new angel vid - Blindfold - Angel/Fred

[obsessive24]

Blindfold
Fandom: Angel
Song/Artist: Blindfold by Morcheeba
Duration: 3:36 minutes

Summary: Angel/Fred. What it means to be saved.
Spoilers: end of season 2 through to season 5.

Click to view

Many thanks to littleheaven70 for helping out with source!


Three months in here
Can't catch the tears
Time never lands
Our love is all that stands now
Streets feel strange
And longer lives can never change

I'm so glad to have you
And it's getting worse
I'm so mad to love you
And your evil curse

I feel out of place
Just look at my face
Stuck in the mud
Knee-deep in blood, girl
Eyes blindfold
You never said I'm growing old

(My heart is still reliant.)
(My heart is very light.)

Tell them I've gone
And nothing's wrong
In from the past
A sudden blast, bang!
Spring has gone
And summer keeps on coming on

I'm so glad to have you
And I'm getting worse
I'm so mad to love you
And your evil curse
I've a plan to save you from my misery
I'm a man too brave to follow history


Notes
I started this vid with some key moments in my head, but the separate threads never formed a coherent plan. Some ideas were garnered from yhlee's Primitive (and some breathlessness from her equally gorgeous shortfic Ready Aim), though I think this vid's focus is quite different. It isn't so much about character similarities as it is about the ways they save each other, or fail trying. Angelus' psycho-sexual aggression toward Fred in season 4 was what initially drew me to the 'ship, but in the larger scheme of the vid it seemed off-base, so I ended up removing almost all references to that arc.

As an unconventional pairing vid that's not overly AU, it's mostly an experiment with twisting context, trying to provide a slightly subversive motive behind canon events.

Vid in a nutshell
First half: Why One Ships Fred/Angel
Fugitive in Pylea vs. the one-eyed girl in Jasmine's kingdom of the blind. Saving the handsome man from his inner monster vs. the magic bullet. In both instances Fred acts as Angel's anchor, to his human element or to reality. And that's damn sexy.

Second Half: The Inevitable Ending
W&H!Angel sinks into corporate-hell-slump, but Fred's death jolts him into altering the state of things. Illyria, Black Thorn, signing away the Shanshu all canon, but hopefully with a far more tragic romantic flavour after the first half sets up the 'ship.

Editing, etc.
The hardest thing about this song is that it's too right for the source. It's too easy to be literal to the point of absurdity. I love the sampling and felt that it was an interesting way to bring Angel's diluted focus into the mix by giving him POV for a few moments. Blurry effects just there for the pretty. A couple of circular gradient wipes, an image matte that hopefully can't be detected easily.

Season 5 generally
I didn't think much of season 5 the first time I watched it, but watching everything in quick succession the second time just wrecked me. I think - and this really seems like the crux of it - joining an evil law firm isn't comparable to losing your soul or slowly getting corrupted; you're constantly on the lookout for that, but you're looking in the wrong direction. The genius of season 5 is about trying desperately at all times to do right, keeping a close eye on your soul, but all that you're doing is getting persistently sidetracked by endless distractions. That's hell in its purest form, because your soul is still in a position to lament it. Angel has never been more heroic, in my eyes, when he killed Drogyn to get into the Circle of the Black Thorn; it takes a tremendous amount of bravery, and it takes a tremendous amount of faith to trust that you'll emerge from it with your humanity still intact. Even the Shanshu, the one thing that's carried his faith through the years, is gone; in the end there's nothing standing between him and the darkness, but that doesn't matter. He is secure in the knowledge of who he has become.

I would have very much liked to explore this theme in the vid, but since the focus was heavily elsewhere, I didn't feel like I had the space to back up the argument. Ergo the much easier (and probably more visually interesting) W&H-will-eat-your-soul imagery instead. Which is also fair (if cliché), but, as I said, it's probably the wrong way of looking at it.

Tech
Massive exporting problems as usual. Lots of swearing and tantrums until I finally figured out it was not the fault of my dear old computer or Premiere, but rather due to memory leaks in the multitude of avisynth scripts I was running. The problem isn't fixable per se, as it's caused by bugs inherent in avisynth, but at least damage was reduced enough to warrant a working export. Also was the first time in mixing 4:3/16:9 aspect ratios, but thankfully not much drama there after the first few missteps.