Hornblower Vid: Archie in the Rain

Archie in the Rain
Hornblower miniseries
"A Little Fall of Rain," Les Miserables
Archie/Horatio

The rain can't hurt Archie now.

Warning for major character death.

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Last summer I was trawling YouTube for Hornblower vids (as one does), and stumbled across a small knot of Hornblower vids set to Les Miserables songs. (Pellew and Horatio to "Bring Him Home", Frogs and Lobsters to "One Day More"... Huh, I know there were more, but they're not coming readily to hand.) Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't find an Archie vid to "Little Fall of Rain," the most obvious Hornblower x Les Mis match of all. The lack seemed the grossest oversight, and in a fit of "This is obviously a terrible idea, but someone has to do it," I started laying down a timeline. Early on, rachelindeed expressed delight in the notion, and was very gracious in helping me find a viddable recording of the song. It's really her fault the vid exists at all: I don't think I would have overcome the making-things-is-a-pain-in-the-ass inertia without her enthusiasm for the idea.

To my shock and glee, the combination of sources worked really well together. I began with the duet-verse at the end, Archie's plan to confess through Horatio's promotion, and it went together butter-smooth. The two shows fit hand-in-glove: about half the time when I laid in a clip thinking "I should make this an extreme close-up or maybe a dramatic slo-mo to match the intensity of the music," the original source was already an extreme close-up in dramatic slow-mo. I just. Look. The thing about the Hornblower miniseries is that it is not shy about its crashing waves and swelling strings and melodramatic rain storms, and there is no shortage of "hold me, I'm dying!" footage between Horatio and Archie, because Archie is on his death-bed in literally every other episode. However hard the song goes in its angst-fest of feeling, the miniseries is right there to meet it.

Anyway, there's a ton of on-the-nose silliness in the vid (no idea was a bad idea!), and early on I had to go and get advice from franzeska on how to make sparkles, because damnit, that commander's epaulette needed sparkles! (In part because grrlpup kept not seeing the epaulette in that one shot. And the epaulette was the whole punchline of that particular lyrics-match! I did a ton of manip to try to make that epaulette the focus of attention; seekingferret suggested at one point that I put a great big arrow pointing at the epaulette, but in the end I decided against that, mostly because it would ruin the ~aesthetic~ I had going with the sparkles.) The sparkles went in relatively early in the drafting, and I'm glad of it, because any time I got cold feet about how baldly over-the-top the whole thing is, I'd remind myself that that particular ship had sailed long ago -- I already had animated sparkles.

In the end, however, I think this is less of a crack!vid and more of a Lord King Bad Vid: as cracky as the concept is, I caught a boatload of sincerely earnest feelings while making it. (Look how sweet Horatio and Archie are together! And Archie's smile! And Horatio having feeeeeelings!) And goodness knows, I couldn't bring myself to just slap the vid together any which old way: there's craft in that thing. I drew on all my vidding know-how, ground my teeth in frustration that it still wasn't right, and then taught myself two whole new techniques in order to properly realize my vision. (But that's the defining attribute of a LKBV, is it not? Use all your talent, skill, passion, and belief to pursue an idea that you would totally have loved when you were 13.)

So! Please accept an Archie Kennedy vid set to "A Little Fall of Rain," silly and earnest in equal measure. It was a terrible idea, but someone had to do it, and I'm proud to be the one who actually did.

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