tinturtle | Entries tagged with my creations (about)

Despite having only one round left, I haven't been making very rapid progress on Lifetime Fic Bingo over the past couple of weeks. My mental health has been bad, and my concentration has suffered. What I have been doing, to my surprise, is coming up with an idea for a long Professionals fic and making it concrete to the tune of six pages of notes and a 2,500 word outline. All this inspiration came too late for me to sign up on time for this year's Big Bang, but the kind BB mods have just welcomed me as a late entrant. So here we go. A rough draft by July 1st shouldn't be too much of a problem, right? Right?

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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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.

Well, it's been over a year since I've posted a new vid. Somehow my dissatisfaction with last August's vid Keep Me From Blowing Away has been blocking me from making progress on anything else. I don't know if that stems from loss of confidence or just the subconscious feeling that what I really need to be doing with my vidding energy is fixing my existing work.

At any rate, it seems to have been a good thing that, despite my best intentions, I haven't been able to keep my hands off Keep Me From Blowing Away. After stumbling on some new ideas in July, I finally arrived last week at what felt like a finished revision. And—hey, presto!—suddenly I was full of motivation to make a new vid. Today I posted the improved version of Keep Me From Blowing Away, and I am happily at work on my new project: the least slashy slash vid ever. I hope you are all looking forward to that. *g*

(The new vid will join my Just a Little Light, which, if not the most slashy gen vid ever, must at least be up there.)

I have vid-making on the brain again. Earlier, I was listening to Internet radio and found myself considering each song's potential as a fanvid track. One of the candidates was "All These Things That I've Done" by The Killers. It has some possibilities, I think. It also, however, has the repeated lyric "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier." I once read an article that pointed out that that makes about as much sense as the title of this post, and now I can't hear the line without laughing.

(I am still considering revamping my last vid—indeed, I did some work on it before my move—but I'm not feeling very motivated in that direction at the moment. It got kudos on AO3 yesterday, so somebody likes it as it is. Maybe even several somebodies; it actually has more AO3 kudos than any of my other vids. I don't want to mess it up for the people who enjoy it now.)

I will probably be starting a new Professionals fanvid soon using the song Hammer to Fall by Queen. (Thanks to

restorick for the suggestion.) Today, though, I've been considering whether I should make a fluffy, romantic vid first (or maybe at the same time), since so many people seem to like the one I made using the Turtles's You Baby. Yet I find that, in addition to the barriers to song choice I mentioned in my previous post, vids like that present the further problem that potential songs are often inconveniently gendered. If the singer mentions the beloved in the third person, it may be as "she", if the singer addresses the beloved, it may be as "girl", and so on. Take the song I'm a Believer by The Monkees, which I love. (Yes, I'm a goop, but in my defense, the lyrics are clever and it's got a rock organ.) There are parts that might lend themselves to a Doyle POV vid, but to use the song that way would require associating Bodie with feminine pronouns. I don't know whether that should disqualify it or not, really. My inclination is that it should, however. I'm pretty sure it would have for the Lads and their contemporaries; overlooking it would feel like too much of an anachronism.

So, almost eight months after my last vid, I've finally posted another. I'm currently in the phase where I think it is terrible and can't stand to look at it, which happens after I post anything. Yet I really enjoy making vids, so I'd like to begin another sooner than months from now. The obstacle, as always, is that I have a lot of trouble finding songs.
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I am so close to completing my new Pros vid, but I can't find the right clip for the ending. I've been looking for weeks. Ack!

I'm making progress on a new Pros vid after roughly six months of alternating false starts and apathy. I have a point of view and a brainstorming grid, and I've begun filling in clips. Now the only question is: Will people still love me if I use a country song?

Something I've found to be important in vid making is to have a point of view in mind. Who is "I"? Who is "you"? Who is "we"? I try to let my vids speak for themselves, so I haven't labelled them on AO3 or YouTube as having particular points of view (as I have my few fics). Nevertheless, almost all of them do, at least per section. In my first vid, "Behind Blue Eyes", Cowley, Bodie, and Doyle each got a verse.* My slash vid, "You Baby", uses Bodie's point of view. "We are the Champions" is Cowley POV, with the verses' "I" referring to himself and the refrain's "we" referring to his organization as he sees it. "Who'll Stop the Rain" is very clearly a Doyle POV vid, and "Just a Little Light" is split between Bodie and Doyle, with each getting half (and with “you” referring to the other partner throughout). The only exception to the rule is "Life During Wartime". While the song uses the first and second person, the vid has a third-party POV that looks on at the Lads' world (or so it seems to me). I think it still works; the difference makes it the least emotional of my vids, though.** At any rate, I have had several vid ideas incubating for some time, but showing no signs of pipping. And I think I might have moved one of them closer to maturity tonight by deciding firmly on a point of view.

See this journal entry for an index of the LiveJournal posts associated with my vids.

*(Although I think one of the weaknesses of that vid is that it's a bit hard to follow the structure. I may produce a second edition at some point.)

**(ETA: I suppose the song choice probably affects this, as well. The song “Life During Wartime” is a bit tongue-in-cheek; it's not as sincere as the others.)

I've never posted a meme before. I got this one from

gilda_elise, whose post was linked in the Pros Newsletter.

1) How many stories have you posted?
Three.
(Also 6 vids and a bunch of photo manipulations.)

( Read more... )

Tonight I've been playing with a tool that shows the most frequently used words in a chosen text, minus a list of very common ones ("the", "of", and so on). I found the list generated by my recent fic What We Are evocative:( Read more... )

I find myself enjoying this photo manipulation tonight. It is the last MFU manip I ever made (and the only one I made outside of the intense depressive episode during which I created the others). I never did get around to posting it on AO3, partly because I liked having my farewell to Robert Vaughn as the last item in that album. I did post it on DeviantArt, though. Here's the copy I wrote at that time:

"In dreams, impressions and memories run together to create new worlds that are nevertheless familiar. Illya is dreaming of his childhood as seen through that kaleidoscope."
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Some of the photo manipulations I made during 2016 impress me quite favorably now. I made some new manips earlier this month for the Professionals seasonal card exchange, and I found that I had forgotten many of the techniques I learned then. I also found that I did not have the seemingly infinite patience that I had during that spurt of single-minded productivity. (Not that I didn't spend hours on each of the Pros manips during which I could have been making a start on Moby Dick.)

I have been working on a new fanvid for The Professionals. One of the things involved in that process is watching one's chosen clips over and over (and over). While doing this, one inevitably begins to notice details that one missed on earlier viewings....such as how tight the heroes' pants actually are. Wow.

I have WIPs. Plural. Imagine that.

And both of them are in the first person. After I wrote my first and so far only fanfic, I told myself I would never write in the first person again. Character voice is hard (especially if the character speaks a different variant of English than you do) and if you are writing in the first person, you have to keep up the character voice through the entire fic. And yet. And yet. Here I am doing it again.

At this point, I don't have enough data to know whether this is something I am prone to, or whether it was simply the natural choice for what I happened to be writing, three times in a row. It could also be a newbie thing. Only time will tell, I suppose.

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The Turtle Jourtle

Entries tagged with my creations (about)

Slow and Steady Enters the Race

Popular vs. Favorite

Sharp and Shiny

Stoppage Cleared

I got ham, but I'm not a hamster.

Song Choice in Vidding (Slash Version)

Song Choice in Vidding

Ack!

Back in the Saddle

POV in Vidding

AO3 Meme

Words from My Fic

Illya Dreaming

The Benefits or Perils of Vidding

WIPs