sholio

I've been working on several Falcon & Winter Soldier vids this year, and wanted to get at least one of them done before the end of the year!

Vimeo's embed style has changed and I had to fight with this a bit to get it to display, so let me know if you have any trouble.

Song: Heavy Stone by Kyla La Grange
Footage from: Falcon & Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron

Password: zemo



Download: 108 Mb MP4 (zipped)
Lyrics: here
Tumblr: here
AO3: here This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425017.html with comments.

The current challenge at vexercises (vidding prompt community) is a constructed reality/AU vid, which happened to hit perfectly right on top of my current feelings about TFATWS, and it seemed like a heist AU would fit them beautifully, don't you think?

Password: idiots



The song is a '70s punk cover of "Mony, Mony" that I found while I was casting about for good heist music, by Celia & the Mutations. You can hear the full version here.

A little more nattering about the heist AU under the cut:

( Team roles, shipping and so forthCollapse ) This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1391319.html with comments.

So basically on work breaks, this past couple of weeks, I started watching an early-80s superhero comedy on Youtube, Greatest American Hero. All episodes are on Youtube here. I loved this show when I was a kid, but, well ... it was the 80s, and I was a kid. I mainly just decided to check out an episode on my lunch break for nostalgia.

So I've been genuinely very surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. I'm not sure if I'd say it's actually good. It's very, very 80s, with a 2-dollar f/x budget and a whole lot of what you might call period-appropriate nonsense, ranging from silly but fun (amazingly unconvincing flying f/x, stock footage of things like rockets and submarines that they don't have the budget for, random nondenominational terrorists and Russians as baddies) and extremely unfunny (sexism played for laughs; no one finding it WEIRD AND CREEPY that the high-school teacher hero's female student has a crush on him).

But it's also very sweet and sincere at the most unexpected times. Apparently the creator intended the show to be a down-to-earth show about a superhero coping with little life problems, and the network wanted basically 1960s Batman, and what they got was a weird mix of both. In spite of how ridiculous some of it is, it's actually oddly grounded-feeling, almost like the Marvel Netflix shows in its general focus on ordinary people around the superheroes. I think aside from Heroes it's probably the most appealing superhero-ish thing I've seen that wasn't a Marvel or DC tie-in (a bar that's admittedly so low it's on the ground).

It's your basic "ordinary schmoe gets superpowers" kind of show, with, by the way, probably the most bonkers superhero origin story that I have EVER seen in ANYTHING, but I think what's making it work so well is that, for one thing, he's an extremely charming version of that character type, very earnest and sweet, and also, his girlfriend finds out in the first episode - telling her is actually one of the first things he does - so instead of what is basically set up as a buddy comedy/action show (naive hero + jaded, slightly unhinged gun-nut FBI agent sidekick), it turns into a 3-person ensemble comedy/action show. They are all very charming and adorable, and have great chemistry, and argue a lot and worry about each other. There are some uncomfortable scenes early on when the girlfriend, Pam, is getting unfairly jerked around by her boyfriend's new superhero career, but once the show starts settling in, the main couple is really adorable, with very little in the way of artificial obstacles inserted into the relationship; they're supportive and sweet and talk to each other about everything, and there's one episode in which everyone is quarantined for two weeks because of possible exposure to a disease (... relatable) in which it's not merely implied but as clearly stated as you can get away with in an all-ages 1980s show that they spend the entire two weeks more or less banging nonstop.

Anyway, I'm still watching the show - I'm only watching an episode every couple of days; progress is slow and I'm just now a little ways out of season one ... and they aren't long seasons - but I made a vid. As you do. Because I wanted one to exist and there is NOTHING.

Video quality is pretty low because I used the Youtube videos for source footage. I may someday remaster this, but honestly I was just making it for myself for fun, so why not? I've realized that one reason why I haven't actually vidded much lately is because it's gotten so complicated and hard, with an expectation of high-quality footage that can be difficult and expensive to get and slow to render. The most fun I ever had making vids was years ago, when I was just using episodes downloaded from the internet, taking clips was dead easy, and the results were good enough to make me happy and I didn't really care much about it beyond that.

So that's what this is: a fun little vid that I made for myself for play. Someday I might remaster it with nicer-quality clips (if I find a place to get them from; the show isn't available on iTunes and similar) but for now the vid is what it is, flawed and silly and earnest and fun, like the show itself. I don't think you have to worry about spoilers all that much; it's not really that kind of show.

Title: Waking Up in Vegas
Fandom: Greatest American Hero
Clips: Mostly season one, scattered clips from random other episodes
Warnings: None

Streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya…
Download: Here (28 Mb zipped MP4)

This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1374142.html with comments.

This was intended to be my Defenders dance-party/fandom-recruitment vid at last spring's fan con in Seattle. You know what didn't work out about that? *waves hand vaguely at world* EVERYTHING.

I stopped working on it when everything went to hell in March, then ended up slamming out a version of it for the Con-Solation vid party on Discord, but was never really happy with some of the clip choices, and I've been tinkering with it and poking at things all summer long. By this point I haven't done anything new to it in months and I figure it's about as done as it's going to get.

So I present to you: Defenders: Welcome to New York. A tribute to 5 years of the Netflix Defenders universe.



Clips from all the seasons of all the shows.

Download MP4: Big (187 Mb) | Smaller (46 Mb)

Tumblr, AO3, etc. posts coming soon. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1352156.html with comments.

First of all: the con_solation vid show is live! Post with links here; Vid show here. This is a virtual vid show for vids that would have premiered at cons this spring if things hadn't, well. Happened.

I have a Defenders vid in it, Welcome To New York. I'll make a proper post for it in a day or two. In the meantime, check out the vids! (The Buffy one is password protected; the password is "buffy".)

--

This Twitter thread about two amorous disaster snails made my day. (Link goes to a de-Twitterfied version so you can read the whole thing on one page.) The comic timing is great. I think this is right up there with the owl sex playlist for things to pick me up when I'm having a bad day.

In other news, sheron and I had a conversation last year sometime about disappointing series finales and how Supernatural, which is ending this year after 15(!!) seasons, is basically immune to that because they've already had so many bizarre, game-changing developments in the actual show. There is literally nothing that could happen in the finale that would be more out-of-left-field and WTF than things that happened several seasons ago. I mean, many finales kill characters, and some kill most of their characters, but really, who on SPN hasn't died multiple times at this point? The characters realize that their entire lives are happening inside a book and the book writer is God? Been there! They break the fourth wall Blazing Saddles-style and find themselves on a soundstage with the actors playing them? Done that! Everyone ends up in Heaven and/or Hell? They were doing that by season 2. A lot of finales pull the rug out from under their viewers in various bizarre ways, but this show does that all the time anyway. Everything from turning out that it's all a dream, to the world blowing up, is basically something that's already happened in some previous season.

But there was one possibility that we completely forgot to account for:

And it is here.

This show is so meta it broke our timeline!

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I did the first challenge at vexercises this afternoon, and it was a lot of fun! (Also very hard to make myself follow the rules! I kept wanting to trim or recut the clips.)

Here are the instructions:

1) Pechakucha 2 ways

Create a video edit of exactly 60 seconds consisting of precisely 10 video clips from your chosen source text, each lasting precisely 6 seconds, assembled with straight cuts. Make two versions of your pechakucha, with 1 minute excerpts from two different songs as audio. Fade in and out on your audio at the beginning and end of the audio clip.

[Word to the wise: Most six second clips that you use are bound to have in-clip cuts--you don't have to go looking only for clips that have no internal cuts. But you can make those internal cuts work for you rhythmically or thematically etc!]

I decided to do a Nakia/T'Challa vid since I already have all of Black Panther imported into Final Cut and there are a relatively limited number of scenes featuring both of them, so I wouldn't have too many clips to choose from. I did cheat a little and let the last clip play out for an extra second or two so I could fit all of the Survivor chorus without losing the first few words of the lyrics.

Version 1: High On You (Survivor)



Version 2: Amacala (Siphokazi)



(Note: At the moment, for me, the streaming versions aren't playing, but they play fine if you click through on the Youtube link. Hopefully whatever glitch is causing it will go away soon.)

This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1319… with comments.

Misty! She was one of my favorite minor Marvel characters back in the day. I have an action figure of her that I got in the early 2000s, in her red comics outfit. I was so worried about not liking the live-action version of her, and then I LOVED her; Simone Messick is the perfect Misty Knight. Making this vid made me heartbroken all over again about never getting more of her.

Title: Monsters and Angels
Fandom: Defendersverse (Defenders, Luke Cage, Iron Fist)
Artist: Voice of the Beehive
Pairings: Mainly Misty/Colleen, some incidental Misty/Luke and Misty/Ward, but not really a pairing vid as such; mainly it's focused on Misty, her found family, and her search for her place in the world.
Summary: I'm nobody's wife and nobody's baby. The true OTP of this vid is Misty/happiness.



Download: 151 Mb MP4 (zipped) | 33 Mb MP4 (zipped)
Tumblr: At my Sholiofic tumblr
AO3: On AO3 here

Subtitles will be added a little later today.

( Lyrics under the cutCollapse )

This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1238… with comments.