Dear Festividder 2022
Oct. 26th, 2022 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosDear Festividder (and potential treat-makers),
Thank you for making me a vid!
I have one thing that I put outside the cut tag, because I have a couple visual triggers:
1) Super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut scenes for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. It depends on the amount of contrast between the two scenes – stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, or between a nighttime and daytime scene. Strobe lights, strobe effects, or fast lightning flashes can also trigger this. These have to be very fast to bother me – think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).
2) Frame rate fuckery - when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films these days. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame. Some people can't see this at all, but to me it looks stuttery.
If you're concerned about either of these, please feel free to run a sample bythingswithwings. She can also explain them with examples if that would be helpful.
The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!
General Preferences: I really enjoy the diversity of vidding styles and genres at festivids and I look forward to seeing your style! I'm down for: any rating, outside source (including crossovers), still footage, critiques, action, deep character studies, shippy vids, action vids, dance vids, slash, femslash, het, gen, canon pairings, and non-canon pairings.
Things I love: people who put care into the work they do; building communities and found families; history and places being related to people and feelings; queer people; joy; speculative fiction; eating the rich; fighting for justice; people supporting each other.
Music: I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! I love vids to instrumentals, to dense lyrics-heavy songs, to hip hop, to weird indie music, to fun dance songs, to classics, and to things I've never heard of before. I also like vids to non-music, like spoken word pieces or sound effects. I am fine with dialog in a vid.
That said, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to understand lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (or, like, 50% of the dialog in a modern action movie). I'd appreciate it if you offered subtitles, especially if you intercut dialog and song lyrics.
I asked for: Neptune Frost (movie), The Great Canadian Baking Show, The Dead Lands (TV), Lego Masters (US TV), Saturday Church (movie), Taskmaster (UK TV) and Adaptations, Rhymes for Young Ghouls (movie), Lizzo RPF, Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls (TV), and Bit (movie).
Neptune Frost (movie):
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist film set in a coltan mining village in Burundi (and also in a parallel dimension), about many people whose escape and transformation brings them together in a hacker collective built out of electronic waste materials. Also, it's a musical.
Why to watch: Amazing visuals, incredibly cool costuming work using electronic waste, somewhere between a movie and a poem and a visual album and a dance performance. Lyrically and visually dense. Black liberation and Black revolution. A queer, trans, and/or intersex character, Neptune, who is played by two different actors before and after a transformation. Fuck Mr. Google.
Contains: police violence; political violence; capitalist violence; imperialism; attempted sexual assault; a character who talks about being forced into binary gender and "boy."
Request details: something that works with the allegories and the visuals; something about liberation and resistance. This is so visually poetic and fascinating that I think there are so many possible vids: a character study of Neptune, who was born in her 23rd year? A character study of Matalusa? A dance as resistance vid? The visuals of hacking as a glitch in the system, the patterned static that Neptune creates?
Note: The strongest glitch effects in the movie are mostly okay for me in isolation, but I couldn't watch a string of many of them in a row.
The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV)
The Canadian spinoff of the Great British Bake Off, with Canadian themes (Montreal bagels) and ingredients (birch bark syrup and seaweed and saskatoon berries) and a truly stellar number of interesting, thoughtful, awesome contestants.
Why to watch: We all know the Bake Off model, but the Great Canadian Baking Show is somehow an even sweeter spinoff. The judges are interested and delighted by new flavors, and they don't get defensive when they don't know something. Instead, they're peering into the oven next to the contestants and speaking to them as peers. And are SO MANY good contestants on the show! I really appreciate how many queer contestants there are on GCBS – I think season 6 is 50% queer. There are also many queer contestants of color – this season there are at least three (Jomar, Chi, and Kristi).
Request details: Soooo I did make a vid for this show two years ago, but due to timing and source availability I was only able to use the first two seasons. Season 6 is airing now! And seasons 3 - 5 had many great bakers and many great running around with cake montages and many disastrous bakes that weren't in my vid! I love the energy in the tent and the way the contestants help each other and laugh together. I love the delightful and surprising successes, the way sometimes a technical bake just comes out and the baker doesn't even know why. In season 3, I particularly like Colin, Chris, and Jodi; in season 4, Sheldon, Tanner, Anjali, Mahathi, Oyaks, Raufikat; and in season 5, Vincent and Stephen. They're all such interesting bakers! Season 6 just started but I'm already prepared to love them all. I'd just like something sweet and fun about this show and these great bakers!
The Dead Lands (TV):
An eight-episode Māori horror tv show show, featuring a young girl whose village is threatened by not-alive and not-dead demon warriors; she recruits a warrior to help her find out why the demons are coming. The warrior has already died but is locked out of the lands of his ancestors until he makes amends for the things he's done in his life.
Why to watch: Visually stunning, super cool concept, action-adventure-quest with horror elements set in Aotearoa. Mehe is determined to succeed in her quest; Waka isn't sure how to be a good person; the spirits are possibly lying to them. The opening scenes of this show are somewhat confusing – Waka dies in like the first ten minutes – but it gets much stronger from there.
Contains: some blood, some gore, horror elements. (Pretty well covered in the trailer above.)
What I want: Something that uses the visual language here! It could be a retelling of the plot, a character study, an action vid about the fights using the mere, a vid about spirits – there are many cool options. I think there's also a really fun annoyed-allies-to-annoyed-friends vid in Mehe and Waka's relationship. Or just do some badass horror vidding!
Note: There is also a film also called The Dead Lands from 2014 – it's by the same creator, and it also has a warrior who can't reach the lands of his ancestors, but it is essentially unrelated to the show, and is more of a revenge drama with minimal demon presence. Also, no Mehe.
Lego Masters (US TV):
A reality television show in which teams of Lego builders build things like moving parade floats, bridges that can withstand the most weight, and castles built up and out from sheer cliffs.
Why to watch: People having fun building things! A community based around creation and story getting to meet two Lego professionals! It's partly about aesthetic, partly about story, and partly about engineering with lego bricks and tecnic.
Contains: A really annoying episode with Chris Pratt as a guest, some references to Brad Pitt as a producer.
Request details: I find this show delightful and charming, and I use it as a comfort-watching show – people building interesting things and then, sometimes, putting them on shake plates to see if they'd withstand earthquakes. I really enjoy the creativity of the show and I think it would make an absolutely beautiful vid! Just bring me fun and delight and Lego models exploding or rotating or becoming carnival attractions.
Saturday Church (movie):
A queer film about a fourteen year old kid, Ulysses, who likes to wear heels and stockings, and who meets some queer and trans kids who go to an outreach program (run by Joan, played by Kate Bornstein). Also it's a musical?
Why to watch: This film is one of Indya Moore and MJ Rodriguez's early roles! It's shaky sometimes in a very indie queer film way – for example, the songs are awkward restatements of the scenes that just happened. But it has a good heart, queer visuals, a story about young people finding themselves, and did I mention MJ Rodriguez?
Contains: homophobia and transphobia; family rejection (and physical violence); coerced underaged sex work.
Request details: Okay so this film is shaky but I think there's a really beautiful vid to be made from it: it's about discovering queer community, it's about dancing, it's about people trying to help Ulysses. I really liked the lighting and the visual framing, especially in some of the happiest moments like the kiss, or the moment when Ulysses first looks at himself in the mirror after putting on lipstick. Even though the songs are awkward, they're framed and filmed interestingly. There is a bunch of sort of classic queer sadness narrative in it too, though, and I think that's important - there's a reason that these kids are homeless or runaways - but I'd rather not, like, dwell in the details of Aunt Rose being a jerk. I don't really want to give that a ton of time. I'm looking more for beautifully lit moments of finding community.
Taskmaster (UK TV) and Adaptations:
The taskmaster comes up with ridiculous tasks and five people try to execute them, but internationally.
Why to watch: If you've seen Taskmaster, here's MORE Taskmaster! Many of the international versions are available on youtube; there are so many different versions of the show but all of them seem to require contestants to try to empty a bathtub as quickly as possible without removing the plug or damaging the bathtub.
Contains: Some racist, sexist, homophobic, or nationalistic jokes, depending on version/season/comedians. I haven't watched many of the international versions yet so who knows what's in there.
Request details: I watched Taskmaster NZ last year and found it hilarious, and Paul Williams' vibe as the Taskmaster's Assistant is so different from Alex Horne's vibe (ennui vs kinky middle management). When I watched the first season of Kongen Befaler (the Norwegian version), I was amused to discover that Olli Wermskog has yet another Taskmaster's Assistant vibe – oddly aggressive! So I started thinking about a multi-taskmaster's-assistants vid, which would be delightful. As I watched the international versions, I also noticed that there were so many repeat tasks, and I thought it would be fun to do an all-the-bathtubs or everything-in-a-lab section in a vid as well. Or a classic compendium of falling down and being silly! Feel free to pull from any of the international versions, or from the game or book or hometasking or fan versions or anything else you'd like. One note here is that some seasons/versions of Taskmaster are really straight, really white, or really dude-heavy, and I'd appreciate it if you tried to avoid making a vid that pulls from just those seasons/comedians/taskmaster's assistants.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls (movie):
The story of Aila, a young Mi'kmaq girl, who sells drugs in order to pay truancy tax so that she and other children will not be sent to the residential school; when her money is stolen, she needs to get it back to pay the tax. Set in the 1960s and 70s.
Why to watch: Aila is the namesake for the Aila Test, Ali Nahdee's version of the Bechdel Test for Indigenous women characters. This film deals with many difficult and traumatic subjects (see content notes), but that's not the only tone of the film - it's also a supernatural teenage heist film, a story about defiance and humor in this cycle of trauma, a story about telling stories and making art, a story about forgetting and remembering and generational trauma. Aila is played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, who also plays Elora on Reservation Dogs, and she is absolutely brilliant in this role.
Contains: suicide; a child killed by a drunk driver; colonial violence; the prison system; residential schools; police violence; onscreen attempted sexual assault; referenced sexual assault; alcoholism and drug abuse; grief; anti-gay slurs (re masculinity and the prison system); the r-word.
Request details: Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs is SO GOOD as Aila, and I would love an Aila centric vid! I think there's also a lot of space here to tell a story about telling stories: a vidder could do a lot with the art and the animation in the film. A vid could also play with the central metaphor - a story about the residential school consuming and killing victims who then, as the undead, take down the villains. The skull and the skeletons in the woods and the gas mask and the monster. Aila in her mask peering around the hallways of the residential school and stealing back space for herself.
Jeff Barnaby talks a bit about the Listuguj raids and the documentary Incident at Restigouche as foundational to his filmmaking in this interview. In this interview, he also talks about why Rhymes for Young Ghouls is set in 1976, the year he was born: "these people, at that time, set the rest of us free." (Jeff Barnaby passed away this month; here's an obituary on the cbc.)
Note: If you're interested in a crossover, there's some interesting thematic overlap with Blood Quantum, Jeff Barnaby's other film about generational trauma and the dead set on a fictional Mi'kmaq reservation – it's a zombie film set five years later, in 1981, at the time of the raids on fishers in Listuguj.
Lizzo RPF:
Lizzo is a singer, songwriter, dancer who can twerk while playing the flute, and a delight.
Why to watch/listen: Lizzo's music brings me joy when I'm down or having a bad day; Lizzo sings about self-confidence, about trying to be happy and fulfilled, about being 100% that bitch. She wants to use her platform to lift people up; she talks about her choreographers and her dancers, about going to therapy, about getting inspiration and language from Missy Elliot and Lauryn Hill.
Request details: I'd love a vid about Lizzo's joy, or a vid about the work of making music and videos, or a vid that was all dancing and singing, or a vid about how hard she works to be able to play James Madison's flute and say fuck you to her haters, or whatever else you can think of! Also as a fat person I love Lizzo's amazing sexy fatness, I want to watch her dance forever and I'm so happy about the Big Grrls she dances with. "If you can love me, you can love yourself."
Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls (TV):
A reality tv competition show in which a group of fat dancers compete to become new backup dancers for Lizzo.
Why to watch: Calling this a "reality tv competition show" is true, in that the dancers are trying to become Lizzo's backup dancers, but it's also really misleading. This isn't a competition only one person can win – and it's also not a competition that's about sabotaging your competitors. It's about learning and growing together, whether that means working with a choreographer to learn new skills, working with a makeup artist to try a new look, or working with a movement coach to learn about vulnerability. This is a show about sincerity, working together, and learning. Lizzo is an icon, and the dancers have to believe that they can dance with her, and they have to learn that in addition to learning how to dance on stairs.
Request details: I legit teared up watching this show and if you make a vid for this fandom I will probably tear up watching your vid. I started crying in episode one when the dancers were so excited to see Lizzo, and talking about how important she was to them, but, like, this is just a show filled with sincerity and emotion all the way through. I love everyone in this bar (except Jasmine) and I'd love a vid about the dancers all dancing and learning and being happy together! It might also be fun to make a vid about a particular dancer's journey and growth, or multiple vidlets for multiple dancers? Everyone gets an emotional journey. I particularly liked Ashley, Jayla, and Charity but any of the dancers would make a great center for a vid!
Note: The flashy intros / scene changes here are mostly fast enough to bother me in isolation or together.
Bit (movie):
A vampire movie about queer women vampires and the new woman they've turned, Laurel. Laurel is trans, but the vampires are trans-inclusive radical vampires, and they accept her into the gang. Turns out, though, that the gang has a women-power-means-being-anti-all-men lesbian-separatist attitude that Laurel recognizes as a problem.
Why to watch: This is a silly queer comedy horror movie, with a fun vibe and flirty vampires and an L.A. party scene. It's also a movie that thinks about the emotionally devastating effects of the vampire stories it's in reaction to, and what it means to have experienced Vlad's mind control powers. The politics get kind of incoherent at the end but, like, are we really here for that? No, we are here for Laurel being a deadpan newbie vamp dancing at a club and setting Vlad on fire.
Contains: mind control (including some thoughtful exploration of what Vlad's mind control powers mean), imprisonment, offscreen attempted suicide, an "all men are evil" attitude that the film recognizes as problematic.
Request details: LAUREL. I want Laurel having a great time moving to L.A. I want the vampire gang and Laurel's deadpan reaction to utter nonsense. I want Laurel to have fun and I want the vid to be fun! I also enjoy the vampire gang's swagger although a lot of what they do is nonsense. Good times, dancing, makeouts, queer vampires, and being tired of having to figure out what to do as an adult: yes please.
Thank you for making me a vid!
I have one thing that I put outside the cut tag, because I have a couple visual triggers:
1) Super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut scenes for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. It depends on the amount of contrast between the two scenes – stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, or between a nighttime and daytime scene. Strobe lights, strobe effects, or fast lightning flashes can also trigger this. These have to be very fast to bother me – think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).
2) Frame rate fuckery - when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films these days. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame. Some people can't see this at all, but to me it looks stuttery.
If you're concerned about either of these, please feel free to run a sample by
thingswithwings. She can also explain them with examples if that would be helpful.The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!
General Preferences: I really enjoy the diversity of vidding styles and genres at festivids and I look forward to seeing your style! I'm down for: any rating, outside source (including crossovers), still footage, critiques, action, deep character studies, shippy vids, action vids, dance vids, slash, femslash, het, gen, canon pairings, and non-canon pairings.
Things I love: people who put care into the work they do; building communities and found families; history and places being related to people and feelings; queer people; joy; speculative fiction; eating the rich; fighting for justice; people supporting each other.
Music: I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! I love vids to instrumentals, to dense lyrics-heavy songs, to hip hop, to weird indie music, to fun dance songs, to classics, and to things I've never heard of before. I also like vids to non-music, like spoken word pieces or sound effects. I am fine with dialog in a vid.
That said, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to understand lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (or, like, 50% of the dialog in a modern action movie). I'd appreciate it if you offered subtitles, especially if you intercut dialog and song lyrics.
I asked for: Neptune Frost (movie), The Great Canadian Baking Show, The Dead Lands (TV), Lego Masters (US TV), Saturday Church (movie), Taskmaster (UK TV) and Adaptations, Rhymes for Young Ghouls (movie), Lizzo RPF, Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls (TV), and Bit (movie).
Neptune Frost (movie):
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist film set in a coltan mining village in Burundi (and also in a parallel dimension), about many people whose escape and transformation brings them together in a hacker collective built out of electronic waste materials. Also, it's a musical.
Why to watch: Amazing visuals, incredibly cool costuming work using electronic waste, somewhere between a movie and a poem and a visual album and a dance performance. Lyrically and visually dense. Black liberation and Black revolution. A queer, trans, and/or intersex character, Neptune, who is played by two different actors before and after a transformation. Fuck Mr. Google.
Contains: police violence; political violence; capitalist violence; imperialism; attempted sexual assault; a character who talks about being forced into binary gender and "boy."
Request details: something that works with the allegories and the visuals; something about liberation and resistance. This is so visually poetic and fascinating that I think there are so many possible vids: a character study of Neptune, who was born in her 23rd year? A character study of Matalusa? A dance as resistance vid? The visuals of hacking as a glitch in the system, the patterned static that Neptune creates?
Note: The strongest glitch effects in the movie are mostly okay for me in isolation, but I couldn't watch a string of many of them in a row.
The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV)
The Canadian spinoff of the Great British Bake Off, with Canadian themes (Montreal bagels) and ingredients (birch bark syrup and seaweed and saskatoon berries) and a truly stellar number of interesting, thoughtful, awesome contestants.
Why to watch: We all know the Bake Off model, but the Great Canadian Baking Show is somehow an even sweeter spinoff. The judges are interested and delighted by new flavors, and they don't get defensive when they don't know something. Instead, they're peering into the oven next to the contestants and speaking to them as peers. And are SO MANY good contestants on the show! I really appreciate how many queer contestants there are on GCBS – I think season 6 is 50% queer. There are also many queer contestants of color – this season there are at least three (Jomar, Chi, and Kristi).
Request details: Soooo I did make a vid for this show two years ago, but due to timing and source availability I was only able to use the first two seasons. Season 6 is airing now! And seasons 3 - 5 had many great bakers and many great running around with cake montages and many disastrous bakes that weren't in my vid! I love the energy in the tent and the way the contestants help each other and laugh together. I love the delightful and surprising successes, the way sometimes a technical bake just comes out and the baker doesn't even know why. In season 3, I particularly like Colin, Chris, and Jodi; in season 4, Sheldon, Tanner, Anjali, Mahathi, Oyaks, Raufikat; and in season 5, Vincent and Stephen. They're all such interesting bakers! Season 6 just started but I'm already prepared to love them all. I'd just like something sweet and fun about this show and these great bakers!
The Dead Lands (TV):
An eight-episode Māori horror tv show show, featuring a young girl whose village is threatened by not-alive and not-dead demon warriors; she recruits a warrior to help her find out why the demons are coming. The warrior has already died but is locked out of the lands of his ancestors until he makes amends for the things he's done in his life.
Why to watch: Visually stunning, super cool concept, action-adventure-quest with horror elements set in Aotearoa. Mehe is determined to succeed in her quest; Waka isn't sure how to be a good person; the spirits are possibly lying to them. The opening scenes of this show are somewhat confusing – Waka dies in like the first ten minutes – but it gets much stronger from there.
Contains: some blood, some gore, horror elements. (Pretty well covered in the trailer above.)
What I want: Something that uses the visual language here! It could be a retelling of the plot, a character study, an action vid about the fights using the mere, a vid about spirits – there are many cool options. I think there's also a really fun annoyed-allies-to-annoyed-friends vid in Mehe and Waka's relationship. Or just do some badass horror vidding!
Note: There is also a film also called The Dead Lands from 2014 – it's by the same creator, and it also has a warrior who can't reach the lands of his ancestors, but it is essentially unrelated to the show, and is more of a revenge drama with minimal demon presence. Also, no Mehe.
Lego Masters (US TV):
A reality television show in which teams of Lego builders build things like moving parade floats, bridges that can withstand the most weight, and castles built up and out from sheer cliffs.
Why to watch: People having fun building things! A community based around creation and story getting to meet two Lego professionals! It's partly about aesthetic, partly about story, and partly about engineering with lego bricks and tecnic.
Contains: A really annoying episode with Chris Pratt as a guest, some references to Brad Pitt as a producer.
Request details: I find this show delightful and charming, and I use it as a comfort-watching show – people building interesting things and then, sometimes, putting them on shake plates to see if they'd withstand earthquakes. I really enjoy the creativity of the show and I think it would make an absolutely beautiful vid! Just bring me fun and delight and Lego models exploding or rotating or becoming carnival attractions.
Saturday Church (movie):
A queer film about a fourteen year old kid, Ulysses, who likes to wear heels and stockings, and who meets some queer and trans kids who go to an outreach program (run by Joan, played by Kate Bornstein). Also it's a musical?
Why to watch: This film is one of Indya Moore and MJ Rodriguez's early roles! It's shaky sometimes in a very indie queer film way – for example, the songs are awkward restatements of the scenes that just happened. But it has a good heart, queer visuals, a story about young people finding themselves, and did I mention MJ Rodriguez?
Contains: homophobia and transphobia; family rejection (and physical violence); coerced underaged sex work.
Request details: Okay so this film is shaky but I think there's a really beautiful vid to be made from it: it's about discovering queer community, it's about dancing, it's about people trying to help Ulysses. I really liked the lighting and the visual framing, especially in some of the happiest moments like the kiss, or the moment when Ulysses first looks at himself in the mirror after putting on lipstick. Even though the songs are awkward, they're framed and filmed interestingly. There is a bunch of sort of classic queer sadness narrative in it too, though, and I think that's important - there's a reason that these kids are homeless or runaways - but I'd rather not, like, dwell in the details of Aunt Rose being a jerk. I don't really want to give that a ton of time. I'm looking more for beautifully lit moments of finding community.
Taskmaster (UK TV) and Adaptations:
The taskmaster comes up with ridiculous tasks and five people try to execute them, but internationally.
Why to watch: If you've seen Taskmaster, here's MORE Taskmaster! Many of the international versions are available on youtube; there are so many different versions of the show but all of them seem to require contestants to try to empty a bathtub as quickly as possible without removing the plug or damaging the bathtub.
Contains: Some racist, sexist, homophobic, or nationalistic jokes, depending on version/season/comedians. I haven't watched many of the international versions yet so who knows what's in there.
Request details: I watched Taskmaster NZ last year and found it hilarious, and Paul Williams' vibe as the Taskmaster's Assistant is so different from Alex Horne's vibe (ennui vs kinky middle management). When I watched the first season of Kongen Befaler (the Norwegian version), I was amused to discover that Olli Wermskog has yet another Taskmaster's Assistant vibe – oddly aggressive! So I started thinking about a multi-taskmaster's-assistants vid, which would be delightful. As I watched the international versions, I also noticed that there were so many repeat tasks, and I thought it would be fun to do an all-the-bathtubs or everything-in-a-lab section in a vid as well. Or a classic compendium of falling down and being silly! Feel free to pull from any of the international versions, or from the game or book or hometasking or fan versions or anything else you'd like. One note here is that some seasons/versions of Taskmaster are really straight, really white, or really dude-heavy, and I'd appreciate it if you tried to avoid making a vid that pulls from just those seasons/comedians/taskmaster's assistants.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls (movie):
The story of Aila, a young Mi'kmaq girl, who sells drugs in order to pay truancy tax so that she and other children will not be sent to the residential school; when her money is stolen, she needs to get it back to pay the tax. Set in the 1960s and 70s.
Why to watch: Aila is the namesake for the Aila Test, Ali Nahdee's version of the Bechdel Test for Indigenous women characters. This film deals with many difficult and traumatic subjects (see content notes), but that's not the only tone of the film - it's also a supernatural teenage heist film, a story about defiance and humor in this cycle of trauma, a story about telling stories and making art, a story about forgetting and remembering and generational trauma. Aila is played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, who also plays Elora on Reservation Dogs, and she is absolutely brilliant in this role.
Contains: suicide; a child killed by a drunk driver; colonial violence; the prison system; residential schools; police violence; onscreen attempted sexual assault; referenced sexual assault; alcoholism and drug abuse; grief; anti-gay slurs (re masculinity and the prison system); the r-word.
Request details: Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs is SO GOOD as Aila, and I would love an Aila centric vid! I think there's also a lot of space here to tell a story about telling stories: a vidder could do a lot with the art and the animation in the film. A vid could also play with the central metaphor - a story about the residential school consuming and killing victims who then, as the undead, take down the villains. The skull and the skeletons in the woods and the gas mask and the monster. Aila in her mask peering around the hallways of the residential school and stealing back space for herself.
Jeff Barnaby talks a bit about the Listuguj raids and the documentary Incident at Restigouche as foundational to his filmmaking in this interview. In this interview, he also talks about why Rhymes for Young Ghouls is set in 1976, the year he was born: "these people, at that time, set the rest of us free." (Jeff Barnaby passed away this month; here's an obituary on the cbc.)
Note: If you're interested in a crossover, there's some interesting thematic overlap with Blood Quantum, Jeff Barnaby's other film about generational trauma and the dead set on a fictional Mi'kmaq reservation – it's a zombie film set five years later, in 1981, at the time of the raids on fishers in Listuguj.
Lizzo RPF:
Lizzo is a singer, songwriter, dancer who can twerk while playing the flute, and a delight.
Why to watch/listen: Lizzo's music brings me joy when I'm down or having a bad day; Lizzo sings about self-confidence, about trying to be happy and fulfilled, about being 100% that bitch. She wants to use her platform to lift people up; she talks about her choreographers and her dancers, about going to therapy, about getting inspiration and language from Missy Elliot and Lauryn Hill.
Request details: I'd love a vid about Lizzo's joy, or a vid about the work of making music and videos, or a vid that was all dancing and singing, or a vid about how hard she works to be able to play James Madison's flute and say fuck you to her haters, or whatever else you can think of! Also as a fat person I love Lizzo's amazing sexy fatness, I want to watch her dance forever and I'm so happy about the Big Grrls she dances with. "If you can love me, you can love yourself."
Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls (TV):
A reality tv competition show in which a group of fat dancers compete to become new backup dancers for Lizzo.
Why to watch: Calling this a "reality tv competition show" is true, in that the dancers are trying to become Lizzo's backup dancers, but it's also really misleading. This isn't a competition only one person can win – and it's also not a competition that's about sabotaging your competitors. It's about learning and growing together, whether that means working with a choreographer to learn new skills, working with a makeup artist to try a new look, or working with a movement coach to learn about vulnerability. This is a show about sincerity, working together, and learning. Lizzo is an icon, and the dancers have to believe that they can dance with her, and they have to learn that in addition to learning how to dance on stairs.
Request details: I legit teared up watching this show and if you make a vid for this fandom I will probably tear up watching your vid. I started crying in episode one when the dancers were so excited to see Lizzo, and talking about how important she was to them, but, like, this is just a show filled with sincerity and emotion all the way through. I love everyone in this bar (except Jasmine) and I'd love a vid about the dancers all dancing and learning and being happy together! It might also be fun to make a vid about a particular dancer's journey and growth, or multiple vidlets for multiple dancers? Everyone gets an emotional journey. I particularly liked Ashley, Jayla, and Charity but any of the dancers would make a great center for a vid!
Note: The flashy intros / scene changes here are mostly fast enough to bother me in isolation or together.
Bit (movie):
A vampire movie about queer women vampires and the new woman they've turned, Laurel. Laurel is trans, but the vampires are trans-inclusive radical vampires, and they accept her into the gang. Turns out, though, that the gang has a women-power-means-being-anti-all-men lesbian-separatist attitude that Laurel recognizes as a problem.
Why to watch: This is a silly queer comedy horror movie, with a fun vibe and flirty vampires and an L.A. party scene. It's also a movie that thinks about the emotionally devastating effects of the vampire stories it's in reaction to, and what it means to have experienced Vlad's mind control powers. The politics get kind of incoherent at the end but, like, are we really here for that? No, we are here for Laurel being a deadpan newbie vamp dancing at a club and setting Vlad on fire.
Contains: mind control (including some thoughtful exploration of what Vlad's mind control powers mean), imprisonment, offscreen attempted suicide, an "all men are evil" attitude that the film recognizes as problematic.
Request details: LAUREL. I want Laurel having a great time moving to L.A. I want the vampire gang and Laurel's deadpan reaction to utter nonsense. I want Laurel to have fun and I want the vid to be fun! I also enjoy the vampire gang's swagger although a lot of what they do is nonsense. Good times, dancing, makeouts, queer vampires, and being tired of having to figure out what to do as an adult: yes please.
