New vid: Created By Man

I made a short silly vid.

Title: Created By Man
Vidder: Sumana Harihareswara ("brainwane")
Fandom: 1980s US television commercials
Music: "Fall", Daft Punk (TRON: Legacy soundtrack)
Length: 1min27sec
Summary: And they have a(n installment) plan!
Content notes: Creepy cars
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA)
Download: on Google Drive (34.4 megabytes for a WebM file); also available at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res MP4 and WebM files)
Stream: on Critical Commons, or you can play streaming in Google Drive; also embedded below
Tools: kdenlive, youtube-dl, LibreOffice, emacs
Sources: several car commercials from 1980s television
Subtitles file: none -- no lyrics in music

So seekingferret and thirdblindmouse and I got together for several hours of vidding and chatting, and I decided to make a vid in a few hours. Sometimes to relax my spouse and I watch old TV commercials, so I decided to use that for video source, and I thought that some of the short pieces from the TRON: Legacy soundtrack might work for a silly vid. I decided to make something highlighting the (to my eyes) over-the-top creepiness in certain ads, and then zeroed in on the car ads that seem to want to frighten the viewer? Like, here's a dog that sneaks into a factory at night and sees a car named the Shadow that comes alive in a horror-movie-looking sequence (Leonard said "Like Christine meets Cujo"). Here's a guy on a date who looks over his shoulder and a car is following him! It feels weird that the car ad seems to want me to be afraid of the car that it wants me to buy.

So here you go. Hope it makes you laugh. Folks should tell me if they need to know which specific cars were being advertised, the dates of broadcast, etc.

seekingferret and, later, Leonard identified a scifi theme that I wasn't initially seeing -- Knight Rider, Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica echoes. My initial title was "Every Move You Brake" but Leonard thought of "Created by Man" to echo the Cylon feel, and that's better.

There are black columns on either side because I imported 4:3 source into a 16:9 project, but it looks fine and is totally watchable. In the interest of getting this up quickly I'm not fixing it right now. Maybe later.

This vid is under CC BY-SA and I hope people feel free to remix it, redistribute it, and otherwise enjoy it, as long as they attribute me as the vidder.

Thanks to seekingferret and thirdblindmouse for encouragement!

Seeking organizers for arts fest about programming next year

In May, I chaired "The Art of Python", a festival of arts about programming that took place at PyCon North America. People presented short plays, monologues, songs, and a video remix that explored how it feels to program and play with Python. Since I can't co-organize it again for 2020, I have written up a retrospective and HOWTO document about "The Art of Python". It's in two parts: "Why I Did This" and "How I Did This". I hope it helps recruit organizers for 2020.