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

Re: a few comments

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for joining in! And yes, this was definitely helpful. Detailed feedback about what works for you and what doesn't is just great to have.

Also, I'm very interested in hearing how the vid works for someone who doesn't know the source. It's Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, which is a rather small fandom these days, really. (Excellent fannish overview here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/crack_van/249753.html).) So when you say that this makes you want to see the show, just picture me cheering. *g*

I liked the "literal" shots--[snip]--this may partly be a function of my unfamiliarity with the source, and grasping onto whatever I can find. :-p

Hee. There are many vids I love that I don't know the source/context for, and sometimes I need those shots to ground myself, as it were, so I know what you mean. Also, I'm especially pleased that you liked the swordfight at the end, because that was one of my own favorite moments.

the one place where I was a bit thrown at first was at the beginning of the midway moody-bluesier?-slower part of the music, because I wasn't so prepared for the shift in tone

:nod: Makes sense. The music slows and turns moody twice, on 'these blues I lay low', and the first time that happens, there is a very long closeup of Iolaus - that's almost a break in the vid, because the shot is much longer than anything else, and I have a hunch that that may be what threw you off. It was something I decided to risk trying. :-)