HSU IT Department

My gift posted today over at hoggywartyxmas and oh, my, is it a thing of wonder. If you like stories that break your heart and then put it back together again in a most satisfying and lyrical manner, please take a moment to go and read:

Through the Spiral of the Years

Reveals are up over at sshg_giftfest, so I can now admit to having written "The Price of a Memory" (on the fest community or on AO3) for reynardo! Her prompt was positively inspiring, and I had a wonderful time writing this for her.

I would also like to profusely and enthusiastically applaud and thank dragoon811, who wrote for ME a splendid story containing so many of my favorite elements: entangled souls and seventh year, too-clever-by-half Hermione and sarcastic biting Severus, all beautifully interwoven with canon events and a perfect, heart-tugging ending. Go and read Warmth and see for yourself!

Check out all the other artses and fics while you're there, too, because every single one is top-notch. The amount of talent in this particular 'ship continues to amaze and delight me...

During filming of The Hobbit, Ian McKellen had an angsty moment over the fact that he was acting with thirteen dwarves and yet not a single actor was there on camera with him -- all he had were 13 photographs of the dwarves on top of stands with little lights; whoever he was "talking" to their light would flash, but the actual actors did all their camera time separately and were filled in later by the computer techs. "I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, 'This is not why I became an actor'. Unfortunately the microphone was on and the whole studio heard..."

I sympathize with him. Much as I love special effects and amazingly realistic goblins, dwarves, dragons, monsters, spaceships, etc., there's something missing when 90% of what you see was produced inside a computer. The best, most memorable performances I've ever seen are live: Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Mikado, even the junior high musicals I was in (under protest) and the high school musicals I worked tech crew on were magical in a way that movies can't be. When you know there are no second takes...when the actors are responding in real time to the audience...there's a wonderful feedback loop that gets going, and its remarkable. Light years different from what happens in a movie theater, where your reaction makes no difference at all to what's playing on screen.

This is also why I'm very excited about the movie version of Les Mis that's coming out next month. Instead of the usual approach, where the singers do all the singing in the studio months ahead of time and then have to time their acting to what they did weeks earlier, this production is allowing them to sing in real time, while they act. It's an interesting middle ground between live performance and movie-musical, and the actors are pretty excited about it.

We've already bought our Hobbit tickets; may have to snap a couple of these up as well.