melodytree

Title: Tides Are Gonna Shift
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: Can't Lose Them All by Kim Richey
Contains: A few quick fades
Notes:
A celebration of many of the LGBTQ athletes of figure skating. Happy Pride, everyone.

Download: Click here (contains subs for lyrics on track 1, skaters on track 2)
Embed: (also has both sets of subs)

Misc notes:
The vid is not completely comprehensive (and couldn't be), but I did try to include as many queer elite skaters as I could.

A few notes on the thoughts behind some of the lyric/clip matching, if anyone was curious:

• "I've got a silk shirt in my closet" - I counted at least six tiger faces on this costume. It is peak figure skating and amazing and I will not hear a word against it.


• "I could go down in history" - John Curry won the triple crown in 1976 (Euros/Olympics/Worlds); along with Cranston, he is credited with advancing artistry in skating by integrating his dance training. Even now, older FS fans gush over him for good reason.


• "Or I could go up in smoke"/"If I'm playing on the b-team"/"or I'm sitting on the bench"/"it's not for lack of trying" - all small fed skaters


• "Be the center of attention" - Adam Rippon was a breakout star of the 2018 Olympics.


• "or the butt of every joke" - Fumie Suguri competed past her peak, even when she was no longer making Nationals, which meant she got criticized for continuing to compete when she was old and hopeless, the horror.


• "I justify the risk" - Jeffrey Buttle won Worlds in 2008 without even attempting a quad jump, unlike his competitors; he never did land one successfully. Cue whining from the silver medalist about there being a champion with no quaaaad.


• "To a hit with every miss" - Rudy Galindo had never medaled on the senior singles podium or been to a major competition as a singles skater (he had some success in pairs with Kristi Yamaguchi) and had been training with no funding in the season leading up to his victory at US Nationals. He then went on to win a bronze medal at Worlds.

I think this is the quickest I've ever made a full vid. I way overclipped for it, which probably helped, as did color-coding the movement direction of each clip before I started editing. (Twice, because Premiere lost it all the first time.) I would also like to thank whoever added masks to effects in Premiere, because that made it much easier to get rid of the color artifacts on the ice while I was color-correcting every clip.

Title: Swans and Princes
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: Swan Lake mix
Download: Here
Notes:
Vid contains notes on who each skater is in the subtitles (included as soft subs in the download).

After doing a previous collection of Carmens, someone asked if I'd do Swan Lake as well... and I do love Swan Lake.

This is every Swan Lake program I could find (which was skated at least once as a competitive program at the senior elite level), edited down into five minutes. There are 94 programs in there - if I missed your favorite, double-check that you aren't thinking of a program set to The Swan instead :)

I also did another full write-up with stats and graphs about the whole list of Swan Lake programs, from which year had the most Swan Lakes to how many were Black Swan programs to how often women have feather skirts as part of their costumes. It's here on DW and also over on Tumblr.

About the vid itself: since I got a question about this last time, I didn't try to match clips to the original Swan Lake music used in them except once or twice - I dropped the clips into Premiere without the matching audio. My process was more efficient this time, and first consisted of finding two or three good clips from each video as I watched them and clipping them into a 'storage' timeline. After I had gone through all the programs, I color-coded each one as having movement toward the left, toward the right, or various directions/no real directional movement. This made it much easier to match surrounding clips in the vid timeline to achieve flow. I also had three layers in the storage timeline: 'used' 'used [but not this particular clip]' and 'not yet used'. These organized which programs I had and hadn't already integrated into the vid and to make it easier to swap out clips that weren't working.

(There's also a very silly additional vidlet on Youtube here - explicit language in lyrics.)

Embed:

Title: Come On, Zhenya!
Fandom: Figure skating feat. Evgenia Medvedeva
Song: Come On, Sailor Moon by the Super Moonies
Embed:

Download: Here (soft subs of the lyrics are included)
Notes:
Happy birthday to Zhenya! Here's to her first four years as a senior (this was made before the beginning of this season); I hope she has many more happy ones.

I like how cute she can be. I like how openly fannish she is about K-Pop and her favorite anime. I like how she seems to be a very determined young woman. I like her skating! I like her efforts to improve herself and her drive to be able to make her own choices about her career. I like her costumes. I like her murder face.

Is her skating perfect? No. But she doesn't deserve even an iota of the ridiculous hate that's been thrown her way for crimes like winning competitions, not winning competitions, moving to another country to train while continuing to represent her home country, not being able to take flowers to her old coach because she couldn't find her, saying nice things about Canada, liking anime, or whatever other nonsense they've come up with this week.

Anyway, screw the haters. Haters gonna hate, Zhenya's gonna skate as long as she likes.

Thought it would be fun to set her skating to a Sailor Moon song (I edited together the English and instrumental versions of the song to make it less repetitive), and right after I started it, it was announced that she's going to be starring in the first Sailor Moon ice show next summer! Good for her.

The other skaters she's shown with in the 'Sailor warriors will be forever friends clips' are Anna Pogorilaya, Wakaba Higuchi, and Serafima Sakhanovich. (Because of the Sailor Moon theme, I chose friends of hers who are also young women.)

More technical note: Made in Resolve, since I wanted to try a program that might be less crash-happy than the old one I was using, and bonus - it's free. There were a few things about it that I liked, but I found it to be so glitchy and freeze-happy on my system that I promptly uninstalled it as soon as I was done. Oh, well. Added a couple of effects this time for fun, as I haven't really tried much before other than fussing with colors.

Originally meant to post this back in August, but then it got hit with copyright restrictions on Youtube due to the music and I never figured out what (if anything) to do about it. Then I checked it again today and it was magically cleared up to 'copyright owner can put ads on this' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not going to complain!

Title: Skating Forward
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: Time Back by Bad Style




Embed:

Download: Here
Notes:
Vid contains notes on who each skater is in the subtitles (included as soft subs in the download).

This vid is a history and celebration of figure skating. Not the history of figure skating (it's biased in terms of who and what I decided to include, in the decades and people and disciplines that got more emphasis than others, in who I could even find footage of even before the Great SBS Purge starting hitting YouTube, in terms of what I could fit into two and a half minutes) but I think it's interesting to see the changes over time all the same.

For example, you can see:
・skating change from 'evening dance and simple (often badly-done) jumps on ice and figures' to something much more difficult and action-packed
・women's skirts shorten dramatically
・men eventually stop wearing suits and dress up like the ladies (well, sometimes)
・if you peer closely enough at the feet, you might be able see the change in the shape of the skates from something longer to shorter but more supportive - certainly there's a change in the color, for women
・figure skating (slowly) gets a little more diverse over time, though obviously there are still biases in who one might see at the top levels
・figure skaters used to compete outdoors, and now only compete on controlled indoor rinks.

N.b. while the years are all in order, a couple of times, I messed with the order of footage within a given year to fit the music better.

More specific notes:
The three skaters in the first image are the inimitable Madge Syers, the ice dancers Eva Romanová and Pavel Roman, and if you don't recognize Yuzuru Hanyuu, you probably don't watch modern skating.

Madge Syers - the footage is of an unknown date. I found this clip in an ISU archive video that didn't give it a specific date/place; it was in another video that was supposedly taken in 1910, but she had retired in 1908 due to her health, so clearly that's wrong. In any case, Madge Syers won the silver medal at 1902 Worlds, despite the fact that women weren't supposed to compete - they forgot to make it an actual rule until after she medaled, at which point they banned women with bullshit reasons like 'their skirts are too long to see their feet', sigh. (She lost only to Ulrich 'yes he invented the jump' Salchow.) She won the 1908 Olympics women's event and took bronze in Pairs with her husband.

[next unknown pair] - footage is from here and despite later efforts, I couldn't ascertain who was in the video, or when/where it was actually taken.

Ulrich Salchow - I found this footage interesting because there's this huge crowd of people there to see him do things that are less advanced than you can see on any freestyle session today. Sometimes even a quiet public session. But he did win pretty much everything in the early days of figure skating, so. (I mean, I'd show up if one of my favorite figure skaters was going to go skate around a nearby pond and do a couple of singles.)

Sonja Henie - she did not get several clips in this video because I particularly like her or her skating (I don't) but because she was HUGELY influential in the early days of the sport. She's why 99.9% of women wear white or occasionally tan skates in competition, and she pioneered short skirts. At her first Olympics, she was 11 and could get away with short skirts instead of long ones that were too heavy for her, and ditto a few years later when she was 14. (I believe that's 1927 Worlds - while one source said she was already wearing white boots by then, I found other descriptions of what she wore that matched the footage but didn't mention her newfangled white boots.) She won a bunch of things, then became a movie star and toured ice shows. Also she might have been a Nazi sympathizer? I need to read a biography on her.

Dick Button - first man to land a double axel and a triple of any kind, he was the only non-European man to ever win Euros (another loophole to close, especially since that same year, Barbara Ann Scott was the only non-European woman to win Euros). He was a two-time Olympic gold medalist, won Worlds five times, and later provided figure skating commentary. As of this writing, he's still around and occasionally posts on Twitter.

Karol Divin - Divin is shown doing compulsory figures here (one of like, two clips of this in the vid), back when figure skating still included skating figures.

Carol Heiss - I recommend giving her 1960 long program a look - while simple by today's standards, it's still interesting to watch, not least because of the section where she does four axels in a row in alternating directions.

John Curry - okay, he got multiple clips in here because I love his skating. They did have jumping beans who little choreography back then, too, but Curry wasn't one of them; he was a lovely skater who brought his ballet training to the ice.

Cherkasova & Shakhrai - she looks tiny compared to him, because she was - they won a bronze medal at Euros when she was 12 and he was 18, since age rules were different back then. They did the world's first quadruple twist when she was 13, one of which is in the vid, though I don't know for sure what year or competition that was.

Debi Thomas - for a long time, I had other clips here, but decided it wasn't working, and also wanted to put a little more diversity in this vid. As far as I know, she was the first black woman to compete internationally (the first period was probably the men's singles skater Bobby Beauchamp), though other black skaters had competed domestically in the US, and of course there were earlier skaters like Mabel Fairbanks who weren't allowed to compete. Anyway, I highly recommend giving her 1986 long program a watch.

Kurt Browning - this clip is of him landing the first ratified quad.

Midori Ito - also got multiple clips because I love her skating. She was the first skater from an Asian country to win a Worlds title, was the first woman to land seven triples in a program, did back counter entrances to axels and rippon'd jumps before they were cool, was the first woman to land a triple axel, and is just a very fun, bouncy skater to watch. (And she still does the occasional adult competition!)

Torvill & Dean - this clip is of their Bolero EX from '94 Olympics, not the famous competitive program, since this one was in HD. I showed my dad this vid and his one complaint was that there wasn't enough of this program in there, haha.

Vise & Trent - this clip is of them performing the first ratified quad throw jump.

Savchenko & Massot - if I were in charge of the Netflix pair skating series, I would file the serial numbers off of them instead of that nonsense it sounds like they're doing. Will not-Massot get his citizenship in time to go to the not-Olympics? Will not-Savchenko, on her fifth not-Olympics, finally get her gold medal? Will they be able to climb out of fourth place with a beautiful free skate and reach the top of the podium??? (Savchenko herself is one of the most decorated pairs skaters in history, having medaled at Worlds with her partner 11 times, and at Euros and the GPF 9 times.)

Premiere did not like the ending sequence (and some wonkiness with the way it resizes/crops things makes it not pixel-perfect despite my math), but it kindly refrained from crashing this time around.

Thanks for watching!