More backlog from 2010…
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was released around Christmas 2009, and I saw it on Boxing Day, and another three times before it left the theatres. Needless to say, I loved it, and it was the focus of my fannish attention for the early part of 2010.
I made two fanvids for Sherlock Holmes.
The first is called “there still remains the cocaine bottle”:
When I made this vid, I wanted to highlight some of the gritty urban shots from the film, and make it atmospheric and violent, in opposition to a lot of lighthearted vids I’d recently seen. I also wanted to bring out some of the darker characterisation of Holmes I picked up from Arthur Conan Doyle’s books; the vid’s title is from the closing lines of The Sign of the Four:
“The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?”
“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it.
I made the second vid as a kind of unicorn chaser to the first one, using footage I’d clipped and then not used. It’s called “Still a Rock Star”, and is set to P!nk’s “So What”. It’s a slash vid, in that it deals with the (presumed romantic) relationship between Holmes and Watson: Watson is leaving Holmes for Mary Morstan, and Holmes is trying to tell us (not very convincingly) that he’s dealing just fine with that.
I was particularly glad to be able to use a lot of the fight footage from the movie for this one. The bareknuckle boxing scene was a particular favourite of mine. Does it show?
Incidentally, 2010 was also the year that we saw a DMCA exemption for fan video creators, allowing us to legally rip DVDs to create fanvids, remixes, and the like. The Organization for Transformative Works, about whom I’ve blogged before, were largely responsible for this. Their blog posts about the proceedings make interesting reading.