Festivid: For I am the Cape

Alternative title: The one with the raccoon.
Fandom: The Cape (2011)
Music: "Mahala"
Performer: Életfa
Summary: Vince Faraday becomes the Cape. A gift for seekingferret

Password = festivids



This vid started three Festivids ago, back in fall of 2013. Roughly three things had happened simultaneously, to the extent that I cannot remember what order they happened in, and combined to form the genesis of this vid:

- I started watching The Cape.
- seekingferret posted this Dear Festividder letter.
- I was thinking about instrumental vids.

The topic of instrumentals was on my mind because the previous year I had received this hilaricool Face/Off vid for Festivids, set to instrumental music. At that point I had never made an instrumental vid, because one of the things I enjoy about making vids is how constrained an art form it is. The song provides me with a verse-chorus-bridge structure. The lyrics provide me with direction. Without those, I'm left adrift in a sea of clips, with nothing to guide my vidding. But I started thinking about instrumental sections in songs I'd vidded, and which parts I enjoyed making, and realized I love having nonverbal cues in my vid music, possibly even more than I love lyrics (and I love lyrics a lot). I realized that as long as I had a piece of instrumental music that provided me with those cues continuously, from the first note to the last, an instrumental would be no more difficult to vid than a song with lyrics -- possibly even more fun. The obvious place to turn for such a piece was a genre that was inherently kinetic, i.e., dance.

So everything came together at once -- the show, the request, the music -- and I was vidding The Cape to a Transylvanian folkdance. However, that year I was also working on four other festivids: a challenging assignment, a treat I'd already started for elipie, an "I'm freaking out about my assignment" treat, and a treat that turned into a pinch hit. As the deadline grew near, I realized that I could stress out over finishing a fifth vid, or I could put the Cape vid on pause and gamble on the possibility that seekingferret would request the same thing for festivids the following year. I liked where the vid was going too much to rush it, so I took that gamble.

Unfortunately, seekingferret did not request The Cape for festivids the next year. Or the year after that. At this point, a sensible person would have either a.) finished the damn vid, or b.) given up and deleted the project and the ten episodes of The Cape from their laptop. But not I! And in 2016 I was finally vindicated, and didn't even have to copy any files back onto my hard drive. So there, imaginary naysayers!

This year, I did not have any treats in progress to distract me, but I did manage to catch the flu the week of the assignment deadline, which was also the weekend of MIT Mystery Hunt. I did not make it to Mystery Hunt, which I'm sure everyone taking the bus to Boston that weekend thanks me for, but I did stay up late finishing a draft of the vid to submit. I submitted the draft at 2am, noticed I was running a fever, and did the only reasonable thing, which was to do a quick google search for The Cape + Chess Piece Face to see if anyone had ever combined the two. They hadn't, so I did.

Then a few days before Go Live, I ripped out and redid a minute of the vid, re-edited the music, and thank goodness, because it's so much better now you have no idea.