Festivids 2023 vid notes
Feb. 11th, 2024 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosI made five vids for Festivids this year! They are:
Moby Dick adaptations: a vulture feeds upon this heart forever (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: #teamwhale (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: Queequeg and I (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: Here It Goes Again (dw | ao3)
Janelle Monáe: I Like That (dw | ao3)
... so yes,bironic was totally right in the Guess the Festividder post, I did indeed make four very multisource Moby Dick vids for Festivids drawing from approximately 100 years of Moby Dick adaptations. These were all for nicosilang!
And then I made one Janelle Monáe vid forlivrelibre's great request! (I said to thingswithwings "someone might guess me for this, because I've vidded Janelle Monáe before, but also they might not, because I'm not being completionist about it." Nobody did guess me.)
In the watch party for festivids, somebody said something like "wow, I wonder how long this vidder has wanted to make all these Moby Dick vids." The answer is: since October, during signups for this years' festivids. I didn't read Moby Dick until after assignments went out. I hadn't seen a single one of these Moby Dick adaptations before several months ago.
So why'd you vid Moby Dick then?
I had never read Moby Dick (though I have friends like Nico andchagrined who are huge fans), but I had an interest in whaling narratives from a funny angle.
I visited a friend who lived in Rhode Island, and one day she said "Do you want to go to the Boston Museum of Art or the New Bedford Whaling Museum? It's cooler than it sounds." I was over-peopled and Boston was super busy and sounded exhausting so I picked the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I knew like five things about American industrial whaling, which I had learned from school ("whaling is bad") and pals who were into Moby Dick ("whaling is also gay").
The New Bedford Whaling Museum was super cool. I was so surprised. It was a really deep look into one particular aspect of American history from all of these different lenses. When I visited, there was a display about the way that whaling ships engaged in colonial and imperialist projects on the one hand (and are involved in the history of the American Navy), and also on the way whaling ships split profits and were multiracial, multilingual, and multinational projects. (A display about the Azores and also colonialism. A display about escaped enslaved people signing onto whaling ships as a way to temporarily disappear and a way to rename themselves. A display about Swain v Folger and how whaling played into the end of slavery in Nantucket.) This referenced Moby Dick, and was the first time I learned about the way Melville tried to represent that kind of diversity in the book. (Like a lot of people, my impression of it was very much "Ahab is there and also there's a whale.")
(Here's an article on Freedom and Whaling on Nantucket, which has some cool pictures of the type that were in that exhibit, though this article is not very well written. I didn't start taking pictures till I was more than halfway thru the museum, so mostly I just have pictures of like ropes and contents of whaling ships, but if you're interested you can check them out on google photos.)
Let me just also say that the New Bedford Whaling Museum looked a great by comparison to the spectacularly terrible historical placards in Newport, Rhode Island, which were. Wow. Erased so much of the terrible history of Newport.
Anyway I still didn't read Moby Dick because I wasn't reading books much, and it was long, and I was busy.
Then Nico nominated Moby Dick & Adaptations for Festivids, and I was the person who ran down the list of Moby Dick adaptations on wikipedia to see if it was a rare fandom, and I was like "this is a VERY weird list of sources, most of which are old" and "this would make a cool vid" and "Nico's request is interesting" and then I signed up for it on spec having still seen zero of those Moby Dick adaptations.
Then I read Moby Dick.
Then I got assigned to Nico! I went and looked at that list of Moby Dick adaptations again and exported it into a spreadsheet to track my efforts to try to find source.
In the process, I heard the song that's the basis of "a vulture feeds upon that heart forever" - I edited that song very minimally! The original is 6:46 and already included Leonard Nimoy. The song is from Whales Alive, a new age album from 1987. The two musicians (Paul Winter and Paul Halley) put on some whale song recordings and then improvised in response to them - which is what gives the whole instrumental section a sense that the music is following the whalesong instead of being in sync with it. This is a big part of what gives the vid the rushed, hurried, anxious vibe. I heard this on the first day, because it's on that list of Moby Dick adaptations, sent it tothingswithwings like "wtf," and then together we talked me into it over the course of a lunch break.
I did also consider another song from the album, "Whales Weep Not!" BECAUSE the Leonard Nimoy narration on it is from the D.H. Lawrence poem. But also they skip the part of poem about whale phalluses and imho that doesn't honor the spirit of Moby Dick. Also also the music isn't as weird and tense and interesting.
So I collected a bunch of source, and downloaded an ebook of Moby Dick, and planned to make one (one) totally reasonable - okay somewhat unreasonable it's six minutes long - Moby Dick vid.
Weirdly during this period I also went to a wedding where a guest read the Ishmael and Queequeg meetcute-to-marriage and so the first part of Moby Dick I read was technically that chapter! That's when I started mulling over a good song for "and then they got married."
I started reviewing source with Moby Dick (or, the Webcomic) and very rapidly realized that I absolutely could not review source until I'd finished reading Moby Dick because I could not at all figure out what was canon. (It was all canon! Moby Dick (or, the Webcomic) is actually by far the most book-accurate canon I reviewed; pocketsizedquasar is only up to the storm so far but if it were complete it would've featured even more in "Queequeg and I." It's also the only adaptation I had access to that did a canon-accurate number of nights Queequeg and Ishmael spent in the "and there was only one bed" trope - the 2011 Moby Dick didn't even let them wake up together.)
So then I kept shoving things into a source folder but didn't watch or read any of them because I was reading Moby Dick. I kept tellingthingswithwings Moby Dick facts and sperm whale facts (according to Ishmael) and I enjoyed the whale facts section of the book a bunch.
a vulture feeds upon that heart forever
aka the serious one
My vidding computer had a broken GPU fan, so I couldn't vid on it. I sent it into warranty repair and it came back still broken and had to go into repair again. I didn't get it back until ... I think January 10th? Like four days before the deadline. So I had a lot of time to clip and source review and structure on my old computer, but I was hoping like heck that I wouldn't have to actually vid on it.
I planned for this vid to be entirely actual whaling ships (no space stuff), and all live action, though I later broke that rule because the glass-painted animation looked weird and creepy enough that it matched ~the vibe~. Also no comics, so reviewing 2000 AD Moby Dick in Space was for nothing.
I listened to the song a BUNCH to come up with the general structure:
Because I intended several sequences to be disorienting, this was a weird multi vid to review source for! I clipped kinds of shots I normally wouldn't have - like "joy but they're out of focus" and "they're tiny and you can barely see them in the ocean" and "which way is the motion going here." Also I briefly felt like a group of seven artist because I kept clipping shots with rope and wood in the front of the frame and action happening behind it.
When my vidding computer came back ... it was wiped and first I had to reinstall everything, but then I just vidded based on my notes for like three days solid. Fortunately I had super good notes for especially the Nantucket sleigh ride section, and laying that down felt GREAT, and I was really delighted by how it came out! Getting into the boats and rowing across the ocean and the whales.
The opening section on the other hand was a pain in the ass: for some reason, most of these sources are reluctant to include footage in which very little happens? I used every single frame for almost every shot of people or work in the whole opening narration. So I spent a bunch of time rearranging these so they didn't look silly ("if I put this short clip of Starbuck here on this slightly shorter line then ..." etc). And I did have to reclip for this as well, which was deeply annoying because I had been released from clipping and had a plan and a computer with a GPU and I wanted to just GO GO GO. (I also tried and failed to get a shot from Star Trek IV into this section to honor Leonard Nimoy's monologue.)
I intended the obsession/violence/butchering a whale section to include Pip and the psychological horror of being left alone in the ocean, but it's filmed so badly in every adaptation that it took forever to do and it didn't work at all. Sorry, Pip, your story is super creepy but it didn't look creepy in the vid :(
The punctuation of the vid is the Ahab/Starbuck section (and I totally vidded myself into shipping them in the process).
Because this is a vid about adaptations, I treated it differently than I would have in a different kind of multivid! I smoothed the transition between sources by making them fit the 16:9 aspect ratio, but I didn't color correct anything unless I needed to because it was hard to see. This also helped with the disorienting video in the last Moby Dick sequence, because the whales are all different sizes and types and the ocean is different colors and the water rushes in weirdly.
One other thing I tried to do with this vid is that normally in a multivid of this type I'd flip and zoom and recenter shots in order to create coherent motion - see for example the harpooning Moby Dick section of Here It Goes Again, where everyone is going left to right and throwing their harpoons in a smooth arc of motion. I did some of that here on the human action sections, so like in the harpooning Moby Dick section here some of those shots are flipped and recentered. But I totally abandoned it on the sections about the whale and the ocean, and I let those shots be absolutely out of sync with each other, because the whale and the ocean are big and scary and not in human control. So that last section of the vid where Moby Dick is pulling the whaleboats they go left, right, towards camera, they fall at different angles, the focus is pulling to different sides of the screen. (I did a little of this with Ahab specifically as well, so the doubloon scene here and the doubloon scene in Here It Goes Again look pretty different! In HIGA you'll see the doubloon move pretty smoothly across the screen from shot to shot, flipped and zoomed so the coin continues from the previous shot. Whereas here it's towards camera left focus (1956), moving right to left (1998), disrupt it with people (1999), center focus and still (2011), right focus (1956).)
PS: there are actually four Marvel actors in this vid, because I clipped some shots of whaling from In The Heart of the Sea, a film about the sinking of the Essex. (It's not good, and it's sort of retconned into a Moby Dick adaptation - they make the first mate Chris Hemsworth into a sort of Starbuck character and give him a bunch of backstory that's not historically accurate.) So technically Tom Holland and Chris Hemsworth do both appear in this vid! I asked twwings if she could spot them and she said no so I left them in to stand in for generic whalers.
#teamwhale
I clipped several kids movies while I was doing the clipping for the main project, and I noticed this weird theme in the process! I was clipping Animaniacs and heard this song and was like "that IS the message of these adaptations!" It's also only 40 seconds long, contains ableist language, and is not enough about the whales, so once I thought seriously about making this treat I realized it should be an earnest song about the sea instead. I auditioned both Baby Beluga (charming and one of my fave songs as a kid) and Octopus's Garden (almost but not quite right).
This vid was a pretty easy project, both because of limited footage and because of the narrow focus. Twwings' beta was super crucial here though in shaping the narrative and including the lurking whalers - initially there was too much happy-whale-in-the-ocean at the beginning.
Queequeg and I
So then a hard one again! Nico specifically mentioned this ship and also I definitely shipped it and wanted to make a vid with more Queequeg in it.
This song choice owes a lot to Laura Shapiro's 2001 vid to this song, Wouldn't It Be Nice. I was thinking about songs that were hopeful but not uncomplicatedly happy (because tragedy), earnest, sweet, and about marriage, and the line "we could get married and then we'd be happy" from this popped into my head.
This was a super limited source vid on the scale of these Moby Dick vids because many adaptations were excluded for various reasons. (1926 and 1930 had no Ishmael, 1956 cast a white guy as Queequg and had him wear fake tattoos on pantyhose over his face, etc.) I had done a bunch of random youtube searching for different theatrical productions and there are a LOT of recent Moby Dicks and a lot of them also cast a white person as Queequeg, including the all-women version, booooooo. So I knew it was going to be more reliant on comics and art, with less live action. I clipped a bunch of Marvel comics that were Moby Dick adaptations but most of them had TERRIBLE framing / panel structure, and often terrible art as well, so really I ended up mostly using the webcomic, which is GREAT and which also had good framing and panel structure that's not 98% speech bubbles. I also used some professional art, from illustrated Moby Dick books.
I named all my early Queequeg/Ishmael relationship clips "meet cute" and "there was only one bed" so when I was structuring the vid it was like "meet cutes along this verse" and "only one bed through the chorus" and etc. There's a somewhat sadder moment in the song where it seems more mournful - starting around 1:38 and continuing to about 1:55 - that fit the actual tragedy ending, and then with the drums coming back in let me transition back to "no, wouldn't it be nice if this instead?"
As I made this vid I got increasingly mad at the 2011 Moby Dick, where Charlie Cox and Raoul Trujillo kept being cute at each other where the camera wasn't looking at them. Like a) this adaptation doesn't even let them wake up in bed together b) it makes Ishmael Ahab's confidant so they're continually separated on the ship and c) then when they ARE in the same place they don't even film the cuteness really? Like I had a "Queequeg gives Ishmael a boost into the rigging and then pats his ass shot" where the ass-patting was basically offscreen, and the focus in the shot was some random dude climbing behind them. And then I had a cute joining-together-sweet-hand-pat-in-a-whaleboat shot that was utterly impossible to zoom in on because it was filmed around the ship and under a bunch of other action. Let Charlie Cox and Raoul Trujillo be cute!
I didn't want to call the vid "wouldn't it be nice" because sometimes it's fun to surprise people with a song choice like this, so I called it "Queequeg and I," because Moby Dick is written in the first person Ishmael POV so throughout that opening section of the book it's all "Queequeg and I went down to the ship."
Here It Goes Again
me to twwings, having made three Moby Dick vids: what's the maximum amount of Moby Dick vids I could make without being ridiculous?
twwings: three
me, having put this song on repeat to think about structure: okay but WHAT IF I had already started a fourth one
Here It Goes Again was on my list of "this would be a fun song for an umbrella fandom of some kind" songs, because in a way that's what "and adaptations" is doing: here it goes again.
This vid exists in large part because of two things:
1) There was absolutely no opportunity to vid the 2010 Asylum Moby Dick in any of the other vids, meaning I hadn't vidded Moby Dick eating a helicopter OR a submarine. A crime.
2) I sat around in clipping/clip review for longer than I would have otherwise, because I was waiting for my vidding computer. So I spent some time trying to track down some older or weirder source that I already knew didn't fit in any of my planned Moby Dick vids, or searching for cartoons with Moby Dick themes to see what was out there that wasn't on the wikipedia list of adaptations. And I had clipped all the kids content into some kids-media specific folders for Baby Beluga, but one folder I hadn't used at all was "kids media - hitting those same moby beats." When I did clip review, I switched from Baby Beluga to Here it Goes Again while reviewing those clips, and I was like PERFECT NO NOTES.
In clip review, once I realized "your car is pulling off of the curb" was lowering the whaleboats I was committed! And when I started vidding I did that section first, leading into the doubloon and action sections.
I was going to get more comics in here but the Marvel stuff was badly framed for this purpose too.
This was just a ton of fun to vid because it's all so ridiculous! Every time I watched a new tv show and clipped it I'd throw it in that moby beats folder and it was all like "ahabish guy throws a lobster fork at moby lobster" and "the doubloon is a sandwich" and "space ahab plays electric keytar" and "call me Fishmael." Putting them on the timeline was so much fun and built these long sequences of silliness.
I could have made an Ahab/Starbuck vid, because I had incepted myself into the fandom with the help of that section in "a vulture etc" and the Moby Dick webcomic, but I restrained myself to ONLY four Moby Dick vids and jumped into a treat I'd wanted to make!
I Like That
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livfic had a great Janelle Monáe request: "I’m very into their Age of Pleasure glow up. Their stepping into the fullness of their identity as a black queer poly icon, titties out and pleasure centered, makes me so happy."
I did vid Cindi Mayweather six years ago, pre-Dirty Computer, but my glitch/flashing sensitivity is worse now than it was then - I almost can't watch my own vid because of the glitch effects. So I already knew that if I wanted to vid this, I'd have to be non-completist about it - I can't watch the glitchy videos, and I can't watch the stage lights in their Age of Pleasure performances, etc. And also I wanted to make a vid of their current evolution and their Age of Pleasure glow up, so it was okay that I couldn't use some of the old stuff and I could limit my source acquisition! I did grab a bunch of my old clips, though, to use if I need them.
I knew I'd only finish this vid if I restrained myself in terms of source, so I didn't backread their whole instagram or anything like that. I was like "Dirty Computer videos, and then videos from the Age of Computer era." (I did end up backreading their whole TikTok because there's actually not much there - just Age of Pleasure stuff and then like six older videos.) I also didn't watch every interview ever - though I was really happy about the StylForU interview, and I thought it would make a perfect opener to this vid: the pile of clothes on the floor and learning to love themselves, and the into Age of Pleasure.
I had a lot of fun matching motion and position in the vertical video vs the 4:3 music videos vs the 16:9 music videos in order to move the eye in a way that would make the different aspect ratios less jarring, but as I was partway through it matching direction of motion in a tiktok video to something from a music video I stopped for a moment like "wait, how did I also give myself a treat with aspect ratio work?"
I also considered vidding Haute (but it's a little too repetitive for this) and vidding Make Me Feel (SUCH a perfect vid song, so beautiful, but not for this vid). Make Me Feel has too much "you" in it - "that's just the way you make me feel" - and I needed much more "I." So I landed on I Like That, with twwings' help listening to various Janelle songs!
This came together really quickly once I had done all the clips for it, and it was a delight to make it and include all of this footage into a joyful vid.
Moby Dick adaptations: a vulture feeds upon this heart forever (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: #teamwhale (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: Queequeg and I (dw | ao3)
Moby Dick adaptations: Here It Goes Again (dw | ao3)
Janelle Monáe: I Like That (dw | ao3)
... so yes,
bironic was totally right in the Guess the Festividder post, I did indeed make four very multisource Moby Dick vids for Festivids drawing from approximately 100 years of Moby Dick adaptations. These were all for nicosilang!And then I made one Janelle Monáe vid for
livrelibre's great request! (I said to thingswithwings "someone might guess me for this, because I've vidded Janelle Monáe before, but also they might not, because I'm not being completionist about it." Nobody did guess me.) In the watch party for festivids, somebody said something like "wow, I wonder how long this vidder has wanted to make all these Moby Dick vids." The answer is: since October, during signups for this years' festivids. I didn't read Moby Dick until after assignments went out. I hadn't seen a single one of these Moby Dick adaptations before several months ago.
So why'd you vid Moby Dick then?
I had never read Moby Dick (though I have friends like Nico and
chagrined who are huge fans), but I had an interest in whaling narratives from a funny angle. I visited a friend who lived in Rhode Island, and one day she said "Do you want to go to the Boston Museum of Art or the New Bedford Whaling Museum? It's cooler than it sounds." I was over-peopled and Boston was super busy and sounded exhausting so I picked the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I knew like five things about American industrial whaling, which I had learned from school ("whaling is bad") and pals who were into Moby Dick ("whaling is also gay").
The New Bedford Whaling Museum was super cool. I was so surprised. It was a really deep look into one particular aspect of American history from all of these different lenses. When I visited, there was a display about the way that whaling ships engaged in colonial and imperialist projects on the one hand (and are involved in the history of the American Navy), and also on the way whaling ships split profits and were multiracial, multilingual, and multinational projects. (A display about the Azores and also colonialism. A display about escaped enslaved people signing onto whaling ships as a way to temporarily disappear and a way to rename themselves. A display about Swain v Folger and how whaling played into the end of slavery in Nantucket.) This referenced Moby Dick, and was the first time I learned about the way Melville tried to represent that kind of diversity in the book. (Like a lot of people, my impression of it was very much "Ahab is there and also there's a whale.")
(Here's an article on Freedom and Whaling on Nantucket, which has some cool pictures of the type that were in that exhibit, though this article is not very well written. I didn't start taking pictures till I was more than halfway thru the museum, so mostly I just have pictures of like ropes and contents of whaling ships, but if you're interested you can check them out on google photos.)
Let me just also say that the New Bedford Whaling Museum looked a great by comparison to the spectacularly terrible historical placards in Newport, Rhode Island, which were. Wow. Erased so much of the terrible history of Newport.
Anyway I still didn't read Moby Dick because I wasn't reading books much, and it was long, and I was busy.
Then Nico nominated Moby Dick & Adaptations for Festivids, and I was the person who ran down the list of Moby Dick adaptations on wikipedia to see if it was a rare fandom, and I was like "this is a VERY weird list of sources, most of which are old" and "this would make a cool vid" and "Nico's request is interesting" and then I signed up for it on spec having still seen zero of those Moby Dick adaptations.
Then I read Moby Dick.
Then I got assigned to Nico! I went and looked at that list of Moby Dick adaptations again and exported it into a spreadsheet to track my efforts to try to find source.
In the process, I heard the song that's the basis of "a vulture feeds upon that heart forever" - I edited that song very minimally! The original is 6:46 and already included Leonard Nimoy. The song is from Whales Alive, a new age album from 1987. The two musicians (Paul Winter and Paul Halley) put on some whale song recordings and then improvised in response to them - which is what gives the whole instrumental section a sense that the music is following the whalesong instead of being in sync with it. This is a big part of what gives the vid the rushed, hurried, anxious vibe. I heard this on the first day, because it's on that list of Moby Dick adaptations, sent it to
thingswithwings like "wtf," and then together we talked me into it over the course of a lunch break. I did also consider another song from the album, "Whales Weep Not!" BECAUSE the Leonard Nimoy narration on it is from the D.H. Lawrence poem. But also they skip the part of poem about whale phalluses and imho that doesn't honor the spirit of Moby Dick. Also also the music isn't as weird and tense and interesting.
So I collected a bunch of source, and downloaded an ebook of Moby Dick, and planned to make one (one) totally reasonable - okay somewhat unreasonable it's six minutes long - Moby Dick vid.
Weirdly during this period I also went to a wedding where a guest read the Ishmael and Queequeg meetcute-to-marriage and so the first part of Moby Dick I read was technically that chapter! That's when I started mulling over a good song for "and then they got married."
I started reviewing source with Moby Dick (or, the Webcomic) and very rapidly realized that I absolutely could not review source until I'd finished reading Moby Dick because I could not at all figure out what was canon. (It was all canon! Moby Dick (or, the Webcomic) is actually by far the most book-accurate canon I reviewed; pocketsizedquasar is only up to the storm so far but if it were complete it would've featured even more in "Queequeg and I." It's also the only adaptation I had access to that did a canon-accurate number of nights Queequeg and Ishmael spent in the "and there was only one bed" trope - the 2011 Moby Dick didn't even let them wake up together.)
So then I kept shoving things into a source folder but didn't watch or read any of them because I was reading Moby Dick. I kept telling
thingswithwings Moby Dick facts and sperm whale facts (according to Ishmael) and I enjoyed the whale facts section of the book a bunch. a vulture feeds upon that heart forever
aka the serious one
My vidding computer had a broken GPU fan, so I couldn't vid on it. I sent it into warranty repair and it came back still broken and had to go into repair again. I didn't get it back until ... I think January 10th? Like four days before the deadline. So I had a lot of time to clip and source review and structure on my old computer, but I was hoping like heck that I wouldn't have to actually vid on it.
I planned for this vid to be entirely actual whaling ships (no space stuff), and all live action, though I later broke that rule because the glass-painted animation looked weird and creepy enough that it matched ~the vibe~. Also no comics, so reviewing 2000 AD Moby Dick in Space was for nothing.
I listened to the song a BUNCH to come up with the general structure:
- slow and still establishing shots through the monologue, establishing this is Ishmael - this guy is also Ishmael - so's that guy. The ship at rest, alone in the ocean.
- thar she blows from the monologue had to lead directly into running to the whaleboats, so there couldn't be any shots of land or home here - we start on the ship and then jolt into motion, and that motion had to be a JOLT, disorienting and much faster cut
- which means not introducing Ahab at his proper point in the narrative, so after the whale hunt there was a transition point in the music that would take it into increasing tension, Ahab, and butchering a whale
- Ahab into obsession, violence, the storm, the gaslighting, Ahab vs Starbuck
- a repeat of the first section, but even more out of control - Ahab vs Moby Dick, and Moby Dick is too big and the ocean is too big
- #teamwhale: from Moby Dick's perspective this isn't a tragedy; the whale leaving Ahab floating dead in the water
- but Ishmael is alone
Because I intended several sequences to be disorienting, this was a weird multi vid to review source for! I clipped kinds of shots I normally wouldn't have - like "joy but they're out of focus" and "they're tiny and you can barely see them in the ocean" and "which way is the motion going here." Also I briefly felt like a group of seven artist because I kept clipping shots with rope and wood in the front of the frame and action happening behind it.
When my vidding computer came back ... it was wiped and first I had to reinstall everything, but then I just vidded based on my notes for like three days solid. Fortunately I had super good notes for especially the Nantucket sleigh ride section, and laying that down felt GREAT, and I was really delighted by how it came out! Getting into the boats and rowing across the ocean and the whales.
The opening section on the other hand was a pain in the ass: for some reason, most of these sources are reluctant to include footage in which very little happens? I used every single frame for almost every shot of people or work in the whole opening narration. So I spent a bunch of time rearranging these so they didn't look silly ("if I put this short clip of Starbuck here on this slightly shorter line then ..." etc). And I did have to reclip for this as well, which was deeply annoying because I had been released from clipping and had a plan and a computer with a GPU and I wanted to just GO GO GO. (I also tried and failed to get a shot from Star Trek IV into this section to honor Leonard Nimoy's monologue.)
I intended the obsession/violence/butchering a whale section to include Pip and the psychological horror of being left alone in the ocean, but it's filmed so badly in every adaptation that it took forever to do and it didn't work at all. Sorry, Pip, your story is super creepy but it didn't look creepy in the vid :(
The punctuation of the vid is the Ahab/Starbuck section (and I totally vidded myself into shipping them in the process).
Because this is a vid about adaptations, I treated it differently than I would have in a different kind of multivid! I smoothed the transition between sources by making them fit the 16:9 aspect ratio, but I didn't color correct anything unless I needed to because it was hard to see. This also helped with the disorienting video in the last Moby Dick sequence, because the whales are all different sizes and types and the ocean is different colors and the water rushes in weirdly.
One other thing I tried to do with this vid is that normally in a multivid of this type I'd flip and zoom and recenter shots in order to create coherent motion - see for example the harpooning Moby Dick section of Here It Goes Again, where everyone is going left to right and throwing their harpoons in a smooth arc of motion. I did some of that here on the human action sections, so like in the harpooning Moby Dick section here some of those shots are flipped and recentered. But I totally abandoned it on the sections about the whale and the ocean, and I let those shots be absolutely out of sync with each other, because the whale and the ocean are big and scary and not in human control. So that last section of the vid where Moby Dick is pulling the whaleboats they go left, right, towards camera, they fall at different angles, the focus is pulling to different sides of the screen. (I did a little of this with Ahab specifically as well, so the doubloon scene here and the doubloon scene in Here It Goes Again look pretty different! In HIGA you'll see the doubloon move pretty smoothly across the screen from shot to shot, flipped and zoomed so the coin continues from the previous shot. Whereas here it's towards camera left focus (1956), moving right to left (1998), disrupt it with people (1999), center focus and still (2011), right focus (1956).)
PS: there are actually four Marvel actors in this vid, because I clipped some shots of whaling from In The Heart of the Sea, a film about the sinking of the Essex. (It's not good, and it's sort of retconned into a Moby Dick adaptation - they make the first mate Chris Hemsworth into a sort of Starbuck character and give him a bunch of backstory that's not historically accurate.) So technically Tom Holland and Chris Hemsworth do both appear in this vid! I asked twwings if she could spot them and she said no so I left them in to stand in for generic whalers.
#teamwhale
I clipped several kids movies while I was doing the clipping for the main project, and I noticed this weird theme in the process! I was clipping Animaniacs and heard this song and was like "that IS the message of these adaptations!" It's also only 40 seconds long, contains ableist language, and is not enough about the whales, so once I thought seriously about making this treat I realized it should be an earnest song about the sea instead. I auditioned both Baby Beluga (charming and one of my fave songs as a kid) and Octopus's Garden (almost but not quite right).
This vid was a pretty easy project, both because of limited footage and because of the narrow focus. Twwings' beta was super crucial here though in shaping the narrative and including the lurking whalers - initially there was too much happy-whale-in-the-ocean at the beginning.
Queequeg and I
So then a hard one again! Nico specifically mentioned this ship and also I definitely shipped it and wanted to make a vid with more Queequeg in it.
This song choice owes a lot to Laura Shapiro's 2001 vid to this song, Wouldn't It Be Nice. I was thinking about songs that were hopeful but not uncomplicatedly happy (because tragedy), earnest, sweet, and about marriage, and the line "we could get married and then we'd be happy" from this popped into my head.
This was a super limited source vid on the scale of these Moby Dick vids because many adaptations were excluded for various reasons. (1926 and 1930 had no Ishmael, 1956 cast a white guy as Queequg and had him wear fake tattoos on pantyhose over his face, etc.) I had done a bunch of random youtube searching for different theatrical productions and there are a LOT of recent Moby Dicks and a lot of them also cast a white person as Queequeg, including the all-women version, booooooo. So I knew it was going to be more reliant on comics and art, with less live action. I clipped a bunch of Marvel comics that were Moby Dick adaptations but most of them had TERRIBLE framing / panel structure, and often terrible art as well, so really I ended up mostly using the webcomic, which is GREAT and which also had good framing and panel structure that's not 98% speech bubbles. I also used some professional art, from illustrated Moby Dick books.
I named all my early Queequeg/Ishmael relationship clips "meet cute" and "there was only one bed" so when I was structuring the vid it was like "meet cutes along this verse" and "only one bed through the chorus" and etc. There's a somewhat sadder moment in the song where it seems more mournful - starting around 1:38 and continuing to about 1:55 - that fit the actual tragedy ending, and then with the drums coming back in let me transition back to "no, wouldn't it be nice if this instead?"
As I made this vid I got increasingly mad at the 2011 Moby Dick, where Charlie Cox and Raoul Trujillo kept being cute at each other where the camera wasn't looking at them. Like a) this adaptation doesn't even let them wake up in bed together b) it makes Ishmael Ahab's confidant so they're continually separated on the ship and c) then when they ARE in the same place they don't even film the cuteness really? Like I had a "Queequeg gives Ishmael a boost into the rigging and then pats his ass shot" where the ass-patting was basically offscreen, and the focus in the shot was some random dude climbing behind them. And then I had a cute joining-together-sweet-hand-pat-in-a-whaleboat shot that was utterly impossible to zoom in on because it was filmed around the ship and under a bunch of other action. Let Charlie Cox and Raoul Trujillo be cute!
I didn't want to call the vid "wouldn't it be nice" because sometimes it's fun to surprise people with a song choice like this, so I called it "Queequeg and I," because Moby Dick is written in the first person Ishmael POV so throughout that opening section of the book it's all "Queequeg and I went down to the ship."
Here It Goes Again
me to twwings, having made three Moby Dick vids: what's the maximum amount of Moby Dick vids I could make without being ridiculous?
twwings: three
me, having put this song on repeat to think about structure: okay but WHAT IF I had already started a fourth one
Here It Goes Again was on my list of "this would be a fun song for an umbrella fandom of some kind" songs, because in a way that's what "and adaptations" is doing: here it goes again.
This vid exists in large part because of two things:
1) There was absolutely no opportunity to vid the 2010 Asylum Moby Dick in any of the other vids, meaning I hadn't vidded Moby Dick eating a helicopter OR a submarine. A crime.
2) I sat around in clipping/clip review for longer than I would have otherwise, because I was waiting for my vidding computer. So I spent some time trying to track down some older or weirder source that I already knew didn't fit in any of my planned Moby Dick vids, or searching for cartoons with Moby Dick themes to see what was out there that wasn't on the wikipedia list of adaptations. And I had clipped all the kids content into some kids-media specific folders for Baby Beluga, but one folder I hadn't used at all was "kids media - hitting those same moby beats." When I did clip review, I switched from Baby Beluga to Here it Goes Again while reviewing those clips, and I was like PERFECT NO NOTES.
In clip review, once I realized "your car is pulling off of the curb" was lowering the whaleboats I was committed! And when I started vidding I did that section first, leading into the doubloon and action sections.
I was going to get more comics in here but the Marvel stuff was badly framed for this purpose too.
This was just a ton of fun to vid because it's all so ridiculous! Every time I watched a new tv show and clipped it I'd throw it in that moby beats folder and it was all like "ahabish guy throws a lobster fork at moby lobster" and "the doubloon is a sandwich" and "space ahab plays electric keytar" and "call me Fishmael." Putting them on the timeline was so much fun and built these long sequences of silliness.
I could have made an Ahab/Starbuck vid, because I had incepted myself into the fandom with the help of that section in "a vulture etc" and the Moby Dick webcomic, but I restrained myself to ONLY four Moby Dick vids and jumped into a treat I'd wanted to make!
I Like That
livfic had a great Janelle Monáe request: "I’m very into their Age of Pleasure glow up. Their stepping into the fullness of their identity as a black queer poly icon, titties out and pleasure centered, makes me so happy."I did vid Cindi Mayweather six years ago, pre-Dirty Computer, but my glitch/flashing sensitivity is worse now than it was then - I almost can't watch my own vid because of the glitch effects. So I already knew that if I wanted to vid this, I'd have to be non-completist about it - I can't watch the glitchy videos, and I can't watch the stage lights in their Age of Pleasure performances, etc. And also I wanted to make a vid of their current evolution and their Age of Pleasure glow up, so it was okay that I couldn't use some of the old stuff and I could limit my source acquisition! I did grab a bunch of my old clips, though, to use if I need them.
I knew I'd only finish this vid if I restrained myself in terms of source, so I didn't backread their whole instagram or anything like that. I was like "Dirty Computer videos, and then videos from the Age of Computer era." (I did end up backreading their whole TikTok because there's actually not much there - just Age of Pleasure stuff and then like six older videos.) I also didn't watch every interview ever - though I was really happy about the StylForU interview, and I thought it would make a perfect opener to this vid: the pile of clothes on the floor and learning to love themselves, and the into Age of Pleasure.
I had a lot of fun matching motion and position in the vertical video vs the 4:3 music videos vs the 16:9 music videos in order to move the eye in a way that would make the different aspect ratios less jarring, but as I was partway through it matching direction of motion in a tiktok video to something from a music video I stopped for a moment like "wait, how did I also give myself a treat with aspect ratio work?"
I also considered vidding Haute (but it's a little too repetitive for this) and vidding Make Me Feel (SUCH a perfect vid song, so beautiful, but not for this vid). Make Me Feel has too much "you" in it - "that's just the way you make me feel" - and I needed much more "I." So I landed on I Like That, with twwings' help listening to various Janelle songs!
This came together really quickly once I had done all the clips for it, and it was a delight to make it and include all of this footage into a joyful vid.
