I don't want to talk about it

[gwyn]

I won't be doing a con report this year for VVC; i just feel too bad overall to do it. But I wanted to let my friends know I'm home, especially movies_michelle, since she saw what happened to me at the airport. I was already in a really bad head space from finding out that United had literally stolen my aisle seat away from me without telling me, and there were no seats left available except middle ones, and they refused to do anything about it. It was really depressing me facing a four and a half hour flight sitting in the middle with my six foot frame and everything, but then I had to catch the toe of my shoe on the curb at O'Hare and I fell, really hard. My right elbow is bloody and scraped and seriously bone-bruised, my hand is scraped raw and bruised, my knee (and my favorite jeans are wrecked) as well, my other elbow is bruised, I have a huge bruise on my forearm and thigh, and it hurts a lot, and my wrist is sprained pretty bad. Plus it's always lovely to humiliate yourself utterly and completely in front of hundreds of strangers and your friends from the con.

It was *much* harder to say goodbye to people than I had expected and so that added to my overall feelings of sadness. I don't know why I hadn't expected that, but it was tough. Me and goodbyes these days are unmixy. And the premieres show ended up making me feel kind of dumb. I felt like I had brought a VCR vid to a convention of professional filmmakers. The dazzle and the flash were the big themes of the evening (much of the content looked like it had come from pro editing marketing houses), and I'm not sure that slow, quiet vids have a place in this world anymore... I don't know, it just felt weird and bad. AMV has infiltrated the live action vidding world, i think, and I don't know what this means for people like me who have a different aesthetic... anyway, I have to think about it. It just ended up feeling bad for me, I had loved my vid and put a lot of emotion into it (I made it right after my sister died, so there are a lot of feelings tied up in it), and it was hard seeing how it didn't fit in with the rest of the themes and styles. I don't know. (ETA: Many people had lovely kind things to say about the Buffy vid; it was just mostly me who felt it was so lame and sad compared to the rest of the vids in the show and the reactions they engendered. I was in awe of many of those vids, and I felt very basic and support-hosey again.)

The panel went okay, but only thanks to melina123 and her great theory; I have no idea what would have happened if I'd had to do that alone. I loved seeing my friends, especially the girl talks in different rooms on Sunday night. But there were a lot of weird bad things that happened toward the end, and then falling at O'Hare and being crammed between smelly Dutch guy and face-plucking Chinese OCD woman (seriously, I don't want to talk about it), just kind of sent any good feelings spirallling away. My damn cat wouldn't even come out to see me.

I'm just tired, and sappy, and sad, and I don't think I could say anything valuable or important about the con at all. I'll put the vids up as I can, but I don't know if I'll announce them all at once or parcel them out.

Comments

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wrote a response to this and I didn't like it, so I deleted it. Suffice it to say that I just don't think like the vidders who get the ooohs and aaaahs, which I think comes from the fact that I'm an old VCR vidder and I just don't see those things. A lot of people criticize vids, too, because a vidder doesn't make the vid that that other person thinks they should have made, regardless of the fact that maybe their choice was just... to make it their own way, the way they wanted it. It's a weird world, and I just am not sure where I fit in it anymore.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

A lot of people criticize vids, too, because a vidder doesn't make the vid that that other person thinks they should have made, regardless of the fact that maybe their choice was just... to make it their own way, the way they wanted it.

::nods::

I think you're describing what I call the ice-cream syndrome: the creator may have put forth some perfectly beautiful strawberry ice cream, but if her audience is looking for chocolate or vanilla they may only notice the ways in which the ice cream isn't what they were looking for (instead of noticing what a glorious shade of pink it is, and the bits of berry embedded in it, and whatnot.) Frustrating as all get-out, so I totally empathize.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly it! I find it both thought-provoking and eminently frustrating, depending on my mood. The thing is, I can't imagine that any one vidder there would make any vid the same way, and so to say something like "the vidder missed because they didn't do X" with the implicit "as I would have" is kind of irrelevant. But the lines get blurry in situations like that, where there's this confluence of people with wildly varying styles.

I don't know. I think that's partly what I feel up against the wall about -- and when BNFs criticize you for not doing it the way they wanted, others tend to follow and you find yourself with a lot of people switching sides, kind of narrowing their eyes at you for not doing it "correctly." that happened to me last year and that's why I didn't vid again for over six months. It makes me wary and weary. ;-)

[recycledmedia.livejournal.com]

This is part of why I only went to VividCon once. I didn't feel like I fit in - felt way out of my depth. I vid to my own drummer so to speak and it's apparently a different band altogether. *g*