hazelk: (sellack)
hazelk ([personal profile] hazelk) wrote2006-11-10 03:31 pm
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32 beats from happiness

This vid is totally kicking my arse. Right at the last, which happens to be the first and I know exactly what it needs to do and the kind of things it needs to do it but just can't seem to figure out exactly what. Had an inspiration this morning that almost cracked it only to realise that the colour was all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So yay me for noticing something colour-related (for possibly the first time ever) but damn Technicolour for ever tempting the movies out of good old black and white. And then inventing aspect ratios. Bastards.

Tangentially, I just finished reading Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye. Murch is/was a film editor who worked on, amongst other projects, The Conversation, American Graffiti, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (parts II and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The English Patient. Fortunately I didn’t realize about the last of these until I’d already ordered the book. That movie took three hours of my life!

Admittedly the problem I had with it was probably down to Minghella who does exactly the same thing of lingering infinitely on every other emotional moment in all his films. I think the killer on the EP was when having already been sitting in the theatre since the late Cretaceous, someone decided it was necessary to show the complete sequence of Ralph Fiennes crossing the Sahara desert. On foot. In slow motion. S-L-O-W M-O-T-I-O-N.

The book is a much more fast-paced experience. I have a fairly cast iron kink for hearing people who know stuff talk about stuff they know that this hit big time. I think I was sold from the first time he made a comparison between film editing and mammalian genome evolution. That makes it sound terribly dry but it really isn’t. A good read.

[identity profile] laurashapiro.livejournal.com 2006-11-10 04:48 pm (UTC)(link)
Re your vid: is this a situation where you can tweak the color in your vidding program? Sometimes you can make really amazing changes that way, and make non-working things work.

I adore In the Blink of an Eye. It's helped me so much, in terms of understanding why editing can produce emotional responses. It's just plain nifty.

[identity profile] aycheb.livejournal.com 2006-11-11 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
I have had some success with tweaking shots with a single main colour in FCE but tend to go all deer in the headlights if there's more than one. Must face fears. But I'm also thinking this isn't just a problem with the colour as such, the clips that weren't right were a run of dark spacey shots and also there was too many of them, the rythmn was wrong. The bulk of the song is quite pacey/dancey but it starts with a more tentative, tinkly piano bit and I needed to re-adjust to that and go gentler on the explosions. I have an almost working version of the beginning now (but am begining to have doubts about the end).

Nifty. Exactly, all those ideas about when the audience blinks had the kind of simplicty that feels true. And you get this wonderful impression of him standing up, conducting proceedings like Tom Cruise in Minority Reportbut searching for the emotion instead of the killer.