A new fanvid? (Hopefully sometime soon)

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any fanvidding. It was February of 2010 when I released my Doctor who vid for Martha and Ten, “Out of Bounds”, and I think this time last year when I tried to get started on a Dawson/Jen video for “I think about it all the time”, and managed a grand total of 45 seconds of completed footage, sigh.

I put fanvidding on my goals list for August, (reaching 2 minutes on a project, specifically,) and played around with the Sony Vegas project I had for “I think about it all the time”, but it was pretty easy to tell that I wasn’t inspired, or even particularly interested anymore.

So, a new project. Back to Doctor Who, once again. Season five, specifically the two-parter of “The Hungry Earth” and “Cold Blood.”

The song? An Amy Grant tune called “Eye to Eye,” which may seem like an odd choice, but there’s so much in the lyrics that resonates to me with those episodes, and the music seems like a pretty good fit too.

The first step was to get ahold of some video to work with. I watched season 5 of Doctor Who on the LG DVR, and even though I burned those episodes to disk, they’re not really in suitable quality for fanvidding work. The next copies I happened to come across are gorgeous 720p mkv files, but Sony Vegas didn’t seem to like those, and I didn’t have any luck with the instructions to extract the video file out of the mkv container. Finally I’ve found something that seems to work, and I’ve got my project workspace set up with the two episodes and the song.

Before I start picking video clips to set to the instrumental opening, though, I figure it’ll help to review what I’ve got. So I’ve started watching “The Hungry Earth” just so I remember what happens, thinking of which bits would be good for what lyrics or what instrumental passages.

I’m excited!

Doctor Who versus the Snowmen!

Yay, new Doctor Who, finally! It took me a few days to track down and watch the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas special, but if you’re further behind than me, don’t read ahead, because – you guessed it. “Spoilers!”

I’ll start off with a few odd notes on characters and casting. I hadn’t remembered that Madame Vastra’s human sidekick (and wife, apparently,) was named Jenny, and so when I read somewhere that the trailers hinted that Vastra, Sontaran Strax, and Jenny would be back for the Christmas special, the first character I connected with Jenny was the title character of the David Tennant episode The Doctor’s Daughter.

Also, the first thing I thought when I heard the voice of ‘The Intelligence’ was “OMG, it’s Patrick Stewart”, and I couldn’t shake that connection even when I found out that the voice acting was actually done by Ian McKellan. Weird.

Okay, so – great adventure with the Doctor. I liked lots of things about it, starting with the plot arc where the Doctor began as very withdrawn and remote, observing the Victorian world but not interfering in it, and ending as once again very engaged and excited about the future. Also, loved all the Sherlock Holmes references.

Jenna-Louise Coleman. Clara Oswyn Oswald. There’s a lot that Moffat is obviously trying not to give away about her still, so I’m really looking forward to more regular episodes coming out – whenever they do. Moffat does well with women of mystery, I think, looking back on Amy Pond, and River Song, so if he’s specifically trying to keep us off balance and not sure what to expect next, I think we’re in for an amazing series; though I do have one guess, as I’ll mention later.

What I was most aware of in a lot of the scenes with Jenna-Louise and Matt was how they were going through a lot of the established tropes of a long-term companion falling in love with the magic of the Doctor’s universe – but that this was really the first time we’ve really seen those tropes in a Christmas special, at least with New Who. Rose Tyler and Amy Pond were both established companions before their first Christmas with the Doctor. Many of the Christmas specials have had ‘one-shot Companions’, and even Donna Noble, who became a long-term companion in the end, was not established that was in “The Runaway Bride.”