Vid chatty

[hazelk]

Some thoughts, very late thoughts, in response to bop_radar’s excellent vid chat on lyrics and literalism. Most of what can be said has been but one thing I don’t think I saw mentioned was using lyrics for the physical sound of the words as well as their meanings. There’s a line in “Scarlet ribbons”

All the stores were closed and shuttered

Sinead does a sort of staccato thing on the word “shuttered” that made me think of the clack, clack, clack of someone going down stairs so I used that. The image fits thematically as well – onomatopoeia like pure literalism isn’t sufficient to make a clip work but I think it can add something to a sequence.

The most recent vid I made was to a song with almost no lyrics and it was interesting to find that it didn’t feel a radically different process to the previous ones. Being musically somewhat illiterate it took longer to work out the structure of the track but that done it was still very much a matter of deciding what each section was going to focus on and using the musical accents and ornamentation the way I’d usually use words to guide the specifics. It was freeing in many ways.

I do think laurashapiro had a very good point calling lyrics the enemy. They’re like the serpent in the garden, endlessly tempting with their “look at me, ignore all the other stuff going on, make it about me!” But if the song is good, or at least coherent, and supports the story you’re trying to tell words can be just as flexible as music in their interpretation. One exception maybe, lyrics (if audible) can specify a POV in a way that music alone cannot. If it’s a first person lyric it’s possible to shift the ‘I’ of the song from one protagonist to another, it can be the making of a vid, but it’s not a trivial matter. For instance, I know it’s not exactly a vid but I really like the way the opening sequence of the T:SCC second season premiere plays with the identities of its Samson and its Delilah but the song is third person omniscient. If instead of Manson-out-of-Springsteen they’d decided to use the Tom Jones version of “Delilah” such a fluid approach would likely have been impossible, although there are probably other reasons they didn't go that route.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but the Samson and Delilah sequence is too a vid. I know vids aren't normally embedded in TV shows, part of the canon, but I don't think it's less a vid for that. And I'm really pleased by what it implies about the T:SCC production team - they probably watch fan vids, they appreciate the art form.

(I also think a number of shows fanfiction themselves sometimes - Farscape leaps to mind.)

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Well it's like a vid in the close relationship it has with the lyrics and the text, much more of one than in a standard TV montage. But its also not like a vid in how compressed the story is and embedded within the larger story of the episode. in that way it's more like a musical number from a musical. It moves the story along rather than commenting on it or making an argument. So its kind of a hybrid but does suggest that the makers have experience of both previous forms.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Idunno that I agree that the content of Samson and Delilah makes it not a vid. I know what you mean, based on the vids you discuss here, which are concerned with commentary and (often quite sophisticated) argument. But there's a lot of other vids out there that are much less sophisticated and in my opinion are less commentary on the show than Samson and Delilah is (which admittedly is very hard to judge accurately, given that S&D can't escape being canon, and had the luxury of original footage). I'm trying to say that your standard for vids is very high, and while I don't blame you for ignoring all the other vids out there, doesn't mean they don't exist.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Not so much ignoring them (well except in the sense of being shamefully ignorant and not watching them very much) as wanting to use the definition of 'vid' as a way of exploring the differences between different vid-like things and their similarities to things that I wouldn't normally call vids because they have other names. Samson and Delilah was interesting because I could read it like I would a vid but it's being embedded within the episode meant that I was also responding to it in a way I don't to 'vids' but do to the numbers in Hollywood musicals.