Festivids Reveal!

[seekingferret]

Speeding Rover (0 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Mars Rover RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Spirit (Mars Rover), Opportunity (Mars Rover), Curiosity (Mars Rover), Sojourner (Mars Rover), Prop-M (Mars Rover)
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:

Speeding motorcycle, let's speed some more

Thanks to sanguinity and lannamichaels for betaing and to brainwane for brainstorming help.


I was delighted to be assigned Mars Rover RPF for festivids for eruthros. I love the rovers and I have many space exploration feels and it was wonderful.

My first thought was to make a fuck the humans vid about how Rovers have colonized Mars and left stupid, shortsighted humanity behind. It was going to be about how Earth is terrible and humans mess everything up, so the Rovers are camped out on Mars and are having the time of their life building a better civilization. I considered a few songs, and got the furthest on a timeline for a vid to Jefferson Starship's "Sunrise", with Grace Slick's icy, furious rejection of the patriarchy tinged with astrofuturism and solar imagery. The opening is great, I had great fun tracking down video of a sunrise on Mars, but I realized within a week of starting the draft that the song doesn't pivot enough to triumph on the red planet, so it didn't give me enough of the story I really wanted to tell.

I ended up moving in a much more optimistic direction with my next vidsong. Daniel Johnston's "Speeding Motorcycle" is a song whose power comes from the fact that it is completely silly, yet just as serious. Yo La Tengo's cover is so tongue in cheek it comes back around the other side. To the ironies already inherent in singing a sincere love song to a motorcycle, I add the additional irony that the rovers are the opposite of speeding- plodding and meticulous. Nonetheless, I love them.

At some point in the process the fact that Rover is a dog name struck my fancy and I faked up a WeRateDogs tweet about Opportunity because it made me laugh. And between that and the overall good dog vibe in the music and the vid overall, I started to nurse the possibility that I could pass this off in the anonymous phase as a bessyboo vid. It worked! I am delighted that findmeinthealps at least was faked out. A very uncharacteristically successful stealth vidding festivids for me! It was certainly helped by the pile-on of everyone accusing bessyboo of vidding everything, which I hadn't planned when I came up with the idea of using her as my decoy.

Besides the WeRateRovers bit, I got a real workout in GIMP altogether in this vid. A lot of my source material was not in the same aspect ratio, a lot had artifacts or imagery that needed to be cleaned up to not distract the eye, and I did a bunch of things with text and still or static imagery that I wanted to look clean and interesting. I picked up some new GIMP tricks, so that was cool. Me and the Clone Tool are on much better terms now, and also Layer Masks, Drop Shadows, Layer management in general, color correction, and some other things. I cannot say enough good things about GIMP 2.10, by the way. The usability is cranked way up since the earlier versions I first learned on, yet it hasn't changed paradigms enough to render my old hard-earned knowledge useless. And there are a LOT of great tutorials on Youtube.