This is by far my most ambitious songvid to date, using source footage from the 1940s in addition to that of Doctor Who and Torchwood, and cut to the fastest song in the world. OMG.

The driving force behind this was pretty much that I wanted Jack to have an adventure in the 1940s, so I built a constructed reality in order to give it to him. There are some more notes behind the cut, if you're interested. Otherwise, here's the masterpiece! I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. :)


Title: 1941: The Year That Never Was!
Vidder: cupidsbow/cupidsbow
Fandom: Torchwood and Doctor Who
Pairing: Jack/Tosh, Jack/realJack, Jack/Tosh/realJack
Rating: PG-13
Music: "Sing, Sing, Sing" by Benny Goodman (1987 remaster)
Summary: What if Jack had never met the Doctor?

Download: FileFront (16.03 MB).
Streaming: You can stream this from FileFront -- just click on the 'streaming' button. BAM isn't uploading at the moment, so I'll add it there later.


( The Making of 1941 )

Tags: 12-days-of-cliche, songvid, torchwood

Writing short stories is kind of like visiting Narnia. While you're going from sentence to sentence, hours, days (or, in some extreme cases, years) can pass as you're living through your character and going from one sentence to the next in that character's perspective. You write, ponder, edit and rewrite. Yet for the readers with the finished product, only a few minutes will be spent experiencing what took you all those long hours.

Writing a story well is taking all that time and making the readers live through it in those few minutes.

lunch with Maria

afternoon coffee with Ruth, Kerry and Sarah, all of whom I used to go to primary school with once upon a time

and then dinner with Angie, Stevie and Rob

at which I received an astronomy lesson from Stevie

relating to my current novel-in-progress's requirement for two moons.

Tags: life

1) I’m going to find every mother-fucker who tried to convince me I’d like this film and I’m going to punch them in the arm. If they trotted out the “you just have to turn your brain off” logic, I’m going to punch them twice. I turned my brain off, as advised. It was still too stupid for me to actually like it.

2) To be fair, there were some good bits. Many of them recycled from Aliens, the last film James Cameron made that I actually liked. I liked Giovanni Ribbisi’s evil corporate guy far more than I liked Paul Reiser’s evil corporate guy. And Michelle Rodriguez in an ornithopter makes up for a variety of ills.

3) At the end of the first hour, I hoped that this might not be an utter disappointment. The opening is solid, the characters get onstage pretty quickly, the set-up is full of bad naming conventions but otherwise okay. Conflict is established: the marine among the field researchers; the humans against the world; Ripley versus Paul Rieser; that second Avatar pilot getting jealous of Jake’s success with the Navi. Sure, most of that conflict disappears once Sully is inside the Avatar, but maybe it’ll come back.

4) At the end of the second hour, I decided there really should be some Disney song about A Whole New World playing over the top of the long sequences where we learn that the world is magical and interconnected for the ninth or tenth time. Said sequences do a great job of showing of the technology and creating spectacle, but also eliminates every character arc but one. Most of the more interesting arcs are blatantly written out via voice-over.

4b) I’ll be honest here – Avatar is primarily about spectacle. I don’t do spectacle. My first response to the Grand Canyon was “It’s a hole in the ground; lets go do something else.” Couple this with being an SF fan from way back and most of Avatar is really just well-rendered vistas of standard SF/Fantasy landscapes. If they wanted to do that, they should have just made a computer game.

5) At the end of the third hour, the movie had tried to perk me up by saying “Dragon’s versus Ornithopter’s, dude. Come on, this is cool.” For the most part, it was too late – I was bored and irritable and just wanted the fucking film over. Still, it was a cool fight scene. It lured me in. Then things got really stupid. Deus ex Machina stupid. And it tacked on a hand-to-hand fight scene it didn’t need, and tried to play out the character arc I would have been interested in if they’d actually bothered to build it at some point.

5b) The worst line in this film – and there are some contenders among the rather generic dialogue – comes in the finale twenty minutes when the hard-arsed marine captain squares off against our hero Sully and asks “how does it feel to betray your own race?” and you’re left thinking “you know what, it’d be nice if someone actually put some thought into that before this point in the script.”

6) Okay, the turning off my brain thing mentioned in point one? I can do it. Honestly, I can. I own copies of The Chronicles of Riddick. And Desperado. Heck, I own a copy of the Core. And I really, really liked Aliens. The thing is, most films where I turn off my brain basically say “look, if we have subtext it’s primarily accidental. We’re just chasing after the next cool thing.” They know that Subtext is a two-way street – you can’t promise it and walk away just because you have pretty visuals and nice action sequences. Avatar promised subtext and meaning. I paid attention. It decided I wasn’t getting it, despite the fact that the subtext is relatively shallow, and proceeded to beat me around the head with said subtext for the final hour of the film.

7) Seriously, the best thing in this film is Michelle Rodriguez flying a gunship.

Pandora? Sully? Grace? UNOB-FRICKEN-TANIUM? Worst naming conventions since the Chronicles of Riddick. And at least the Chronicles of Riddick knew it was an unrelenting sequence of cheese and action-sequences with all the depth of a wading pool.

9) 3D movies give me a headache.

10) Good things about this movie: Michelle Rodriguez; Sam Worthington; Paul Reiser Giovanni Ribisi; Ripley; the ability to endlessly snark about its failings; ornithopters. If someone would just take these elements and, say, remake Dune or put out a new Alien movie (without Predators), I’d be a happy man. ‘Cause there’s potential there for something awesome, especially now that Avatar’s gotten the obligatory “new film technology’s endlessly wanky film that’s really about how awesome said new film technology is” out of the way.

End Note: All of this leaves off the original objection to the film I posted on facebook a while back – that it’s going to be the same tired replay of white post-colonial guilt we’ve seen in shit like the The Power of One and Dances with Wolves and every other story where a white block from the conquering nation saves the tribe by becoming one of them. Needless to say, that objection remains, but I’m saddened to discover that there’s really no attempt to complicate the the narrative beyond that. Here’s one of those hints to take home – you can write a gritty story about the evils of corporations, or you can write a fairy tale. It’s fucking hard to do both in the same story, and Avatar falls apart about the point that it tries.

Originally published at Random Acts of Literary Vandalism. You can comment here or there.

Tags: movies

Hope has posted today's fest item -- a fantastic Left Turn story...

Title: Proxy -- DreamWidth, LiveJournal
Vidder: hope
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Lisa/Ianto, Lisa/Jack
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Role reversal.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/335280.html.

Tags: 12-days-of-cliche, torchwood

Almost 700 words written in The Song of Victor Spelling. The most I've written in one sitting in quite some time. Now tonight is the marketing phase.


Still thinking about Saturday night. God, what a fiasco. Yet I retain hope that the pieces can be picked up, even if such a fiaso is usually fatal at this early stage. This will ultimately depend on the scenario that played out behind the curtains.

First day of my week off. I'm sitting here just after breakfast, planning to go to a cafe and write soon. I'm web surfing and seeing job ads/headlines somewhere on cnn, which reminds me of the time I would sit on my couch on Monday mornings for a very different reason than I am now, but with a very similar setup. It makes me think, "What if the similarity of sitting here on a Monday Morning seeing job ads on the web, causes my reality to shift back to what it was when I was unemployed? What if this activity tips fate back in that direction?"

What a frightening world it would be if fate actually worked that way.

We finally caught up with this TV show even though it aired ages ago. What a cracker of a program! For starters, it starred the fabulous Jemima Rooper (pictured below) who was so excellent in Hex. I'd pretty much watch any show with her in it I reckon, even if it was about death metal or motorcross. Some excellent adaptive Austenesque dialogue, intricate twists of character and how much did I love Mr Collins' three disgusting brothers shipped in by Lady Catherine in order to take the Bennett girls off the marriage market. I believe a major motion picture is in the works. Awesome. Bring it on!

Tags: tv

Movies watched Saturday night were Torn Curtain by Hitchcock with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews (whose teeth I wanted to knock out during the first about 20 minutes of the movie). The whole thing is pretty preposterous plotwise --American physicist apparently defects to behind the Iron Curtain because the US govt stops funding his anti-nuke research. But he's really trying to get the pertinent info from a Polish scientist. Paul Newman gorgeous as per usual.

27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl--woman is the superbridesmaid who takes care of all her girlfriends' needs pre and during the wedding while having a crush on her boss ( who she can't tell). Baby sister comes to town in a whirl and sweeps boss off his feet. Ugh ugh ugh....some funny bits but I think overall the aftertaste is really pretty awful.

Finished the first season of Angel.

Post Christmas brunch at the Womacks. Took a video of young Lily zapping flies with her frog hat's tongue...fresh bagels, eggnog with rum, smoked salmon, chopped liver and presents exchanged. I'd already gotten a gift certificate/to donate to my favorite charity --Kiva--from Carrie, and also got a beautiful silk scarf made by Sylvie, a friend of Valeria's (birthday). A lovely sparkly single earring from Katya, strange Japanese purse that opens two ways from V&J.(xmas)--there will likely be a couple more birthday gifts coming my way this week.

Recuperated from the overindulgence of Xmas and raring to go this week...dinner with our of town friends at my favorite Japanese restaurant tomorrow night.

And my dad walked with his walker yesterday (only a little but I think it's the first time he's used it since the surgery) and asked to pee--which means that hopefully, the aides will help him use the toilet (TMI, I know-but this is an important step to getting my dad home).

Tags: dad news, gifts, movies, xmas

Today is a happy day, as Hope and I will both be posting for our fest. Hope has written an awesome story about Jack and Ianto getting kinky with first aid supplies. I know, I know, that was my reaction too. :)

And then I thought to myself, "Hey, I bet I could vid that!" So I did.

Title: First Aid
Vidder: cupidsbow
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Music: "I Touch Myself" by Divinyls
Summary: Jack has a first-aid fetish... or maybe just an Ianto fetish.
The Story: This was inspired by Hope's awesome story, "First Aid," which you can find on DeamWidth and LiveJournal. It's is NC-17 and smoking hot.

Download: FileFront (7.14MB).
Streaming: You can stream this from FileFront -- just click on the 'streaming' button. BAM isn't uploading at the moment, so I'll add it there later.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/334856.html.

Tags: 12-days-of-cliche, songvid, torchwood