Festivids Reveal!
Gift Vid: Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
Fandom: Flight of the Conchords
Music: "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" by LCD Soundsystem
Summary: Bret, Jemaine, ...and Murray. (Present.) Made for Little Heaven, Festivids 2015.
Content notes: None.
Password: binarysolo
...Playing At My House from Nicole Anell on Vimeo.
Formerly posted here.
Jemaine: It doesn't look like Daft Punk. We wanted ones like Daft Punk.
Murray: I don't know who he is.So, this is the vid I have less to say about! :DD But I really enjoyed making it and didn't realize how much I missed these guys. This is one of the only years I actually vidded the fandom I matched on (the other year was "Caprica", because I am me and see below for lady robot emotions). I tend to Do Festivids Wrong and pick up one of my recipient's other fandoms instead. And that almost happened this year! (Hello, IT Crowd.) I was really worried I just wouldn't be able to find the right vidsong for Flight of the Conchords without going the obvious/limiting route and using one of their own songs.
But then, while looking for a song for the OTHER fandom, I stumbled on this thing I've had on my iPod forever and I knew it just fit. Between those retro, falsetto "ooh yeah"s in the chorus and the silly instrumental section that sounds like people playing on household appliances, finding this song did half the work of this vid for me. And while I started out thinking it would just be a Bret & Jemaine vid, I soon realized Murray was the missing link to really bring the lyrics together with the "I'll show you the ropes" refrain and never letting them go (back to New Zealand alone, apparently).
One thing I enjoyed was contrasting the "music video" visuals of the show, which were always really bizarre and interesting, with the more "normal" and pathetic images of them in Murray's office and their terrible gigs, because I wanted both those elements of the show present in the vid. Also, I always knew Mel was gonna make an appearance in that one verse and I was kind of delighted to find clips of her interacting with Murray.
(Also Rhys Darby was literally JUST in the new "X Files" and it took all my strength not to be like LOOK IT'S THE GUY FROM MY VID THAT'S STILL ANONYMOUS. If you haven't seen his Were-Monster episode yet, omg go watch it now.)
Treat Vid: About a Girl
Fandom: Ex Machina [movie]
Music: "My Humps" by The Black-Eyed Peas
Summary: Fergie in the black-and-white room. Made for Kitty, Festivids 2015.
Content notes: This vid is NSFW and contains nudity, self harm, and implied sexual violence.
Password: ava
About a Girl from Nicole Anell on Vimeo.
Formerly posted here.
IT WAS ME, I CREATED THIS THING. *ahem*
So, uh,.. Ex Machina was certainly a movie Relevant To My Interests when it comes to lady robots. Something about the intersection of artificial life and gender politics has been potent to me for a long time, and this movie was firing very hard in those directions. When considering doing a festivid treat, I was oddly torn between this and "Gone Girl" (which I'll probably make one of these days) and while I would've liked to finish both in time, I started to feel like vidding Ava & Amy was almost redundant in a revenge-on-the-patriarchy way. Or a self-aware(-ish) female characters boxed into roles and playing them to perfection and ultimately taking control of the story way.
I actually kinda had the idea to vid this song before I saw the movie -- I didn't know if it would work, but it was in my head along with a couple of other (way less ridiculous) songs to interrogate the movie's treatment of female bodies and sexuality. Just knowing how heavily the movie featured woman-as-machine (tm BSG) tropes, my brain had latched onto that song as being potential fodder for an ironic vid. Not least because really, when you LISTEN to the song, it has a legit (and totally unintentional) sinister vibe in places, and the lyrics go through these shifts from super-gross to some kind of weird-ass attempt at empowerment.
So I watched (and really liked!) the movie, and it wasn't *exactly* what I expected, especially visually -- this is gonna sound weird considering what's in the vid, but there's not a whole lot real objectification & male-gazey parts IMO? Which, cool! There's a handful of outright nude scenes and all of them are more frank (Ava admiring her new skin in between murders) and/or unsettling (e.g. with the Othering body horror or Nathan's previous experiments) than erotic, which is a choice I found interesting, and in the vid I kinda had to work around that? But it's also something I tried to match in the vid, with the supposedly ~sexy imagery more implied, and the outright NSFW parts being further toward the end and played almost casually or beside-the-point or counter to the point, if that makes sense. (Sidebar, I HAVE NEVER MADE A VID THAT REQUIRED A NSFW LABEL BEFORE, so holy shit this is one reason I was flipping out on twitter.)
But otherwise the movie was very much what I thought it was gonna be (which is not a criticism) so I decided to just GO WITH this dumb "My Humps" idea, knowing it was... honestly the most ambitious vid I've ever made and really UNLIKE anything I've done before? It required a lot of things I'm not exactly 'known' for as a vidder, starting with just how fucked-up the subject matter is and that it was gonna descend from "sorta creepy but playful" to "content warning needed". And that it required some musicality in the editing and walking a fine line with the tone and dark humor. I HOPE IT SUCCEEDED IDK.
Ava and Kyoko and the prior androids are artificially human and yet have so much gendered baggage imposed onto them (monstrously by Nathan, relatively benignly by Caleb -- which is a whole other meta I would write paragraphs of, maybe when I do a full vid commentary. *g* But whether you see him as an innocent sap or lowkey creepy himself, he definitely projects his own share of sexual and romantic fantasy onto Ava, which does Not End Well 'cause she's just trying to dance, boy walk outside her freakin' room and exist for herself).
P.S. I gave the vid a title that's not the name of the song (it is in fact the name of another song) because I was kiiinda hoping to conceal that until the viewer was already watching and had the WTF reaction, rather than go in totally prepared or skeptical of it. ;)
Fandom: Flight of the Conchords
Music: "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" by LCD Soundsystem
Summary: Bret, Jemaine, ...and Murray. (Present.) Made for Little Heaven, Festivids 2015.
Content notes: None.
Password: binarysolo
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
...Playing At My House from Nicole Anell on Vimeo.
Formerly posted here.
Jemaine: It doesn't look like Daft Punk. We wanted ones like Daft Punk.
Murray: I don't know who he is.So, this is the vid I have less to say about! :DD But I really enjoyed making it and didn't realize how much I missed these guys. This is one of the only years I actually vidded the fandom I matched on (the other year was "Caprica", because I am me and see below for lady robot emotions). I tend to Do Festivids Wrong and pick up one of my recipient's other fandoms instead. And that almost happened this year! (Hello, IT Crowd.) I was really worried I just wouldn't be able to find the right vidsong for Flight of the Conchords without going the obvious/limiting route and using one of their own songs.
But then, while looking for a song for the OTHER fandom, I stumbled on this thing I've had on my iPod forever and I knew it just fit. Between those retro, falsetto "ooh yeah"s in the chorus and the silly instrumental section that sounds like people playing on household appliances, finding this song did half the work of this vid for me. And while I started out thinking it would just be a Bret & Jemaine vid, I soon realized Murray was the missing link to really bring the lyrics together with the "I'll show you the ropes" refrain and never letting them go (back to New Zealand alone, apparently).
One thing I enjoyed was contrasting the "music video" visuals of the show, which were always really bizarre and interesting, with the more "normal" and pathetic images of them in Murray's office and their terrible gigs, because I wanted both those elements of the show present in the vid. Also, I always knew Mel was gonna make an appearance in that one verse and I was kind of delighted to find clips of her interacting with Murray.
(Also Rhys Darby was literally JUST in the new "X Files" and it took all my strength not to be like LOOK IT'S THE GUY FROM MY VID THAT'S STILL ANONYMOUS. If you haven't seen his Were-Monster episode yet, omg go watch it now.)
Treat Vid: About a Girl
Fandom: Ex Machina [movie]
Music: "My Humps" by The Black-Eyed Peas
Summary: Fergie in the black-and-white room. Made for Kitty, Festivids 2015.
Content notes: This vid is NSFW and contains nudity, self harm, and implied sexual violence.
Password: ava
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
About a Girl from Nicole Anell on Vimeo.
Formerly posted here.
IT WAS ME, I CREATED THIS THING. *ahem*
So, uh,.. Ex Machina was certainly a movie Relevant To My Interests when it comes to lady robots. Something about the intersection of artificial life and gender politics has been potent to me for a long time, and this movie was firing very hard in those directions. When considering doing a festivid treat, I was oddly torn between this and "Gone Girl" (which I'll probably make one of these days) and while I would've liked to finish both in time, I started to feel like vidding Ava & Amy was almost redundant in a revenge-on-the-patriarchy way. Or a self-aware(-ish) female characters boxed into roles and playing them to perfection and ultimately taking control of the story way.
I actually kinda had the idea to vid this song before I saw the movie -- I didn't know if it would work, but it was in my head along with a couple of other (way less ridiculous) songs to interrogate the movie's treatment of female bodies and sexuality. Just knowing how heavily the movie featured woman-as-machine (tm BSG) tropes, my brain had latched onto that song as being potential fodder for an ironic vid. Not least because really, when you LISTEN to the song, it has a legit (and totally unintentional) sinister vibe in places, and the lyrics go through these shifts from super-gross to some kind of weird-ass attempt at empowerment.
So I watched (and really liked!) the movie, and it wasn't *exactly* what I expected, especially visually -- this is gonna sound weird considering what's in the vid, but there's not a whole lot real objectification & male-gazey parts IMO? Which, cool! There's a handful of outright nude scenes and all of them are more frank (Ava admiring her new skin in between murders) and/or unsettling (e.g. with the Othering body horror or Nathan's previous experiments) than erotic, which is a choice I found interesting, and in the vid I kinda had to work around that? But it's also something I tried to match in the vid, with the supposedly ~sexy imagery more implied, and the outright NSFW parts being further toward the end and played almost casually or beside-the-point or counter to the point, if that makes sense. (Sidebar, I HAVE NEVER MADE A VID THAT REQUIRED A NSFW LABEL BEFORE, so holy shit this is one reason I was flipping out on twitter.)
But otherwise the movie was very much what I thought it was gonna be (which is not a criticism) so I decided to just GO WITH this dumb "My Humps" idea, knowing it was... honestly the most ambitious vid I've ever made and really UNLIKE anything I've done before? It required a lot of things I'm not exactly 'known' for as a vidder, starting with just how fucked-up the subject matter is and that it was gonna descend from "sorta creepy but playful" to "content warning needed". And that it required some musicality in the editing and walking a fine line with the tone and dark humor. I HOPE IT SUCCEEDED IDK.
Ava and Kyoko and the prior androids are artificially human and yet have so much gendered baggage imposed onto them (monstrously by Nathan, relatively benignly by Caleb -- which is a whole other meta I would write paragraphs of, maybe when I do a full vid commentary. *g* But whether you see him as an innocent sap or lowkey creepy himself, he definitely projects his own share of sexual and romantic fantasy onto Ava, which does Not End Well 'cause she's just trying to dance, boy walk outside her freakin' room and exist for herself).
P.S. I gave the vid a title that's not the name of the song (it is in fact the name of another song) because I was kiiinda hoping to conceal that until the viewer was already watching and had the WTF reaction, rather than go in totally prepared or skeptical of it. ;)