Vidding Year In Review

[permetaform]

So I saw a couple vid Year In Reviews on my flist and thought that it was good idea to reflect on this past year's vids sorta to take stock of older vids and figure out where I'm at and perhaps where to go next. Also vid-chatting is relaxing for me (for the most part) and I'd just finished a final and am coming off post-test-high.

It got kinda long. ::wry grin::

Below the individual cut-tags for the vids are notes on my learning goals going into the vid, surprising stuff that I learned while vidding, and other miscellaneous process notes. The Learning Goals are less formal "Goals" than it is me going, "I'm sorta scared of this vid because I have to learn [x]". The Process Notes are less step-by-step technical stuff than it is me going, "Oh wow, that was painful! ::fond reminsce::"


After Midnight ('Saiyuki')
Started: August-ish 2004

Initial Learning Goals: how to do an anime vid, color tweaking, a narrative for a song with a climax 1/3rd of the way into the piece and the Longest Outro Ever

Other things learned, during vidding: the reason that anime vids have so many effects sometimes is that they move so rarely omgwtf, "color key" is your friend, "color corrector" is also your friend, Saiyuki anime footage IS SO NOT YOUR FRIEND.

Process notes: I was flush with Saiyuki love and I'd hadn't seen the source yet, but I knew it existed, and I got totally horribly bitten by a vid-bunny. Then I got a good look at the source, and ye GODS what the fuck is up with the pink hair? DUDE. That is a crime. So I had to fix it.

Cue over 7 months of pain. Okay, granted I took maybe 3 months hiatus just staring at the thing trying to figure out how to fix it, but still.

Initially part of the pain was just getting over my adversion to color-tweaking what almost amounted to every clip. Granted, I did that for The Fragile, but that was almost as an after thought. Also the color tweaking only took 1 layer. The color tweaking for After Midnight required at least 2 layers per clip and sometimes more because of other effects.

What I ended up doing to change the hair red was basically copy the clip a layer about it, blue screen the clip above, contrasted and red tinted the clip below, and then adjusted the settings depending on the style of animation and the tone the animators decided to use that day. (yeah, the characters looked slightly different in a constantly-newly-surprisingly awful way in *each* episode. The Saiyuki animators were on the BAD crack, I swear to god.) Depending on the clip there were greater or lesser masking going on, and several clips I had to go to photoshop to color tweak it there and then do some shifty fade-work in Premiere.

But see, that was just pain for the first couple of months. I got most of the color tweaking figured out on the night of November 2nd, when I was so outraged by the Bush re-election that I channeled the rage into Premiere.

The latter couple of months was me getting screwed over by The Longest Outro Ever, even after cutting it down, it still took up at least half the vid. I sorta got around it by letting the accidental POV change that happened in the last chorus to carry for awhile, then switched it back and forth between Hakkai and Gojyo until it was sorta both their POV's. The switching POVs allowed me to show each of them in bad places, then slowly meeting up to a good place. That shift to a good place happens when the music changes tone, with soft chimes and some light choral work, it's position suggests that it's possibly the climax of the song though the final chorus ended long before. But if so, then its possibly the gentlest climax *ever*, which I'd only realized as I was typing this. Huh. I think I might know more of what to do when I remaster this sucker because this reallllly has to be remastered one day.

Moment Couldn't Break ('Jeremiah')
Started: sometime fall 2004

Initial Learning Goal: co-vid with lierdumoa, learning avi-synth, vidding highly repetitive lyrics

Other things learned, during vidding: tag-teaming a vid is HELLA FUN, me and lierdumoa really really brain-share.

Process notes: So like lierdumoa was all, "Acoustic techno!" And I was all, "Buh?" And she played it, and we looked at each other and said, "Jeremiah." And it was so.

Learned avi-synth for it, over which we went OMG SQUEE.

The tricky thing about the song is that it's SO repetitive, since, hey, acoustic techno. We got around that when we figured that it was the times that Kurdy met different sets of people, because we knew immediately that it was Kurdy's vid. Sent the song off to morgandawn who said that the last line is when the moment *does* break Kurdy...and after some initial wibbling over the fact that I'd be helping angst Kurdy up, it worked itself out for the best.

Elizabeth was integrated from the start just 'cause it wouldn't be a Kurdy vid without her, though it had Kurdy/Jeremiah too. It helped that Elizabeth shipped Kurdy/Jeremiah as well. XD (granted lierdumoa had to stop me from shady vidding by layering the Kurdy/Jeremiah and Kurdy/Elizabeth campfire scenes against each other, which boo, but made for a stronger vid in the end)

A long hiatus happened in the middle of making this one too, mostly 'cause the beginning was done and so was the very end, but we couldn't figure out the Elizabeth section and the section before the Elizabeth section. Eventually we made that the Kurdy & finding a community section and called it done.

So in effect we'd handled the repetitive lyrics by assigning one of Kurdy's relationships to each section.

ie.
1st section) Kurdy having and losing parents
2nd) Kurdy meeting Jeremiah, butting heads with Jeremiah
3rd) Kurdy meeting Elizabeth, giving Elizabeth space
4th) Kurdy meeting communities, losing communities
5th) Kurdy connecting with Jeremiah
6th) Kurdy connecting with Elizabeth
7th) Kurdy losing Elizabeth, Kurdy losing Jeremiah
8th) Kurdy running after Jeremiah, Kurdy losing Jeremiah

Though we never did manage to fit in Jeremiah's naked ass. ::mourns::

And omg, it was SO hard to not talk about Jeremiah all through this 'cause it was being made for the challenge vidshow at vividcon...ooo, speaking of which, I need to look up those Jeremiah fic recs...

Sunburned ('Hero' vid)
Started: winter break

Initial Learning Goal: avi-synth

Other things learned, during vidding: how to switch verses, PIC-video is not good for computers with 256 mb RAM, keyframing an exponential lensflare

Process Notes: God, but this was such a fun vid! I'd just got avisynth and the source was soooo pretty. I was dreaming this vid for such a long time but the source was at my parent's house, and had a fair idea of what mood I'd wanted in each section as well as what certain clips were doing where. And god, vidding this was such a joy, I put down a clip and squealed at the screen...well, that is until towards the end where my laptop went, "OMG I HATE YOU." and I went "OMG I HATE YOU BACK". After the 5th or so crash I just rendered the sucker and posted it. I'm still not completely happy with the end sequence, I'll go back and remaster it one day.

I'd imagined this vid as a visual kata and it still feels that way, though somewhere along the way it became the Emperor's POV and started being about culture wars. ::shrug:: Heh, went with it and figured it mostly worked.

The end sequence I'd actually imagined a faster "run" of images sorta rainbowing underneath black images...the computer couldn't handle it at the time and I couldn't handle the slowness. I'd actually expanded the track # to 4 (one color dedicated to each) just so that organizing it wouldn't be so headache inducing and so I could keep track of the color changing at a glance.

How Soon ('Gattaca')
Started: sometime spring? It's still not really finished which is why I count this as half a vid.

Initial Learning Goal: compare and contrast vidding style w/ lierdumoa, vidding faster

Other things learned, during vidding: That it might be neat (translation: an interesting excercise in pain) to see how long I can hold a clip (to "ride" a beat) and still keep it interesting. What would the clip to beat ratio be for max effect in a slow song? How much can you subjectively slow a song down (via slow cutting) and still keep it interesting?

Process Notes: So see, me and lierdumoa frequently challenge each other into greater and more obsessive heights of vidding insanity. We'd started vidding Moment Couldn't Break last fall and noticed that we pretty much wanted the same clips at the same place or discussing edits and frequently wanting the exact same changes. It was a freaky level of brainshare, and felt less like what I'd imagine co-vidding to be like and more as if I'd cloned myself and when I went to sleep more vid appeared...So we're like, hey, what would happen if we vidded the same song?

We set a deadline of one weekend to work on it, had the same version of the song. What we'd discovered is that we'd actually have a radically different vidding process. I tend to work in laying down clips that cover wide swathes and then making more and more precise alterations to the structure as a whole while lierdumoa starts from one end and builds vigourously-precise little segments to the other; which is actually a fairly good comparison to how we each think, which makes it all the more hilarious that we usually arrive at the same conclusions.

There's a LOT of percussive special effects in this vid that, again, my computer couldn't have handled at the time, I think I'll pull this vid out again when I upgrade to at least a gig of RAM and get After Effects.

In The Breakdown ('Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind')
Started: either Spring break 2005 or sometime just before

Initial Learning Goals: vidding a source with an already insane narrative structure, vidding a song that is highly repetitive lyrically for a single relationship (versus many relationships)

Other things learned, during vidding: ...?

Process Notes: I saw the movie during Thanksgiving break (cousin's dvd, and trying to hold back tears when the end happened) and KNEW that I'd needed to vid it. NEEDED. I kept looking for a song and knew that I'd wanted a boppy sound similar to what Postal Service has in many of their songs. The problem with Postal Service is that the lyrics wasn't right at all and no matter how I'd tried to imagine it, it wasn't telling the story that I needed it to.

absolut3destiny was awesome and directed me towards Frou Frou. I'd found their "Let Go" and I was like, "Oh." I was waiting until winter break though to grab source from my cousins then start vidding. I'd laid the beginning, the climax, the bridge, and the end, showed it to laurashapiro who'd pointed out that the lyrics were repetitive and that I could make a much tighter vid by cutting some choruses out.

Which was a completely correct and valid assessment, but just...cutting that song...cue balking and mental flailing.

I think I sat on it for a month or so before realizing that I'd just have to make every chorus' mood very different, the first couple verses already had very different moods, and so did the last two, I'd just needed to fix up the middle ones. So I pulled it out and fixing it up before laurashapiro, morgandawn, lierdumoa, and I all met for another vid-party. They'd pointed out that they wanted more memory-losing and less drawn-out ending and I was like "'kay."

School hit. I flailed and forgot about the vid for awhile, moving the source to my external harddrive 'cause I needed the room on my computer for class stuff and for auction vid, thinking that I could just move the source back, right?

HAH.

I still don't quite know what's going on with my external, I'll get it figured out eventually. But the main thing was I lost access to the source and just decided to concentrate on auction vid, the planning of which was giving my brain fits (which will be elaborated upon in the Holy Egoism section).

Auction vid got pwned and submitted a bit early, I was like, okay no worries, it's not like I'd submitted anything to the Premiere's last year either. But lierdumoa was being all fanatical-insane vidder about Girl Anachronism and I was like, "Why am I not fanatical too? I have soooo much time in comparison." My vid was almost done anyways, I just didn't have access to the source.

Fine then, I thought, I'll cannibalize my own vid.

'Cause see, I'd kept the big pretty version on my laptop harddrive to take out occasionally and watch over and over again and try to mentally vid it until it looked "right". I realized that I had several early sections of Joe turning away from Clementine, or shots going from Clementine to Joe, relating her to him.

So in the memory loss section I'd basically reversed the clips, so it's him turning to her over and over again and then ended the sequence with a clip of him alone being horitzontally stretched and faded. It's not *technically* more images of memory being lost, but rather it's as if he's trying to change his memories and turn back to her, it's as if he's trying to grab her in his memories metaphorically and not succeeding. I'm not sure if this would have worked at all emotionally had the previous sequences not made literal him trying to keep her...and I'm still not sure if that's completely why that sequence worked.

It might even be simply because the old-memory filters makes everything look all soft and pretty. =)

If you're curious:
1) top clip - opacity ~30%, brightness and contrast increased ~25%, slightly desaturated, gaussian blur ~30%
2) bottom clip - opacity 100%, brightness and contrast increased

General rule of thumb I follow in regards to color tweaking:
partially desaturated = nostalgia
increased saturation = more intensity
greater contrast = more intensity
slightly higher brightness = more "stress"/energy

Careful tho: Too much brightness will "gray" your source and just look icky.

I was kinda surprised that this vid was so well recieved, 'cause it's a repetitive song and I had less trouble with the narrative than usual and I didn't really feel "sore" afterwards. I think I'm still sideways miffed at it, this sort of vague discomfort that I wasn't in more pain when I made it. Or rather, that the residual soreness was caused by annoying tech issues rather than because I was learning something new. In other words, all the frustration and none of the payoff.

Vidder blue-balls, perhaps.

The Holy Egoism of Genius (James Bond movies)
Started: March '05?

Initial Learning Goals: how to vid from a POV without using face shots, how to create a narrative wholesale, ie. how to work an AU

Other things learned during vidding: how to vid a really long chase scene and keep it interesting, how to increase speed massively to make vids punchier

Process Notes: jackiekjono poked me during the vidder auction for vividcon and asked me if I was willing to vid the song. I listened to the song and said, "HOLY FUCK YES."

And she was like, "But I'd want to not show the villain's face until the very end..."

And I was all, "I DON'T CARE, THIS SONG SO COOL OMG."

And she won me at the auction and I was all yay and then started trying to plan the thing.

::cough::

Well. Yeah. See, I think I didn't realize how hard it would be to establish POV without a face and, to compound the issue, with so much lyric-less intro. Also, I don't think I'd wrapped my head around how much source it was going to be.

There was much befuddlement.

And consternation at my timeline.

And more befuddlement.

And gnashing of teeth, and vidder insecurity, and feelings of DOOM...

Rinse, repeat.

Eventually I saw a preview of laurashapiro's Circles, and did an, "Oh of course" when people mentioned that she'd assigned different instruments to different people.

Once I got back, I'd went ahead and assigned the Villain the orchestral section of the song ('cause he's GRANDIOSE and also, y'know, DEBUSSY) and James Bond the techno-y base beat ('cause techno and base are both Bond, James Bond like whoa) and every thing fell together bit by bit.

At one point I started figuring out clip choices by playing the movies on 5x and then was like, "::lightbulb!::"

At the end of it all I can assuredly say that my brain felt totally sore, in that freshly fucked kinda way that's pleasantly satisfied.

Also?

James Bond is such a 'ho.

Also?

Never ever start vid-discussion whilst in vid-farr and all At One with Villian POV. Is *bad*.

Soy - The *Other* White Meat ('Once Upon A Time In Mexico')
Started: July '05

Initial Learning Goal: comedy vid

Other things learned, during vidding: color tweaking orange and reds

Process Notes: twistingside82 posted a lot of Richard Cheese one day and I was like, "SANDS!" But that was actually sometime in 2004. I was contemplating my lack of in-progress vids after the vividcon deadline in June and decided that that must be fixed. I had the source and had the song, and suddenly I was method vidding and staring at my timeling going, "OMG WHY?"

It was shady vidding and semi-AUish and totally silly and randomly fucked in its little vid head.

It was very Jeffery Sheldon Sands. ::wry grin and facepalm::

After some amount of waffling, eventually I just decided to relinquish control of the vid to my inner 12 year old to just get it done.

Because of the extreme orange of the source it was actually good practice for color-tweaking reds which is always tricky because of the red in the skin tone. Eventually I'd ended up with a combination of contrast tweaking and color keying. The trick to it is to eyedropper the color you want to key, and then go to the color field and pick a color slightly "off" from it in a range that doesn't exist in the source (greenish, for OUaTiM's orange source). Then you play with the "color similarity" and "blending" options until you affect the color you want to key to a slight degree while not so much affecting the skin tone.

'cause I mean, black eye-socket-juice is all fine and dandy for the big screen but sometimes you want something just a titch more red, yanno? =D

Welcome Home ('Stargate Atlantis')
Started: November '05

Initial Learning Goal: vidding an instrumental, vidding an inanimate object

Other things learned, during vidding: working an "undertow" in the vid, altering the subjective speed of sections of a vid

Process Notes: I'd sat on this song forever, looking for the right fandom, and I found it in SGA. But not in any specific character in SGA, rather in the city *itself*. But I'd started vidding it and then realized that it needed a *face*, it's sorta the same problem in Holy Egoism of Genius but because of the lack of lyrics it was almost impossible to attribute an "I" to the city. But wait, I thought, it's *not* just the city. The song's about the city not being able to help on away-missions, it's the city embracing it's people, and it's the city protecting it's people. And I'd realized that the song was about *war*, about how it's the city was at war despite itself...which meant, really, the song is also about Elizabeth.

Which works out marvelous because Elizabeth needs more vid-love. =)

Influence for part of the cutting in this vid came from Melina's Bawitaba (The Shield) and Shallott's A Day In The Life (Dead Zone); I'd realized that part of the intensity of Bawitaba (as a whole) and A Day In The Life (the ending clip) was that it vidded against the 'pull' of the base beat, which is to say that they were timed perfectly, but that they "rode" over some major beats to only hit the strongest beat and created tension and I tried to use some of that style during the city rising sequence.

Another thing I was playing around with is subjectively speeding up cuts by forcing eye-shifts. I forgot what vid this was (it was something that lierdumoa showed me and HP) but it was cut really slowly, but *felt* fast. I'd eventually figured out that was because the vidder was forcing you to move your eyes a lot around the screen; this is the opposite of what I try to do during my fast cuts which is to align up the visuals and to place clips so that the eyeline flows naturally from one clip to the next, because the eye has to move less it has more time to recognize what the clip is. Anyhoo, most of that was in the first section of the vid, and because the first section was bouncy it allowed a lot more tension in the second section, which is where I tried out "riding" over major beats on the approach to and during the city rising sequence.

After those two bits were done I did the very end and then sat on it for a day after which I added in large "outline" clips in the middle section (that matched the mood of the bits, though it didn't contain the content that I wanted. ie. filler-cakes), rendered it, then played it over and over while sending it to beta. They pointed out stuff, I tweaked, and I stared at the large empty middle section for a bit more. Eventually lierdumoa watched it and was like, "Yay, you're almost done!"

I was like, "Um, what?"

"It's almost done!"

"...I've only finished maybe 30% of it. The rest is filler-cakes."

"Well it *works*--"

"...::flails::..." (me = o.0;)

"--should show it to seperis."

"WHAT?"

but seperis Yay!ed at me and I went "...aheh, but okay!"

The next day I woke up and thought, "I'll work on this until I get frustrated at it."

9 hours later, I had a full draft done. ::wry grin:: tweaked it some more and in a couple of days released it.

This was finished absurdly quickly for me, or felt that way, the only other vid that came close was The Fragile which might or might not make a difference as I think it's the only other vid that I love as much.

Huh, so I made 7.5 vids this year, more or less (How Soon is 0.5 of a vid). Or 6.5 if you consider that two vids were started in 2004, which is still good considering that 2004 would still only have either 3 or 4 vids to its count...I'm slowly vidding faster! yay! =D

I still have to practice more comedy vidding though, and anime vidding. And I want to vid rap and to vid JohnRodney (or rather, *finish* my vids for them). I need to relearn both vidding heavy effects and encoding with Xvid 'cause I'm woefully out of practice with both ever since my old laptop's started complaining that I was stressing out its tiny tiny brain. I also want to improve my vidding speed, which might be taken care of by my next project (which is my Insane December/January Vidding Project, but unofficially so), and perhaps vidding a reaaaaally long song and seeing if I can sustain interest over the entire length. I'm still having trouble wrapping my brain around vid narrative, but that's an ongoing thing, and semi-connected to that being that I want to be able to better handle vid AUs.

In any case this vidding year has been, if not entirely an *easy* trip, a worthwhile and pleasant one on hindsight. I expect next year to be just, if not more, insane, especially 'cause I finally think I'd be able to handle vidding Madroad Driving. =D Which is, y'know, surpising as fuck to me, 'cause I've been sitting on this vid-bunny for two years now because I've literally been *afraid* to vid it.

...then again, I might have just jinxed myself with that statement.

We'll see.

Comments

[syredronning.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

[permetaform]

=D np. It felt mostly like venting so it was written fairly quickly.