carmen and how she experiences the world.
Technically, I'm also proud that I was able to figure out enough about Blackmagic Fusion to mask out some Carmen talkyface in a key shot. That was one of the most sophisticated effects I've ever done for a vid. Of course then I got lazy and left in another bit of talkyface I probably should get around to removing. :P
Thanks for
starlady for beta!Glass Coffins (21 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carmen Sandiego, Malcolm Avalon, The Woman in the Locket
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:
All the rowboats in the oil paintings
They keep trying to row away, row away
posted to Critical Commons here
In much less thoughtful terms, I dumped a bunch of the excess Carmen Sandiego feels I had into "Talent", a vidlet to the opening chorus of Taylor Swift's "I Did Something Bad". This one is all about Carmen's thieving swagger and I make no apologies for it because Carmen Sandiego is bad AF.
Talent (18 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carmen Sandiego
Summary:
Anyone can steal a Stradivarius...
password: festivids
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Date: 2019-02-07 05:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-07 09:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-03 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-04 03:49 pm (UTC)