The Turtle Jourtle

mab_browne recently made a post on Tumblr responding to the following prompt:

List your “top 10” (or up to 10 if you haven’t written that many) fics ranked by kudos on AO3. Are you surprised by what’s most popular to your readers? Then, under a cut, provide your ranking of your personal top 10 fics (with explanations if you want!), and then tag a few fellow writers!

I've decided to do something similar, but with my Professionals vids. Hence I'm only going to list the top five in each ranking, since I only have eight vids, and I'm going to do the first ranking according to the sum of the AO3 kudos and the YouTube likes. Here we go.

Most Popular:
Cover Me: 28K + 27L = 55
You Baby: 9K + 33L = 42
Life During Wartime: 8K + 15L = 23
Behind Blue Eyes: 11K + 10L = 21
Keep Me From Blowing Away: 14K + 5L = 19

The first two items on this list are not surprising. Cover Me is probably the closest to perfect of my vids and also uses better footage than the others. And I knew that You Baby was a viewer favorite. I'm surprised that Life During Wartime ranked so high. I've always been fond of it, but I had the impression that it wasn't very popular. Behind Blue Eyes was my first vid, and while I do like it, it has issues. I attribute its place in the top five to a combination of people wanting to encourage me as a new vidder and its having been up the longest. The fact that this is apparently the perfect song for Pros may also play a role. Among Pros vids available online, Behind Blue Eyes is used more than any other song, with four examples besides mine.

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Here is an index of the vid recs I posted for the Discovered in the Autumn challenge in September and October 2022:

Bodie and Doyle Trash the Streets of London by 45to37
Allies by Katharine Scarritt
Heartbreak Beat by Ancasta
You Can Count On Me by Bodie WAP
Standing Outside the Fire by kat-byrd
Ground Zero by Jasmin R / DanceDevil
Sweet About Me by jaicen5
Bodie and Doyle #1 Crush by zzebeddy
Holding Out for a Hero by Katharine Scarritt
We Walk the Same Line by Media Cannibals

Halloween bonus: ghostbusters by Perruffus / María Magdalena Fernández del Río Ossandón

Well. I forgot to post this rec on Wednesday and nearly forgot to post this week's pseudorandom vids today. It's been a weird week.

This vid rec is the tenth in the series I've been posting as part of the Discovered in the Autumn challenge. It is the last proper entry in the series, though there will be a bonus on Monday in honor of Halloween.

So, let me present We Walk the Same Line by Media Cannibals. This vid has their characteristic impeccable editing and satisfying clip choices. The sentiment of the song is also very appropriate for the Lads, even if, as the vid's creators noted, it is a little soft "for our rough, tough boys."

Bodie and Doyle #1 Crush by zzebeddy (sw33n3y) is another one of that creator's hypnotic and stunningly stylish vids. This series of recs has not had many unequivocally shippy entries, but this is one. I think the song is very suitable for the Lads.

zzebeddy's approach to vidding is notably different from mine. It uses many more effects, obviously, and also includes clips not directly related to the lyrics of the song alongside those that are, achieving a kind of collage effect. I really enjoy several of zzebeddy's vids, though. It's fun to see someone else do something in a way you never could.

I admit that I like Ground Zero by Jasmin R / DanceDevil partly for the bombastic sci-fi rock anthem it is set to. This song, apparently, was written in the 1990s for the Transformers fan convention BotCon, and who could resist a fun track with that kind of fandom cred?

Visually, the vid doesn't have a clear message and only selectively follows the lyrics of the song. It has very good timing, however, and its creator did match the clips to the changing mood of the music in a way that I find satisfying. I think that the vid manages to capture some of the spirit of the show.

Today's Discovered in the Autumn recommendation is You Can Count on Me by Bodie WAP.

Last night I read a very sweet Starsky and Hutch fic and found myself reflecting that you just can't write anything as sweet as that for Bodie and Doyle. That, in turn, reminded me of something kat-byrd (sc_fossil) said during a discussion about choosing songs for fanvids: that if a song she likes is too sappy for the Lads, she can often use it in an S&H vid. Anyway, all this is build-up to saying that the song in this vid is almost too sweet for Pros. Still, I think it works, perhaps partly because it's a friendship song as opposed to a romantic one.

Today's rec, Allies, is one of the recently posted VRC-era vids by Katharine Scarritt. It's not as unusual as Bodie and Doyle Trash the Streets of London; it's just a well made vid using what seems to me a perfect song for the Lads.

(Unfortunately, the audio of the available copy is kind of mushy. Viewers may wish to read the lyrics of the song before watching. The visuals are in pretty good condition, though, being faded but not damaged.)

At the end of last month, eight VCR-era Professionals vids by Katharine Scarritt were posted at the Internet Archive. One was Land of Confusion, which the notes indicate has been a highly regarded vid in the fandom. I can see why. The recording posted at IA is badly damaged, but the excellence of the vid is still evident. There is a wonderful sense of movement throughout, due partly to the clip choice and partly to the timing of the clips. The latter, which I'm sure must have been difficult to control using tape, is particularly impressive.

The degraded state of the recording and the great work underneath make me itch to recut this vid using the digital copies of the episodes that I use for my own vids. According to Fanlore, however, Katharine Scarritt passed away earlier this year, so there is nobody whose permission I could ask for that project. It's possible I may still do it for my own enjoyment, but it is a big undertaking and a fiddly one. I've puttered around a bit, testing the feasibility, and I've found something curious. The audio of the transcribed file is slightly faster than the digital version of the song Land of Confusion. Yet the video clips move slightly slower than those drawn from my digital copies of the episodes, taking longer to get from their first frame to their last. The latter, in particular, would make it difficult to do a perfectly faithful recut, and if I am the only person who would ever see it, I'm not sure it would be worth the headaches.

ETA: Good news! I may be granted permission for a recut by the person now responsible for Katharine Scarritt's works.

My new vid is the first I have made using the better copies of the episodes that a helpful fellow fan gave me last year. (You know who you are. Thanks!) These copies have much sharper and brighter images and truer, more consistent colors. That's all good. In particular, it's nice not to have to do as much tinkering with color balance while editing in order to keep consecutive clips from different episodes from clashing with each other.

Yet I kind of miss what I suppose you could call the more traditional look I got when I used my old copies of the episodes. They made my vids look more like most of the other Pros vids I enjoy and admire and made them feel like part of a continuity. I don't think I will be switching back; that would be silly, since the actual tradition followed by previous Pros vidders was to use the best footage available to them. I probably won't be recutting my older vids, either, though.

Yesterday, I spent some time rummaging around the Safehouse comm looking for old fanvid postings. I didn't find much that was new to me. Some of the vids I had already encountered on YouTube, others were posted there but have since been removed, a number were hosted on now closed personal sites, and most of the rest were uploaded to file sharing services where they are no longer available.

One thing I did find, though, was kiwisue's post introducing "Sisters are doing it form themselves" by Enednoviel, which by some grace still has live links.

This is an unusual and well crafted vid focusing on the women of The Professionals. I'm familiar with the song, and before watching the vid I was skeptical that there would be enough footage to support it. I was wrong, though. Who knew there was so much girl power going on while we were busy watching the Lads? As firlefanzine said in a comment, "Here we see how a good trailer can sell even Pros...as a women’s liberation show!"