![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiki_engOne Girl Revolution by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arefadedaway
This is a vid that was made for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
halfamoon, as a celebration of female characters in fandom. I love it. I love that it uses the art for that challenge year, which featured female characters sorted by Hogwarts house, and then the rest of the vid shows women being awesome in all kinds of different ways - women reading, women fighting, women doing science, women working together, women dancing, etc. I love the opening footage of this vid, and I love all of the footage of women striding and moving.
(Song: One Girl Revolution (Battle Mix) by Superchick)
Space Girl bycharmax
It's a history of women in science fiction and it is brilliantly executed. It starts off with black and white footage and then makes this seamless transition to colour that is brilliant to watch. It showcases all of these different roles that women have had in sci-fi and how they've changed over the years. The music that its set to is integral to the vid and there are some fantastic sequences in this.
(Song: Space Girl by The Imagined Village)
Hook Shot bykuwdora
This is a vid that has amazing movement. The song that it's set to is an instrumental piece and the vid is a solid three and a half minutes of women physically kicking ass, moving, driving, piloting, shooting things, and blowing things up. It looks choreographed. It is visually stunning.
(Song: Hook Shot by Wolfgang Gartner)
arefadedaway wrote meta about her vid. "This is our heroines at their most magnificent: asserting their independence, celebrating their agency and strength, triumphing over all the odds, whether they be personal, global, or the whim of the writers who let them down; rejoicing in their victories, and ultimately taking charge of their destinies with both hands and never letting go."
"[T]he whim of the writers who let them down" is something that I've been thinking about lately, watching Doctor Who, and having thoughts like, I really like Amy, but I really hate what the writers are doing. I've been thinking about female characters and their treatment by their source material and vids.
thingswithwings has written an interesting piece of meta on this subject - ladies (en masse) are awesome - that I recommend reading. There's a nice list of vids and some good recs and conversation in the comments. There's some really excellent discussion about this genre of vids and what they do and why they exist with specific examples.
One of the things that vids, especially multifandom vids can do is recontextualise clips. What this translates into, especially with multifandom female-centric vids, is that these women get away from their writers, they get to participate in a different narrative. The way that vids function as transformative works is something that's really interesting to me, in part because while vidding is very identifiable as remix culture, the nature of the medium can make a vid's message less parsable than that of other fanworks. I think that vids tend to require a more actively engaged audience. Narrative vids, for example, require interpretation in a way that fic doesn't.
Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what a vid is trying to say, to catch all of the lyrics, to sort out everything that is happening in a clip, to interpret a clip choice. Space Girl was posted about a month after Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who, had died, and ends with a clip of Sarah Jane Smith walking off. That clip niggled at me. Space Girl is a history of women in science fiction, and there are clips of Sarah Jane from both old and new Who in it. Sarah Jane Smith walks off with K-9 at the end, and then, after, she got her own show. Bringing that bit of context to that clip makes it really awesome. Sarah Jane Smith of Doctor Who goes on to become the title character of her own show.
I had that same issue with Hook Shot, where I was watching the end clip and getting stuck. Then I watched Sucker Punch. I hated Sucker Punch; it was skeevy and it made me angry. There is a clip from Sucker Punch in Hook Shot, which, when I was watching it looking for a cleanser, meant that it didn't work as a cleanser. So I thought some more, and remembered other films that had skeeved me out. Personal Best. I watched an interview with Robert Towne, who wrote and directed it, right before I saw it, and he talked about how much he liked women's bodies, liked athleticism in women, liked watching women's bodies' move, and then I watched Personal Best, and there are sections of that that are exactly like Baywatch, only not shot on a beach and with less of an emphasis on breasts. I felt like I was watching porn that Robert Towne had written and directed for himself. ...and then I thought about Kick-Ass, and the context of that clip where Hit Girl shoots out the camera. Do you know what she says, right after she's taken out the men holding her father, right after she puts the fire out, right before she shoots out the camera? "Show's over, motherfuckers." Three and a half minutes of gorgeous movement in that vid, and then Hit Girl shoots the camera out.
kuwdora hasn't posted meta on her vid yet, and I feel like the piece is very open to interpretation. I feel, with Hook Shot, that I am getting what I need out of it. After 110 minutes of Sucker Punch that wasn't a girl shooting out the camera, but a really angry girl shooting out the camera.
Sometimes what I need to see is women being awesome in all kinds of different ways, moving forwards and having agency. Sometimes it's the history of sci-fi, and the knowledge that the role of women in sci-fi is changing.
So. The last movie I saw was Sucker Punch. The last TV episode was The God Complex. Does someone want to rec me something good?
arefadedaway This is a vid that was made for
halfamoon, as a celebration of female characters in fandom. I love it. I love that it uses the art for that challenge year, which featured female characters sorted by Hogwarts house, and then the rest of the vid shows women being awesome in all kinds of different ways - women reading, women fighting, women doing science, women working together, women dancing, etc. I love the opening footage of this vid, and I love all of the footage of women striding and moving. (Song: One Girl Revolution (Battle Mix) by Superchick)
Space Girl by
charmaxIt's a history of women in science fiction and it is brilliantly executed. It starts off with black and white footage and then makes this seamless transition to colour that is brilliant to watch. It showcases all of these different roles that women have had in sci-fi and how they've changed over the years. The music that its set to is integral to the vid and there are some fantastic sequences in this.
(Song: Space Girl by The Imagined Village)
Hook Shot by
kuwdoraThis is a vid that has amazing movement. The song that it's set to is an instrumental piece and the vid is a solid three and a half minutes of women physically kicking ass, moving, driving, piloting, shooting things, and blowing things up. It looks choreographed. It is visually stunning.
(Song: Hook Shot by Wolfgang Gartner)
arefadedaway wrote meta about her vid. "This is our heroines at their most magnificent: asserting their independence, celebrating their agency and strength, triumphing over all the odds, whether they be personal, global, or the whim of the writers who let them down; rejoicing in their victories, and ultimately taking charge of their destinies with both hands and never letting go.""[T]he whim of the writers who let them down" is something that I've been thinking about lately, watching Doctor Who, and having thoughts like, I really like Amy, but I really hate what the writers are doing. I've been thinking about female characters and their treatment by their source material and vids.
thingswithwings has written an interesting piece of meta on this subject - ladies (en masse) are awesome - that I recommend reading. There's a nice list of vids and some good recs and conversation in the comments. There's some really excellent discussion about this genre of vids and what they do and why they exist with specific examples.One of the things that vids, especially multifandom vids can do is recontextualise clips. What this translates into, especially with multifandom female-centric vids, is that these women get away from their writers, they get to participate in a different narrative. The way that vids function as transformative works is something that's really interesting to me, in part because while vidding is very identifiable as remix culture, the nature of the medium can make a vid's message less parsable than that of other fanworks. I think that vids tend to require a more actively engaged audience. Narrative vids, for example, require interpretation in a way that fic doesn't.
Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what a vid is trying to say, to catch all of the lyrics, to sort out everything that is happening in a clip, to interpret a clip choice. Space Girl was posted about a month after Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who, had died, and ends with a clip of Sarah Jane Smith walking off. That clip niggled at me. Space Girl is a history of women in science fiction, and there are clips of Sarah Jane from both old and new Who in it. Sarah Jane Smith walks off with K-9 at the end, and then, after, she got her own show. Bringing that bit of context to that clip makes it really awesome. Sarah Jane Smith of Doctor Who goes on to become the title character of her own show.
I had that same issue with Hook Shot, where I was watching the end clip and getting stuck. Then I watched Sucker Punch. I hated Sucker Punch; it was skeevy and it made me angry. There is a clip from Sucker Punch in Hook Shot, which, when I was watching it looking for a cleanser, meant that it didn't work as a cleanser. So I thought some more, and remembered other films that had skeeved me out. Personal Best. I watched an interview with Robert Towne, who wrote and directed it, right before I saw it, and he talked about how much he liked women's bodies, liked athleticism in women, liked watching women's bodies' move, and then I watched Personal Best, and there are sections of that that are exactly like Baywatch, only not shot on a beach and with less of an emphasis on breasts. I felt like I was watching porn that Robert Towne had written and directed for himself. ...and then I thought about Kick-Ass, and the context of that clip where Hit Girl shoots out the camera. Do you know what she says, right after she's taken out the men holding her father, right after she puts the fire out, right before she shoots out the camera? "Show's over, motherfuckers." Three and a half minutes of gorgeous movement in that vid, and then Hit Girl shoots the camera out.
kuwdora hasn't posted meta on her vid yet, and I feel like the piece is very open to interpretation. I feel, with Hook Shot, that I am getting what I need out of it. After 110 minutes of Sucker Punch that wasn't a girl shooting out the camera, but a really angry girl shooting out the camera.Sometimes what I need to see is women being awesome in all kinds of different ways, moving forwards and having agency. Sometimes it's the history of sci-fi, and the knowledge that the role of women in sci-fi is changing.
So. The last movie I saw was Sucker Punch. The last TV episode was The God Complex. Does someone want to rec me something good?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-22 02:07 pm (UTC)I really wish I could rec you something good with female characters, but I'm a bit stomped.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-23 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-23 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-23 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-24 11:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-24 02:37 pm (UTC)