The story behind my vids

The story behind the videos. Just for the fun of it.

	This song was a big hit in the Netherlands. My kids loved it, and turned up the volume each time it was on the radio. What I liked about this song is that it is a story about two people, who are much alike, yet live far apart, and then of course Nena is from Germany and Kim Wilde from the US. So how to relate this to Stargate? Then I got an idea. The clones! So this became the video of SG-1 and their clones.
	My second project. The Dance Macabre is played in a famous Dutch family park and has always intrigued me. There is so much emotion in this piece of music, you need to listen, and feel it. Anyway, I knew it would be perfect to display the battle between our favorite team and the Goa'uld. I only picked Goa'ulds who had been "beating" our team first, but then got hit back. In the middle of the song, the mood changes, so in the first half you see the snakes being on the winning hand, but then the team strikes back! Gotta love Teal'c's face when he is whispering in Tanith's ear... I gave up MovieMaker already and switched to Adobe Premiere 6.0 for this one. I had some DVD's and the missing ones were shipped from Finland to Holland so I could "rip" them by Nicka!!! Thanks to her I have every scene in pretty good quality. Timing is everything. For this video I learned how to speed the scenes up or slow them down a bit to match them exactly to the beats and moods of the music. Notice how Daniel and Jack fall down by the hand of Seth on the beats of the music, and then of course there is Sam smacking Seth down into the ground somewhere near the end...
	ABBA is one of my favorite groups from when I was a teenager, so I really wanted one of their songs turned into a video. And Eagle is just such a beautiful piece of music, that it wasn't very hard to pick this. So I wanted this all about the fancy flying in Stargate, but I also wanted an eagle in here, and remembered the MacGyver episode where Mac goes climbing a mountain to rescue the bird. So I got that episode from Kaazaa, but it was not that great quality and very small. I had to make the MacGyver scenes bigger by blowing them up, and then spent a lot of time running them through some filters in VirtualDub to make them look good enough to use. How little I knew back then about frame-rates and aspect-ratio and sizes. The scenes from MacGyver were 15 fps, while the others were at least 25 fps and such, not to mention anamorphic mixed with square pixels... Anyway, Adobe kept crashing (and I cannot blame it!) after each scene I added and it was a big challence to get this finished. I would have liked to do a little more timing to some parts, but in the end, after adding a scene and hit save before the next crash, I was lucky to get this done and I decided to leave it as it is.
	This was my cousin Monique's favorite song. It was played at her funeral and it really got to me. So I decided to make a video in her memory, based on moments of hurt and comfort throughout the seasons. And there are plenty. Since the song tells you you are never hurting alone, I concentrated on the scenes, where somebody else was there to comfort the ones hurt.
	I think I by now have switched to Adobe Premiere 6.5. I just LOVE this program, and discover more and more to play with. Bette Midler is a wonderful singer, and with this song, I just thought of the moments in Stargate, where "higher" let's say souls are looking out for others. The Nox, Thor (thru his hammer on Cimmeria) and the spirits that looked after the Salish. Then Oma who does her own kind of watching over others and then I added in SG-1, who had to chose between protecting the Enkarans and the Gadmeer, something which proved to be an impossible choice. The message in this video is that there is something good in everyone. Sometimes, you just need to look for it, grin.
	When I started making video's, I didn't have a website with enough space to host them. Yoof from the Darkgate kindly offered to host them, though, and in return, she wanted another Jack-Harry vid, to this song. I didn't even know the song when she sent it to me, so I played it over and over. I can only make video's to songs I "feel", if you know what I mean. It has to become one, song plus scenes. I try hard to tell a story with my video's to the song, and not just mix scenes together until the music stops. I hope that shows, BTW, grin. Anyway, I still had lots of scenes I didn't use in Love is a Stranger, and I grabbed some more, and there it finally was, the second Jack/Harry vid.
	I wanted to do something completely different. I wanted a Jack-Daniel video, but none too obvious. Then I heard the Ketchup Song again, and saw my daughter dancing, and figured it would be kind of cool to edit certain situations into the raising hands-thing the girls do in their clip. Of course I couldn't get it similar to the dance, but I like how it turned out. Collecting the scenes and editing them until it fitted was a challenge.... and of course my thanks goes to those who has helped me come up with scenes!
	Yoof has been bugging me for a Jack-Harry vid. Now I don't care for slash that much, but Harry is such a fun character anyway, and I really wanted to do this for her, so I had been searching and searching for a proper song. Then I heard this song on the radio. And the words: "I want you so, it's an obsession" just did it for me, 'cause I pictured them with the image of Jack chasing Harry around his truck, and slamming him into the ground in Paradise Lost and I knew that it would work out. Not to mention the part where Jack tells Harry he's not going to hit, but shoot him, big grin. Maybe not exactly "slashy" but yet maybe so!
	Cat Stevens. What can I say? Lovely. Plus again, my kids loved this song, as it was used in a commercial for I think WNF. The title of this song tells you about a new day, a new start... about that the sun will rise, no matter what. So.... for Jack and Teal'c to get to know Merrin and Tomin all over again after the Averium, for Teal'c to show his gratitude to the girl who helped him after the giant insect bite (yuck), for SG-1 to watch how the plants start growing again on PJ2-445, for the people of the Land of Light, after the "Touched" are healed, and the people of the dome in the Gamekeeper discovering the beauty of their planet.. God's recreation of the new day, so praise every morning.
	Classical music is perfect for music videos and I am surprised you don't see it used much yet. Lucky for me, though, cause I have some more in mind.... This piece of music is very powerful, of course, and I mixed this with moments of rushing, running, diving for cover, etc, etc. Worked on the timing again to match the explosives and the gate-exits to the music and there it was! Luckily I found the scene of Walter Davis, sighing out in relief after the rush was over, cause I wanted something like that at the very end.
	Do you girls remember the Chippendales? Big oy. A lot of girls from the office went to that show back in 90-something and we had a great time, grin. Anyway, what I actually liked the most of that show was the beginning... they played Simply the Best while the curtains were still closed and one of the Chippendales just stuck his arm through. You should have seen the crowd! Or rather have heard them screaming, LOLOLOL. So what song matches Jack? There's a lot of songs, actually, and some are already used by others, so I figured this one would be perfect. Getting all the best scenes of Jack was quite a challenge, cause he is always great, but I think I have a nice mix of Jack, action-Jack, angry-Jack, anguished-Jack, shocked-Jack, funny-Jack... all Jack, simply the best. Oh, and as for very understandably hubbies.... mine watch this and this was his comment: "It shouldn't go any further than this!" Oy.
	This is my first video. I made it with Windows Movie Maker I, and only needed two episodes for it, Cold Lazarus and Show and Tell. I didn't have any DVD's back then and downloaded those two eps from some Polish site, the URL I got from Smiler. The song was just so obvious and I deliberately chose to focus on both Charlie's in this, since they both meant a lot to Jack. I didn't know a lot about timing scenes and such back then, and was just lucky that the clips I clipped out of the eps fit the music well they way they do.
	Oh, I wanted to do this song for a long time! It took some courage, though, as I can't imagine a better video clip than Michael Jackson's to this song. Those zombies crawling out of their tombs, it's an incredible project. Lots of good stuff to use from Stargate, though, and I picked Jonas Hansson and his creeps, the Unas, the creatures seen by the Machello bug, the episode the Tomb and the supersoldier serving Anubis to get a good mix of thrilling moments. I think it worked pretty well!
	Now this must be an unfamiliar song to lots of you, as it is a Dutch rock-band playing this. But it has a pretty good beat, and oh, please, listen closely to the lyrics, cause it IS Hathor, really. Everything about this screams Hathor, and the way she drew Daniel, Hammond and Jack to her. Not much trouble making this, all scenes are from one input file, so no differences and no crashes...