Sumana

I have just watched both seasons of Galavant, the comedy fantasy musical sitcom from a few years ago (it was great to get to watch Timothy Omundson having a great time, as I always enjoyed his work in Psych). As I watched, I figured a few of the songs would work as vid songs, much as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend songs do -- "Maybe You're Not The Worst Thing Ever", "World's Best Kiss", "What Am I Feeling" and some others. I welcome recommendations of vids you like that use songs from Galavant, even if they're for fandoms I don't know at all! (This also goes for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend).

In sort of the same mode as "Created By Man" late last year: here's a new vid about weird motifs in 1980s US television ads.

Title: Electric Silhouettes
Vidder: Sumana Harihareswara ("brainwane")
Fandom: 1980s US television commercials (with a bit of the 1990s)
Music: VNV Nation, "When Is The Future"
Length: 5min8sec
Summary: Phones, gadgets, handheld games, executives, the military, and how we thought about them.
Content notes: The US military (a control room), Teddy Ruxpin and children looking hypnotized, brief clips with trippy visual effects, an injured person being bandaged (no blood or injury is visible)
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA)
Download or Stream: on Google Drive (84 megabytes for an MP4 file; a .srt subtitles file is there too); also available at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res VP9 and H.264 files)
Tools: kdenlive, youtube-dl, GNOME Subtitles, Krita, emacs
Subtitles file: see the Download/Stream section


This vid reflects a bit on the mix of moods, images, themes, and assumptions in US television ads for consumer electronics in the 1980s (mostly -- a tiny bit of the 90s too). If nothing else, I hope you'll watch the first minute and laugh with me about "Feature 21" of that calculator watch. This is a very static-y and low-res vid because the source material I'm using is, generally, VCR capture that folks uploaded to YouTube. And folks should tell me if they need to know which specific products were being advertised, the dates of broadcast, etc.

Lyrics websites tell me that the song has a line "The image we create / Now image we designed" but I hear it as (and have subtitled it as) "The image we create / In our image we designed" which is far more grammatical and makes more thematic sense.

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 my spouse Leonard for beta viewing and to and my friend Zed Lopez for encouragement!

My local Python programming conference is going online this year. October 2nd and 3rd, PyGotham will be "PyGotham TV". The call for proposals says: "we also encourage fun and creative talks playing with the TV theme" -- so I was thinking: a little session reminiscent of MTV, or Pop-Up Video, might be interesting.

The sessions "should be 10 or 25 minutes long" which is enough time for a few vids. And, given how well-received "The Programming Saga" by echan and my vid "Pipeline" have been at tech conferences, and given how receptive PyGotham has been in the past to my odd experimental sessions, I think it's plausible that I could get a vidshow accepted. A playlist themed around engineering and the tech industry and our heritage and our successes -- stuff like "The Programming Saga" and "Pipeline", and "Landsailor" by raven, and "Speeding Rover" by seekingferret.

But! The call for proposals says: "Because it is an online-only event featuring pre-recorded talks, you must accept the recording release in order to be considered for PyGotham TV." The recording release itself* says you have to certify "that you are the author of your presentation (or otherwise allowed to present it at PyGotham TV)" with language including "certify that I am either the copyright owner of the User Submission or an authorized licensee of the copyright owner". Partly, I'm guessing, because this stuff is going to get streamed on YouTube. This year's WisCon vid party ended up happening on Zoom rather than YouTube and I would not be surprised if DMCA takedown concerns were one of the reasons.

So.... I think this could still work. Vids using public domain or openly licensed music, maybe?

The call for proposals is open through July 5th. If 3 people want to make some vids that are about engineering/technology in some way, using music that won't trigger a Content-ID takedown, I could put together that proposal. Heck, I don't need premieres -- if you've already made some that fit this constraint, I want to know about them!

* There is "you can opt out" language on that release; I followed up on this and that paragraph is an artifact of prior, in-person conferences. They're fixing the release to remove that now.

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!

Title: Pipeline
Vidder: Sumana Harihareswara ("brainwane")
Fandom: Multi (documentaries, movies, TV, comics, coding bootcamp ads, and more)
Music: "Blank Space", Taylor Swift
Length: 3 minutes, 11 seconds
Summary: The tech industry has a blank space, and is quite eager to write your name.
Content notes: Implied verbal/emotional abuse, a few seconds of very fast cutting around 1:50
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA)
Download: on Google Drive (165 MB high-res MP4, 23 MB low-res MP4, 98 MB AVI), or at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res MP4 and WebM files)
Stream: at Critical Commons (choose View High Quality for best experience)
Subtitles file: http://www.harihareswara.net/vids/pipeline.srt

Premiered just now at WisCon 2015 (the vid party).

Embedded video below:

Sources:
( 50 sources (28 video, 22 still) )

Thank you to my betas:

• Skud
  
• seekingferret
  
• were_duck
  
• Leonard Richardson
  
• Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  
• and others.

Feelings and interpretation:
( You don't need to read this )
Making-of:
( About 75 hours over 2 months )

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.

I'll be at WisCon starting tomorrow and leaving on Tuesday. I am scheduled to participate in these sessions:

1. Imaginary Book Club, Fri, 4:00-5:15 pm in Conference 2. Five panelists discuss books that don't exist, improvising critiques and responses. I proposed this panel a few years ago (you can see video of its debut) and it has continued, which is cool!
   
2. Lighthearted Shorthand Sans Fail, Sat, 8:30-9:45 am in Capitol A. What are your go-to phrasings to avoid sexism, ableism, etc. while getting your point across in casual conversation? I hope to walk out of this with some new vocabulary to replace bad habits.
   
3. Vid Party, Saturday night 9:00 pm-Sun, 3:00 am in room 629. I am premiering a fanvid. Once it's premiered, I'll hit Post on blog posts to announce it publicly as well.
   
4. Call Out Culture II: Follow-up to the Discussion Held at WisCon 38, Sun, 10:00-11:15 am in Senate A. Meta-discussion around discourse in social justice movements. I predict this session will be pretty intense.
   
5. Vid Party Discussion, Sun, 1:00-2:15 pm in Assembly. We will discuss some of the vids shown at the vid party, and fan vids in general. This will be the first time I've engaged in public realtime conversation about fanvids. Before this panel I hope to publish some notes about what I learned from watching several vids that drew from multiple sources (including stills), made a political point, or were otherwise particularly ambitious. I'll probably reference those lessons during the panel.
   

I also proposed "What Does Feminist Tech Education Look Like?", "Impostor Syndrome Training Exercise", and "Entry Level Discussion Group", but am not a panelist or presenter for those sessions; I bet they'll be interesting, though, and you could do worse than to check them out. You can read Entry Level ahead of time for free online.

I look like the photo to the left. I am often bad with names, and will remember 5 minutes into our conversation that we had an awesome deep conversation three years prior. I apologize in advance.

If you are good at clothes, consider joining me at the Clothing Swap portion of the Gathering on Friday afternoon to help me find pieces that suit me. I'm introducing two old pals to WisCon and spending a lot of time with them (we live in different cities), and they're both white, so I might not be able to come to the People of Color dinner on Friday night. And sadly, The Floomp dance party on Saturday happens during the Vid Party so I probably can't attend that. I did buy a ticket for the Dessert Salon and will attend the Guest of Honor and Tiptree Award speeches on Sunday, and maybe you will be at my table!

One of my pals who's coming to WisCon is Beth Lerman, an artist who will be displaying and selling her work in the art show. Check it out!

Also I am open to doing a small room performance of my half-hour geeky stand-up comedy routine if several people ask for it. I don't know when or where it would be; Monday night would be easiest. Speak up in comments or some other medium if you'd be interested.

[Cross-posted from Cogito, Ergo Sumana]

I just remembered last night that I have a DVD copy of Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, a documentary about my old employer, Fog Creek Software, that I can use in my in-progress multivid. I'm looking through it now and it may be perfect. Amazing. Also it's not the most fun for me to look at this source because it has, e.g., Paul Graham (wince) and Aaron Swartz (grief). Oh right, vidding is art, sometimes it'll hurt.