Sumana

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!

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: In the pale dublight
Music: "Intro movie", Syun Nakano, CC-BY
Source: Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Category: gen
Content notes: alcohol, one character striking another
Summary: Sisko's turning.
Download or stream: at Critical Commons

Today, I made my first fanvid, a 30-second Sisko study called "In the pale dublight".

Thanks to Critical Commons for hosting transformative works! Thanks to the open source software community and especially the makers of VLC, Handbrake, and kdenlive for the software. Thanks to synecdochic, Skud, and the wiscon_vidparty vidding workshop for guidance, and thanks to Syun Nakano for the CC-BY music.