First of all, many thanks to Devo, who was generous enough to let me borrow her HL tapes and didn't kill me when I kept them for a month. :-) And to elynross for her usual brilliant betaing, and to Killa, who convinced me to do this as a Joe vid.

I started this one by wanting to do a Methos vid; I thought of this song for him based just on the chorus ("I was a free man in Paris...") and the idea of Duncan as "the work" he'd taken on. But after listening to it and thinking about the rest lyrics more, it seemed more and more like the song was better suited to Joe. The 'voice' of the song's narrator sounds like Joe, and the lyrics as a whole seemed to fit him more, although there were some problematic bits that initially I couldn't see how to present, particularly the chorus.

The song is basically about a recording industry exec complaining about how tough his work is, how much he wishes he was just wandering about Paris. In the vid, this "work" represents Joe's job as a Watcher and his involvement with Duncan (and other immortals). The thing is, I didn't want to suggest that Joe _really_ regrets this work.

So I framed the song as him telling his daughter Amy (from the sixth-season episode Indiscretions) about his life, and though he bitches and moans to her, the real conclusion is that he's actually happy with his life and with his connection to Duncan et al.

The trickiest sequence to plan out was the "If I had my way..." verse, where the narrator describes how great his life would be without the work. The whole vid pretty much jelled when I had the idea of making the visuals undercut the lyrics. So instead of trying to find images of Joe being happy and carefree, I used the alt-universe sequence from To Be/Not To Be (the series finale) where Joe ends up as a miserable bum without Duncan in his life. So while the narrator's saying "if I had my way, everything would be great", etc, the visuals are showing what would happen if he did have his way, if he hadn't gotten involved with Duncan/Immortals.

Technically, this was a pretty easy vid. The music is straightforward and I ended up cutting to the lyrics more than the beat. On the first draft, I found that the fairly long instrumental sections were holding the vid back, so I ended up cutting them heavily, keeping just enough in the first instrumental section after the first chorus to do a sequence representing Duncan's chronicle (framed with a clip of a chronicle being opened that I ran backwards at the end :-), and just enough at the end to finish things up.

Song was edited in CoolEdit Pro, the vid was made in Premiere 6.0. HL pro tapes were the source (and a serious pain, as almost every other one seems to be wound too tight and I couldn't capture a lot of clips that I wanted because they just kept skipping).