Order in the Sound

Vid
Title:	Order in the Sound
Creator:	chaila43
Date:	June 2009
Format:	WMV
Length:	4:32 minutes minutes
Music:	The Frames, “A Caution to the Birds”
Genre:
Fandom:	Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Footage:
URL:	vid announcement
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Order in the Sound is a Battlestar Galactica fanvid by chaila43.

Vidder's Summary: "Lines blur. A Kara-centric overview of what it all really meant."

The vid is third part of a post-finale trilogy of vids reclaiming BSG's mythology, theology and mysticism and the interconnected women at the center of it. Part 1: Cathedrals, Part 2: Child You're the Revolution (Athena and Hera) and Part 3 Order in the Sound (Kara and everyone).

Vidder's trilogy notes: "These vids together attempt to present the Opera House from various angles and to capture what it meant to and for different women. Post-finale and its profane Opera House, they also collectively present a reconceptualization of the Opera House as the intersection between life and death and between human and Cylon, representing hybridity in infinite variations: intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical. The third vid, especially, is based on edits made by Battlestar Redactica,[1] a fan-edited alternate 4.5 by cvm_productions. See here[2] for a short explanation of edits relevant to and relied on by the vid and here[3] for a textual explanation of all this, outlined by beccatoria, my compatriot in all this Opera House reclaiming."

Reactions/Reviews

I think it's a wonderful thematic trip through Kara's destiny without losing the freaky, strange parts of her destiny, like finding her own dead body and being told she'd lead the human race to its end, in favour of some far tidier, simpler and less interesting direction."

~ feedback at the vid announcement.

I watched this earlier today but I really need to watch it again sometime soon to properly comment. For now, I'm going to say it utterly blew me away just for the technical aspects of the way your images and the sound worked together alone and did what great vids do so spectacularly. It didn't feel like I was watching a fan vid (i.e. something taken from previous material, even redacted material, and pieced together differently to make a point) but rather like it was its own independent construct that only ever existed to be this vid. (Hope that makes sense). I really enjoyed the interconnectivity that is the central theme of this vid, not just that you use connected or similar images for mirroring (though you do that brilliantly) but that you make coherent plotlines that are connected as well. A few gorgeous instances: the final four (love the shot of them in the balcony as silhouettes changing to them standing in the empty room of realization), absolutely gorgeous was the sequence of Kara burning her body and Laura burning the book, Kara playing piano synching perfectly perfectly with the music at 1:20 or so, the blood and the paint, the math and the music. Like you, I don't think hybridity was my favorite outcome for Kara (I always liked her best as a plain old human being) and STWOM was a big disappointment to me. But I really appreciate the way you (and cvm productions) were able to make a far more interesting storyline for her than the show did."

~ feedback at the vid announcement

The series finale of cult favorite Battlestar Galactica offered glib and one-sided resolutions to the program’s complex and ambivalent questions. In so doing, it proved extremely divisive among fans. Some of those who objected staged creative interventions to reclaim their beloved narrative, asserting the authority of diversified fan production over univocal industrial production. I here present two examples of such interventions (with similar form but differing tactics): fanvids that appropriate the show’s footage to visually rewrite its ending.... [snipped] Rather than incorporating the events of the finale in order to critique them, Chaila’s "Order in the Sound" excises them completely to offer Battlestar Galactica an alternative ending. But this "derivative work of a derivative work" takes as its source not Battlestar Galactica, but an ambitious fan-edit of the entire last season: Battlestar Redactica. Limited by the available footage, the fan-edited finale supplants pat plot-driven closure with an open-ended visual reverie, leaving the story essentially unfinished. By rendering Redactica a collaborative fanworld and synthesizing its conclusion in vid form, "Order in the Sound" provides it with metatextual (if not narrative) fulfillment. Through the perspective of Kara Thrace, this vid stitches back together the connections—between the central female characters, between technological innovation and divine revelation, between humans and Cylons with a hybrid destiny—that the final season had sundered. If we consider the aired finale a metaphor for "old" media’s fantasy of regression to analog discipline and hegemonic ideologies, Redactica and "Order in the Sound" furnish a counter-metaphor for the capacity of "new" media (in the guise of Kara) to transform the terms of creative production.