ExtraPenguin

So vidukon_cardiff is done and I can show the three (!) premieres I made for the con. (I also submitted Begin Again to the Vidder's Choice non-premieres show.)

To fully appreciate the magnitude of this undertaking, please note that the deadline for getting them all in was the same as the deadline of highadrenalineexchange, so I spent the last two weeks of the time writing a 10k fic.

General notes: I learned how to do time remapping, I made my first vid based on pre-clipped stuff vs clipping in kdenlive, and I continued my micro-rendering ways (rendering small segments that I'd vidded to see how it looked like outside the editor). I also continued making title cards for my vids! I think it's a definite improvement in technique.

Antagonism Premere: You Know My Name

The open submission themed vidshow this year was Antagonism. I sort of cheated in that I had a half-done draft of a Palpatine vid for vid_bingo. (This one was my emergency backup premieres-premieres idea, in which case I would've submitted Start a War for an Antagonism non-premiere.)


AO3

For this one, my key principles were twofold:
1. Palpatine is the big bad of the trilogy (and, well, the entire saga) but he's more of an insidious background influence. This is his brag track, so I wanted to have him be the shadow passing over the screen at the start and then only show his face when he's bragging "you know my name".
2. All of the apprentices are disposable. Maul might be the decoy protagonist of the vid, as he gets the first verse, but the odds will betray him and Sidious will replace him, and he will disappear from the vid, as will Dooku.

This is also my first attempt at time remapping! It made the lightsaber fights much bouncier. I also did some audio editing, as I couldn't make the "I've seen diamonds cut through harder men / Than you yourself, but if you must pretend / You may meet your end" bridge work with Dooku film footage, and didn't want to make it multimedia just for that section.

My personal favorite bit is the Order 66 montage, followed by the jump cuts with Anakin going up the Temple steps.

Eurovision Premiere: Come What May

condnsdmilk resurrected (?) a VidUKon tradition of a vidshow where at least one of vidder, source, and music must be European (though not necessarily from Eurovision). When I heard of this, I went "hey, it would be cool to make a vid with a non-English song!" and approached condnsdmilk about a premiere because I am insane. (Remember, 2.5 full-length vids plus 10k+ of fic in uh way too little time.)


AO3

Based on timestamps on communication, I got the "yes, would love a premiere!" message on the 19th of March and was done on the 14th of April. This included one brief false start where I wanted to make the vid to Sonne, but that didn't really jive tonally with the bright and colorful SWTOR footage, I swapped to Niin tuleni teen, which I already knew should work. (I tested it with one of the vfxercises last year in screencap format.)

No super insightful meta here, but I did make sure to pre-introduce the few people who betray us first in their civilian guises before later defeating them. Same for Darth Lachris, who shows up half a minute before her demise. I'd like to think that my lyric matches are insightful, though given that no-one knew the source and the song was in Finnish (albeit subtitled), I don't think anyone caught them. Fun fact: I had a momentary panic over what font(s) to use for the credits screen, but then I realized I'd answered that in the vfxercise as well, lol.

The vidshow vid listing is here!

Premieres Premiere: Burn It Down

My original grand and sweeping vision was to make a vid to Reincarnation, but then I ragequit midway through clipping TPM (mostly because I'd have had to clip all nine Star Wars movies plus the Kenobi show and also I hadn't watched the sequels yet so I didn't know if my idea was valid), so I went for my backup idea.


AO3 (oh, that's a nice work id, so round)

Before the premieres show, there was a panel on women behind the camera (female directors & the movies they direct), and one of the panelists, colls, brought up her first vidding disappointment vidding Leia: she is a presence, but she doesn't really do that much. I had the exact same experience clipping for this. Leia sounds authoritative, but as soon as dudes turn up, her action scene body language is :O and she gets steadily more and more damseled over the trilogy. My solution was to put in basically every action-y clip of Leia and use editing to let her claim sole credit for e.g. blowing up the first Death Star. I also used the flashback in TRoS for Leia pwning Luke's ass in a lightsaber fight. I think, solely due to available footage, that I won't be making very many Leia vids. Though I have clipped every scene of hers save for the interminable Han/Leia sexual harassment in the middle of ESB (seriously, that movie made me into a Luke/Leia shipper) and the Jabba's palace/slave Leia stuff from RotJ, for posterity's sake.