Black Dove
| Vid | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Black Dove (Firefly vid) |
| Creator: | Frodolyn |
| Date: | Feb 2006 |
| Format: | |
| Length: | |
| Music: | "Black Dove (January)" by Tori Amos |
| Genre: | |
| Fandom: | Firefly |
| Footage: | |
| URL: | offline (vid announcement) vidder's title card |
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Black Dove is a Firefly vid by Frodolyn. It was reviewed on August 8, 2006 by boniblithe at the reel vidding community.
Reactions/Reviews
From the 2006 the reel review:
Overall Impression:The audio and visuals combine nicely to make a vid that’s dreamy and ethereal, yet shaken by moments of violence and clarity; in other words, representing River quite nicely.
Titles: Beginning title is very simple, black and white, elegant. End credits more complex and played with a voice-over by River and Simon. Didn’t add anything for me, but neither does it detract.
Music choice: Good song choice, fits the character of River very well, in lyric and tone.
she was a january girl,
she never let on how insane it was,
in that tiny kinda scary house by the woodsblack-dove black-dove,
you don't need a space ship,
they don't know you've already lived,
on the other side of the galaxyNarration, Tone and Movement: This is where the review kind of falters, because I can't pull much to work with out of the vid. I don't think that narrative or tone was a particular focus of this vidder.
Narration: I didn’t really get a sense of clear narrative here. The framing shots that open and close the vid tie together nicely. I was a bit disoriented by the sudden STOP in the opening sequence, it doesn’t fit the music. The rest of the vid seems to wander from place to place, not chronological, but instead clip choice is linked to lyric. This is not a criticism … It’s probably very much how River’s day-to-day life was, since she gets infusions of psychic stuff and sometimes doesn’t seem to know where she is or what’s going on around her.
Tone: the song is the primary contributor to the feel of this vid. No special use of color or effects that I could detect to contrinute to any consistency of visual tone.
Movement: The vidder does try to do one or two things here that I felt could have been stronger (see below - specific notes).
Cuts, Transitions, Effects & Colouring/Coloring: Some nice cutting effects add to the feel of things being disjointed, some nice overlay & dissolve effects, used well and not detracting from the vid. No thematic use of color that I could detect.
Specific vid & music notes: There are a couple of places where transition or clip choice could have flowed more smoothly, for example, the left-camera move from River looking down at the people during the Serenity opening robbery goes straight into a still shot from the Reaver fighting – then the camera movement goes back the other way (to the right) - that smooth left motion is interrupted and reversed and jars the brain.
I liked the interspersing of River’s dancing with River’s fighting. The first section of this is stronger than the second, because the movements flow more naturally into each other. Having seen Here’s Luck’s Buffy/Faith vids, I’m spoiled now when it comes to seamless integration of one type of scene/movement into another *g* I also especially like the “by the woods” sections. The movement of the clips in the first verse gives the sense of Snow White running through the dark. A fairy tale girl traveling lost in a creepy, otherworldy place; all 3 verses are nicely put together.
Final notes: Note to other vidders submitting work for review: because the file is streamed and I did not have the ability to freeze, rewind, start, stop, that made this review more difficult & time consuming than others. I also can't give you a time stamp for particular clips, so I feel like this review is subpar because of my limitations to work with the file. That said, overall I enjoyed the vid and all of the rewatching, while time consuming, wasn't painful :)