You should know I’m obsessed with videosongs.

The rules of videosonging are very simple:

1. What you see is what you hear

2. If you hear it, at some point you see it

If anything, I have broken the rules here because it’s not really quite a song. It is a piece of music, certainly, but not something you’ll be singing to yourself later (though if you are a drummer, you might end up with the beat in your ear for a few minutes). Still. The principle is sound.

And that’s it. I’m really happy I decided to spend a few hours last night working on this, because otherwise it wouldn’t have posted until probably 2am. As it is, I’m afforded a bit of time to actually enjoy Twelfth Night. And, you know, eat something. Which I haven’t really remembered to do today.

Thanks for watching. Hopefully I’ll keep up with this space a bit better. Though I’ve said that many, many times before.

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“Huh.”

“What?”

“It’s the new episode of Jigsaw.”

“What about it?”

“It’s… it’s like he didn’t spend nearly as much time on it or something.”

“What, so it’s fairly concise?”

“No, I mean — well, yes, actually. Maybe that’s it.”

Went back to work today. Had to film after. No time! No time!

Drumming tomorrow. I apologize in advance if it’s late.

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Compressing the entirety of my thoughts on gender and race in media into four minutes is, of course, impossible. Certainly impossible to do in any sort of entertaining way. It’s just too complex an issue, and there are too many howevers. I hesitate to say it’s a complicated issue, because it’s more a large system of very simple issues, linked at odd angles.

I think the content of this episode serves as a somewhat fair summary of the beginning of my thoughts, if not on gender in media, at least gender on Jigsaw in particular. The issue of female characters has been on my mind for years, and I’m still not entirely sure how to address it long-term. The real question for me is not gender, but collaboration. If I’m going to bring anybody on-board as a regular or even irregular character (i.e. a puppeteer who actually voices their own puppet), it needs to be somebody with whom I can banter in the same manner as the existing cast do. These people exist, but it does take a bit of sacrifice to arrange it. It’s always been on my list of Things I Want. Just hasn’t happened yet.

In terms of technical aspects of this episode, this was the first time I’ve ever done a true two-camera shoot. Thanks to the fact that I brought the Flip home from work, I was able to cut back and forth (after the laborious process of synching the sound). Of course, I didn’t have the idea to treat it like a two-camera shoot until after I filmed, so the framing was a little odd. I decided not to care, since, well, there’s only so much Ninth Day of Xmas left in which to post a video. So.

Comments, as always, are encouraged.

2 comments…

I’m not entirely sure what to tell you here.

I certainly have my concerns. While I don’t think I ever actually say or do anything explicitly in this episode that is inappropriate for younger viewers, I… well, it’s certainly implied. Heavily. It’s just plain dirty, there’s no way around it. I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to do this, whether I wanted to risk offending the parents of my younger viewers.

And then I thought, well, they stuck with me when I had Milton and, subsequently, his disembodied arm, go on a spree of debauchery. These Theoretical Parents haven’t gotten uptight about all the drinking. I give them product that is free of swearing and violence. They can deal with a little heavy innuendo. Or they can’t, and they’ll stop watching, though I can guarantee it’s nothing too far from what their kids are probably doing with their Barbie dolls.

At the end of the day, I just thought it was really funny. That has to be my motivation.

I did decide to cut the bawr-chikka-bou-bou music from the milking scenes. Though that may have been me forgetting I was going to do it in the first place.

So that’s that then. Two-thirds of the way through this very silly song. From here on in, they should get easier, because we’re no longer in the avian world. Which isn’t to say I actually have much of an idea for anything (lies; I have 12 sorted in my head), but I’m not as concerned with people dancing, leaping, or piping as I was with, oh, gold rings or swans.

Till tomorrow, fanclub.

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As I mentioned on Twitter, if you can correctly name the movie Milton and Kranium are watching, you win some sort of prize. As I have just decided this, I have no idea what the prize will be. It will surely be valued under $10. It may not be edible.

So I had this idea, and then filmed, and then while I was waiting for the render to finish, I actually did some research about the subject matter. This is actually kind of a weird story, the story of the Ice Capades. Started in the 40s, it was hugely successful for decades, and largely featured a bunch of pro-skating with some odd themes thrown in. It was in the 80s that it started a decline, when they started sticking a bunch of Snorks on the ice, and when pro-skaters started their own tour that focused more on, you know, actual skating.

Ice Capades shut down in the mid-90s, and there have been multiple failed attempts to revive the franchise. However, Disney On Ice does still exist, and was never part of the Ice Capades company (one could argue that Disney On Ice are what truly killed any chance of Ice Capades making a comeback).

It wasn’t until hearing Milton say “Ice Capades” that I realized the name was a pun. Never even dawned on me that there’s no such thing as a capade until today.

Ballet on Ice is not even remotely a fake thing. Figure skaters often take ballet lessons, because of how closely related the two art forms are. Judging from Google search, Sleeping Beauty seems to be the most popular selection; overall there appears to be a thriving Ice Ballet scene. Just not as much of it in the US as in other nations.

To the best of my knowledge, however, the story of seven ice dancers nearly drowning from falling through the ice during a performance of Swan Lake is complete fiction.

All in all, I’m sort of sad I didn’t have an opportunity to research and write this one a bit more thoroughly. I’ll go ahead and admit now that a) I was a bit ignorant of the subject matter, and b) that I would be surprised if I didn’t rip off this material for some other project some day.

On an unrelated note, how odd it is that the 12 Days of Xmas span the New Year, and yet have no acknowledgement of it? It’s almost as though our obsession with celebrations based upon purely temporal events is a modern development devoid of any real cultural significance beyond a collective agreement of revelry.

Happy New Year anyway.

if xmas were two days earlier, new year’s eve would be 9 ladies dancing, which would be way more apropos

3 comments…