Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Your software: Final Cut Express 4.0.1
Favourite video: Hard to answer because it changes so often. I think Scarlet Ribbons is my best but it’s rarely my favourite, possibly for that exact reason. Favourite right-now, this-minute would be the Gilda vid I did to Rock Steady, I’m thinking of getting back into movie vidding or at least source where I’ll know how it ends before I start and the footage is guaranteed logo-free.
Least favourite video: I have some affection for all my vids even the crappy ones (especially the crappy ones) so I’m going to cheat and go for the one vid I started but never finished. It was going to be an Oliver Cromwell vid to John Lennon’s “Free the People” using The Devil’s Whore and bits of David Starkey’s “Monarchy” series as source. I got as far as half filling the time line but it was a struggle. Partly through lack of source since The Devil’s Whore really wasn’t about Oliver Cromwell but more because, although that series was very shiny to look at, making the vid it became clear that it was a very painterly kind of shininess, great for set pieces and tableaux but I was finding it impossible to get it to move. At about that I point I also discovered that I’d completely screwed up calculating the aspect ratios when I was ripping and screwed it up in different ways for the two different sources so I decided to take this as a sign from the vidding Powers That Be and press the abort button. It felt good.
A video that got surprisingly good feedback, but you are not completely satisfied with it: I think Nobody Loves You benefited from coming out when it did, just after the series ended. It was a vid that took a long time to make. Life was getting in the way but I was also making it in series realtime and gambling that the season was ultimately going to give me something I could use, so it couldn't be finished until the end of the show. I think, partly because of that long gestation, it feels a little less than the sum of its parts.
A video you like a lot that didn't get the good reaction you were expecting: An older Buffy vid Mr. Sellack. I like it because it seemed a different take on the character (there are still surprisingly few vids about Buffy qua Buffy) and the song is an old favourite. I wasn’t actually expecting much feedback, so was pretty happy with what it got at the time (and it also got a really good write up on The Reel).
Best song/video combo (the song you chose was just perfect for the theme): I’m going with Mandalay, which is possibly cheating again because this was one where I had a theme ready to go and scanned through all the Kurt Weill tracks on iTunes to find the best fit. I was pretty sure I’d come across something but this one jumped out and headbutted me with its appropriateness within the first few seconds.
Video you had the most fun with: Babies. Because I am twelve and mixing space porn with evolutionary theory is never not funny.
Video you had trouble editing because of the song: Scarlet Ribbons was hard because the song was so slow and practically a cappella. My brain doesn’t do music theory, I think I ended up calculating a tempo by tapping out the beat and averaging, making all the clips fractions or multiples of the number of frames that gave and then tweaking things until they looked about right. In other words making it up as I went along.
A video you'd like to remaster: If they ever make avisynth for Macs. All of them.
Most inspired sequence you made: I like the intro to Safe a lot. That was a sequence that worked almost exactly as I’d hoped it would, plus the fact that it did legitimized using the ‘papers/documents’ as a recurring metaphor throughout the vid.
Movie/show you have most enjoyed using for a video: Minority Report. Movies are different from TV and I didn’t fully appreciate the sheer precision of Spielberg until making Silence.
Pet peeves: Most of my peeves aren’t specific to vidding. Excessive manpain for example. Or they’re not peeves so much as peevishness. Like being annoyed by people making good vids to shows/movies I hate – if I ever see a decent vid of The English Patient I think my head will explode. Vids that are all boyface or girlface make me uncomfortable, which could be a proto-autistic thing but I think varying focal length and including footage of things as well as people is to be encouraged.

Long time no post but some vid recs:

Fever by sweetestdrain
When you kiss me I want to die. Twilight.

I've been to a marvelous party by charmax
Like the periodic table of party.

DLZ by bop_radar
Like the show, this T:SCC vid is hard to condense down to a single phrase. It has density, it has layers. After multiple rewatches my abiding impression is of how inimical the state of perpetual war is to human life. Machines inhabit the drowned, post-Judgement Day world like fish, like eels, while the humans struggle for breath and lose everything they once held dear.

Order in the Sound by chaila43
Although this is based on Battlestar Redactica it works quite independently. It’s a beautiful, strange synthesis of women and architecture, bodies and buildings, music and mathematics in which Bob Dylan is not God.

This year I made three vids, the same number as last year so at least the rate is plateauing not falling. In order of release they were:

Just BtVS (Faith character study).

Scarlet Ribbons BtVS (Slayer feminist fairy tale).

Silence Minority Report (with an Agatha focus).


My favorite of my own vids this year/my best vid this year:
Scarlet Ribbons. It went through so many drafts that I could pretty much describe it frame by frame purely from memory but despite various technical flaws it’s the one vid I’ve made where every single one of those frames has a reason for being there and for not being something else.

Vid of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
Silence. but to be honest what (numerical) underappreciation there was, was proportional to the obscurity of the source.

Most fun video:
Silence. It was completely unplanned and although I went into with no expectations beyond the pretty I ended up working through some major Spielberg issues and finding the story I wish the film had told. Plus pretty (although I wish I could think of some way of making the vocal section more distinct visually).

Video with single sexiest moment:
I suppose Just came nearest to being literally sexy because, well Faith. If sex equals violence the whole final section of that vid is the sexiest thing. However, if sex equals emotion the moment in Scarlet Ribbons when Kendra catches her throat is sexier still.

Biggest vid fail:
Releasing Silence without checking and belatedly realizing that the entire second half of the vid was two frames out of sync with the music.

Hardest video to make:
Scarlet Ribbons but hardest in a good way. A mixture of really, really needing to get it right and having a wonderfully insightful and critical beta from elynross.

Most unintentionally *telling* video:
Scarlet Ribbons again. There’s a lot of that vid that’s intentionally revealing about the show and feminist mythologies and eavesdropped academic theories but the emotional drive behind it is all about mothers and daughters and hopes for the future.

The things I’ve learned this year:
Patience. You think the vid is ready? Give it at least one more week, look at it again and expect to spend at least one more week re-editing. Also the beta maketh the vid and Vividcon audiences are awesome.

For 2009:
I think my plan last year was to learn about masks and tracking mattes. This is still the plan and therefore unlikely to happen but I just though I’d put it out there. Something more achievable effects-wise is to learn how to do rapid zoom transitions (I have a vidsong with much slide guitar). I’d like to beta more (well at all) if anyone will have me. Finally and as far as specific vids go I have three ideas. Two terminatory and a character study of (God help us) Oliver Cromwell but last year I ended up not making anything I had planned so probably the less said the better.

Gloria by sweetestdrain

Tanglewood Tree by charmax

Special Death by kiki_miserychic

Get Low by sisabet

( Read more... )

Your faces, O my sisters! Your faces filled of light!


Title: Scarlet Ribbons
Artist: Sinead O’ Connor
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and a little Angel)
Characters/Pairings: Slayers
Format: DivX
Size: 44.8 MB

Download here (Right/control click and save target as)


Major thanks to elynross for betaing a very hungry caterpillar of semi-digested ideas into something like a butterfly.

Feedback shops and sneezes and makes ready to be strong

( Notes )

( Lyrics  )

Faith vid is racing along. She’s such a kinetic character, it feels as if all you have to do is throw random clips at the timeline then sit back and squee. Well there’s the tagline to write but that came fairly early on. I actually find it much easier to vid once the summary’s done, I have a tendency to think in headlines or captions and having one for a vid gives me something to build around.

So just the titles to do and two bars of intro - at this rate it’s going to take weeks rather than months. At least I think it’s two bars. I seem to be incapable of parsing musical structure intellectually, it’s as if there are no audio jacks attached to my left brain or something. This was part of the reason the VVC vid took so long, it’s the first vid I’ve made in a while without marking out the beat and that was basically due to having no idea where to find it in a song that was both slow and as good as dammit a cappella. I pick up emotion from music and have a reasonable sense of rhythm but that’s a body thing not a brain thing. So for marking out beats I’m basically reduced to tapping along to the music and watching what my hand does as if it were some alien entity. Does anyone else have this sort of musical dyslexia? You hear so many really good vidders talking about having poor visual memory, me I can’t remember music. Other than by singing the whole song until I get to the relevant part - it’s lucky most pop songs are only 3 minutes long.

So finally the vid I’ve been working on intermittently since January is done. Done and uploading to VividCon as a non-attending premiere. Yay!

But already there’s somewhat of an empty nest feeling in its wake. What next?

Back in April when I thought it might be almost done and posted in the normal way the follow up I had planned was a BSG threesome/Three vid mostly because I needed to vid something faster. Less serious, more shiny and not requiring seven seasons (plus some comics and chunks of AtS) of source material. I have that clipped and the song edited but now feel a terrible reluctance to get down and actually do it. It’s the song mostly, I like it but it’s turned out to be more of a surface attraction and it’s not going to be able to sustain the level of repetitive obsession that vidding requires. I also think there’s too much going on in BSG to want to vid any of it before the end is clearer. So no Battlestar, which also puts the class struggle with robots option up against the wall.

I had a Heroes idea. Two actually one about Nikki and the other a sort of Guinness advert crossover about Mohinder’s evolutionary imperatives. But about halfway through season two the love is just not there. It’s patchy, there are still characters and story lines I care about and potential for more now Hiro is back but the Nikki vid is definitely off. Which leaves, and I fear this, a completely new idea about Faith and before this Slayer opus I was so not the person to vid Faith. Probably still not but there’s this perfect, perfect song, which is Faith and no-one else and comics Faith. Comics!Faith wants me to make this vid. It just has to be a really bad idea.

Origin Stories by giandujakiss has been recced all over and much commentated on already (also here). These are my mixed-up and conflicted responses:

( Let her speak )

Day the last and two very different vids to finish with:

Grace by whereistheluv

Emotionally intense and a welcome reminder of how beautifully shot the later Harry films are. The sense of isolation and loss is almost overwhelming, the ending (especially the last three images) affectingly understated.


Short Skirt, Long Jacket by talitha78

I didn’t know Smallville had a Lois! And I imprinted on Terri Hatcher but this vid blasts through that dusty old image like a breath of fresh form Metropolis, sassy yet klutzy, no-nonsense, smart-mouthed, body to die for and knows it but doesn’t care air.

ETA: And just to show how doing this challenge has helped me get over various show issues another rec for the utterly delightful, de-lovely and above all delicious Java Jive posted today by bop_radar