After a long period of YouTube silence, I finally published another Farscape music video!

John Crichton, meet the Uncharted Territories. Uncharted Territories, try not to kill John.

Farscape visuals, meet Five Nights at Freddy's music. Now kiss.
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Once upon a time, there was a song and a story.

The song was beautiful and evocative, but it made very little sense. It was like a pretty tossed salad made of randomly tossed words.

​The story was also beautiful, stirring and complex. But there were many incarnations of it, many of which had never come into being.

One day, a tragic incarnation of the story poked its head into the room of an artist and said, "I could be something real and wonderful, if you paired me with that song.

"I could make the tossed-salad lyrics make sense, and the song could give shape to the untold story that is me."

So I brought the song and the story together into the cathedral of Windows Movie Maker, and through repeated clicks of an editing mouse, they said their vows and were wed.

Then they joined in the holy union of the "save video" feature, and soon thereafter, a new music video was born into the world of the internet for you to enjoy.

​So enjoy it.
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Over a year ago, I made one of the best music videos I've ever created. Magia is an awesome song, from the best anime I've ever watched, and it fit remarkably well with my favorite fictional character from my favorite sci-fi show.

Needless to say, I was excited when it was complete. I uploaded it to YouTube, painstakingly added captions to translate the Japanese lyrics, and grinned as I hit "Publish"...

Only to watch in horror as Sony instantly blocked the video worldwide.

Can you guess who is NOT among my favorite companies?

Disappointed, I moved on to other projects, fitting video clips to music from less territorial companies. For over a year, my Magia video sat neglected in my computer, inaccessible to anyone but me.

Then, it finally occurred to me: there are several altered versions of Magia sitting unmolested on YouTube, so why not make my own?

It was worth a shot.

A few minutes in Audacity, and a few more in Movie Maker, and voila - a slightly higher-pitched version of my video was ready to be uploaded.

Then came the real test: would Sony allow a video that included a pitch-adjusted version of their carefully guarded song?

I uploaded it and added the captions again, silently praying that my work wouldn't once again be wasted, and wishing that I could know one way or the other before I went to the trouble of adding captions.

I could have just published it caption-free, I guess, but I'd hate for my subscribers' first impression of the video to be a fruitless battle with the caption button.

I published the video, held my breath, and...

SUCCESS!

Magia is published, and as far as I can tell, it hasn't been blocked anywhere! :D

I can't wait to hear what you think of it. This is one of my favorite creations, and I'm happy to finally be able to share it with you.
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Sometimes, it's fun to explore the viewpoint of characters who aren't featured much.

And sometimes, it's even more fun to take a funnier version of that viewpoint, and have those characters express it toward other characters who aren't normally the target of such motherly bossiness.

In my latest music video, the mothers of Farscape have decided that it's time for them to have their say. The protagonist and his pooka are too old to act the way they do. Two dangerous and high-ranking military officers are grounded until they're 36. Two pulse weapons say that there will be no more computer time tonight.

If you enjoy Farscape, or if you don't but you also don't care about spoilers, check out the hilarious video below.

Sometimes, it's fun to explore things that never actually happened in a book or show, or that you know will probably never happen.

Characters whose paths never crossed getting stuck in a room together... plot threads that were left dangling being tied up... deleted scenes being fleshed out... characters who would never drink getting absolutely plastered.

(That last one is especially fun; sometimes, my siblings and I pick a show or book, and just theorize our way through the entire cast.)

In my latest music video, I took a character who's probably the mentally strongest in the entire Farscape cast, and explored what would happen if his resilient mind finally snapped.

Scorpius tends to have his inner demons very much under control, but what would happen if he fully and permanently lost the battle to his pain, rage, and long-suppressed Scarran side, and plunged full-tilt into PTSD and psychosis?

Let's take a look:

Have you ever noticed that adding an element of innocence can make an already creepy thing that much creepier?

Imagine a ghost story that featured the deceased spirit of a homicidal madman. A tall, crazed apparition, wielding a jagged, bloodstained knife, which it uses to carve out the souls of its victims. No one knows where the blood comes from; the knife enters the body and tears out the spirit without breaking the flesh... and yet, the blade is always tainted red.

Now, instead of the ghost being a raving adult, imagine it was a giggling child. Same capabilities, same method of attack, but in the shape of a cute little girl, with a knife in one hand and a broken doll in the other.

How much creepier would that be?

Sure, the adult ghost would be larger and more viscerally intimidating, but there's something about innocence that heightens the effect of anything that contrasts it.

Violence is worse when it's inflicted on a child. Same for sexual harassment and assault. And when a child is DOING these things instead of having them done to her, it adds a whole new level of wrongness to an already horrific situation.

The contrast between childlike innocence and unchildlike malevolence creates a disturbing dissonance, and it probably plays into a lot of peoples' fears about their children being harmed, turning out badly, or both. Childhood is supposed to be a time of cuteness and happiness and fun, not broken dolls and soul-stealing knives.

This dynamic is a big factor in my latest music video. In it, Scorpius from Farscape hunts the increasingly scared protagonist in reality and in his own mind... and in the background, a young girl sings cheerfully about her playful search for her terrified prey.

Click the player below to watch the video, and once you're done, please take a moment to let me know if you enjoyed it.

Blessing a fellow fan with something she loves is an awesome feeling.

A few months ago, my younger sister got hooked on Attack on Titan. I haven't seen it yet myself, but she adores it, and the song The Reluctant Heroes frequently graced my family's kitchen while she did her chores.

As a person who knows what it's like to love a story, you can just imagine my glee when I realized that one of her favorite songs would make a great Farscape music video. It's like finding a special edition of someone's favorite book on sale, but with a more personal touch.

The video turned out to be an ambitious project. If you're a subscriber on my YouTube channel, you'll know that it took me over a month to complete it, and if you've heard The Reluctant Heroes from other sources before you watched my video, you'll probably notice that I extended it so that there would be enough room to tell the amazing story that is Farscape.

44 extra seconds of music. 310 items in the final Movie Maker file (which is to say, WAY more clips than the software was ever intended to process in just over 5 minutes). A month in the making, and my first venture in featuring almost the entire cast in just one video.

And my little sister loved it.

For an artist, there are few feelings better than watching another person gaping and grinning with happiness while enjoying your art. Especially if that art was made as a gift for them.

Sadly, I won't get to see you smile if you watch the video, but all the same, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please take a moment to let me know. I worked long and hard on this MV, and I shamelessly wish to bask in the happiness that it brings to my fellow fans.

I had an interesting experience while I was making my latest music video. "Leaving Tonight" is a creepy song, from a Halloween-themed album by a band named "The Birthday Massacre".

(For my more sensitive readers, don't worry - the songs are generally much gentler than the band name implies.)

And yet, when I actually started making the video, it turned out to be more like a love story. I didn't see that coming.

It's interesting how a small tweak in the portrayal of something can completely change the way it comes across. I've seen villains who did very little damage be portrayed as major threats, evil or stupid actions painted as heroic, and improbable plotlines played with conviction... and in skilled enough hands, it often felt truly convincing.

In this case, all I had to do was portray a person, rather than a place, as the thing to which the video's protagonist wanted to come home, and it instantly turned into a love story.

D'Argo and Chiana. One of those strange ships that worked to a certain degree, but never quite sat right with me.

Have you ever seen a relationship like that, where the characters were clearly happy with it, but it just seemed strange?

When Farscape first started hinting that D'Argo and Chiana were starting to get together, it seemed odd to me. Sure, Chiana is one of those characters who could generate chemistry with just about anyone if she wanted to - it's a skill she's very deliberately honed.

But she struck me as being too much of a bratty, free-spirited wild child for D'Argo. She's fun and sexy, but she's also flighty and promiscuous... not the stuff that long-term relationships are made of.

Despite my feelings about their relationship, I've wanted to make a music video of them for a while. It was just a matter of finding the right song. And a little over a week ago, I finally found the perfect one.

So, here it is: a portrait of D'Argo and Chiana, in all their turmoil, mixed feelings, affection, condescension, betrayal and lingering tenderness.

Enjoy.

I've been running into a dilemma lately in my music videos, and sometimes it shows up in novel-writing as well.

What do you do when you want to create a high-energy video or series of scenes, and not let the adrenaline decrease at any point, but some of the scenes, lyrics or clips are too docile for that purpose and can't be removed or replaced?

While that hasn't been a problem in my recent writing, it's caused me some difficulties in a few of my videos. Especially when it came to a video set to Nightwish's Amaranth, in which the words of some of the lyrics are soft, and therefore fit best with soft visuals, but they're sung with so much energy that pairing them with anything peaceful just felt wrong.

So, how do you maintain high energy during peaceful scenes, in writing and in movie-making?

The answer came from an unexpected source: a Madoka Magica AMV I'd discovered almost a year ago, without initially recognizing the genius of a stylistic element it uses.

The video is set to A Demon's Fate by Within Temptation, not a peaceful song by any means. But some of the scenes it uses ARE peaceful... yet it managed not to lose any momentum by including them.

The way it did this was simple yet brilliant: it used rapid transitions between shots and set them in time with the music, so that even though the scene itself was peaceful, the sense of urgency was maintained because the picture being shown changed with such frantic speed.

It also interspersed some peaceful scenes with glimpses of combat scenes, so that the softer images could be depicted without losing the fierce, ominous tone. I suspect the same could be done in writing, by punctuating a slow scene with flashbacks, flash forwards, or glimpses of a more dangerous scene that's happening elsewhere in the setting.

It's a technique I was happy to add to my arsenal, and I can definitely see its positive effect on my latest music video (which also happens to be set to A Demon's Fate). I don't know when I'll need it for my writing, but I'm glad to know that I'll have it available when the need arises.

​In the meantime, here's the video, if you want to watch it: