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Tuesday, August 20, 2002

AAAHHHHHH. Son of a bitch -- I had a whole long, long entry written out about Saturday at the con, and then just before posting, my god-damned computer froze up, and I lost the whole thing. <ranting, raving, shaking of fists>

So, I guess I'll see if I can recover it …

Date: Saturday. Schedule: packed solid with cool programming. Me: underslept and hungover. Ah, yes.

I didn't get to as much programming over the weekend as I'd planned to, actually, because I had con suite duties, and because I ended up spending a lot of time hanging with people and talking. The first panel I got to was Killa's, on Aesthetics of Vidding, and it was excellent. She had put together a wonderfully organized presentation, complete with vid clips, slides, etc., and I have no idea how she found the time to do that, given that she's also been working more than full-time at her job lately, plus producing all the print materials (program, flyers, feedback sheets, etc.) for the con. Amazing woman.

She covered several visual elements of film/cinematography that vidders can use to advantage, especially color and shape, and the whole thing was a revelation to me. God, I am so not a visual person. Regarding color, she first gave a quick overview of color theory, the color wheel, etc., and then talked about how various shows have their own distinctive color palette. X-Files, for example (at least in the Vancouver years) used a lot of dark green, grey, black, along with their signature acid green--cool and somewhat distancing tones. Highlander used a lot of blue and gold, rich complementary colors, while West Wing is characterized by a warm earth/wood palette. She pointed out (via use of vid clips) that due South is a show whose color schemes are predominantly neutral (with Fraser's red jacket as the eye-catching focal/contrast point), and hence she doesn't much like looking at it, because she likes richer, more vivid colors, and I had a little Aha! moment of thinking, hey, maybe that's one reason I myself like the show so much, because those neutrals (greys, taupes, browns, black and whites) are my preferred colors, the ones I naturally gravitate toward.

Then she talked about shapes, and the way that jagged or asymmetric or diagonal shapes and lines can produce an edgy, unsettled effect in a vid, whereas circles and curves affect a viewer very differently. She also brought up gestalt theory, pointing out the ways that the eye's tendency to seek pattern, bring closure to incomplete forms, etc., can be used by vidders.

I recall leaving the panel with a sense of brain full now and thinking, "Jeez, I really am not smart enough to do this vidding stuff." I mean, to me the overwhelming thing about vidding is that there's so damn much going on all at the same time--visuals, music, lyrics--and the panel made me aware of how many more things are going on that I hadn't even been aware of. As several kind people pointed out to me, it's not really necessary to take control of all these elements, especially as a beginner; but the thing is that if one's aware of them as potentially significant variables, things that one could use to create a desired effect, then one feels a kind of responsibility to try to keep them in mind, try to use them consciously. And I just don't have enough horsepower to do all that, at least not at this point.

I really wish I could have gone next to Luminosity's Movement panel, but I had con suite duties, and in any event she'd told me about most of what she planned to cover during that late-Thursday-night Cajun dinner. Note to self: pick Lum's brain as often as possible. Good brain, full of excellent stuff.

Then I did make it to Francesca's Comedy panel; this was a relaxing hour for me, actually, because comedy is an area where I don't expect myself to have any innate talent, and hence I could just soak up the conversation without feeling swamped by inadequacy. I did find myself thinking, though, that vidders in general could learn a lot by studying what makes an effective humor vid--especially the principles of brevity, focus, restraint, working against the obvious, finding the one key moment/clip, getting in and getting out fast. Over the weekend, I thought at times that quite a few vids could be improved by cutting maybe a verse or so out of the original song--figuring out exactly what it is you want to do in the vid, and then using only as much as is needed to make that point. Excess or padding seem to me somehow more apparent in vids than in writing, and never more so than in comedic vids.

After that it was dinnertime, and a bunch of us wandered over to the local House o' Meat and stocked up on protein, with much conversation. I remember that there was mocking of dreadful Highlander fiction, and I finally got a chance for some conversation (though not enough) with aerye, who struck me as someone of great brain, depth, and clarity.

And after that was the premiere show, which … well, arrgh, I so suck at describing or critiquing specific vids. Sockii has a wonderful account of this show, and I'll just refer you all there.

And the rest of the evening is a bit blurry in my mind … I remember that I managed to snag a copy of Media Cannibals 5 to show Francesca, who hadn't seen it before. Then later we wandered down to the Room of Slack, where Zen and Pete were watching Smallville episodes, and Francesca gave us a meta-riff on Lex as the latest in a long tradition of Queering the Villain. And much conversation was had, and eventually bed was fallen into.

And Sunday will be covered tomorrow. Late. Tired. Pissed off at computer. Sleep beckons.

Posted @ 11:00 PM CST [Link]3 comments

Mother of god, am I tired. It seems that with every passing year, the bounce-back from a con, and from the physical drubbing it entails (lack of sleep, mass consumption of junk food, social overstimulation) takes a little longer. But I'm home, and being relentlessly bellowed at by my very pissed-off cat while trying to sort through a huge stack of mail. ("Grrrawwwhhgggg!" "Shut up!" "Mrragghghghgrrr!" "I don't care!" "Rrrrrangggrghghg!" "Suffering Jesus, will you put a cork in it before I kill the both of us!" Run on continuous loop for six straight hours...) So this con report is especially disjointed and incoherent, but I thought I'd jot a few quick notes before memory fades.

Drove down Thursday with Carol, Jackie and Pam in the Rental Car of Great Reliability and Capacious Trunk Space; the rental was essential because none of our cars feature much reliability at all, and we were transporting four people, four people's luggage, two VCRs, and a big boxful of tapes. Dropped everyone and everything at the hotel, and drove myself to the Chicago Loop house, to find most of the con com huddled around a great shrine of electronic equipment, madly burning DVDs, air humming with adreneline overdrive. Francesca/Speranza was there (meeting whom was one of the great pleasures of the weekend, about which more later), and after a while a group of us trooped off in search of food, ending up scarfing down Cajun at an outdoor cafe at 11:00 p.m. Returned to Loop house to find mad DVD burning still in progress; finally, around 1:30, the remotes were pried out of Ellen's hands, and everyone crashed on an assortment of futons and sofabeds.

Friday was the day of the great transport of all equipment to the hotel; I lost count at some point, but at least seven or eight VCRs and DVD players were packed into cars, along with tapes beyond number, and enough cables to stretch to Schenectady. The plan had been to get all packing/conveyance/unpacking done by ten or so, after which we would decamp to Walker Bros. Pancake House for a big breakfast. As it turned out, we actually converged on the pancake house like a swarm of hunger-maddened refugees at 2 in the afternoon, after a long interlude of electronics-wrangling which I thankfully evaded by hiding out in the hotel lobby. (Inserting here mad props to the tech-whizzes on the con com who managed to make an incredibly complex set-up work almost glitch-free, at the cost of great time, labor, and skull-sweat.) Anyway, I have never seen so much food devoured so quickly. Then we drove back to the hotel in semi-diabetic-comas; naps were taken, con suite supplies were purchased, tech-wrangling continued. Members started showing up, and there was much frenzied greeting and hugging. Somewhere in here, Francesca and I got checked into the room we were sharing, and got to spend some quiet time talking.

OK, Francesca is just one amazing human being. There are people out there who are scary-smart and insightful; or who are fearsomely articulate; or who have a high order of extroverted warmth; or who are hilariously funny. You don't often find all of these attributes in one person, but she's one of those rare birds. We spent much of the weekend conducting a sort of on-and-off high-intensity colloquium on due South, probably boring the bejaysus out of all the non-dS-fans within earshot, and every so often I'd have to grab a notebook and jot down all the extremely cool concepts she was spinning off, which I want to try to hang onto for nefarious story purposes.

There was one moment--about 2:00 a.m. Sunday, I think--when I'd been blathering about the WIP, and she started riffing on a Harold Pinter play, and suddenly came up with a whole new way of structuring the entire story, which is (a) monumentally cool and would be a great improvement over the structure I've been working with, and (b) would require major rewrite of all 680K I've got so far. Waaahhhh. I don't really think I can face that at this point; but man, I wish I'd been smarter a year ago and thought about this structure for it. Sigh.

God, I lost my chronology in here somewhere, right? Friday night, Friday night ... oh yeah, then Zen and nancy and Pete showed up, and Francesca and I ended up hanging out with them in the Room of Slack. She hadn't met them before, and I'll tell you, there's no pleasure like seeing people one digs meeting for the first time and really hitting it off. It was a marvelous evening, and I made ferocious inroads on a bottle of Jack Daniels, and staggered back to bed around three, and woke up for the first full day of the con feeling rather less than crisp.

OK, this is getting way too long, and somehow it's gotten to be midafternoon, and I have to make a grocery run and return some phone calls. Stay tuned for the next installment, coming soon to a blog near you.

Posted @ 03:28 PM CST [Link]5 comments