Over, yet not over

This past week has been a very bad one in a lot of respects, mostly because the escrow closed on my sister's house, which means that it is really gone now, and in someone else's hands. Her friend sent me the flyers they put out to market it, and aside from the most atrocious spelling I've ever seen and the egregious abuse of "fancy" typefaces that randomly changed from word to word, it was hard for me to see the pictures of it, and it being talked about as this entity separate from my sister. And some of her friends have been in touch, which always brings up the bad feelings. There have been tons of other small things, too, that make everything seem so hopelessly gone, so impossible, unbearable. I think most people assume I'm getting over it, whatever that means, but I feel like I'm actually sinking farther and farther down, the more people forget and expect me to be normal. The world is forgetting her, her friends will move on, but I don't get that luxury. Already everyone is mostly past it.

The neighbors all want to know about the new car, and then I have to explain about everything because it inevitably comes up. A friend recently said to me, as well, that I was so "lucky" to have enough money that I could just buy a car, such a cute, cool little car, and get my plumbing fixed and buy the new washer dryer unit that doesn't work at all. Yeah. Lucky. Lucky that I lost my job last year and that's why I got such a honking huge tax return that I could buy the washer -- because I had to fork out so much money in medical expenses that I could actually write them off on taxes, and they took so much withholding out of my unemployment check. Lucky that my sister died a horrid, brutally fast death and had her plans and dreams stolen from her at the best time of her life and now I have no twin left. Lucky that I had to sell her beloved car because it was too expensive and time-consuming to drive it up here, and I feel like I betrayed her. Lucky me. Honestly, I don't understand what gets into people sometimes. Of course I was lucky to have a sister who took care of me so well. But that doesn't mean I'm lucky to have the money. I'd give anything in the world not to have the money.

So depression always means lots of random driving around, and then when I'm home, vidding. I started the next Fast and the Furious vid, which I've put off for a long time. I made my first F&F vid, Stripped, last year about this time, because I was completely besotted with the movie and the fandom. I wanted to make this vid right after, but in the intervening year, more than half a dozen F&F vids have popped up and I didn't want to contribute to oversaturation. I've seen this happen with other movie fandoms, and when you get that kind of overkill for a two-hour movie -- especially if the vids are not always very well done, as I feel has been the case with a lot of the vids in this one -- you start to drive people who are not into it, but could be lured, away, rather than pulling them in. I'm still very hesitant to make this, for that reason. I really don't want to be the one driving a nail into the coffin, especially after the good fortune of luring a few people in with the first vid.

It's also harder this time because I don't have any of the effects I wanted to use in Final Cut Express, since the things I wanted to use were in iMovie plugins that I bought way back when. So I can't make it look like it does in my mind, and the only way I know how to do something similar would look too much like lierdumoa's vid The Chemicals Between Us, which is my favorite in the fandom (and just a damn great vid, period). What effects I am using, they aren't turning out right, either (how the freaking hell can you use a dip to color dissolve on letterboxed movie footage? Jesus H, these things are a freaking pain). I can't say that vidding, because of these frustrations, is fun. On the contrary, I don't think it's fun at all, and I give myself terrible headaches trying to figure out stuff that doesn't register in my brain in any way, shape, or form. But for some reason, the more depressed I am, the easier it is to focus on vidding. I don't know what that means, psychologically. Maybe it's just the kind of forced concentration on really pretty men or something... I have no idea. But hey, I have almost a minute already of my four-and-a-half minute vid! (I would like to offer it for beta as I go, but I'm not sure how well that would work, because of the kinds of expectations I have.)

I want to jettison the usual storylines for vids in this fandom, too. With Stripped, I wanted to pare down really tightly to the relationship between Dom and Brian. Their own little hermetically sealed world, in a way. This one I want to open up to the crime and the action and racing aspects, as well as their relationship, and shine a different light on it With such a long song, it should be easier to do, but then, I always think I know what I can do and find out different. If I was a flashier vidder, it would be easy, I think, but being Support Hose vidder, I fear my matronly, workmanlike style might not do it justice. But I won't know till I work on it. Also, I want to not go in a linear sort of story. Definitely not end with the ending, and move the timeline around. I'm tired of the regular timeline.

Now I have to go ponder whether I want to buy a FCE plugin for time effects and whether it will do what I want. And look at my pretty men.