I need a vidding icon
Sep. 13th, 2006 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkThere are some notable exceptions but most vids are made to songs with words. Hardly surprising given that media fandom is so overwhelmingly verbal and popular music abhors the instrumental. Words are seductive and although meaning is ultimately dependent on musical context (Patsy Cline implies a very different kind of Crazy than Beyonce) it’s easy to forget that when vidding. It’s always tempting to use the lyric as a script and give too much weight to isolated lines or even single words when deciding on what footage to use.
The helplessly literal approach to clip choice is effective in comic vids precisely because of the potential for throwing up incongruous images but that doesn’t mean literalism can’t also be used for dramatic effect. Some of my favourite vids are very lyrics driven.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sdwolfpup’s Fix you for instance.
The first half of the vid uses each line of the song to introduce a different character, Apollo is “so tired he can’t sleep”, Tyroll is on the verge of having “tears run down his face,” Adama is gazing at the photograph of the son he’s “lost and can’t replace” and so on. The scenes follow from the lines of the song not from each other but it works wonderfully because at this point what the song is doing overall is setting a scene not telling a story. Each line describes a different item on a list, within the overall context of the song they’re supposed to be isolated, not to flow from each other. Moreover the imagery is not word for word literal rather each character’s emotional state matches that of the line as a whole. It does become word for word though, by the final verse. To, “Lights will guide you home” there’s a clip of cylon ships as lights flickering on in the sky, then one of them moving purposefully across the screen (guiding), then a shot of New Caprica to “home.” Here the literalism works because it’s become abundantly clear by now that the vid is using Chris Martin’s lyric in a deeply ironic fashion “Fix you” in the sense of genocide, concentration camps and divine love.
Another example of how literal image-to-word matching can be exploited for non-comic purposes would be Lum’s Come together, the introductory track on Scooby Road. The song gives the overall impression of being about Lennon in his yippie prophet phase exhorting people to to unite behind him. “Come together” is the perfect message for a vid focussing on Restless and its wider implications but the protagonist of Buffy is not some long-haired, holy-roller, later-day Beatle figure. The vid needs to emphasise the idea powering the refrain but somehow play down the image invoked by the verses. It does this (I think) by ignoring sentence structure to match clips to random words hair, roller, joker, knee. Our John’s image shatters and the whole show becomes a surreal puzzle, much as the dreams in the original episode were.
The helplessly literal approach to clip choice is effective in comic vids precisely because of the potential for throwing up incongruous images but that doesn’t mean literalism can’t also be used for dramatic effect. Some of my favourite vids are very lyrics driven.
sdwolfpup’s Fix you for instance. The first half of the vid uses each line of the song to introduce a different character, Apollo is “so tired he can’t sleep”, Tyroll is on the verge of having “tears run down his face,” Adama is gazing at the photograph of the son he’s “lost and can’t replace” and so on. The scenes follow from the lines of the song not from each other but it works wonderfully because at this point what the song is doing overall is setting a scene not telling a story. Each line describes a different item on a list, within the overall context of the song they’re supposed to be isolated, not to flow from each other. Moreover the imagery is not word for word literal rather each character’s emotional state matches that of the line as a whole. It does become word for word though, by the final verse. To, “Lights will guide you home” there’s a clip of cylon ships as lights flickering on in the sky, then one of them moving purposefully across the screen (guiding), then a shot of New Caprica to “home.” Here the literalism works because it’s become abundantly clear by now that the vid is using Chris Martin’s lyric in a deeply ironic fashion “Fix you” in the sense of genocide, concentration camps and divine love.
Another example of how literal image-to-word matching can be exploited for non-comic purposes would be Lum’s Come together, the introductory track on Scooby Road. The song gives the overall impression of being about Lennon in his yippie prophet phase exhorting people to to unite behind him. “Come together” is the perfect message for a vid focussing on Restless and its wider implications but the protagonist of Buffy is not some long-haired, holy-roller, later-day Beatle figure. The vid needs to emphasise the idea powering the refrain but somehow play down the image invoked by the verses. It does this (I think) by ignoring sentence structure to match clips to random words hair, roller, joker, knee. Our John’s image shatters and the whole show becomes a surreal puzzle, much as the dreams in the original episode were.