Cupid's Bow

Supernatural S8 - that bar scene

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:59:47 GMT

Right, so I think S8 is safe for me to watch, and I'm really looking forward to it.

In order to judge that, I've been spoiled for a few things, including the bar scene in the final ep. Having seen it (out of context), I can see one reading of it that most reviewers don't seem to have taken from it.

Spoiler for the Bar Scene in 823
It's pretty obvious that Dean and Castiel are talking at cross-purposes to some extent here, partly because of Dean's use of vernacular (although it's interesting how much better Castiel is at parsing and speaking that now).

Dean: You're boarding up Heaven, then locking the door behind you.
Castiel: Yeah, I know.
Dean: You did a lot of damage up there, man. You think they're just going to let that slide?
Castiel: You mean, do I think they'll kill me? Yeah, they might.
Dean: So this is it. ET goes home.
Castiel: *does not understand that reference*

I think we're obviously meant to read this as Dean does, as he's our viewpoint character in the scene. He assumes Castiel is going to close Heaven, and be inside Heaven when he does.

I'm not sure that's what Castiel is actually saying, though, especially given that he's looking resigned, but not sorry or anxious about how Dean will react -- Dean is always such a huge driver for him, so this seems a really weird calmness for Castiel.

So take away Dean's assumption about which side of the door Castiel will be on, and assume instead that Castiel intends to lock himself out of Heaven, along with any other angels who happen to be in vessels on Earth at the time.

Does the scene still make sense?

I don't have the full context, so I'm not sure. But I think maybe it does, especially with Castiel's re-wording of Dean's question, and his incomprehension about ET.

I almost don't want it to be readable that way, because it would make this the most perfect misunderstanding of all time. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/398983.html.

Trek 2: The Glass Half Full

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:29:57 GMT

Went to see nuTrek2.

Very minor spoilers below; I don't mention anything specific, but I do talk about things in general terms, so if you don't want to know anything at all, don't read.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but it was nothing special. Iron Man 3 did several of the same things, and did them better.

The cast were all strong. Quinto can run! His eyebrows are so good. Cumberbatch did the physical stuff very well too. Pegg was funny, as always. Saldana didn't have much to work with, but worked it well. The rest all had a moment or two in which to shine, and we got Captain Sulu, which is always a win.

There were far too many white men, though. I really wanted the Admiralty scene to have more women and people of colour, and in particular, the head cheese would have been much, much better as a woman, in every way -- thematically, as a twist, furthering Rodenberry's ideals. Just. Such a missed opportunity. I liked Peter Weller fine, but I'm so tired of that particular character popping up in movies.

The TOS echoes were the highlight of the film for me, along with Zoe Saldana, who really is fabulous, despite having not much to do. There's one scene with her and Kirk in the lift that was so enjoyable; my fannish heart went: YES!

The opening was visually gorgeous, but felt like a cheat; I expect more cleverness from Trek plots. The middle was boring. The ending was pretty spectacular, and I really liked the way they re-worked some of the iconic original Trek moments -- when you see it you will all know which scene I mean in particular.

In the boring moments in the stodgy middle, I found myself thinking about original Trek and making comparisons. For instance:

There were many clever things about TOS, but one of the writing choices I really admire is that the three leads (and this is why there are three) represent the corners of the rhetorical triangle: Kirk=ethos, Spock=logos, Bones=pathos. That's why they debate things all the time, and why Bones and Spock are polar opposites, and why Kirk is the mediator. It drives nearly all of the plot and conflict, and it's so clever. The first reboot film didn't have this at all, and was weaker for it. I thought it interesting that they started to work that dynamic back into the second film, and highlighting Kirk's ethics was the one saving grace for the otherwise heavy-handed opening sequence.
Amanda Grayson invented the Universal Translator in TOS. How are they going to deal with that in nuTrek? Or are they not? In any case, it makes Uhura's role more important which I'm all for.
There's a lot of speculation in TOS fandom that Kirk had a high psi factor of some sort -- probably empathy or pre-cog. It explained a lot of things about him and the choices he made, even though in TOS he had a more logically trained and educated mind. It actually explains rebook Kirk even better, so I'm officially re-instituting this bit of fanon into my personal headcanon.

Spoiler about the main villain

About the casting of Cumberbatch. This is not a simple thing. Khan is an important part of TOS canon, so I can see why they wanted to engage with that storyline. Having made that choice, there are two conflicting issues with regards to casting Khan. Obviously, casting Cumberbatch whitewashes an important character of colour, and that's crappy, especially in a film with so many white men already. That said, Khan as originally conceived was alluding to the "yellow peril" and "evil foreigner" stereotypes -- it's a credit to Ricardo Montalban that he managed to make the role so much more. However, to perpetuate that stereotype, no matter how well acted, is also crappy. It's one of the reasons IM3 did what it did with The Mandarin. You just can no longer play the "yellow peril" card in films without considering the way it stereotypes race, thank god finally.

All of that said, the solution to this is not that hard -- have lots of other diversity in your casting, so that Khan is not the only major character or colour. Duh! See that J.J. Abrams? Choosing a white person is the slacker's way out of the dilemma; you fail the Kobayashi Maru.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/398838.html.

Pet Teen Wolf S3 theory

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:11:31 GMT

This isn't exactly a spoiler, as it's not based on anything except a feeling I've picked up from the teasers, but I'm putting it behind the cut anyway.

I think in S3 we're going to see... zombies. Specifically werewolf zombies (other than Peter).

Why? It's really not based on much. The tag line, "This might hurt." Well, what will hurt more than loved ones coming back as monsters?

Then there's the teasers. Red, blue, orange and black eyes. What can black eyes be representing for a werewolf or another type of shifter? Death perhaps, or evil, or both. It certainly doesn't fit the Alpha/Beta/Omega triad, so it must be something else. Then there's death of self as a major theme, as expressed through Scott killing of his old human self and accepting the wolf.

Also, there are so many "dead" characters in Beacon Hills -- Argents, Hales, cops, and potentially Stiles' mom. Zombies can bring all these characters back for an encore.

(My favourite theory about Stiles' mom is that she isn't dead, but faked her own death or left in a cloud of mystery and is still a missing person; my super favourite theory is that she got bitten and decided to leave in order to protect Stiles and the Sheriff.)

So yeah. I feel no surety about that speculation whatsoever. But it amuses me.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/398199.html.

Things which concern me today

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 12 May 2013 05:16:08 GMT

My concerns about eating

It genuinely gives me a sense of creeping horror that so many people are still so invested in denial of climate change.

I see numbers like this, going ever upward for most of my adult life. I see reports of the effects of these increases in reputable journals, not only in terms of abrupt and disastrous localised weather changes, and longer term climate change (warmer oceans and shrinking ice caps, etc), but in repeated crop failures, animal deaths, and the huge economic and social costs of these things. And that's without even mentioning all the other negative side effects of pollution.

How can anyone who wants to continue to eat not be worried about this? Is that why so many people want to colonise Mars?

My concerns about fellow fans

How did this not register for me?

The police in Zhengzhou Province arrested 32 slash fiction writers whose work had appeared on a Web site specializing in homoerotic content. The arrested writers were all women, and most were in their 20s.

What? What?

How is this not everywhere? We should be talking about this.

I don't have contacts in China, or frankly, the spoons to try and reach out. But has anyone? Have these women been released? Is there anything that can be done to find out/help them?

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/397995.html.

Lana Wachowski

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:10:51 GMT

What a fantastic speech. Apart from the gorgeous articulation of the experience of being othered and then finding peace with her identity, it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard of being a child and unable to explain the truth of your experiences because there literally are no words with which to do so.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/397638.html.

Dean and Castiel and homophobia

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:20:51 GMT

You know what's convincing me more than anything that the queer subtext in Supernatural is about to go canonically textual?

The flaming, hate-filled, homophobic outpouring from anti-Destiel shippers that's currently all over the internet, and seemingly all over Supernatural conventions too.

And to a lesser extent, that the Destiel shippers are mostly being much more cautious, and honestly, a lot of them sound pretty terrified, and that's kinda convincing too.

Both of these things make me really sad. And pissed off.

I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but just to make it clear: I ship Dean/Castiel.

I ship them first as a friendshipper, but in practice I like to read and write fanworks along most of the shipping spectrum, from friendship to slash. I'm not really a fan of things like PWPs for the most part, because the sex isn't that interesting to me out of context. (That's true for most pairings I follow.)

So, yes, I liked that Dean found a friend, his first real friend. And I liked that it was problematic, and they weren't always great with each other -- sometimes it was like watching four-year-olds be friends, they were so bad at it. I liked that. For lots of reasons, but a big one was that making new connections that lasted more than an episode was something I read as Dean recovering from PTSD. And the fact that Dean and Castiel could get it wrong, and still find new ways forward without becoming totally dysfunctional was interesting to me.

Despite being a friendshipper first, and not being invested in canonical romance, I'm tired of queer-baiting in texts. If it means the queer-baiting stops, I'm for a queer romance becoming canon. Totally 100% behind it. I can still friend-ship, okay. If I can wear slash goggles for subtext, I can totally wear friendship goggles for a canon pairing.

That said, I can understand the fear being expressed by Destiel shippers, because most shows are shit about having any nuance or consistently positive and non-stereotyped queer themes and/or characters. Supernatural is not the worst offender in this regard, but their record isn't that good. Season 6 used Castiel's subtextual queerness for Dean as foreshadowing for his evil downfall. I wrote meta about it back then, and called it toxic, which I still think it was.

Given that track record, I think if they do make Dean/Castiel overtly canon, it's going to be problematic at least some of the time. So yes, I get the fear.

But I don't even care. If a show like Supernatural does this, and doesn't immediately kill or make evil one of the couple, I'm totally watching the whole season, even if it triggers me. I will wave fucking rainbow coloured flags. Because just making two established male characters hook up in season 8 of a show is already awesome in terms of breaking the stereotypes. Super awesome, with awesome-sauce topping.

This is important.

These kinds of stories that we watch every week and make part of our everyday lives are important; they help us decide what's normal and what's not. They help us decide what's moral and what's not. It's hard to decide something is normal and moral if you never fucking see it, except as evil dead people or rank stereotypes.

So there's that.

But what really sparked this rant is the homophobic outpouring. I'm so tired of people acting like homophobic jerks about Dean/Castiel, and trying to mask it as shipper outrage, or Christian outrage about Castiel being an angel, or straight up homophobia about Dean's "bisexuality" as though that can't possibly be a thing a "real man" can be, or disingenuiously ascribing homophobia to the actors because they "seem" uncomfortable with shipping and/or queerness. Ugh. My tiredness with this kind of gay-bashing can't even be textually rendered. Jimmy, I'll grant as a legitimate reason for being ethically uncomfortable with the pairing. The rest is homophobic bullshit, which people are using to peddle hate speech.

We need a fucking Bingo card for this, just so we can point people to it every time they start their gay-bashing hate-speech.

I really hope Supernatural does make the relationship canon, just so those people can go choke on their own hate.

ETA

In comments, we're talking about how ground-breaking this might be.

My housemate says she can think of a couple of characters who came out after the start of their show:

Billy Crystal's character, Jody, in Soap, and
Sgt. Wield in Dalziel and Pascoe

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/397334.html.

I'd completely forgotten!

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:09:54 GMT

You know that point in a story, where you've written a bunch, and you still like the concept, but you kinda start thinking, "Why am I writing this? Who will even be interested in this?"

It's been so long since I've written any fiction of length, I'd forgotten that happens.

How did I used to get past it?

*looks at 3 million words of unposted fic in wips folder*

Oh, yeah. That's right. I'd just stop writing. /o\

So how do all of you get past it?

ETA: People are leaving awesome, positive, encouraging comments. And it's quickly made me realise that I stopped finishing and posting things because I was having a hard time dealing with all the wonderful comments people would leave.

I remember now that I considered turning comments off when I posted stories, but couldn't bring myself to do it, because I love the first ten or so. It's only after that it all got a bit much.

My brain, ladies and gentlemen. Ugh.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/396872.html.

Coconut is the most under-rated food

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:36:43 GMT

So it turns out that coconut yoghurt is a thing you can buy. And at the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I have to tell you guys that it's the best yoghurt I've ever tasted.

Before I stopped eating dairy, I tried yoghurt in every country and Australian state I visited, and of all those places, the best by a large margin was boutique-dairy pot-set yoghurts from Western Australia. The flavoured milks are the best here too. I think there's something about the climate here that makes the milk, and products made from milk, unbelievably good.

I'm not going to list everywhere I've tried the milk/cheese/yoghurt, but the second best cheese I've ever eaten was in France (I'd stopped eating yoghurt and drinking milk by the time I visited there). Western Australia's best boutique-dairy cheeses just pipped that French market stall cheese, but it was real close. If I'd had a chance to try a wider range while I was there, it's possible I would have found an even better cheese than the ones I've had locally.

Anyway, coconut yoghurt. It's a thing. And it's so good. I can't even tell you. SO GOOD. A smidge better than my favourite boutique-dairy pot-set yoghurt from Western Australia, which is saying something. Now I can eat muesli again (it's just not the same without yoghurt, and soy yoghurt sucks).

I really don't understand why coconut products aren't as common as dairy. They fill many of the same food niches, and are usually on par with, and surprisingly often surpass, the dairy equivalent.

ETA:

I got it from Manna Wholefoods, 274 South Terrace, South Fremantle. The website linked below has a store locator guide for Australia, and a link to the UK site.

COYO
Heaven in a mouthful. Australia's original coconut milk yoghurt. Dairy free, vegan, soy free, gluten free, lactose free, no added sugar.

COYO is made from the milk of the coconut and not from dairy milk. It is cultured in the same way as other yoghurts but with different strains of Probiotic cultures which are dairy free.

The writing on the label is too small for me to read the ingredients. It comes in four flavours: plain (the one I've tried so far), berry (my housemate says it's awesome), and passionfruit (the one I plan to try next), and mango (sounds delish too).

The same company also makes a brand of coconut ice-cream which I have not yet tried.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/396660.html.

Weirdness on Supernatural

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:25:08 GMT

I haven't watched the second half of season 8 of Supernatural yet, but I'm getting the distinct impression that something strange is going on. Or maybe it's just the fan filter I'm seeing things through, but...

Spoilers for S8

One of the themes of the first half of the season was clearly Dean's PTSD, going beyond the self-medication of alcohol and sex, and coming to a place where Dean was too tired to fake it anymore and was starting to let it all hang out.

I was afraid to hope that this might actually be for real, and that they'd continue on with that theme, but I'm seeing all these animated gifs, and it seriously looks like they have. OMG. So tell me, oh flist...

Is Dean really making friends? Several, that he hugs and says he needs and accepts affection from?
Is the relationship with Benny really a metaphor for Dean finding ways to forgive himself for his own "monstrous" crimes?
Are he and Charlie really becoming buddies? Did he really tell her how to flirt with a guy, go clothes shopping with her, give her an entirely platonic kiss? Is she really teasing him about Castiel?
Has Dean really stopped drinking and sleeping in his clothes? Has he really not been flirting with women?
Are they really setting him up as bisexual in more than a nudge-nudge-his-siren-is-a-guy kind of way? And are they really fucking doing it in a way that isn't subtly coding gayness as wrong?

Because if any or all of that is true, I can't wait for the season to end so I can watch it.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/396345.html.

Fic: "Missed Texts, Missing Wolves" by cupidsbow (TWOLF, Derek/Stiles, PG-13)

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:53:56 GMT

Title: Missed Texts, Missing Wolves
Author: cupidsbow/cupidsbow
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: pre-slash Derek/Stiles
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentions of canonical deaths, guilt, grief, and Derek’s general emotional trauma.
Summary: Derek drives; Stiles texts. Also on AO3.

He couldn't remember the walk to the car, except for one moment, a sudden crisp jolt of there-ness as Peter said, "Derek," and tried to put a hand on him.

"No," Derek said, not wanting comfort, not from him. He slammed the car door, shutting Peter out, and then he drove and drove and drove, aware of the steering wheel against his palms, the dark tunnel of the road revealed by the headlights, the monotonous shush-shush of the tires on bitumen. Nothing else for a long time.

When dawn began to dull the world -- blurring together the headlight beams and the grey of the road so that it was wearying to drive -- Derek pulled off into a deserted rest stop. He stepped out onto the crunching gravel and listened, scented, and when all he could sense were the stirrings of animals, he stripped, locked his clothes out of sight in the trunk of the car, and jammed the key up behind the tire rim.

He welcomed the wolf, and slipped silently through the last shreds of the night, pacing his way between the trees until he found a grassy hollow at the edge of a sweet-smelling glade. He curled up, nose to tail, and let the welcome amnesia of sleep claim him, not even bothering to keep his usual half-an-ear open as he slept.

He jerked awake from a nightmare of black blood in his mouth, already mid-snap at a pesky fly buzzing at his ear, but still a fraction too slow; it zoomed into a sunbeam far above his head. Around him the clearing was morning still, dew on the ground, long shadows barely breached by the sun. Putting his snout back onto his paws, he dozed again.

When he woke again, it was to sun-warmed fur and a good stretch, the sweet smell of grass, honey bees buzzing, the sound of water tripping over stones, the pick pock of a grazing rabbit. Rising silently, he stalked the incautious rabbit, staying downwind until it was in his sights; then he pounced. Unlike the fly, the rabbit did not escape. Its warm, sweet meat took the edge off his hunger, along with the last phantom memory of the taste of ash. Afterwards, he slaked his thirst and cleaned himself at the creek.

He felt lighter afterwards, as though more than dirt had been washed away.

The car was still sitting as he had left it, and once he was clothed and back in the driver's seat he dug out his phone so he could look up his location. He ignored the message alerts, and went straight to the GPS and waited for the pin to drop.

Cache Creek.

He stared at it for a while, only a little surprised at where his instincts had been leading him. Fuck it, he thought. He didn't want to go back to Beacon Hills yet, and there was one other place he wanted to go. It had been far too long since his last visit.

When he hit the main road, he made the turn that would get him back on I-5, heading away from Beacon Hills, and south towards the sun.

* * *

He drove with a sense of purpose, foot heavy on the gas, just edging over the speed limit. At about the half-way point of his journey, the red warning light of an empty tank blinked on; he pulled in at one of the enormous space-dome style gas stations, complete with KFC, MacDonalds, Starbucks and a convenience store. He'd been driving for bit over three hours by then, so after filling up the car, he parked in one of the temporary bays and went inside. Everything smelled like sweaty humans overlaid by too much bleach. He held his breath and made use of the amenities, then bought some water, a double shot cappuccino, a couple of chicken wraps, and a cookie.

He stood by the car while he ate the wraps (the rabbit had tasted better) and drank the coffee, mind almost blank as he watched the cars hum by on the Interstate. His phone chirped with a text as he was stuffing an empty food wrapper into the carry bag the meal had come in; he was tempted to ignore the message, except for the sudden guilty realisation that it could be Isaac.

Stiles:
Abt 2 send out srch pty. Txt someone if ur not dead, asshole.
16:42

Derek frowned and scrolled back.

Stiles:
Scott just confessed shitacular Gerard masterplan. U ok?
11:03

Stiles:
Stupid question. R u poisoned/vomiting black goo/dying?
11:04

Stiles:
Srsly. R u alive? Gerard worryingly MIA. Every1 else accounted 4.
11:40

Stiles:
Where r u??? Peter said you looked like shit and drove off. Isaac is pining. Txt him.
12:09

Isaac:
Are you ok? Stiles thinks you're missing. He's trying to get Danny to hack your phone.
12:13

Stiles:
Y r u in Kettleman City? Imagining u kidnapped by undead psycho grampa & stuffed in trunk of own car. Not as much fun as u'd think.
16:38

Stiles:
Abt 2 send out srch pty. Txt someone if ur not dead, asshole.
16:42

Sighing, Derek texted back, Getting milk, back soon. He hesitated for a moment, and then added, Call off the dogs. Petty, yes, but he knew Stiles would take it as an insult to Scott. Stiles seemed to think he had the sole right to make werewolf-related dog jokes. No doubt he'd rant at Scott about it, passionately, on-and-off over several days.

The thought made Derek feel ever so slightly better. Scott totally deserved to be ranted at by Stiles.

Stiles:
OMG. Ur such a dick!
16:45

Derek smirked, turned off the phone and got back into the car.

* * *

He rolled into Acton after dark, and headed straight out to the wolf sanctuary. After a twisting drive through the hills, and still with several miles to cover, he parked in a deserted, weed-covered picnic area, and repeated his preparations from that morning. As soon as he'd welcomed the wolf, he scented the air, searching for the familiar call of pack, but the evening breeze was in the wrong direction. He set off at a ground-eating lope over the scrubby terrain, quickly covering the remaining distance.

Just as the moon was rising he came to the chain link fence that marked the boundary he was looking for. The scent of wolves was ripe in the air now, and he tipped his head back and howled, long and loud. Then he leapt the fence with little effort and sprinted towards the central compound, towards the familiar howl that cut through the night in reply to his own.

He saw her first -- Lois was pressed up against the inner fence, waiting for him, ears cocked, tail up, fur thick and tawny, shining in the moonlight. She spotted him a moment later as he left the shadows of a row of shrubs, and as soon as she saw his eyes, her head and tail drooped. She pawed at the ground and whined, a mournful sound that struck at his heart.

Derek sped up, barreling at the eight-foot fence separating them. His leap cleared it with a good foot to spare, and he immediately turned and playfully pounced on Lois. She cuffed him around the head as she went down, showing him her belly, and licked his jowls while he snuffled her fur.

"Sorry," he muttered, as he changed back into his human skin, so that he could thread his fingers into her fur and curl around her, breathing her in, the way they had as cubs, before anyone had known she was one of the rare ones -- always a wolf, unable to welcome her human form. "I'm sorry. I should have come sooner. Laura and I should never have left you here."

Lois stuck her nose into his ear and snorted.

"Hey!" He flailed away, hunching his shoulders. "You know I hate that."

She rolled her eyes.

"I take it back." Derek said, sulkily, "I remember why we left you here now."

Before he could retaliate, Lois darted forward and licked his face, then tried to sneak her nose up to his other ear so she could snort in it too. Derek pushed her away and grabbed for her tail. She yipped and danced back, nipping his ribs, right in the ticklish spot, making his whole body flinch.

Derek bit off a curse and changed back into his wolfskin; he pounced, knocking Lois off balance so that they both went rolling across the yard, growling and biting, fur getting filled with sand and saliva. Derek didn't realise until too late that Lois was angling them towards a half-full water dish, until he slammed into it with enough force to flip it over. It landed on his head, the tepid water drenching his fur and getting up his nose.

Lois skipped out of reach, laughing at him as he sneezed.

You think you're so funny. Derek thought as he shook his head, sending out a sphere of droplets.

She thought back an exaggerated memory of Derek as a cub, all paws and eyes, tripping over his own feet and landing in a mud puddle; it was a memory filled with fondness. She closed the distance between them and touched her nose to his gently. With an obvious effort, she thought her curiosity at him in words: Why have you come? Is it safe to go home yet?

No, it's not safe. Derek shook his head, turning aside from her touch. Laura's dead. Peter killed her, and then the new pack killed him. Lois whimpered, but Derek stayed turned away, unable to look at her. There's no-one else left. No one else to be Alpha. No one who deserves it.

Even without looking at her, Derek could feel Lois' sadness at Laura's death and their lost pack, confusion-fear-sadness for Peter's betrayal, misery for Derek's guilt, and beneath it, a small but constant thread of joy at seeing him, and contentment in her new pack. No anger, though; no anger at all.

Derek felt more tired than he'd ever felt. Why aren't you angry at me? This is my fault.

Lois pressed in close against his side. Do you blame me for being a only half a sister?

What? Derek frowned. You're not half a sister. You're the way you're meant to be. It's not your fault you're a wolf.

Lois nodded, her fur brushing softly against his neck. And it's not your fault there are hunters, she thought. Don't blame yourself for their crimes. Might as well blame the moon. It was a saying their mother had often used when one of them had railed about the unfairness of having to hide their nature from the human world. Or blame me for being half a sister. She faked a nip at his ear, and ignored his half-hearted snap in return.

Stop making this about you, Derek thought. It's not about you. And you're not half a sister. Stop saying that.

Stop this cub thinking, then, Lois replied. You're meant to be an Alpha, not an addle-headed beta in her first heat.

Derek distinctly heard several wolves sniggering from somewhere in the shadows at the other end of the enclosure. You suck, he thought. I hope you get fleas.

If I get fleas, I'll share them with you, Lois thought; when Derek rolled his eyes, she surged forward and snorted right in his ear. Come and meet my new pack, Cub.

Derek glared at her, flicking his ear several times, trying to get rid of the tickle. Whatever, Beta. As soon as Lois turned and trotted off towards the sleeping area housing her pack, he darted forward and yanked her tail with his teeth.

* * *

Derek arrived home three days after he'd left, having holed up in an Palmdale motel for a day so he could spend another night with Lois' new pack. They were nice enough, and Derek had formed a definite suspicion that Lois had decided to take Beau, a rust-coated former Omega, as her mate.

It was well after dark by the time he parked at the subway station; late enough that he could do a perimeter run of the town in his wolf form without attracting undue attention.

He went downstairs to get a drink before heading out again, but stalled halfway to the make-shift kitchen. Sitting on the scarred old table Erica and Boyd had scavenged from the side of the road was a large white envelope with Derek's name scrawled on the front. Derek scented the air, but nothing seemed out of place. He picked up the enveloped and sniffed it: paper, ink, glue, and the pungent hormonal soup that indicated Stiles had handled it extensively.

The flap wasn't stuck down, so he flipped it open impatiently and let the contents slide out onto the table. There was an official looking form -- a Dog Registration form -- and a dogtag with the name HALE engraved on it. Fucking Stiles and his dog jokes. Derek could feel his teeth prick against his bottom lip. He threw the envelope down and turned away, trying to regain his earlier peacefulness. Then he stopped, backtracked, and picked the enveloped up again.

Inside the flap on the envelope Stiles had written something in his almost illegible scrawl.

Deaton has a lot of strays. One more won't be noticed. SS.

Derek stared at the message. It didn't actually sound like a dog joke. Or if it was, Derek didn't get it.

He pulled out his phone, turned it on, and was greeted by the buzz of a handful of incoming messages. Derek scrolled back to the last one he'd read.

Stiles:
OMG. Ur such a dick!
Yesterday 16:45

Stiles:
Why have you stopped in the middle of the desert?
00:02

Stiles:
Did your overcompensationmobile break down? LOL.
00:03

Stiles:
Srsly, do u need a tow?
07:15

Stiles:
Palm motel, huh? Classy.
11:38

Stiles:
Y r u even there? Visiting the nature reserves? Getting frisky with the local wolfdog pack? Or maybe the cougars? ;D
15:59

"Fuck," Derek said, and scrolled down to the next message with trepidation.

Stiles:
Shit. Just realised... shutting up now.
16:09

Stiles:
Let me know if u need help.
16:10

Derek looked down at the registration form again, and considered how someone might go about hiding a wolf in plain sight, if, say, they knew a vet who processed paperwork for a lot of stray dogs needing new homes. Or maybe two dogs needing new homes.

After a moment of thought he tapped out a reply and sent it off.

Derek:
Back in one piece. The cougars say hi.
21:44

* * *

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/396043.html.

Swancon report -- vidding stream

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:23:34 GMT

I've been campaigning for more space to talk about fan vids and fan films at Swancon for a few years now, and this year we actually had a mini vidding stream. Yay! It kicked off with the vidshow on Saturday morning, and ended with an in-depth review panel on Sunday afternoon. Along the way, we also talked about the politics of vidding, and had an instavidding party.

It was better attended than I expected, and Ash and I had so much fun brainstorming it and doing the panels. I'm calling it a big win, and I'm hoping to run another mini-vidding stream next year.

Behind the cuts are links to the vids we watched, and my thoughts on the panels.

Vidshow

My goal with the vidshow, as it has been every time I've managed to get one scheduled at Swancon, was threefold: show some of the very best vids; give a sense of the wide range of genres fan vidders are working in; and raise awareness of the art of vidding so that we can move away from simple show-and-tell style vidshows and try some more interesting things.

Ideally, I'd like to have a premiere show within the next two or three years, and maybe some themed vidshows too. For that to be worthwhile, we really need to have enough Aussie vidders to make up a solid part of the show, and as far as I can tell we're not quite there yet. There were more self-identified vidders at this year's con than ever before though, so I'm hopeful.

And while I'm dreaming, I really want to hold an Aussie vidding mini-con within the next two years too. :)

In the hour we had scheduled for the vidshow, this is what we watched:

FILK Johnson Style (Gangnam Style Parody), NASA
MULTI Starships, bironic
MISC (Aliens) Stayin' Low, Hollywoodgrrl
MULTI Doomsday 1 - Lost Home and MULTI Doomsday 2 - The Way, Norlack
MULTI Touching Your Fear, Uniquevil
SPN Dueling (cellos) Winchesters, Ash48
AD Commercial Days, Proxy
MULTI A Different Kind of Love Song, giandujakiss

As you can see, the Russians were the stars of the show this year; they are doing such amazing work.

We didn't get to these, but they were also on my playlist:

MISC (Pumzi) Fire and Water, rhivolution
MISC (Wolfman) Wolfsbane, jetpack_monkey
TWOLF Seven Devils, FlowerxHearts
MULTI Flow, lim
MISC (Wonder Woman) Titanium, giandujakiss
COMM Each Feather and Each Spangle, leanwellback

The role of fanvids

In this panel, I wanted to discuss the politics of fan media works, ranging beyond the politics of copyright (as interesting as that is). I also wanted to cover lots of different types of fan media works, from fan films and AMV to songvids. The panelists did a good job of this, bringing a lot of perspectives and experience to the discussion.

One issue we talked about was that remixing was no longer one-way borrowing (if it ever had been), which can be seen with the rise in the commercialisation of remix culture. We watched some examples of this in advertising (see below). We also discussed how some fan vidders were transitioning into careers as remixers.

More lightheartedly, we talked about some the genres of remix, such as the "fake trailer" and constructed realities of various stripes; and how the rendering power of current computers made things possible in minutes which used to take months, and the impact (and heartaches) that had on amateurs making things in their free time.

ORIG Bonobo's Cirrus -- Official Video, by Cyriak
AD Audrey Hepburn Starring in Galaxy Chocolate, UK TV Advertisement
AD Gene Kelly commercial, for Volkswagen Golf GTI
SPN The Profound Bond, ablazingwings

We watched another vid too -- an AMV that Andy used to demonstrate how fans could completely change the tone of a source through re-editing. I don't have the details for it so can't link it. If anyone knows it, drop a comment and I'll add it to the list.

Insta-vid room party

This was a trial run to see if Ash48 and I could run a simple vidding workshop which actually made a vid in a couple of hours -- an idea I got from reading discussions of joyful shenanigans at American vidding conventions.

The short version was that yes, we could, and we did indeed make the fastest vid in the world -- about 3 ish hours of vidding, and four participants (Capsikin, WonderingElf, cupidsbow, Ash48), to produce a vid 1:07 minutes long.

Let's not beat around the bush -- it was a crummy vid we made, but also huge fun, and a feat of vidding ingenuity, as we had to overcome several technical issues (all of which I'd foreseen, but couldn't fix prior to the event). We ended up using Ash48's laptop with FinalCut on it, and my hard drive, which contained pretty much my entire media library.

I short listed a few songs, and the participants picked their favourite. We cut it down, brainstormed a sketchy concept (basically: space!), and then started clipping and editing.

Apart from the technical issues, we could not have done this without two vital ingredients: familiarity with the editing and clipping software (Ash48 in this case), and a good knowledge of where to find specific clips on our theme (me).

With a few tweaks, this could be a really successful program item. Note to self for next time:

Ensure the exact specifications of the hardware available beforehand. This was an issue this time around, as the laptop available didn't have the grunt needed, but it was largely because my previous hardware plans fell through very close to the con.
Install all the software needed on a hard drive, along with an archive of media. This worked well.
Shortlist three songs. Worked.
Have a limited number of sources (6-10) with visual themes that would suit the music. We had too many this time -- if I hadn't known the sources pretty well, we would have been swamped by choice.
Have at least two experienced vidders, so that you can do some multi-tasking. :)
Bring extra stuff like powerboards, flashdisks, etc. I did this, and we did use some of it, although not everything I brought.

We premiered the instavid at the Review Panel, and it actually made a great counterpoint to the other vids we reviewed. The instavid was so obviously weak and unrealised in comparison, so it drove home just how much time and effort goes into making really good vids.

I'd totally do this again; it was great fun to have a chance to just hang out and vid, and spread the love to some new people.

Review panel

I floated the idea that we have a vid review panel which talked about just a few vids in depth, because I really wanted to talk nuts-and-bolts of why a vid works technically and/or emotionally.

Then I got really lucky, because Ash48 was just as interested in the idea, so we began the session by talking about one of her vids, At the Movies. I kicked off with why I loved it as a vidder (its clever use of genre, commentary on violence, use of humour, the colouring, the framing with the meta movie posters, the sequence, there's so much to love). Then Ash talked about making it -- the inspiration, the planning process, editing and effects, collaborating, beta, reception. Really interesting, and I got to ask all the nosey questions I've been burning to ask.

Then we talked about the showstopper from the vidshow -- Norlack's constructed reality, Doomsday. We talked about how much work it must have taken, and the effects used (below, I've linked to an image of his/her timeline for the vid, which gives some idea of the scope of it), and the different ways people read it. Most people mentioned they usually played "spot the source" on first viewing of a constructed reality, which could make it hard to see the whole narrative. I found this fascinating, because one of the things I love about constructed reality is that it invites you to read it on multiple levels at once: spot the source, recognise the original context, discard the original context if no longer relevant, look for the newly constructed context. It hadn't really occurred to me that some viewers kind of stalled out at "spot the source", at least on first viewing.

And that's why I wanted to have an in-depth review panel -- it was worth it for this insight alone.

We then segued nicely into a discussion of how much work editing a vid is, with one of the participants from the Instavid panel, WonderingElf, talking about how he hadn't realised there was so much happening behind the scenes. We also talked about video editing programs, and it became apparent that there were a few other vidders in the room, although they aren't known to me.

(Hi fellow vidders! I didn't get a chance to catch you after the panel, but would love to see your work -- please link me. :)

This panel was really successful, and way better attended than I expected. I'd love to do it again.

SPN At the Movies, by Ash48
MULTI Doomsday 1 - Lost Home, by Norlack
The screen capture of the timeline is here, and s/he says, "Project screen in my first work day at movie 'Doomsday: Lost Home'. Which dated 03.08.2012".
Cupidsbow's overview of video editors, for Windows (both free, and a range of cut-down and pro editors).

Questions, feedback and comments welcome, especially if you have ideas for next year's convention.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/395985.html.

Flying cars!!!!!

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:37:19 GMT

You know what is a thing? Flying cars, that's what. Or something very, very close to it.

Mercier Jones have a prototype and it's gorgeous. So shiny! Like something out of a Ridley Scott movie.

Volkswagon ran a competition and this won. It's just a concept, and doesn't actually have doors, but whoa, that's a pretty car.

*want*

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/395660.html.

Sunday Musings -- Teen Wolf, Supernatural, Life, Art

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:17:20 GMT

There comes a point on a Sunday evening when not only have you had all the baths you usefully can, you've also done the laundry, cleaned, shopped, changed the linen, put fresh flowers in your vase, patted the dog, cooked a nutritious dinner, and answered the email from students panicking about an assignment. And then you look back the at the weekend and find yourself wondering, "Why did I get nothing done?"

It's ridiculous. I feel like I'll never get a project finished again.

I'm currently working on several Teen Wolf projects, most of them in liminal stages of "Oh, that would be fun," with maybe some story notes and concept art, and not much else except plots in my head.

One of my most advanced projects I've been working on since the Christmas break. And you know how much of it I have done? Two pieces of art. Don't get me wrong, I think it's some seriously awesome art, and it makes me gleeful every time I look at it. But seriously. Two pieces of art in two and a half months! And that was after I got fed up and worked on the "half" for most of the night last night and finished it off. I really wish I could draw, because piecing together digital art is such a slow process. Adding shadows and colour correction alone takes ages.

How do you guys go about making digital art? Do you have nifty shortcuts to make it faster, or do you just plod away adding layer after layer? Or do you not even try for "realness" and use bricolage and masks and stuff instead?

I always want to tell a story in my pictures, like they are a still from a scene in a movie. I've figured out a few tricks -- like body doubles. I search for body doubles a lot now, mainly looking for interesting action shots. Publicity shots tend to be posed in very limited ways, mostly head-and-shoulder full-face shots, some three-quarter face shots, a few profiles, and sometimes full body shots. But pretty much always facing the camera. Makes it really hard to pose a scene if everyone ends up standing in a line facing the same way!

One of the things I find most interesting about the process of making digital art is finding the source images. It gives my Google-fu a bit of a workout.

And sometimes it totally fails me. Take my current project. I went looking for shots of Sinqua Wells, and there are just a handful of shots re-used over and over and over. They are actually pretty great, but I needed a profile shot and I could not find one anywhere -- so annoying as I found a great body double for him, but couldn't get the angles to match. In the end I changed the concept of the picture and took him out of it. It's a little easier for Holland Roden and Crystal Reed and Gage Golightly, but still pretty hard. Of course, I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O'Brien and Tyler Posey.

Do you guys have this problem too? Do you lurk on forums to find HQ pics? Make your own caps? Some other trick?

Supernatural is a whole other kettle of fish -- there's so much fan art already that it's kind of daunting making anything. That's one of the reasons I ended up doing dc_dystopia recently -- it's off the beaten track.

It helped that the prompt was unusual too. You would not believe some of the things that came up when I was searching for "dog suits" (or maybe you would!). Whatever dog suits your mind is now conjuring up, yep, I discovered all that and more. :) That was such an interesting project -- I signed up for it mainly because it was way outside my comfort zone and I knew I'd need to do stuff that was really different to my usual.

I was a bit disappointed in the art though, as I still can't get the manips to quite look real. I kind of thought that the bizarreness of Dean in a dog suit would trigger suspension of disbelief, the way fantasy images often do, and it would end up having that kind of Baudrillardian realness; but it doesn't. It just looks fake. There's something a bit off about the perspective, or angles, or lighting, or shadows. The eye can totally tell.

I have a whole new appreciation for the artists that do this professionally and are good enough to fool the eye. How do they do it?

PS: Speaking of Sinqua Wells and Gage Golightly, why does so much fanfic assume Boyd is Derek's second? It's totally Erica that Derek treats as first Beta, and for good reason -- she's clever and resilient and can make and follow a plan. Boyd is not still waters running deep -- that's not a cliche that applies to him at all. I'm not saying he's stupid -- we don't him well enough to judge that yet. He doesn't talk much, it's true, but he's actually a bit of a hothead, going for what he wants without much thought to the consequences; and he's also a follower not a leader -- it's Erica that thinks leaving Derek is the good idea, and Boyd that follows. I kind of like that about him, and I'm looking forward to seeing where his character goes in S3.

PPS: Spoiler for S8. What is going on with Cas this season? Is Dean's whole nesting/praying thing just fan-service, or are they actually treating the Cas-as-family theme seriously? Are they actually really truly seriously showing Dean as recovering from his PTSD (and hence him not drinking etc)? I loved the first part of the season because of the way it was setting up those themes, but I've been hesitant to watch since. I know if they fuck those particular themes up I'll be triggered like crazy, so I'm cautious. Thoughts?

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/395353.html.

Art: Burn it Down Tryptic, by cupidsbow (SPN Dean/Castiel, Dean/Alistair PG-15)

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 06:41:00 GMT

Title: Burn it Down Tryptic
Artist: cupidsbow/cupidsbow
Inspired by: Burn it Down, by felicia_angel (Dean/Castiel, implied Dean/others, NC-17)
Summary: Alpha/beta dynamics through the lens of a fairy tale. For dc_dystopia Round 3.

The Ball

Medium: Manip
Fandom/Genre: Supernatural AU
Pairing(s): Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Dean sees his Prince.

Click for full size.

Alpha/Beta

Medium: Manip
Fandom/Genre: Supernatual AU
Pairing(s): Dean/Alistair
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Non-explicit torture
Summary: Dean suffering Alistair's attentions.

Click for full size.

Dogskin

Medium: Manip
Fandom/Genre: Supernatural AU
Pairing(s): Dean
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: The safety of Dean's fur.

Click for full size.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/394812.html.

Escapade Vidshow

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 06:29:33 GMT

I submitted to the Escapade vidshow again this year, which is only my second time taking part in a formal vidshow. I'm stupidly excited, especially given that I'm not even there!

This year, having learned from last year, I meant to suborn a spy who could tell me about the show as it happened... but due to personal drama that doesn't need exploring at this juncture, I forgot.

Why is no-one tweeeeting???? Ugh. It's worse than waiting for someone to read a just-finished story while you're in the room with them.

Anyway, having managed to submit to Escapade twice (without much grace, admittedly; I'm sure the vid-runner despaired), I'm thinking of maybe trying to submit to Vividcon this year.

There's enough time I can make a new vid and figure out how to export it to NTSC so it doesn't look like a zebra (for non-vidders: it's a thing that sometimes happens when you convert stuff from one format to another if you are a n00b like me). And I even have a Teen Wolf idea that I think would play well for a live audience.

Vividcon, though. *bites nails* Have any of you done Vividcon? Is it as much fun as it sounds?

And most importantly of all, are any of you willing to be my spy? I don't think I could wait until the after-con reports for Vividcon. I'd bite my nails to the quick or something. *Bambi eyes*

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/394550.html.

Choosing a Video Editor

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 08:17:16 GMT

I've had a few people recently asking me about the video editor that I use with an eye to choosing one for themselves, so I've distilled the main issues into this post.

Please note that I'm an amateur video editor -- I don't work in the film/tv/online-content industries -- so this guide does not pretend to offer professional editing advice. It gives a basic overview of some of the issues an amateur or semi-pro would find useful to consider when trying to choose a video editor.

The focus is on "free" video editors, with a bias for the Windows platform (as that's what I'm using). ETA: sholio has added a useful review of iMovie here.

Learning to edit

This may seem obvious, but learning to edit video is harder than you think. Even in the Idiot-Proof editing suites, the controls tend not to be intuitive at first, a lot of stuff works backwards to what you think it will, and the official manuals tend to suck. In other words, video editing is not a hobby you can pick up over a weekend; it's going to take some time to make anything that looks good.

To give you an idea, it took me about a month, if memory serves, to really get anywhere with MovieMaker, starting with absolutely no knowledge at all. MovieMaker is designed to be easy -- and I can say it absolutely is, now that I'm familiar with Sony Vegas Pro. It took about 6 months of pretty steady effort to really get the hang of the basic functions of editing on the pro version of Sony Vegas (which is considered one of the easier editors to learn). I'm only just now getting really good at it, nearly 3 years later. In hindsight, I should have used the non-Pro version as a stepping stone, and then upgraded.

It may well take a shorter time for you, but if you have a deadline, you need to seriously over-estimate how long the editing stage will take, especially if you have limited editing experience.

Technical stuff you need to know

If you are making a vid for a particular audience, there are technical specs you need to know before you choose an editor. I really can't stress this enough. Choosing an editor with your tech requirements in mind will save you a lot of heartache at the project's end. I once had to re-edit an entire video because I didn't know enough about this, and couldn't render the film I'd made.

First, and most importantly, you want a non-linear editor (NLE). Don't go for anything that's not -- they are horrible to edit on. A non-linear editor allows you to place your video clips anywhere on the timeline and they stick there. A linear editor requires you to place clips in sequence, one after the other, and they will shuffle forward if you remove a clip, rather than sticking to their place. Ugh.

Second, if you are editing for a specific purpose, you need to know what kind of input and output you need -- eg. the format your camera uses, the format you want to export your video in, the frame rate needed, and so on. If you're just making vids for fun, this is less important, but if you want to submit your vid anywhere other than internet services like YouTube or Vimeo, you really do need to know this. Some editors don't support common formats when you import from video cameras; some don't export in certain formats. So if there's a format you absolutely must import, or render your final movie in, make sure the editor you pick can do so... or that you know of a stable work-around. For instance, if your editor can render lossless avi files, you could then convert them into the format you need another way and still get a good result in most cases.

How To guides

YouTube has a lot of awesome How To guides. I tend to use them a lot to figure out how to do things. I strongly recommend you look at a few for the video editor(s) you are thinking of using. See what the interface looks like, and how it all works.

For more technical information on making a vid, there's a fabulous guide (focused on AMV makers, but useful for anyone getting started in video editing): A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video (v3).

Don't try to read it from start to finish -- dip into it as you get to each stage of making a vid. I use this for every vid I make, as there are different technical challenges each time.

The Video Editors

I actually use a combination of a pro NLE editing suite (Sony Vegas), and about a dozen freeware applications which help prep and convert media files. The freeware actually does some of these jobs way way better than Sony Vegas -- in fact you can't do some of these jobs in Vegas. Below, I'm just focusing on the actual video editors. Links and guides to using the freeware are in A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video (v3).

Free editors for rank beginners

Windows MovieMaker. Free, single-track NLE.
You've probably heard about this editor -- heard people cursing it, that is. Everything that you've heard is true, but I'm still recommending this as a starting point if you've never made a vid before. It's very easy to learn how to use, is the thing. So if you're an absolute n00b to the world of video editing, this will help you get familiar with the basic ideas of clipping, placing on the timeline, adding effects, and so on, without a lot of confusing extra options. It's also well documented and there are a lot of help forums.

WMM comes bundled with Windows, but can also be downloaded from Microsoft. It started out as a very poor linear editor, but is now NLE, which means it actually works pretty well as training wheels. It's still single track, however, which is a deal-breaker for most editing jobs, as it seriously limits the effects you can create. It's quite simplistic, but will do an okay job on short films.

I wouldn't use it for anything more than 5 mins in length, because the old version I started out vidding on had trouble rendering big files, and as far as I know that's still true. It only renders in a couple of formats -- as Windows Media files natively, and I think you can add other codecs for one or two of the other common formats.

I would also only recommend you use this for your first 3 vids, just enough to get familiar with the basics of editing, and then move on to something better.

Ulead Studios. Free, single-track NLE.
I've never used this, but I've heard it's on-par with WMM in terms of ease-of-use, while offering slightly more functionality. Like WMM, it would probably work well as a training-wheels type editor, so you can get familiar with the basics before moving on to a better editor.

"Free" pro editors

Lightworks. Public beta, multi-track NLE.
Lightworks is currently available in a public beta version. I haven't used this, but I believe it's harder to learn than Sony Vegas Pro or Premier Pro, just from what I've read on forums. It's rapidly becoming an industry standard, and buzz about it is mostly positive. There's lots of official support and tutorials for Lightworks because of it's public beta status, and also lots of documentation on Wikipedia and so forth.

This could be a really good choice, depending on your needs. You'd need to do a comparison of features with other editors to figure out if it would work for you. However, public beta does imply that at some point this will come out of beta, and when it does it may no longer be "public", so you could end up having to pay for it.

Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Open to download, multi-track NLE.
I haven't used Premier, but it's rapidly becoming one of the industry standards, and generally considered very good. It probably takes the same kind of time to learn as Sony Vegas Pro, so be prepared to spend some time on it.

Be warned: Version 2.0 is only available "free" because Adobe recently posted public keys to the software they are no longer maintaining, so that old clients could still access it. The site warns that only legitimate customers should download and use it.

Version 2.0 is old, obsolete really, but still should be perfectly serviceable for basic pro editing. Because it is so old, it may not work on your current system, and there will be little documentation and less support.

All that said, if you are considering buying the Adobe creative suite (Premier, After Effects, Photoshop, etc), this could be a good way to have a play with the editor first.

Other free video editors

There are some other freeware options, but they are an order of magnitude harder to learn as they don't have spiffy user interfaces. Some, like VirtualDub, are worth using in a limited way for their Avisynth editing capacity (as outlined in the AMV Guide I've linked to above). Most of them would be very, very hard to edit a whole vid on.

You can find a list of free editors on Wikipedia, here.

Buying an NLE

If you are interested in buying a multi-track editor for Windows, here are the main options, in alphabetical order.

Adobe Premier Pro and Elements. Around AU$1,300 and AU$130 respectively
Elements is the cut-down version of Premier Pro. It seems reasonably priced, and from all accounts it does a good job of basic editing, and has some neat stuff bundled in. Premier Pro is rapidly becoming an industry standard, and integrates well with the other Adobe creative products.

Avid Media Composer. Around US$2,500
I don't know much about this, but it's considered an industry standard, and is used a lot in workplaces where there's a need to share files.

Sony Vegas Pro and Movie Studio. Around US$600 and US$50 respectively.
Available as both Pro and cut-down versions, much like Premier. Vegas Pro is the editor I chose, because it was the cheapest reputable full-suite editor around when I was looking to buy. I'd now probably try Lightworks first, but I'm happy with Sony Vegas and plan to continue to use it.

Related software

There are some applications you'll hear a lot about when poking around at NLEs. These are not generally used as video editors (although can be), but to do specialised work, usually special effects. The two mains ones are:

Adobe After Effects. Around AU$1,600
Commonly used by vidders to add special effects to videos, and also now fairly widely used professionally. Can be used in conjuction with video editors other than Adobe Premier. There's lots of how-to guides about, but it looks pretty difficult to learn.

Blender. Free, 3D graphics modelling software.
Used primarily for special effects. I'm seeing this crop up a lot now in ads and show reels on YouTube. There's a fair amount of industry buzz about it, and it's starting to get used more widely as a pro tool. The user interface looks pretty unintuitive, and the people who talk about it mostly use dense jargon, so my impression is it's still very much for hard-core tech geeks.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/394332.html.

Midnight musings

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:40:45 GMT

Question of the day:

As Derek is a born werewolf with near-instantaneous healing under most conditions, the tattoo on his back must have been done under unusual conditions.

So does that mean it's magical and would also appear on his Alpha form? Because that would be pretty awesome.

Observation of the day:

A while ago I wrote meta on the socio-economic status of the werewolves in Teen Wolf, and how it's mapped on a spectrum from hero (employed, upwardly mobile Scott) to anti-hero (not visibly employed, downwardly mobile Derek).

And then I found out about this...

Spoiler for Season 3 of Teen Wolf
Derek is being touted by The Powers That Be as having more backstory and romance (ie. less obviously an anti-hero) in the upcoming Season 3. Not coincidentally, in my opinion anyway, he has also been given a rockin' bachelor pad. You can see a sketch of it here.

LOL. How hilarious is that? It's like a cross between Dr Evil's lair, and a James Bond love nest!

Supports my argument nicely, yes?

Oh, and Season 3 has now officially been scheduled to begin airing on June 2!

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/394135.html.

The Making of "We Must Be Killers"

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:50:01 GMT

"We Must Be Killers" is not only my current favourite of all the vids I've made, it's one of the most technically complex vids I've edited, about on par with a constructed reality like "Movin' On". Hopefully you have no idea what I'm talking about right now, because if I've done my job right, you shouldn't even really notice that "We Must Be Killers" has any difficult effects at all. They are not the point of the vid, so I tried not to draw attention to them in the vid itself.

The short version is that the film I used, The Defiant Ones, is only available in black and white, and I wanted to make the vid in colour. The long version of how I did this is behind the cut.

This year for Festivids, I really wanted to make a vid featuring Sidney Poitier. I nominated The Defiant Ones (1958), because it's such a great story -- dramatic, elegantly told, focused on characters, and made in an historically interesting moment -- but didn't have any real hopes of being matched to a request. I honestly didn't think anyone would want a vid made from this source.

Much to my delight, it was requested by lilly_the_kid. Little did I realise as I let out my giant HOORAY at seeing the match that I was about to embark on a ridiculous colour odyssey as a result.

I'd seen the film years ago on TV, but didn't have a copy, so I had to track it down which took a bit of doing. It was no longer in stock anywhere, so I ended up buying it second-hand. I was so excited when I finally got my hands on it... and then I started watching it, and felt this horrible sense of betrayal.

You see, in my memory, the train sequence at the end was in vibrant colour, but the film itself was in black and white. Was it just the copy I had? Surely there was a colour version somewhere? After scouring the internet, I concluded that this film had never been released in colour, nor had it been colourised. Which meant that I had colourised it with my brain. Good one, brain.

All my happy dreams of vidding the movie disappeared in a puff of disappointment. I wanted the train in colour! I didn't want to vid that scene in black and white! It needed to be in colour!

Yeah, I was kind of petulant about the whole black and white thing, even though I really like black and white movies. Anyway, I put aside the idea of vidding The Defiant Ones, and instead I started looking at the other sources lilly_the_kid had requested -- all of which were awesome, and in colour. The idea of The Defiant Ones (and Sidney Poitier) kept niggling at me, though, so in the end I cracked out my Google Fu and typed in "colourising film".

Because of course that's what a sane person would do when faced with a black and white film they wanted to vid in colour. *facepalm*

I found exactly what I was expecting. A whole heap of sites with some n00b asking, "How do I colourise this old black and white film I have?" and a dozen knowledgeable people laughing and pointing at them, and replying, "Pay Industrial Light and Magic $60,000."

Yeah.

Even though it's exactly what I already knew, it made me cranky. So got kind of curmudgeonly about it and I started looking a bit deeper, following the obscure links left by the few people who took the question seriously. Most were dead-ends -- they required specialised programming skills, or a lot of cash, or they just didn't work (I trialled several Avisynth plug-ins that didn't work the way I hoped). However, there was one possibility I decided might actually work: coloured filters.

I didn't have time to get deeply into colour theory (something I really want to do -- I now totally get the awesomeness of clapperboards and test patterns and want to know more), but I did some basic Colour 101 reading, and in the end decided to attempt an old school solution -- adding a primitive three-colour tinting process (red, blue, green) to the film using filters, and see what it looked like. I think it turned out pretty great, actually. Surprisingly so, given my total lack of colour expertise.

I did the colour conversion in three stages.

Stage 1: Cleaning the film

The Defiant Ones is an old film, and it looked it. The print I had was grainy, and I knew if I tried to add colour to it, the whole thing would look really ugly and fuzzy. So I cracked open the trusty A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video (v3), and cleaned up the source footage. As you can see in the screencaps below, this removed some of the texture, but also nearly all of the grain, leaving a nice clean canvas to add colour to. This took the best part of 24 hours.

Click to see in detail

Stage 2: Creating the tints

Using my nice clean black and white footage, I ran Eugene Khoroshavin's Color Mill 2.1 in VirtualDub (which you can download from the AMV guide), creating three different coloured tints. I decided that skin tone and sky were the most important colours, so I rendered in sepia rather than a deeper red, then a sky blue, and then finally a plant green. Because I was rendering these tints losslessly, it took about 24 hours to set up and render each tint, and the files were enormous.

Click to see in detail

Stage 3: Mixing the colours

Once I had my three tints, I mixed them in Sony Vegas. I wasn't aiming to produce realistic colour. My goal was to get something that looked pleasing, and evoked old-fashioned sepia photos.

I tried several different mixing approaches -- starting out with the sepia track and adding in the other tracks, but wasn't happy with the result.

In the end, I used the clean black and white as the main track, but set it at a high level of transparency. Green was the next track, also set to be highly transparent, and then finally blue and sepia. I did some colour correction on the black and white track to enhance dark, mid-tone and light saturation levels, to bring out the relevant colours -- for instance, I set "light" to enhance blue, as most of the light tones were sky.

I then did another lossless export of the three-colour tint, and this was the source I used for the vid. The colour mixing and rendering process took about two days.

Click to see in detail

The end result doesn't look that much different to the sepia, but it has some important characteristics that the sepia alone did not have. First, you need some colour in the source in order to be able to make use of tools like the colour corrector wheels, and the tinted source now had all three colour embedded in it, even if only vestigially, so I could now somewhat manipulate the colours while vidding. Second, scenes shot in the studio or at night had very little colour differentiation, because the cameras of the day didn't capture a wide spectrum of light under those conditions. However, scenes shot in full sun actually looked the most like full colour, because there was a wider range of light captured, and so the tints were more subtle and nuanced. This meant I could further enhance the colours using colour correctors and saturation/contrast controls for scenes in full sunlight.

This was actually perfect for my purposes, as I wanted to build up to the most saturated colours for the climactic train sequence.

Editing the vid

Editing was the longest stage, taking about ten days to complete; this doesn’t include planning or music editing or creating the art, but does include beta and revision. There were a few issues that arose specifically because of the colorisation.

After all my hard work in producing a clean, tinted media source, when I actually started editing I found that it was incredibly fragile (and to be fair, I think this would also have been true of the black and white version). What this fragility meant was that I couldn't use most of the transitions and effects (like velocity changes or pan/crops) that are the standard stuff of vidding more recent, robust sources. When I tried, the image went fuzzy very quickly. There are a few effects in the vid, nonetheless, but very few, and mostly used at very minimal settings -- if you look closely you can tell every time I use one, as the clip is slightly fuzzier than those either side.

The one effect every clip has is colour correction to some extent. In the early scenes this is mostly tweaking green versus blue depending in whether it’s day or night. Saturation also increases as the vid goes along, with the highest saturation for the climax.

Click to see in detail

Transitions proved to be the most difficult part of the vid. I wanted crossfades for most of the cuts, to enhance that old-fashioned look. Normally crossfades are easy, but in this case there were colour artifacts from the tinting process that became apparent in crossfades, creating purple after-images. I had to try a lot of different crossfade curves before finding one which minimised the colour artifacts.

Another issue was in the final sequence, after they jump/fall from the train. The day they filmed that sequence must have been gorgeous, as the sky was a deep enough blue that it registers as a mid-tone (in other words: it’s sepia in the three-colour tint rather than blue), so I couldn't get it to look blue without making everything else blue too. In the end I used a mask for these clips -- masking out the brown sky, and using matching clips from the blue tinted track to replace it. Quite a tedious job, as Poitier keeps sticking moving body parts up into the sky, but I like how it turned out. In the image above, you can see this edit where the clips are layered on top of each other in the editing tracks; the title sequence is also overlayed, which is why there are so many clips.

Finally, I did several test renders and tweaked the colour until it looked reasonable. I prefer it as a Windows Media file, played in Windows Media Player -- that codec is really nice, one of the Window products that actually works awesomely.

Click to see in detail

Final thoughts

There are some things I'd do differently with the benefit of hindsight. I'd spend some more time learning about colour balances and how to reset white and black -- they are the shades which got tossed out in the tinting process, and I think the colour overall would be richer if I had spent some time on white/black correction at the end of the tinting process.

Would I do it again? I'm really not sure. I like black and white film, and many of these old films were shot in studios, so the light captured wouldn't allow for a good tint in any case. It was a really interesting challenge, though, and I love the vid I ended up making. It was definitely worth it for this particular project. Having done this project I now want to learn more about colour, but even so, I doubt I'll ever colourise a film again using this method.

Would I recommend it as a viable method for colorising a film? No, not for a whole film. There are huge sequences of the film which ended up looking weird when I mixed the three-colour tint, but I didn't need them for the vid, so I didn’t bother to try and correct them. I suspect you’d need to do a lot of mixing and editing to end up with something reasonably watchable. You could do it, if you were prepared to spend the time, and it would be cheaper than the alternatives. But it would take a hell of a lot of work.

Anyway, that's a snapshot of my colourising odyssey. I'm open to questions if you have any.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/393644.html.

Festivids 2012 Recs

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:14:01 GMT

My eyes are totally square, but it's so worth it, as there are some awesome vids this year! You can find the masterpost here.

A prize of infinite kudos if you can pick which vid(s) I made. :)

My favourites

The Blue Ribbon vid this year is the one made for me:

Aliens series - Stayin’ Low by hollywoodgrrl
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/156638.html

It's psychedelic and gruesome, and fills my festivids letter to a T. This is the best Aliens vid I've ever seen, a wonderful nightmarish confection with Ripley at its heart.

Also highly recced:

Amelie - Beauty in the Breakdown by turquoisetumult
http://fv-poster.livejournal.com/135733.html

We'll Take Manhattan - I've Just Seen A Face by purplefringe
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/165653.html

Pumzi - Fire and Water by rhivolution
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/155647.html

Maru the Cat - Living In A Box by Little Heaven
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/148215.html

Batman: Under the Red Hood - This Night by dragonchic
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/152893.html

Big Eden - Cooking Breakfast by bironic
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/131866.html

These all took my fancy for one reason or another:

Dororo - Hand in My Pocket by Shati
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/161729.html

Charlie's Angels - The Look by Jetpack Monkey
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/132842.html

Carrie - Love On Top by sweetestdrain
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/172005.html

Eyes without a Face - Made You Move by sweetestdrain
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/170253.html

Face/Off - Face/Off by echan
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/169296.html

Hero - A Combat in Tribute to You by rhoboat
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/129361.html

Ladyhawke - The Wolf Sky by lizbetann
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/154956.html

Mayhem (Allstate TV ads) - Mayhem is Coming by sabaceanbabe
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/129843.html

Modern Family - Meant to Fly by E-transitions
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/160401.html

Moon - Another Code Against the Gone by CherryIce
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/167687.html

Parks & Recreation - Give Me Everything by Anoel
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/157090.html

The Princess Bride - Killer Dillers by Crowie
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/158653.html

Robin Hood: Men in Tights - Amusements in Tights by SDWolfpup
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/155789.html

RPF - Teen Wolf Cast - OMG by Greensilver
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/160111.html

Sense & Sensibility - Rondo by heresluck
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/174526.html

The Wolf Man movies - Wolfsbane by Jetpack Monkey
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/172769.html

Wonder Woman - Titanium by Gianduja Kiss
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/126671.html

You're Beautiful - Complicated by cappy
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/141126.html

3 Ninjas - Defeat You by echan
http://fv-poster.dreamwidth.org/168622.html

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/393230.html.

Festivids

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 07:11:27 GMT

OMG the last day before festivids opens is always the worst. Amirite? It's so close, and yet still so far away!

I'm looking forward to reveals too -- usually I'm just interested to see who did what, but this time I really want to talk technical stuff. I'm getting more and more interested in the technical stuff.

I've edited enough vids now that I'm getting a feel for which aspects of vidding particularly interest me. I love credit sequences, and I love colour work -- I want to learn all the things about colour. I'm also interested in sound editing and sound effects, but know hardly anything about them. I'm also increasingly interested in fps, and what impact that has on viewing -- I regularly vid in ~24fps and 25fps, and sometimes in ~30fps. The differences aren't visible to the eye, until you try to mix sources at different frame rates. I wonder what 48fps looks like in the editing suite? I wonder how long before we have a useable universal standard -- that would be so great.

I'd kind of like to have a go at co-vidding something, so I can get a first-hand look at how other vidders work. That doesn't seem to be something that people do very often -- I guess it's much harder to share vid files than docs. Have any of you co-vidded? How did you go about it?

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/393100.html.

Vid: Not Afraid by cupidsbow (Festivids, PG-15)

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:41:04 GMT

This was made as a pinch hit, very fast, just before Festivids went live. I had hoped to pick up a pinch hit this year, and hmmyeahokay's requests were a real windfall -- I would haven't chosen any of the fandoms she had asked for, so working out what to vid and how to vid it was a challenge (which, let's face it, I love).

At first, I thought I'd make a vid about Alice from Resident Evil, because I knew I'd be able to get that source easily. But I managed to get my hands on Colombiana, and after watching it went, "Wow! A revenge tragedy I actually like!" Zoe Saldana's character was kick-ass and awesome, and deserved a vid, so it was a pretty easy choice from there.

Music was also a challenge, as I didn't know what hmmyeahokay liked, and I had nothing in my vaults that would do. I spent some serious time pounding the internet looking at random stuff. GJan was an accidental find, but the beat really struck me as a good match for an action vid. I had to cut the song down a lot, but it in the end it worked wonderfully well with the visuals.

The only downside of doing a pinch hit was I didn't have time to get a beta, and it shows: there are some rough bits, especially in the prison sequence (which I vidded last). Anyway, I'm pleased with how it turned out. It was a lot of fun to make, and ended up being more popular than the other vid I made (go figure).

Title: Not Afraid, by cupidsbow/cupidsbow
Fandom: Colombiana
Characters: Cataleya & Emilio
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Fast cuts, flashes, violence.
Recipient: hmmyeahokay, for Festivids 2012. (Originally posted here).
Artist’s notes: Music: Not Afraid by GJan.

Summary: Vengeance is a harsh mistress.

Download: MediaFire (wmv rar 72MB)
Stream: YouTube

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/392730.html.

Prezzies!

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 06:12:46 GMT

I've scored two great prezzies so far this season.

Supernatural:
Ghost in the Machine | Dean&Castiel [8.07 Spoilers]
A vid which delivers just what I asked for - plotty Dean and Castiel in an earworming recap of S8 so far.

Teen Wolf
Jingle Bells, Batman Smells
And in the fest which nearly didn't happen, I actually scored a gift! It's pretty freaking awesome too, featuring Lydia as a P.I. solving the case of the killer snowman. I actually LOLed at parts of this, which is rare for me. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/392514.html.

Final call: Teen Wolf Yuletide 2012

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 05:52:35 GMT

Thanks to all of those who have already posted to the alternative Teen Wolf Yuletide fest on the AO3. The gifts have all been awesome so far! You can read them here.

This is the final call for those who want to take part in the anonymous part of the exchange. Authors/artists/vidders will be revealed on 1 January 2013.

Participants are welcome to keep posting at any point, even after reveals have taken place. Go to the Teen Wolf Yuletide 2012 collection, and click on "Post to Collection".

Happy New Year, everyone.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/392407.html.

Update on Teen Wolf Yuletide

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:56:49 GMT

Hi tw_yuletiders,

I'm about to begin my Christmas holiday, which involves travelling to places with very limited internet.

This shouldn't be a problem, as you can post to the AO3 community straight away, and I will make sure I get access to open the gifts on the 23rd December.

Here's the collection: Teen Wolf Yuletide on AO3. Press the "Post to Collection" button to add your gift.

If you do have an issue or need an AO3 invite, email me and I'll respond as soon as I can (cupidsbower[at]gmail[dot]com).

Have a great holiday everyone!

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/392154.html.

Open call to all Teen Wolf Yuletide participants

cupidsbower@gmail.com — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:19:11 GMT

Season’s greetings to all Teen Wolf Yuletide participants!

As you may be aware, the original moderator of the Teen Wolf Yuletide fest for this year has been suffering from pneumonia, and has been unable to respond to email. S/he has our best wishes.

For those of you who signed up for this fest, we are providing an AO3 community, Teen Wolf Yuletide 2012, in which you are welcome to post your gifts. Posting to this community is entirely voluntary, and is offered as a stop-gap in place of the official community posts.

Instructions on how to post to the community are given below the cut.

Dates:

Posting open now: Post your stories/art/vids whenever you’re ready
Go live: All posts made public on 23 December 2012
Reveal: 1 January 2013

Updates to this plan will be posted in cupidsbow’s Livejournal/Dreamwidth/Tumblr, with the tag of tw-yuletide.

If you need help posting to AO3, you’re welcome to contact cupidsbow by leaving a comment here, or emailing cupidsbower[at]gmail[dot]com. I also have some invite codes if you need one. Please use [AO3] or [TW Yuletide] in the subject line.

The AO3 community is currently co-moderated by cupidsbow and avarosier. However, we are not acting as replacement moderators for the fest. The original moderator has not been able to hand over any of the participant information, and we are offering this option without his/her approval. We have no idea who even signed up or who may have needed to drop out.

If you would like to help out (by pinch-hitting, moderating the comm, or making an icon/banner for the community, for instance), please let us know. We can’t make any promises about pinch-hits, but we’ll see what we can do.

As of now there is a master collection on AO3 for the exchange as a whole (in case the fest is run again next year), and a sub-collection for the 2012 entries.

If you are already a registered user on AO3, please post your work to the Teen Wolf Yuletide 2012 collection by December 23rd, so it can be added to the moderation queue.

If you don’t read this until after December 23rd, go ahead and add your story/art/vid anyway.

If your recipient doesn’t have have an AO3 handle (or signed up with a different handle), just go ahead and post to the collection as usual, and put in the name you were sent. If you don’t remember the name of your recipient, type in “Unknown”, but give as much detail about the prompt as you can in the notes.

If you are not currently an AO3 user, cupidsbow has a pool of invites. To pick up your invite code, please email cupidsbower[at]gmail[dot] com using the address you would like the invite sent to and tag your request with [AO3] in the subject line .

To post to the collection, all you have to do is go to the collection's profile page, and click "Post to Collection".

The form you'll get is the exact same form you get whenever you post a new work, but it will automatically have the collection name applied for you.

You will also notice there is a space to put the name of your recipient. If their name appears in the dropdown menu, select it, otherwise please type in the full name (or use “Unknown” if you don’t remember it) and move on to the next required field.

After you fill in all the necessary information and click post, your work will be entered into our queue. And that's it!

(Our thanks go to the deancas_xmas mods, from whom we borrowed most of these instructions.)

Happy belated festing,

cupidsbow and avarosier

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/391836.html.