Seasonal Spuffy!

[quinara]

It was my seasonal_spuffy day yesterday, which turned out to be a rather extreme output of my last few month's creative energies... But still, Remix and the Free For All day are on the horizon!! (And sb_fag_ends is still running...!)

First of all I had a fic - a post-DMP crossover with AtS just post-Loyalty, featuring a strung-out Wesley, an Angel doped up on baby-love and a long-suffering Lorne. ~25,000 words, rated R for reasonably explicit sex and quite a lot of swearing, AO3 warning free.

The More Things Stay the Same. (Also now on DW.)
Buffy goes to Wesley instead of Tara about the resurrection spell.

I also had a vid, which was an experiment with John Cage's 4'33''. I might as well re-embed it here...

So, John Cage's 4'33'' is a piece of music made out of silence - or more specifically ambient sounds. It was released as a single last December, in a bid for the Christmas No. 1 in the UK (hoping to beat the latest X Factor winner, like the re-release of Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name did in 2009), under the name Cage Against the Machine. It came with a number of 'mixes' - different people's versions of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient sound, of which Fake Blood's Needle Drop Mix was one, building a piece around the sound of a vinyl record player just on the verge of playing something.

For some reason I thought this would make a great vid. Why, I don't exactly know, but I was charmed by one of the charities the single supported being the British Tinnitus Association (my tinnitus isn't incapacitating, but as a thing tinnitus needs waaaaay more awareness than it has). As a music fan I'm also always up for anything that challenges the definition of what that funny old medium actually is. So, I wanted to create a vid that treated essentially 4'33'' of static as music, linking audio and visual stimuli as much as anything traditional.

But! I also wanted (which is possibly stranger?) to make a vid where you could turn the sound off and it would still be 4'33'', hence my inclusion of text and (dare I get really wanky) my attempt to build some sort of language out of a relatively restricted number of clips. It may or may not have worked...

TL;DR: This vid is strange, but you can hopefully still watch it with the sound off. It comes with a free poem...? Warnings for discrete flashes and a lot of juddery cutting. Otherwise it's fairly gloomy in mood, but with nothing more ratings-worthy than a rat. And those strangely made-up cuts on Spike's chest from Lessons. If you feel like it, I'd recommend watching with the lights off and in HD / having downloaded the file.

4'33''

in the dark / sometimes / i hear you

[BtVS + John Cage 4'33'' (Fake Blood's Needle Drop Mix)]
[Sunnydale High Basement, Early S7]

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

I watched this once last night and it floored me, but I didn't comment because it was too close to bedtime. Now I am back and want to rewatch, but the stream is crapping out at 0:22, and your download options are dead. Could you upload the HD version someplace else, please?

Going from memory of first impressions: it's amazing! I've never seen a vid like it -- though it reminds me a little bit of vrya's work. I love the palette, especially the way you capitalize on the lighting in the opening shots, and the startling, unsettling saturations later. I need to watch again to figure out what they mean in the narrative; I R slow.

I love the soundtrack. I love the concept: make a vid that works with the sound off. I think you succeeded. I couldn't look away.

[quinara]

I give you an .mp4 at MegaUpload! Let me know if that is also being rubbish/if you would like the .wmv (uni's internet is like some sort of greased lighting, so, seriously, any uploading isn't a bother). And thanks for telling me I must sort the download links out - Vimeo seems to set it up that it'll host your video on its page, but it won't store the link in any way that'll let you post it anywhere else (reliably), which is just a pain. I need to find somewhere vaguely permanent (and useful) to put them. Or stop being daft about passwords, maybe, and be proud of my transformativity...

A preliminary yay, thank you, though!! I'm not sure I could even tell you what the colour exactly means in the narrative (I'm avoiding one-to-one mappings these days rather insistently, in everything), but hopefully you'll find the vague story I found. :)

And hooray!! I was rather surprised to find I could make myself sit and watch something four and a half minutes long repeatedly, so I'm glad I can do it for other people...

P.S.

[stultiloquentia]

halfway through the novella. loving it.

Re: P.S.

[quinara]

Awesome. :D

[actiaslunaris]

You've created a lovely, haunting narrative, and quite possibly the most unique episodic vid I've ever seen, even with the addition of a few clips from other episodes. The layering of video and text makes it necessary to watch it at least one more time, not a hardship at all. I love the concept of the silent vid, and you've used it to great affect here.

[quinara]

Oh, thank you very much! I'm really glad you like the concept - I hope it stands up to repeated viewings. 'Haunting' is exactly what I was going for! :)

[sophia_sol]

This is beautiful. I am -- I am floored, with what you have done with this vid, and I find I am lacking the words to describe how I experienced it except that it's amazing.

[quinara]

Wow, thank you very much! Any experience other than boredom is a win as far as I'm concerned; I'm so glad it could give you something.

[calvinahobbes]

I think this is absolutely amazing. I love the sound, and I love the effective way you've used text -- especially the way it circles around, changing slightly, adding new emphasis; very much like lyrics. The way you escalated the clips towards the end was breathtaking.

Oh, Spike! ;_;

[quinara]

Oh, Spike, indeed! D:

Thank you very very much - I wasn't sure about text at first, because I thought it would be intrusive (I'm not very good with heavily lyricsy vids as it is), but it became clear fairly early into the making that the images needed something extra to hang onto, so I'm really glad what I came up with worked OK. :)

Feedbackathon feedback

[rranne]

Hope this is where you want it. What follows is a mixed review and concrit for the vid
"4'33".

Wow, I hadn’t expected to be reviewing a vid. Especially a vid that I’m not real sure about, I mean I think I get it – I read the A/N and all that before I watched it and in afterthought, maybe I shouldn’t have; but there wasn’t much else I could do while it was downloading, and I read the comments too. All that sorta biased me a little as to what to expect. When I finally got to watching it wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

Here’s where I have to start qualifying things: as what it was described as, I have to say for me it fails for numerous reasons (remember this is all qualified - I also have a completely different take on it when I look at it without any pre-established expectations; then it has a whole new light to it – but we will get to that in a few.)

I am assuming that you were going for an artsy, abstract rendition of Spike’s POV of the events of this timeframe and I am not quite getting that from what is there. I have recently started playing around with vids and it isn’t as easy to do a good one as one would think - lack of material in the way of clips that “fit” is one issue, especially if you can’t rip your own. So I get that end of it. Still, more would have been better to clarify where the vid was going. For example some clips, just flashes, mind you, of say, Spike biting Buffy in the Lady’s basement or some of his flashbacks of his own memories of the girl Buffy saw him with when she was following him or even a quick cut to him/the First (?) peering around the corner of the alley/building (whatever it was?) when the second (?) potential got killed by the Bringers, or even some of the “button, button” scenes from a later episode would have brought this take home for me.

If it was intended as a joint Buffy/Spike POV, then a little more of Buffy above ground, like her subtle look at the basement access door from the high school hallway when she makes the mental note to go and look for Spike down there first chance she gets, or brief glimpses of the “there’s a duck” exchange might have done it for me.

As for the soundtrack - bad. This was way too esoteric a choice for this vid. Ambient ‘noise’ might have worked if it was topical ambient noise, but this just didn’t. I honestly don’t know what would work for this, but you might have been better to mix your own ambient sounds for the vid. I am among the “muters” of the soundtrack.

For editing, the style works with what you were trying to do, in fact a little more ‘out of phase-y-ness’ and maybe even some distortions other than color would have really enhanced the overall effect of the vid. The fade-through-white flashes are disturbing, so if that is what you were going for, that worked. I dislike the sepia/color shift at about 0:55, or so, intensely, that needed to be filtered in more. Overall, a little more variety in the color transitions would have worked better,( less cookie cutter-ish) like more flashing in some places and more subtle muting from b/w or sepia to color in others.

Loved the rat.

Now, with all that said, on the other take I had on this vid, and glancing through the comments, I must have been the only person with this particular take on it. I said maybe it was a mistake to read the A/N description of the vid and look at the comments beforehand. If I throw all that out and pretend I never read it (and that the clip has no soundtrack at all,) and give it a fresh look – I see something different! This is the POV of the First. The vid really works if you have that in mind while watching it – try it and you will see what I mean. Looking at it that way, I really get it, it makes perfect sense.

Sorry this was such a mixed review and sorry I couldn’t really separate the review from the concrit. This should get the ‘bad’ out of the way somewhat. I have read parts of ‘As Good as a Rest’ at AO3 before and will go back and read it again for the next review, hopefully in a few days.

rranne

Re: Feedbackathon feedback

[quinara]

Hi! Thanks for the feedback - I really do appreciate it. It's interesting to me how this comes across to you as a viewer, as opposed to how I approached the vid when creating it. Mainly that's because my starting point was the music, rather than the concept, because I wanted to try vidding to this track and seeing what happened. I think the concept I ended up with was more supposed to be about Spike's state of mind than his actual POV (or at least an illustration of the words I put on screen rather than about actual canon events), but I could probably have made that clearer from the outset.

[(Anonymous)]

What a very cool idea! It's unsettling and pretty... Poor, frayed soulful Spike! The silence drives home how lonely he must have been, and I think it also works great with the confusion & misunderstandings & weird spookiness of the first few times Buffy met Spike post-soul.