JOURNAL: Qyot27

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  • I'm obligated to make an entry every 3½ years... 2010-01-26 04:34:54 Even if I've voted in the VCAs every year since 2005(?), I knew there's a reason I'm not doing it this year. I just stopped caring, even though I haven't stopped caring about editing (I just haven't done anything in Premiere since last July, putting that Clannad video I was working on on hold).

    Are there videos I liked that came out this year? Sure. Do I think they should win? Sure. But do I think it's worth bothering voting for? Nah.

    I've seen what all the tension over it that seems to have erupted this year is doing, and I mean, it's just put me off of the whole competition. The stuff I actually want to see win generally doesn't anyway. Any controversy over it be damned. Do I blame Koop for Euphoria's success? No, even if I might joke about it. Editors are not responsible for the impact their videos cause - nobody can predict that, and the most one can do is hold on tight and see where it takes them. No more, no less.

    IMO, what ends up representing the community isn't always some deep and symbolic video - if deep and symbolic represents a medium, Hollywood really misses the mark on that one. Does that mean that Hollywood blockbusters aren't worth the praise they do get? Absolutely not. Then again, I like indulging in self-deprecating humor and encourage it at every chance I get. If you can't laugh at yourself or realize how ridiculous you're being in whatever pursuit, you may as well stop, and if that point is something you've already taken to heart, what other people choose to make popular or see as artistic or what-have-you doesn't affect you, even if that opinion might make you shake your head and groan (Twilight, for example).

    My only criteria for something being artistic is if it means something to you. Creativity is an artistic outlet, but the products of that outlet don't have to be. They can be, but trying to make a litmus test for it is absurd. Art is just as much about guilty pleasures as it is the deep and introspective. People argue over the meaning of surrealist paintings or whether you can even call pictures of pipes with antagonistic catchphrases or dogs playing poker or melting clocks 'artistic', when all that it really comes down to is what you see in it. Do I think that Dali's paintings are artistic? Sure, on a technical level - do I subscribe some deeper meaning to them? No. I think they're hilariously funny because they're so weird, but trying to analyze them like you would some Freudian mindfuck (Evangelion, I'm looking at you) is absurd - even trying to analyze those mindfucks is a pointlessly trivial activity to me. Doesn't change how much of an impact they make, or the kind of basic enjoyment one can get out of it.

    And I'm rambling again. Whatever. Let the nasty, petty, non-constructive criticism be like water off a duck's back. I guess that's the real point, but also that there's no reason why the very basic, simple, 'random'-if-they-are pleasures can't be called artistic if someone wants to see them that way, and there shouldn't be a stigma against it. The reverse is also true - leave people to their pretentious wankery, and if they don't have the self-awareness to see how they look from someone else's perspective, screw 'em. 
  • Over a year later and... 2006-06-25 01:07:46 I thought I never would have used this part of the site again, but here I am.

    It's strange, really. These past couple of years have been like living in a freaking dream, these past few months like the nightmare crashing down around my own pitiful, disgusting existence, and memories of middle and high school pouring salt all over those wounds.

    A part of my recent descent into misery probably has a lot to do with me cleaning out a box full of old school papers and various whatnot from 7th and 8th grade. Looking at those things, having to get all the nasty junk off them that had built up from being stored away in a cardboard box in our garage for so many years, caused those things to just flood back. Considering my already, for lack of a better description, fucked up state of mind, it was like having cold water thrown on my face and stormclouds start pouring like a scene out of one of a gajillion romantic comedies that never seem to make an impact but people still love them anyway. It was a feeling that I haven't really, truly felt since around my 19th birthday (and only twice before that, at a school function the previous April or May, and for about two or three weeks after graduation), if my memory serves.

    And of course, in my normal windowshopping manga on the 'net, I had run across a site that sells import doujin. I didn't know this at first - I guess it was rather a chance thing, finding out. For whatever half-brained reason I did this the other day, one of the newest additions was an Eva doujin called 'RE-TAKE'. It looked interesting. There wasn't any sort of content warning on the site about the title, of course, but I went scrounging around for information. Turns out, there are explicit sex scenes (ooohhh, *sarcasm*), but from everything I read that the scenes were actually there for plot reasons, and that the story was plot-driven rather than sex-driven.

    I had my reservations about this, naturally. I wouldn't freely admit to reading something that could be construed as hentai, considering that for all intents and purposes, hentai is one thing I'd rather not have in my life.

    I found out that this doujin series is actually in the process of being scanlated (and the scanlation has caught up with the releases so far), and for whatever reason I was possessed to do so, I went ahead and downloaded it. In fact, I just finished reading all four volumes about a half hour ago.

    Yes, the sex (what little there is, anyway) is explicit, and of the sort that I *definitely* would not have wanted to see, not for perversion, necessarily (I've seen worse; and besides, there was not much that was all that perverted about the scenes as it was, save the one in RE-TAKE 0 - gah, I feel like I'm making excuses and rationalizing), but because I find myself not wanting to see characters degraded in such a way, and in the framework of Eva, especially not the relationship between Shinji and Asuka, although the implications of such acts are prevalent in near-every fanwork that focuses on that pairing. I have a funny little habit of that; I get an image of a character - be they fictional or a real person - in my head and I don't want to accept any different. Heck, I did that to some extent (not all areas, but predictably, in regards to sex) in high school.

    But despite the prescence of those scenes, which I just clamped down and read anyway (often grimacing, I might add), it's like I feel nothing. Not because I've been desensitized to the mindless and completely base instincts which propel human libido, but rather because of the other relational elements in the manga. I feel as though I'm staring back at myself, in a way - albeit distant.

    I've often fantasized about being back in middle or high school, and correcting what I perceive as the major mistakes that have lead to the living Hell I'm in now. Coincedently, that's kind of what the manga does as well. The story is well-done, as is the artwork itself. The psychological elements are still there too, and these only served to amplify the effect of jettisoning me into reality for a second, bringing me out of a haze (although I feel as though I'm still in a haze, but a different one; heck if I know what I'm really experiencing - the anti-depressants I had to be on in high school probably messed up my head pretty bad too).

    All this, and I'm not even explaining what the freaking thing is about. Essentially, it could be called a 'what if?' scenario, in that after the very final scene of End Of Eva, Shinji suddenly wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream (and for placement's sake, he wakes up just after the Sea of Dirac incident). From there, he tries to rewrite what happens so that the outcome he saw doesn't occur. I won't really say anything else for the sake of not spoiling it for those that want to read it, but the impact is quite pointed.

    What does this have to do with what I started off talking about? Plenty. I'd already mentioned that going through the contents of that box from middle school was like cold water, and brought me, to some extent, back to a reality I once knew. That evening (this evening), I then read this doujin, which seems to be touching on an idealized, but consistantly psychological, representation of Eva. That subject matter is like another slap on the face. I honestly don't know what I'm feeling right now, but it's like I'm stuck - in a manner even more intense than the haziness of the last few months - between a dream and reality, and that my greatest need is to take hold and make contact with the past I had before graduating. It doesn't mean going back to high school, but it's like I'm being pushed to touch base with the people I knew, trying to connect those things in my life that always just hung lifeless in my hands. As I said, it's an odd feeling, I feel exhausted, but I also feel nostalgic, and I also feel the longing and despair I did before - something that I've not felt in very large amounts for two years.

    I don't even know how any of my friends are doing. I saw several of them at my cousin's graduation, but the people I felt disputedly closest to I've not heard from, and that is tearing me apart. It's making me relive what I felt after we all left school. It seemed that for two weeks it didn't stop raining - literally and figuratively. During that period, I was still numb from it all ending, but deep down it was just like I wanted to burst into tears, similar to the incident at the end of the school year that I mentioned further up the page. Those feelings have been a close comfort of mine - during those years I always sort of viewed myself as pathetic, weak-willed, a pitiful excuse for anything, and above all, that there couldn't possibly be anyone that would ever want me as more than just an aquaintance or friend. Depression, sadness, longing, fear, all those things became engrained in me, and it seemed that after high school, all those years of enduring that kind of pain, day in and day out, finally broke me. Oh, the Paxil sort of glossed-over the situation, it corrected the chemical problems which spawned a lot of it, and that initially made me feel numb, but I was still apt to emotional outbursts. But after high school, it was virtually gone. For about six months I still felt the need to gulp down my courage and do something about it, but after my birthday that year it was as though those desires just subsided and I started descending into a bottomless pit of unsatisfying drivel. And now, thanks to a box of papers from a fairly painful time of my life and a manga I had a really strange draw to read, I can feel that sort of deep emotional pain for longer than just a moment upon hearing a song or forcing myself into an utterly depressing fantasy of high school gone by. It's almost like a drug, intoxicating me all over again. It's making me feel both crappy and ecstatic at the same time. I miss this feeling, to be completely honest.

    I'm not sure why I just bore my soul like that, nor why those things have been set up just so right now, or why of all places to do this I chose here. I'm almost in my right mind to make this a private entry, but there's a part of me that wants this to vent, and all using private does is make any soul-bearing sealed off, that sort of thing never really helped me, it only set me up for larger falls. Heh, how is this going to help me, either? I don't know. Of course, one way of looking at this is that these feelings have manifested themselves while I was in the process of editing. Not often, because it's pretty concentrated into a few of my videos that are of the Sentimental, Romantic, or Drama persuasion, but in a way, since the first video I spent a substantial amount of time working on, The Nights Will See Them Through, was a product of this molotov cocktail of angst inside of me, it could be considered the driving force behind my first real 'rebirth', if you will, in terms of editing. Maybe someone can see a link between the two, maybe you just think this is entertaining to read, or whatever other reasons people have for reading these things. It's also one of those rare times that people actually see me write something of substantial length, and self-deprecating to boot, in contrast to my rather reserved demeanor that people normally see.

    Alright, it's rather late (just after 1 in the morning; I started typing this nearly an hour ago), and I need to stop. 
  • Nuclear Disaster Remastered and available for upload 2005-03-29 14:04:23 Like the title says. Get it here:

    http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=13302 
  • New Video! 2004-05-16 13:15:04 You know, it seems like every time I make one of these entries, it's because I've finished a video or something like that.

    Anyway, I have finished a new video. The first part of the Dreamscape, to be exact. Now, this thing has been in planning for almost a year (it'll be a year sometime in June), and luckily back at that point in time I laid out what I wanted on a notepad file and was using that as the blueprint, so it was very much planned from the beginning. I also used the title editor in Premiere as well as a couple effects to help it along. Overall, I think it is one of my best. Of course, the problem is that I didn't have all DVD footage to work with, which means I can't release it yet.

    It's an Eva video. Yeah, I know. But the issue isn't that so much as it is 'do I want to spend over $500 importing the Renewal discs so I can have pristine video quality', or 'do I just want to use the so-so quality American release except for the two Director's Cut DVDs and the movies'? I would prefer to have the Renewal discs (that'd be sweet), but my budget just doesn't allow it, since I don't have a job anymore.

    It would be nice to get the Renewal discs for several reasons: several of the episodes have the style of animation used in Death and Rebirth, so if I got the remastered episodes, I'd have more footage to pull from when I go back to remake 'Eva Stripped'. I hate not having a job.

    Too bad I don't know anyone who has the Renewal discs. If I did, I could arrange something with them to get the footage. But alas, the only friends I know that have DVDs of Eva have the American release. I'm screwed. I think I'll probably do an edition that uses the American just so I can get it out there, and then somewhere down the line when I get the Renewal discs (I do plan on getting them, by the way), I can do a nice remaster of from those discs as well.

    Oh well, seya later. 
  • New Video!!! 2003-12-31 01:06:56 Okay, it's about time I put out another action video. This time it's Spineshank's "New Disease" set to FLCL. Here's the video link:

    http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=29313

    I would really appreciate feedback on this one, cause I deviated so much from my typical editing techniques thus far. The execution of the editing on this adrenaline rush is light-years away from my early work, and the only thing it has in common with my newer stuff is that I incorporated some of the techniques I've used in the past, but never like I have here. 
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