Darkness, darkness

One of many reasons I hate online vids is that they're so small, the files end up being darker than they already are by virtue of compression. For a show like Angel the series, that's deadly. Every time I vid in this show I'm more and more frustrated by how hard it is to get a clear sense of the visual, to allow the audience to make sense of what's happening. If you're using a lot of action scenes, it's even more difficult. Buffy, Firefly, and Angel all tend toward the dark, but at least Buffy used a fair amount of those SoCal daylight scenes to leaven the mood. There are things I can do in Final Cut that I couldn't in iMovie to lighten things, but they make the vid look like crap -- grainy, washed out when there is light, etc. I'm experimenting with some different methods of compressing the newer vids, but so far my luck has been abysmal and they look ten times worse than if I just compressed them into teeny files that get even darker. And of course it's stupid, and it's displacement, but my frustration at not being able to understand codecs and compression is driving me to tears -- it's like I've got all my sanity eggs in this vidding basket and the fact that it's not working right leaves me feeling hoplessly upset and confused. Yes, I know, I need therapy. (How do you other Angel vidders deal with this? Just ignore it, because too damn bad, or do you spend a lot of time trying to "fix" it visually?)

Making the vids feels therapeutic, though. And I've been reminded as I work on one right now that as much Spike or Wes or Angel or Buffy or Dana or Willow or... love as I have, as much love for myriad other characters on these two shows, there was one pairing I never really pursued much about, but that I think is the hottest pairing they ever had on the show -- Wes and Faith. It's funny, because I loathed Faith on Buffy, and hated Wesley in his doofus incarnation, too. When he got tortured by her in first season Angel, though, things really started to change, and when they broke her out of prison in Salvage, I was all "wow, these two are smokin'." That is the part I'm most looking forward to writing in Measure of a Man, oddly, but it's a long time till I get there, and I'm making such impossibly slow progress. Once I'm done with that story, though, I may have to think about writing a Faith and Wes as rogue demon hunters piece. Though by the time I do that, I'm pretty sure I will be about 80 and there will be no one left in the fandom.

My progress on Measure updates is very slow, as I mentioned, and I apologize again. For some reason I find it harder to write Buffy stuff than Fast and the Furious stuff, though it makes no sense, really. Not that being able to write either means much -- I think everyone gave up on the F&F WIP a long time ago, and I'm sure people have given up on the Buffy WIP. I can see it all in my mind, everything's done and blocked and scored and edited, but getting it down on paper seems so damn hard. I can't seem to translate the movie in my mind to "paper" no matter how hard I try.