ConCrit of Live Till I Die, by marycrawford

[permetaform]

Explanation: I'd offered concrit feedback here. marycrawford's up next with Live Till I Die (HtLJ, lyrics here).

_{To clarify my Vocab (for us to be on the same page):
feel - gut-feeling. Whenever I talk about 'how I feel' relative to a vid's beat, I'm talking about instinctive gut reaction, NOT emotional reaction
narrative - levels of storytelling, story structure
technique - the nuts and bolts of expressing a story
beat - includes musical beats and beats from every instrument including the human voice}

Overall Impression: I can definately see your love of the character here; I have a so-so recollection of the series (watched most of it, but a couple years past, was in the fandom for a long time). I'd forgotten how adorable Iolaus was until you reminded me! I can tell your a new vidder from the vid, but I can also see where you have potential. Nice song choice; it has fun stuff to work with and lovely potential for irony.

Narrative: What I've gotten from your vid is an Iolaus character sketch around his characteristic of upbeatness.

Now, thing is, you mentioned you're new at vidding and your style is thus so new that I'll tell you this: some vids don't need narrative at all. Other vids are solely about narrative. Still *other* vids use narrative as an organizing idea (ie. narrative as an outline for clips), but can be taken narratively OR non-narratively. And at this point I sense that you can go any which way because your style is still flexible to accomodate whichever.

Note that they'd be different audiences for these different vid-types with almost no overlap between them.

What I'm unsure of, at this point, is what your vid aesthetic is. ie. what you *like* to see in a vid and thus is the ultimate goal of your own vids. Are you aiming for a vid of character celebration? Are you aiming for an analytical vid essay? Are you aiming for the visualization of a piece of music?

Go with your gut instinct in the answer to these questions, 'cause that's where you'll make your best vids. Follow your gut, follow *your* aesthetic, 'cause otherwise you'd never be happy making vids. And if you're not on some level happy with your vids, it's THAT much harder to make the vid have that spark of something that makes the vid loveable.

I'm personally of the narrative-as-organizer mode, mostly I have an idea I want to express and a song that'll carry the idea, so I usually use narrative to help me organize the clips *within* the song and the overall idea. Where I'm coming from with is that my inherent concept of communication is via storytelling, and my inherent belief about storytelling is that 90% of the story is subtext, or in other words not directly told. In practice, this means that I'm squishing an idea that'll usually take 50 minutes to tell into 5 minutes, and thus I'd *need* a clear narrative or it'll end up being jumbled incoherence.

HOWEVER, if
1) the means of communication that *you* want to use to communicate to your *audience* in a vid and
2) if your overall belief about the method of communication doesn't match mine, then any advice I might give about narrative can be thrown out the window, because my advice wouldn't be steering you towards the goal you're trying to reach.

In any case, I'm not sure I can be helpful unless I understand better what you're trying to do. I'd welcome discussion on this in the comments because at this point I don't know what I can say without hindering your final goal for your vids.

Technical: In your comment in the initial post you mentioned that:

_{My lone finished vid is Live Till I Die. (It's also on the Escapade 2005 set.) Critical feedback very very welcome. I'm working on a second vid, in another fandom, and there are so many things that I have to gain a feeling for - color palettes, effects, intercutting, fast cuts, all the shiny that you handle so well - without losing the thread of the vid.}

First of all, don't try to swallow *all* that in one go; take only a little bit more than you can handle, and then a little more. Don't think about the issues simultaneously, 'cause your head will explode; instead lay one level down, and then look for other considerations.

In other words, I think that the way you're approaching the various vidding elements are opposite of what they should be: the 'thread of the vid' is key. Everything else just makes the thread stronger. If you are *losing* the thread of the vid by trying to handle the other stuff, then you need to reassess what the thread of the vid is. *Is* the thread about color? Is it about effects? intercutting? etc? If it isn't, then worrying about it isn't key. It's only key when the thread of your vid needs to be bolstered by something else.

Second? I love that even in your first vid you are already intentionally or subconsciously matching several different elements in the music to different elements in the visuals. I'll point this out more as I go through it bit by bit.

0:08 - great movement with the horns here

0:22 - "take the town" ::gigglefit:: too cute

0:26 - screaming on "die", nice!

0:27 - LOVE this clip to the horns here!

0:30 - love the movement to the music here with them jerking back from the falling stick

0:42 - "the blues I lay low" - HEE! great match of mood and irony here with the change in facial expression

0:53 - nice matching of the clap to the horn blast

0:54 - good with the bouncing to the beat

0:58 - good with Iolaus flying and then the lowering of his shoulders as he takes the golden apple and the appearance of Aphrodite on the chime sound

1:00 - "riding high" nice match of the swirl of the sound to the rising swirl movement that Iolaus makes

1:06 - good sequence here with the hitting, rolling down hill, carried by herc sequence

1:14 - good that you changed with the mood here, you did that with both content and visuals (it's dark and doesn't move much and his face matches)

1:21 - the clip here feels good, I don't know if it's 'cause it's a bar scene and it inherently matches the feel of the music here

1:24 - great arm movement to the horn

1:36 - nice match shot

Ending sequence - some nice match shots, compositionally it flows very well and a great clip to end it with as it goes to white.

One thing that may or may not be a good piece of advice (again, dealing with what vidding style you're aiming for) is that you might want to be careful about literal clips. Your literal clips match well to the music and to the lyrics, but it might help more if they were part of some larger theme.

Ending thoughts: I can see this vid playing well at a convention because it's easy to take in during one sitting. I can also see people complaining about it being too simple narratively. Personally I felt your joy at making this vid and your love of the character and I totally didn't mind having this vid on repeat as I was typing this review up, you have some engaging movement matches to the sound and I LOVE that.

Granted, I also didn't have any new revelations about the character while watching this, but then I watched this show alot. Emotionally, I'm not sure that I could say a complete thread was carried through all of this, so that there's emotional arcs in the vid. But take these comments with a grain of salt 'cause this could be completely off from the effect you're shooting for.

What I admit that I was disappointed by was that you didn't make the vid more ironic, because Iolaus died so freaking *much* during the show, and I think you just showed one of the deaths? Then again, I noticed that you took advantage of various mood changes in the source and used them in various ways to amusing effect.

I'll emphasize again that at this point you'd probably want to figure out what vids you like best, and perhaps *why* you like them. That'll help you figure out both what you'd like to see in your own vids and your potential audience.

I'll apologize for rambling so much in this review, I hope this was helpful in some way. Any additional thoughts, comments, critique (*especially* about my post itself) are all welcome!

Comments

Comments, part one

[elynross.livejournal.com]

I found this a fascinating exercise to observe, with you evaluating the vid, then reading Mary's reaction, then yours to her.

One thing that I wonder is how much you focused on Mary *telling* you she was a first-time vidder, and keeping that in mind as you watched. I say this, because I know that I would never have pegged it as a vid from a first-time vidder, had I not known, because it shows a very sophisticated grasp of movement, both within clips and from clip to clip, as well as timing, and the effective use of literal clips without overusing them. Given the quality of first-time vids out there, this one reflects a grasp of possibilities that most don't, to my mind.

But for you, and the tone of your review, that seems to be a primary consideration in approaching the vid. More of your commentary seems to focus on what Mary ought to do, in vidding in general, than on what *this vid does*. That's not a bad thing, certainly, probably helpful, in fact, but it was unexpected, as I approached this as a review of Mary's vid, not a tutorial for the newbie vidder, I guess.

I do have the advantage of having talked with Mary a lot, and I know how much she's studied vidding before even starting out, and how she sought out mentoring and really works with it.

One of the things that struck me is your emphasis on narrative, which seemed odd for a vid review of a vid that's openly and intentionally non-narrative -- a character study, and a comic one, at that. I know when I first started really understanding the dimensions and layers possible in vidding, years ago, I had to consciously work not to try too hard to seek out (and possibly over-impose) a narrative structure on a vid, because it could cloud what the vid itself was actually trying to do.

I found your discussion of contemplating one's style/aesthetic to be alien to me. The style or aesthetic is what comes from the vid or writing, for me. You recognize a particular vidder/writer's style as you watch their vids, but it's not often, in my experience, that said creator sits down and contemplates how to "create" their style in a given vid, because it's creating it that *makes* it their style. It seems like you might believe that any given vidder should (or does) stick to a particular "style," including whether their vids are narrative, or not, intentionally -- and maybe some do. But for the vidders I've worked with (Killa, Lum, Here's Luck, Sisabet, Seah&Margie) it depends on the fandom, the song, what they're trying to do with any given vid. In each case, some of their vids are narrative, some are not.

I do think different vidders have different strengths and inclinations, but I question the idea that a vidder should sit down and make a single choice about how they approach *vidding itself*, outside of the specific vid they're working on.

What I'm unsure of, at this point, is what your vid aesthetic is. ie. what you *like* to see in a vid and thus is the ultimate goal of your own vids.

My reaction to this is two-fold, that it's hard to determine an overall aesthetic from a single vid, and that I'm not sure how this is relevant to the review of an individual vid. I also wonder if you're trying to impose a narrative on a non-narrative vid, and therefore not seeing what it is as clearly as you could.

Maybe it's a matter of not understanding what you were attempting with these reviews; as I said, this seems less like a review of a completed vid, presented for other viewers, and more like an individual tutorial about vidding, in general, for some purpose that isn't quite clear to me, in context of it being a review. (cont. in part two)

Re: Comments, part one

[permetaform]

This review comes on the heels of a recongition that there is a, sort of disenfrancized? audience in regards to non-narrative vids.

To be truthful, I don't know how to help this kind of vid, I was flailing around for comments throughout most of this review. I mentioned this in the post that generally the way I vid imposes a narrative just so I can figure out what to put there. The way I write in generally in metaphor, and same with the way I vid.

I haven't talked with marycrawford so I don't know if she's shooting towards a more narrative vid. I don't know if her intention for *this* vid is *anything* beyond an expressive vid about love of a character. I liked it as an expressive vid, but have no clue about how to give concrit about an expressive vid other than concentrating on movement and for the most part she'd got that covered already.

I'm not attempting a review and more of constructive criticism. What I'm critiquing in an indirect way is that there isn't much narrative in her vid; but I know that this probably isn't the intent of her vid *anyways*. Personally, I like to see a least a little narrative in a vid, but I didn't want to impose this personal preference of mine on a vid that probably isn't shooting for that. And, again, I don't know how to help a non-narrative vid; so I just stuck to constructive comments about where to go from here.

Re: Comments, part one

[elynross.livejournal.com]

This review comes on the heels of a recongition that there is a, sort of disenfrancized? audience in regards to non-narrative vids.

Howso? I find that non-narrative vids tend to be the best received at cons, because the audience tends to not have any ambivalence about how to respond -- they can more easily follow the images and ideas, without having to tease out any kind of storyline?

To be truthful, I don't know how to help this kind of vid, I was flailing around for comments throughout most of this review.

See, this is a key point for me: you were approaching it as a means of helping, not reviewing. I was expecting to get your impressions of the vid, what you thought worked, what didn't -- not read what sounds like basically a beta of an already finished vid. I wonder if those asking for reviews were expecting reviews, or concrit? Either way, it is less conducive to generating conversation, because it excludes anyone but you and the vidder, really -- unless you're pushy like me. *g*

Re: Comments, part one

[permetaform]

oh. OH. you weren't here for the mild wankyness.

I was expecting to get your impressions of the vid, what you thought worked, what didn't

o.0 er. I think it's a difference in communication styles. As far as I was aware, that's *exactly* what I did, only I expressed what didn't work for me in a very roundabout way.

Re: Comments, part one

[elynross.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, I did see that, and I thought you were very calm in your reaction. Man.

And okay, yes, I can see you gave your reactions, but... Hrm. I think it's mostly a matter of confounded expectations on my part, which were my fault. The whole expecting discussion of the vid in greater specifics, but since you were having trouble grasping the intent of the vid, that *would* be difficult, I agree. *g*

And really, I have a lot of sympathy with that. As I said, I had to train myself out of always looking for a deeper level in things, because that's generally my preferred type of vid. Just letting myself experience it is sometimes difficult.

Re: Comments, part one

[elynross.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, on the wankiness -- I thought the post was crocked, and had no clue what she was talking about. I wouldn't take her PoV as evidence of much of anything beyond thinking she knows what she's talking about, when she doesn't. She's like the people who want to shut down public critical discussion of stories because she doesn't find it fun, it's pretentious, and therefore nobody else thinks it's fun, too, we're just wanking for the audience.

ptoohey.

Re: Comments, part one

[permetaform]

she, herself, might be like the people who shut down public critical discussions, but I know there's people who prefer the clear-cut stories, and I try to keep that in mind.

Re: Comments, part one

[elynross.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course there are, and that's great! It's when that preference is used as a club to beat on people who like those *and* things of greater complexity that it becomes a problem for me. You (one) can try and keep in mind every possible potential audience, but every choice you make as a vidder will quite probably limit who your ultimate audience actually is.

Re: Comments, part one

[permetaform]

but every choice you make as a vidder will quite probably limit who your ultimate audience actually is.

...but every choice one makes in giving concrit will quite probably limit who one's ultimate audience actually is.

To reinvent your words.

Re: Comments, part one

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

AH. Ok, that's why you were checking.

*bows* Your manners are impeccable and your behaviour most kind, Mi'lady. Go to town on my vid, if you think it needs it, and I shall take it in good part.

Re: Comments, part one

[permetaform]

=D cool.