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Aug. 6th, 2020 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm gonna try this reccing Thursday thing and rec a fanvid every week if I can get to it.
Let me start withsuch_heights's amazing The Good Place vid "Raising Hell", which premiered at Vidukon this year and which I've watched more than a few times since then. The thing about The Good Place is that it's so funny and it's so smart that sometimes you forget just how heavy it is. This is a vid about the righteous FURY of Team Cockroach, about Eleanor's conviction that the universe just can't possibly be this screwed up and that if it is, it's our obligation to fix it. This is a vid that lays bare the implicit framework of activism and social justice in The Good Place. And yet it somehow manages to do this without taking away one iota of the whimsy of the show. This is a funny, joyful vid about rage and despair. How does it manage this?
One trick is that it uses the visual density of the source material brilliantly. That density was clear to everyone on watching it originally, but is made doubly clear when you've listened to the Podcast and learned everything that the creative team buried in the background, David Niednagel's CGI work and the jokes buried into the background by set designers and prop masters.such_heights contrasts all the humor in the Niednageling to the serious emotional arc Schur and the actors are telling in the foreground. One of the vid's first shots is Chidi waving his hand at a chalkboard filled with names and dates of Greek philosophers. In the vid's primary narrative this is about building an understanding of how people should treat each other and how we can become better... but the viewer who knows the show also knows that this is the punchline to one of the show's funniest jokes: Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics? I love that layering.
"Raising Hell" on AO3 here
Let me start with
such_heights's amazing The Good Place vid "Raising Hell", which premiered at Vidukon this year and which I've watched more than a few times since then. The thing about The Good Place is that it's so funny and it's so smart that sometimes you forget just how heavy it is. This is a vid about the righteous FURY of Team Cockroach, about Eleanor's conviction that the universe just can't possibly be this screwed up and that if it is, it's our obligation to fix it. This is a vid that lays bare the implicit framework of activism and social justice in The Good Place. And yet it somehow manages to do this without taking away one iota of the whimsy of the show. This is a funny, joyful vid about rage and despair. How does it manage this? One trick is that it uses the visual density of the source material brilliantly. That density was clear to everyone on watching it originally, but is made doubly clear when you've listened to the Podcast and learned everything that the creative team buried in the background, David Niednagel's CGI work and the jokes buried into the background by set designers and prop masters.
such_heights contrasts all the humor in the Niednageling to the serious emotional arc Schur and the actors are telling in the foreground. One of the vid's first shots is Chidi waving his hand at a chalkboard filled with names and dates of Greek philosophers. In the vid's primary narrative this is about building an understanding of how people should treat each other and how we can become better... but the viewer who knows the show also knows that this is the punchline to one of the show's funniest jokes: Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics? I love that layering."Raising Hell" on AO3 here
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Date: 2020-08-07 11:40 pm (UTC)