Pray (2002)
Performed by Tina Cousins
Theme: X Files Krycek/Marita Mythology

Summary: A Krycek/Marita mythology piece set during The Truth, tied to Marita’s testimony and her memories, regrets and fears.
My Rating: Four stars. I’m really pleased with this one! I’ve wanted to play with the idea of Marita seeing herself as a kind of parallel to Mulder and Scully for a while, and I liked working with the complex set of emotions from that scene. In The Truth, Marita faces up to her past, the colonisation threat, and the man who killed the one she loved, and it’s wonderful creative fodder. I think this one is a step forward in my work.
Geeky Things To Note: For this one, I decided to try to find ways of fixing all the little problems I normally tolerate – things like pixelation and flickers at the top and bottom of the captured videos. I used a green screen GIF file to create a top and bottom border to mask the flickers, and I played with blur and deinterlace and other settings to clean up the footage as much as possible. The little MTV-style captions at the beginning were also achieved with green screen (my first attempt at this technique). I don’t know if I’ll use them again – they’re kind of gimmicky – but it gave me a thrill to be able to do it. As always, I sneaked in non-XF performer footage, but this time I took a different interpretive tack – I only used them on certain lyrics in the chorus (“Pray for good and pray for love”), thereby indicating that while these moments “happened”, they represent a kind of idealised set of memories that Marita wished had been the norm.
Programs Used: VideoMach, MGI VideoWave, Adobe Premiere, Paint Shop Pro, CoolEdit, VCD Cutter, TINRA, VirtualDub, RealProducer.
Sources: XF to The Truth, Once A Thief, Expect No Mercy, The Raffle, Outer Limits.