Arctic Light

Another batch of vids are up at Sholio Vids on AO3!

I finished uploading the rest of Agent Carter.

• Queen of Hearts (Carter/Sousa/Thompson)
• Try Everything (ensemble)

And going all the way back to 2011 (15 years! what!) I got all my White Collar vids up.

• Fire Escape (Peter & Neal)
• Dustland Fairytale (the tale of Kate, Neal, and Adler)
• I Fought the Law (fun with cops & cons)
• Sugar Sugar (Peter/Elizabeth)

I remember that I vidded the White Collar vids in 2011-era iMovie, which only had one vidding track and clips snapped to each other instead of the timeline - so every time you put a new clip on the timeline, it bumped everything else down. I developed a workaround which was to use blank placeholders (I had a simple black image that I would extend to fill the space) that I used to keep everything locked in place, and then dropped new clips at the end of the timeline and carefully resized them to the exact timestamp dimensions of the placeholder, then dropped them into its place.

On the one hand, the quality was generally really good for the era - although it made the working vid files huge by 2011 hard drive standards - see this post here in which I'm noodling on whether to keep them, lol - and there was a noticeable drop in quality when I moved to vidding in Final Cut a couple of years later, since I had to work out settings once again. (I had started out in Premiere, which was much more powerful but also WAY fiddlier, and you had to deal with export settings and codecs, which iMovie mostly handled for you, and then I went back to Final Cut - which basically is next-gen Premiere - and had to deal with export settings and codecs again.) On the other hand, I remember the sheer relief of being able to layer tracks again, or just be able to place clips without everything jumping downstream on me.

Continuing with the Ao3 vidding project, I'm getting my Agent Carter vids up on AO3!

Going in order so far:

One More Day (2015)
Another Tonight (Jan 2016)
Miracle and Wonder (March 2016)

Let me know if anything doesn't work! All the original download links should work (I just copied them over, I haven't changed anything that I can remember since then), and I've generated new embed codes from the original uploads. Happy to fix anything that goes kablooey.

A vid about the Marines. Clips from seasons one and two; spoilers.

(CW: guns, violence, smoking - the usual show stuff. No fast/stuttery cuts.)



Music: Janelle Monae
Length: 2:48
Crossposted: On AO3 | on Tumblr

Download: 212 Mb MP4 (zipped)

Cannot BELIEVE I still have an SPN icon!

Anyway ... I first started making fanvids for fun in 2002, but I began posting them on LJ in 2006, and since 2026 is therefore my 20th anniversary of posting the first one (#what) and I've been wanting to get more of them on AO3, I decided to make that a project for this year!

So here's my 2006 one and only Supernatural vid, Life is a Highway.

This isn't the first one I put online, but of the 2006 vids I think it's probably one of my favorites and a good one to start with. Contains clips up to late season one because that's all I'd watched at that point and most of what was available. Here's the original LJ-imported-to-DW post. Please enjoy this dive into an alternate reality a moment in time when season one of Supernatural was literally All There Was.

Some notes if you'd rather read them afterwards

Obviously at this point all I have is the exported file rather than the original vidding files (as this was at least 5 computers ago) so 2006 quality is what you're getting, including some slight wonkiness with jerky video and slightly odd cropping (I was screencapturing the video, which explains both the slight borders that occasionally appear - I got a lot better at cropping later - and a few instances of jerkiness as my 2006 computer struggled to render the video). The credits also include my original 2000s-era LJ name, which some of you may remember.

IIRC, I was making these earliest vids on a really old copy of Adobe Premiere that I had absconded with from my college computer lab in the 1990s.

Also posted on AO3.

If you want a 12 Mb download in 2006 quality, you can download it here!

Also, an interesting bit of context on the 20th anniversary vidding project - I discovered recently that I uploaded a bunch (most? all?) of my older vids to Vimeo in 2016 on the private setting, so apparently I was planning a *10th* anniversary vidding project, but got derailed somehow. What is time.

Since I'm getting back into vidding again, I decided to put my vids (that are on AO3) in a collection for easier browsing.

Introducing Sholio Vids!

I tried doing it as a series at first, as I've seen some other vidders do, but this really didn't work for me because it means the oldest ones stack at the top, unless I do them in reverse order, I guess. Also, since I'm wildly multifannish in my vidding habits, making it a collection makes it very easy to pick and choose by fandom, as most people would probably want to do.

I actually have a LOT of vids that aren't on here. I didn't start regularly putting them on AO3 until the late 2010s, so (for example) all my AC ones, my White Collar ones, and basically everything before 2017 isn't on here. (Except one Highlander vid for some reason.) And it looks like there were a few even during this time that I never put on AO3. Also, a lot of my old vids aren't online anymore: a lot of my old Youtube embeds simply Ceased To Work for reasons unknown, and I think the oldest downloads no longer work either.

I started posting vids in 2006 - I was already making them (that started in 2002 or so) but it was 2006, in SGA fandom, that I got confident enough to start putting them online. Which makes 2026 my 20th vidding anniversary (vidiversary?), and one thing I'd like to do is get most of those old vids back up online if possible. That's an ongoing project for 2026 - stay tuned for details!

(Also, I am FINALLY working on subtitles for my recent vids, the Murderbot vid at the very least! I eventually decided to just handwrite the SRT files, which really doesn't take too much time; it's just a bit nitpicky to get the timing synced. It's not up yet, but hopefully soon.)

Okay so this one came together at the last minute. I was vidding a different song entirely, but if you've ever done vidding, you might also have had the experience that some songs are MUCH harder to find clips for than others - and the one I was working on (although I really liked the song for them, a moody folk song) was absolutely glacial. I was running into the last few days before the deadline, a week that also was going to involve travel for me, and I was starting to face the fact that I might not get a second vid done in time.

However, you know what's really fast to vid? Bouncy pop music with clear, non-metaphorical lyrics! This song came up on the playlist I was listening to, and I realized immediately that I could visualize the intro-outro of the vid very clearly, popped it into the timeline and had like half the vid done in just a couple of hours.

It's not the kind of song people usually vid for MASH, so I was honestly surprised the response was so positive - I mean, good surprise! Very good surprise! ♥ But I was kind of expecting it to be many fewer people's cup of tea. However, I feel like the song lends itself very well to the concept I had in mind for it - as one commenter astutely pointed out, it's both how Hawkeye felt about the people he lived and worked with (and how they felt about each other), and how the fans feel about the show after all these years.



Song: I Will Always Love You
Artist: Whitney Houston
Length: 4:02
Lyrics can be found here.
Also posted on AO3.

Oh, and both of these vids contain canon-typical scenes of wartime violence, guns, explosions, etc. ("Lantern" more so than this one, which is softer and more focused on the group dynamic.)

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

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

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

Password: zemo



Download: 108 Mb MP4 (zipped)
Lyrics: here
Tumblr: here
AO3: here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatFZgARj6U
Download: Here (28 Mb zipped MP4)

This is such an Owen song. I've been working on this vid off and on while rewatching Torchwood, and I finally finished! Clips up to 2x12 "Fragments" only, because nothing after that exists.

Song: Die Young
Fandom: Torchwood
Artist: Kesha
Clips/spoilers: Seasons 1 & 2
Contains: Various canon Owen pairings; Owen + team; some flashing lights and sex/violence (but not especially graphic)
Summary: Let's make the most of the night like we're going to die young.

Crossposts: On AO3 | On Tumblr
Streaming: On Vimeo (pass: dieyoung) | On Youtube
Download: 186 Mb MP4 (zipped)

Embed and lyrics under cut.

( Embedded here )

( Lyrics )

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

Here are the instructions:

1) Pechakucha 2 ways

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

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

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

Version 1: High On You (Survivor)



Version 2: Amacala (Siphokazi)



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