Vividcon 2010 Premieres

Summer really is convention season for me, I went to two in August and I'm currently madly prepping for Dragon*Con which is this coming weekend. I thought I'd be done after this, but I just found out that there's a new con, New England Comic Con, in Boston October 15-17, so I'll probably be at that.

As some of you may recall, I left this year's Vividcon early to be in a wedding party, and I missed the Saturday night Premieres event, "the Oscars of vidding" (though it's premieres and not an awards show, so really sundance or cannes would be a better analogy, I think). This weekend I finally sat down with a friend and watched all of the Premieres vid show in one go. These forty vids were all brand new, finished weeks or months early but not shown or distributed publicly until this event. It's really quite neat to be at the world premiere of anything, in my opinion, and I loved Premieres last year. There's two main ways to watch premieres at Vividcon, you can watch in the utterly silent (except laughter) formal viewing room, where people are only allowed to enter or leave between vids except in an emergency, or you can watch in the overflow room, where talking is allowed. I was right up front in the formal room last year, my first time at Vividcon. I mostly had a great time, but it might be a bit more intense than I want next year, I'm not sure what I'll do. I watched this year's premieres in my living room with a friend, and we were pretty quiet during serious vids that we liked, and laughed heartily during funny vids, and were vocal about our confusion during the strange ones.

So, about those vids! I didn't have my program near me this time, and while I had read through what was listed at the con, I had forgotten most details. Normally when I watch a vid I have to actively seek it out, so I know exactly what I am getting. At the con, I constantly check my program. This time, I just put the DVD in, and sometimes the vid began by telling me what the source was, and sometimes it didn't! It was very different. I think in the future I would like to have the program available for when I am confused and would like to know the source, but I'd also like to make myself stop obsessively checking it, because being surprised can be nice.

Here are some links to some of the vids. Starting with the more humorous ones and moving into more serious vids. Enjoy! If you like the vids, leave a comment! Livejournal takes open id.

• "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", Stark Trek
  http://lcsbanana.livejournal.com/1990920.html
  
  I've seen a lot of vids to songs from "The Lion King", and this one still made me laugh. Oh, Kirk. :-)
  



• "Because I'm Awesome", Glee
  http://anoel.livejournal.com/117488.html
  
  I love Glee, and I love Kurt, and this vid is a quick, fun romp through the life of everyone's favorite gay teenager in Ohio show choir. :-)
  



• "When I'm up I can't get down again", Takin' Over the Asylum
  http://deejay.livejournal.com/188291.html
  
  This is the one vid I saw before Vividcon, which made me feel special of course. :-) (Vidders are always allowed and encouraged to get feedback on their vids before they release them). Do you love David Tennant, lately of Doctor Who? Then watch him in his first major role, from all the way back in 1994, as a young bipolar man in a Scottish mental institution. I plan to watch the whole miniseries eventually.



• "I like you so much better when you're naked", Smallville
  http://sisabet.livejournal.com/400373.html
  
  So, I've never watched any Smallville (outside of vids), though I think the Vividcon DVDs and my friends might be conspiring to change that. (I hear season nine is really good?) I know hardly anything about the show outside of the standard Superman canon, and that Lex and Clark are ridiculously slashy, at least in the early seasons. (And on that topic, one of the vidders of this premiered another vid at Club Vivid, Clark/Lex and "Bad Romance", primarily Smallville but drawing from lots of other Superman properties. It's fabulous, and I am reminded how compelling villians are for me... )This vid is totally fun and had me bouncing, and just seeing the title again put the song back in my head, which hasn't happened with anything else from premieres. And I've only heard the song once, ever!



• "CITIHALL*", Futurama
  http://bradcpu.livejournal.com/123653.html
  
  Wow. Brad took a long song, that is mostly spoken word, and really complicated, and he made a vid that matched up to that better than I would have thought possible. I am really impressed. (My other favorite vid to a Tenacious D song is here)
  



• "Ada", Inglorious Basterds
  http://braver-creature.livejournal.com/15702.html
  
  A lot can, and has, been said about the women that Quentin Tarantino creates, how they interact with violence, and with men, lots of really interesting things. Right now, what I have to say is that Shoshana is awesome and I would have gladly watched her story without all that Brad Pitt stuff. Warning, this does spoil almost the entire movie, but it's beautiful.



• "I Can't Hear the Music", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
  http://settiai.livejournal.com/1379002.html
  
  It's been years since I watched DS9, but I loved that show so much. This is a portrait of Kai Winn, her flaws and her desire, her path throughout the whole show. DS9 has had a minor resurgence in my corner of fandom lately, and I really need to rewatch some of it.



• "Becoming Brothers", Friday Night Lights
  http://kassrachel.livejournal.com/834852.html
  
  Do you watch Friday Night Lights? I will have to write a big post on it some day, because it's just fabulous, and I swear on everything, you don't need to like football for this show, and if it's not the kind of show you normally watch, that's a major reason you should watch. Oh, show of my heart! Here is a lovely vid about this amazing show. Watch it, then let's chat. :-)



• "Stay Awake", multiple sources.
  http://laurashapiro.livejournal.com/304845.html
  
  This one is creepy and poignant and I love it. It's about women, and fertility and the womb, and... just watch this one, and tell me (and laurashapiro!) what you think!




• "Bloodbuzz Ohio", Breaking Bad
  http://f1renze.livejournal.com/219264.html
  
  People have been telling me for awhile that I need to see Breaking Bad, and I vaguely intended to do so someday, but this vid just grabbed ahold of me and would not let go. I didn't quite cry, but I am not sure this show will make me cry when I watch it... in the very near future.

There are so many good vids in there, but the hour is late and the laptop power is low, so I shall bid you farewell for now. Watch vids!

More Theatre! "Next to Normal"

I'm not going to bury the lede here, this might be the most emotionally powerful play I have ever seen. It was the first musical to win the pulitzer since "Rent", and something like the 9th in 93 years. I was fairly certain this show would make me cry, given what I knew about the subject matter, but I didn't expect to end the show sobbing and to spend half the show trying not to disturb other audience members with my crying. It's pretty intense.

"Next to Normal" is the story of a suburban family with serious problems. It is about mental illness, how it can control the life of the person with the illness, and how it affects the people around them. It is painful, and poignant. I feel like I could see it three times and still be finding new ways to relate to the story, new ways to identify with the characters, new ways to relive my own experiences through the show. Mental illness has affected my life in so many different ways, and while this is just the story of a handful of people, centered around one person's illness, I feel echoes of so many people in this show. I'm afraid that even a week later, I can't speak very coherently about this show. It was so intensely emotional, I know I didn't catch everything.

I won't talk about the plot in detail, because this is a show that I very strongly recommend going into knowing as little as possible. Trust the story, and let it unfold before you. The music served the plot well enough, but I don't know how much I will listen to the soundtrack. I haven't tried listening to yet, perhaps some of the songs will jump out at me.

I'm told the original lead actress, who left the show last month, was truly amazing, but I was very happy with this cast. The married couple at the heart of the story is played by a real life married couple, (which i read about in the playbill for "A Little Night Music" earlier in the day.) I can hardly imagine what it is like to go through that relationship every day with your spouse, to say all those things and have all that conflict to the person you have a real relationship with. It reminds me how much I would like to play closely with my boyfriend Peter in a Live Action Role-Playing game some day. Recently he played the Judas-analogue to my Jesus-analogue in a game, and the game masters called us during casting to make sure we'd be comfortable in those roles. At the time I laughed and said that of course it would be no problem, but afterwards I did find I really wanted a hug from Peter and promises that he'd never sell me out to the feds. :-)

In conclusion, go see this show. I wasn't the only one crying, when we finally left the theatre one couple was still sitting in their seats, clutching each other and sobbing hysterically. I don't know what pain they've felt in their lives, but I hope the show gives them some catharsis. I really can't speak to what the show is like for people whose lives haven't been touched by mental illness, but I fairly certain the story will still be strong, the pain will be real, the characters will be sharp and touching, even if it doesn't cut into your own heart's pains the way it did mine.

"A Little Night Music"

Hello, blog! I am just back from New York City and I am full of culture! Over the course of < 30 hours, I saw three groups perform at Lincoln Center and two Tony award winning Broadway musicals! It was delightfully decadent. And at the same time, I visited my third city (Chicago, Boston, New York) in seven days! I am very lucky.

Today I'll talk about the Saturday matinee. This was my second time seeing "A Little Night Music" and my companion's first. It's a romantic comedy from Stephen Sondheim (my personal god of musical theatre) set among the love affairs of actors, lawyers and Counts in turn of the (20th) century Sweden. At least I think it's a comedy, it is full of comedic moments, but also many tears and much sadness.

We got really quite good seats through the TKTS booth in Times Square, which sells significantly discounted tickets to shows the day of the performance. Sadly, Angela Lansbury is no longer in the production, but it now stars Bernadette Peters, who I'd take over Catherine Zeta-Jones any day. She was just *wonderful*. Sixty two, and she's still completely gorgeous and lively and wonderful.

This production felt much more comedic than the other production I saw, I think in large part thanks to Ms. Peters. Her mannerisms and tone of voice and energy gave real humor to scenes that felt flat in the college production I saw previously. She was an utter delight, and I was honored to be mere feet away from her.

As I told my companion on the way to the show, I was never clear why, of all of Sondheim's wonderful music, "Send in the Clowns" had gotten the most popular attention, when it wasn't even in my top 20 favorite Sondheim songs. When Bernadette Peters sang it on that stage, heartbroken, crying, vulnerable and pained... I didn't sob, but I had chills, and people near me cried.

The rest of the cast was fine, I was just overwhelmed with love for Bernadette Peters. The actress who played Anne in the previous production... her voice was incredibly unpleasant. It was interesting to see that with an Anne where I am not distracted by the actress, I still think of the character in approximately the same way. (At least this time I didn't slip up and say "God she's so *dumb*" outloud in the front row during Act II.)

Elaine Stritch played Madame Armfeldt, and while she was certainly a fine actor, I did keep thinking about how much I wished I could see Angela Lansbury in the role. I don't know if she's a trained singer. Her one song, "Liasons", was not so muc sung as... complained? In the previous production, she was mostly wistful in this song, where as Ms. Stritch seemed to be close to, well, freaking out about it. As I told my companion, she has such special problems.

"The Miller's Son" is a favorite of mine, and I had high hopes for the actor playing Petra, and she did not disappoint. It's a joyful ode to youthful promiscuity, and I think it will now be stuck in my head again thanks to writing this post. :-)

I always forget just how much better professional productions are than physicists at MIT. (Especially the dancing, I do so love dancing.) I don't have a good enough ear to really notice the difference in singing skill most of the time, but with dancing, I am just delighted by professional work. And this is a show with hardly any dancing at all!

Overall, it was a lovely production and I recommend it. I left the theatre in excellent spirits, full of happiness and love for the world, a perhaps strange reaction to a Sondheim play, I know. Of course, by the end of the second play I saw on Saturday, I was sobbing hysterically, but that will be another post. :)

A Taste of Club Vivid! (Or, I do crazy things to party with fangirls)

This weekend, I flew to Chicago for a dance party full of 100 drunk fangirls covered in sparkles, stayed up almost all night, slept 90 minutes, then flew back to Boston and went to a wedding rehearsal. This is the kind of the thing my life is full of.

Technically, I wasn't just there for the dance party. The dance party, Club Vivid, is the Friday night event at Vividcon, the fanvidding convention that occurs every August in Chicago. (For explanation of vidding, here's one of my earliest posts to this blog: Festivids Reveal.) The con runs friday-sunday, with many people arriving Thursday and staying till Monday, for extra time with rarely seen friends, or time to visit Chicago. Last year, my first time, I showed up on Wednesday and stayed till Monday. This year, I was scheduled to be Maid of Honor in my friend's wedding on Sunday (today). I was quite miserable over the scheduling, and eventually decided to go anyway, just attending one day of official programming.

I flew to Chicago on Wednesday, and went and visited two old internet friends of mine who live in the area. On Thursday, I visited the Field Museum with 5 other fangirls, one of whom works there (and got us in free!) On Friday, I attended panels, and Club Vivid. During all that, I spent as much time hanging out with my once-a-year friends as I could. It was very bittersweet, knowing I'd be missing two days of programming and the big Premiere event, when dozens of vids made my attendees premiere for the first time ever.

There's a lot to talk about with Vividcon, but in this post I'm just going to talk about Club Vivid.

From what I've gathered, no one ever expected Club Vivid to become what it is. It started as a dance party where attendees danced to fanvids made to dancey music. Now Club Vivid has on the order of thirty vids that are made *for* Club Vivid, and premiere there before being offered online or to anyone else. I think the whole con shows up, there is a pre-paid open bar, people wear complicated costumes and a whole lot of glitter, and it's my favorite dance party in the world. I had a fabulous time this year. A lot of people at Vividcon are anxious, many of them surrounded by people they only know online. Drunken dance parties help with that.


Club Vivid always starts with the Joxer Dance from Xena. Imagine rows and rows of excited fangirls dancing along to this, including the weird hopping and the conga line. It is good times. I found myself in a somewhat grumpy mood before Club Vivid, wondering if it really was smart to come all the way to Chicago for such a short trip that would leave me exhausted for the wedding rehearsal.... and then the Joxer Dance came on and everything was better. :-)

[It is at this point in the writing that the author realizes that many of the vids she's been planning to use in this post are not yet available online. This makes her sad, thought she doesn't fault the vidders at all, because they are still having fun at the con or traveling home. It does however change the rest of the post.]

I don't know of anything like Club Vivid. Vids made for Club Vivid... will get watched by other people, but the intended audience in unique in my knowledge of vidding. (Please enlighten me if you know otherwise!) The audience will be watching many, many vids in a row, but that is not unique, given vidshows at many cons. The audience will generally be very happy, and much of it will be intoxicated. Club Vivid (CVV) vids might have some deep and profound meaning, but most of the audience won't see deep nuances while dancing. They won't be looking at the vid continuously, there may be a significant undulating crowd between them and the screen, and they wlll be *dancing*. Some people will ignore the images completely and just dance to the music! I have no proof, but I feel like CVV have it easy, because the audience is easy to please. Given them good music, and something that looks pretty or contains characters they like, and people will cheer and dance. In the light of day, those vids will be analyzed, they will be watched by sober people who are sitting still and watching ever second intently. They will be critiqued, praised and criticized, but for those few moments at Club Vivid... it's just pure glee. I like to play vids for my friends who aren't regular vid watchers, and I have a hard time trying to explain the context of Club Vivid vids to them... hopefully I have done a better job here.

Unsurprisingly, I would like my first Vividcon vid to be at Club Vivid, and I at this moment I am committed to submitting one next year.

And now, some vids that have shown at Club Vivid. I really wish this year's first premiere was available online... I'll add it when it gets posted. Not all vids at CVV were made specifically for Club Vivid.

First off, an Adam Lambert vid to a Lady Gaga song. :-)



This is one of my favorites CVV vids. It premiered last year at CVV and played again this year, it's a multi-source vid about robot armies. Seven Nation Army



Iron Man vid to "Let it Rock" (made for one of my vividcon roomates!)



Club Vivid makes me dance to things I'd never voluntarily listen to, like Miley Cyrus and Kee$ha. Yes, I know.

From Milly, a "Legend of the Seeker" vid to "Party in the USA".

http://millylicious.livejournal.com/343231.html

From Kuwdora, a Vampire Nikola Tesla (from "Sanctuary") vid to "TiK Tok" by Ke$ha

http://kuwdora.livejournal.com/502230.html

This one might need to be seen to be believed... "The Sound of Music" to a remix/cover of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". It is a bit weird. :-) (If you want to see a "The Sound of Music" vid that made me cry, go here)



One that was very popular at Festivids, OK Go and "Back to the Future", Here It Goes Back Again (download only, no streaming).

Of course, we had to be on a boat.





This one is so loved that when the song was played at another con's dance party, sans vid, people were shouting about this vid. It's my favorite of Dualbunny's vids about Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica to Pink songs. :-)

There are many more, but I need sleep to recover from my mad 5 days of con and wedding!

Talking About Television: Mad Men (contains very minor spoilers)

There's lot of reasons I watch "Mad Men", but I think in the end the most important reason is the world. I am fascinated by the world of 1960s Manhattan. I like to think I am acceptably well versed in history, but nothing else has given me such a window into this world. It became even more fascinating to me when I realized that I'm looking at the world of my grandparents. They all worked in Manhattan. My parents are age contemporaries to Don Draper's children. One of my grandmothers met my grandfather because he was looking for a nice Irish girl from the girls in the building (for they were decidedly considered girls back then). My grandfathers both worked in insurance, and I know the constant heavy drinking was real, and something that had real consequences. I've never really understood what that world was like, and I'm fascinating. I'm planning to send DVDs to my 84 year old grandmother, and see what she thinks. There's so much going on in Mad Men, and so much of it is mostly in the background, but so important. Little things, like the family picnic that ends with just leaving all the trash in the grass, and things that turn my stomach, like the depiction of early 1960s childbirth. There's so much going on with gender and gender roles, the sexual revolution, and the increasing prevalence of divorce.

So far, Mad Men has covered 1960-1964. In my mind, the 60s didn't really begin until Kennedy was shot and the Beatles arrived (and I've long seen the intensity of Beatlemania as partly a reaction to the hole left in the America psyche by JFK's death). All of the major events of the 60s are foregone conclusions in the minds of the audience. I know that Nixon loses the 1960 election, and that JFK, MLK and RFK don't survive the decade. I know we make it to the moon. I know that the little conflict in Vietnam first mentioned in season three is going to change American life. It's weird, I rarely watch TV where I know so much of what will happen.

For all of season three, I felt JFK's death looming. Early on, we see the date on a wedding invitation for Saturday, November 23, 1963, and we know that the wedding is doomed, taking place the day after JFK's death. JFK died long before I was born, but I still found myself crying over his death, not so much because of the loss of his life, but because of the way it affected the people on the show. I am a sucker for strong emotion on screen, sometimes even commercials can make me cry.

I am honestly dreading the escalation of the Vietnam War in the Man Men world. That is a story that I know quite well from school and other media. Perhaps they will surprise me and show me some angle that is new to me, but I'd rather they focus on something I know less well. I am very curious to see how many years Mad Men will cover, and which time periods they will skip over. I am looking for recommendations of other shows that give such a profound send of a real time and place.