Tell Me, Doctor

Silly me - I keep forgetting I have two blogs (one for attempting to be an anonymous fangirl weirdo - LiveJournal - and one for family and friends to look up and seeing really what kind of a fangirl weirdo I really am - which is this one.  You're welcome).

I posted on my LiveJournal, saying something along the lines of having been inducted into the vast world of geekdom by making and posting a "Doctor Who" music video on YouTube.  Then, seeing as how I can't live without my iPod for any stretch of time, I got yet another idea for a video and made that one.  While I promoted my creations on LiveJournal and Facebook, I neglected to say anything here.  So - that's what this post is for.

***SPOILER WARNING*** This post contains spoilers for "Doctor Who" up through series 4, but before the 2009 specials.  If that's an issue for you, then I suggest you go find those episodes and watch them and not read this post.

Video #1 - "Ordinary"

This video is a result of watching the series 3 two-parter "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood."  When I very first saw this story, I hated it.  Not because it was badly written or anything technical like that - it's actually quite brilliant.  But I HATED seeing the Doctor be this total and completely helpless character.  It was doubly tough to watch the montage that showed what his life could be if he stayed as John Smith and married Nurse Joan, had their happy little family and grew old and died.  And maybe that desire is a part of his subconscious, but you can't ignore the fact that the Doctor is not human, nor will he ever be truly human (even the human John Smith didn't have a proper memory of his childhood - it was all just facts and figures of the place he'd purported to have grown up).  The Doctor is never going to have an ordinary human life because he just isn't ordinary - and that's what makes him the Doctor. People are always going to need the Doctor and, quite frankly, the Doctor is always going to need to be the Doctor (wow - that was deep).



Just as an aside, I grew to love this story and it's become one of my favorites.  I think that's why I love this series so much - there are fictional stories that I read/watch that are just "meh..." but "Doctor Who" is really an emotional ride for me.  I find myself so fully invested in the story and the characters that I just can't put it down (I bawled my eyes out over the end of series 2).  When something keeps me up until all hours of the night because I have to just get through one more chapter/episode, that's when I know it's something amazing.  The same thing happened with me and "Harry Potter" (what it is with stories from Britain that just sucks me in?  Maybe I'll know someday).

Video #2 - "Take Me Back in Time"

Initially, I suspected that putting this song with "Doctor Who" was probably not the most original idea in the Whoniverse, so I decided to throw my own little twist into it and take the idea of "Back in Time" literally.  I would only use clips from episodes where the action took place in the past.  When I was coming up with ideas to go along with the lyrics, I hadn't seen Series 5 (with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor), and I wanted things to be a little more lighthearted, so I stuck with the Tenth Doctor for this project (David Tennant remains my favorite Doctor, which I don't know if that's really saying anything since I haven't seen any Classic Who yet).





The biggest challenge for this video was finding clips that matched the lyrics.  I didn't want this to be all "Oh, just cobble together a string of clips and set it to music - perfect!"  I've seen good and bad fan videos and, while I'm not a professional video-maker by any stretch of the imagination, I do strive for quality. And depend on a little bit of luck, as it turns out.  Sometimes I'd throw a clip on there just to see what it would look like next to another one and the music would hit a certain beat right as something happened in the clip that no amount of planning on my part could have produced.

The ending stretch was a pain because A) I was getting bored of just putting clips up and wanted to be done and B) the music fades at the end and I was finding it difficult to find something that matched the lesser intensity.  In the end, I figured that a scene with the Doctor and his companion going back to the TARDIS would work since the opening featured scenes where they came out into certain time periods.  And the end of "The Shakespeare Code" with the Doctor and Martha running away from the Royal Guard worked out perfectly - complete with an arrow in the door of the TARDIS.  I also hadn't planned on including the "Back to the Future" speech, but that was a long stretch of instrumental without anything to break it up a bit.

I have ideas for future videos (including one to a Barenaked Ladies song - won't say which one so I can surprise people), so watch this space for further updates!  Or friend me on YouTube.  I figure I have the account - might as well use it.