Snowflake Challenge Day 14: Asking for Help

[corrielle]

Day 14

In your own space, ask for help. Need a beta? Always wanted to learn how to make a vid? a fanmix? icons? Maybe you’d want to have someone cheering for you while you work on an upcoming big bang or fannish bingo?



This is actually quite a serendipitous challenge for today. I've recently been mulling over some fannish things I want to do this year. Some of them are unfinished fics, but some of them are bigger projects that involve skill sets I don't have yet. So, if you have any advice for me as I embark upon the planning phases, I'm all ears.

1. Five Things/Five Times fic rec and archive community.

I have been in love with the "Five Things" fic format for a long time now. I've done it twice myself, and I love how both of them turned out. I especially enjoy "Five Things that Never Happened to..." fics, mostly because it's like getting 5 little AU snippets in a short space.

What I'd love to do is start a multi-fandom community for reccing and posting Five Things fics. The number would be negotiable, of course. If someone wanted to post "Nineteen Times Much Didn't Speak Up for Himself When Robin was Inconsiderate and One Time He Did," I wouldn't be one to stop them.

I'd like to kick the opening of the community off with a Five Things Fic Fest (say THAT five times fast...) where people submitted prompts or titles for optional use by any authors who wanted to comb through them for ideas. After the fic fest was over, I'd like to leave the community open for people to post new fics or recs of fics that fit the criteria.

Here's the thing... I don't know the first thing about moderating a community or running a fic fest. I'd like to end up with a well-ordered, sensibly tagged community that actually gets a respectable amount of activity here. What do I need to know to make that happen?

2. Robin Hood fan commentaries.


For a LONG time, I've been wanting to do RH fan audio commentaries a la Rifftrax. This, I imagine, would involve me sitting down with the DVDs, a microphone connected to some sort of recording device, and a sheet of paper with reminders like "Try not to rant too much. NO PAUSING" scrawled on it.

The thing is... I don't have the first idea how to go about recording my brilliant insights in a form that will be free of extra noise and easy to listen to. I also have no idea how to get it uploaded to some sort of service that would then allow listeners to download it at their leisure.

I think I know someone with a decent microphone embedded in her computer, but other than that, I'm kind of at a loss here.

3. Operation: Finish my PotC fic.

Last year, in the lead up to PotC: OST, I was participating in the PotC Big Bang challenge that was going on. It was a fic mostly dedicated to fleshing out my head-canon for Groves. I wrote a lot, really liked how it was going, and only had a couple more large chunks to write and some minor editing to do before I finished it. My intentions were to finish before OST came out. And then... I kind-of-accidentally saw OST early, and my desire to finish this particular fic went into a coma and hasn't stirred since.

I want to finish. I've invested a lot of time into it, and I want to be able to post it. So, if someone wanted to poke me once in a while and say, "Hey, you think you're going to have time to work on your Theo fic soon?" in a gentle, non-judgmental way, I'd love that.

Comments

[sharpiefan]

OK. Can't really help with 2 but...

Running a comm is really easy. You set it up, picking the name you want to call it, and choosing whether you want it as an open comm (most are) or with moderated posts (where you have to allow each post individually), open membership, or whether member requests are sent to you to be allowed.

Think about how you want the tags to work - you can allow members to create their own, or just add mod-created tags to their posts.

You can create tags on a comm as easily as you can on your own journal - just select the comm name from the drop down box by 'Work as' and make sure you've hit 'select' - it's the same for editing the layout as well.

If you've got any other issues, send me a message. If you need me to walk through anything with you, or you want to set up a test comm to experiment with first, I am more than happy to help.

And I'm willing to poke over your POTC fic whenever you need.

*hugs*

[corrielle]

Thanks for the advice! I think if I DO end up doing a community, I'll set up a couple of tags for fandoms and characters I've written for, and then ask that member-created tags be set up using the same format so everything stays organized. Because I will NEVER get around to tagging other people's posts.

[sharpiefan]

As I say, it's possible to set up a whole bunch of tags right away. And from my poking around things like kink_bingo, it's possible for posters to ask for tags to be created so they can then edit their posts to add the tags.

And right at the beginning is when most tags will need to be set up. After that, you only need to add one or two at a time - and that's not necessarily even once a week.

(And it's always possible to add a co-maintainer to help out.)

[shiftercat]

Okay, so for number 2:

Mark says he did "let's plays" of games (that's sort of like a commentary track but for a video game, and you'd record the visual too for that) by using a recording app on the iPad. I happen to know you have one of those available. I think all you'd have to do then is be in a quiet spot, know the ep well enough you didn't have to have it on loud and have the iPad or other recording device reasonably well away from the TV - or you could use headphones... oh my genius at 1am... um... and then you'd want to put in sync-up bits now and again like they do on Rifftrax. Like tell them when to start the episode ("pause as the logo fades to black and then start when I say now...") and then sync a line or two here and there in it to make sure they're on track. Then just upload it somewhere, I'm sure there's a billion and one file hosting places you could put it and link it from your journal/comms/whatever. You probably want to practice a couple times or script it out actually so you stay on track and that'd help you put the syncing bits in too.

There are also some various freeware sound editing things I'm sure so you wouldn't have to do it in one take if you wanted to cut files together and whatnot. It sounds like it wouldn't actually be all that difficult. As far as noise control, that's the harder bit, you'd have to try to be as quiet as possible in general... and then there may be some editing you could do as well.

[corrielle]

That is very useful information to have. I'll see what Rae's iPad can do for me... and the syncing thing is a good idea. I'll probably end up watching the episode by myself first, writing down some time codes and lines to say to help with the syncing, then rope my co-hosts into sitting down and watching it with me while I record.