[Equilibrium vid] Words of the Dead

[permetaform]

(I would recommend using VLC Player to play the vid, it's free; or if you stil have problems playing the vid you can look at this guide.)



Please right-click and save as! (all feedback and critique are adored and will be responded to)

Words of the Dead | .avi (720x480, 29.9mb)
_{Source: Equilibrium
Song: "The Chemicals Between Us", by Bush
Summary: Preston's dead haunts him still (always).}

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Thanks: Much love to morgandawn, lierdumoa, and laurashapiro, for betas and audiencing and encouragement.


Chemicals Between Us by Bush

I want you to remember
A love so full
it could send us all ways

I want you to surrender
All my feelings rose today

And I want you to remain
The power of children can amaze
I'll try not to complain

I know that's a pisser baby

The chemicals between us
The walls that lie between us
Lying in this bed

The chemicals displaced
There is no lonelier state
Than lying in this bed

I want you to remember
Everything you said
Every driven word

Like a hammer
Held to my head

The chemicals between us
The walls that lie between us
Lying in this bed

The chemicals displaced
There is no lonelier face
Than lying in this bed

The chemicals between us
The chemicals between us
Lying in this bed

We're of the hollow men
We are the naked ones
We never meant you harm
Never meant you wrong

And I'd like to thank
All of my
lovers
lovers
lovers
lovers
lovers
lovers

The chemicals between us
The army of achievers
Lying in this bed

The chemicals displaced
There is no lonelier state
Than lying in this bed

The chemicals between us
The chemicals between us
Chemicals

The chemicals between us


Notes: This vid took both forever and 2 months. Or rather, 2 months stretched over the course of a year. I...gah, I give up. This really should've been done in Adobe After Effects, but I was crazy and stubborn and in the end too lazy to redo my work elsewhere.

My computer had it's revenge tho, in massive export problems. Fun times.

One of the most interesting problems was attempting to make the lyrics more audible with certain cuts. Dunno if the solutions succeeded, but it was an entertaining experiment in any case. Other interesting problems include trying to include massive amounts of relationships in only 4 min., the solution as near as I could make it is to basically have an intro section the length of an entire verse and chorus (PLUS the intro). Usually I'd only story intro during the song's intro, but the world I was trying to include was too big.

I...really really don't want to imagine attempting to remaster this sucker. ::facepalm:: Or at least, not before the next evolution of whatever programs' gonna replace After Effects. Because honestly: way. too. tedious.

I think...this is actually the first vid I posted this year. Wow, I'm lagging. ::wryyyyy::

_{[main vid index]}

Comments

[permetaform]

thank you! I'm glad you liked it!

[permetaform]

HEE!! ::grins and bows::

[permetaform]

Wow. Thank you for such extensive feedback and for the rec! It makes me glee that you recced it because I admire your work.

I'm glad that the sum of it is effective emotionally because I've been trying to work on that; that it's more than just pretty effects. I'm glad that the journey works for you, that you can discern a journey, because I wasn't sure how much of it worked because of the wierd structuring that made the vid non-linear.

So again, thank you for letting me know, thank you for sending this feedback. ::hugs:: =)

[permetaform]

=) thank you for the heads up about the image! unfortunately, I got home from the convention too late to cuttag the image and the post was deleted. I'll try to repost it again.

I'm glad that you thought it was a refreshing take! The problem with movie vids versus tv vids is that there's only about 2 hrs of source versus however many hours in a season, so the footage can get really old really fast if you're watching a lot of vids. I tried to compensate for that fact in this vid and am glad that it seemed to have worked!

Heh, I tried a version without the ghosting effect on my betas and they were confused by the story and the POV. It was a combination of self-preservation and insanity. ::wry grin::

The process that I used to encode my vid is that suggested by this tutorial. Xvid is actually based off of the Divx codec, so it should play on the DVD players that plays .avi's. Unfortunatly, the resolution of the movie is a wierd variant of widescreen (::rolls eyes:: can't they just make it consistent?), and so to prevent distortion I sized the vid's width up to 720 and added black bars to make it 480 vertically; which is the resolution of the basic TV monitor.

Thank you for your feedback, I've seen your name around and I think I saw one of your vids that morgandawn showed me.

[permetaform]

thank you for pointing out the rec, and thank you for your feedback! I'm glad that it makes sense and that it was still effective despite your not having seen the movie.

And thank you for the comment that the vid was intimate. I was trying to show multiple relationships between the characters and at one point I was getting really worried that I wasn't giving it enough of a sense of 'smallness' 'cause I was trying to include the 'world' so much. Your comment then came very much as a relief. =) Thank you for giving me your thoughts.

Re: You're a God

[permetaform]

Thank you for your feedback! I'm happy at the fact that you found the vid highly emotional 'cause it's something that I struggle with sometimes. I'm very glad (and a little awed) that you found the vid to be so good. Thank you so much for such lovely feedback!

(btw, I peeked in your journal and it seems that you've watched Pirates of the Caribbean? I've made a vid to that too if you're interested; it's older work tho.)

[permetaform]

HEEE!! I FEEL NO SHAME; YOUR BOOK MADE ME CRY FOUR SEPARATE TIMES.

Heh, actually I 'cheated' for most of the effects; Sean Bean was actually in most of those scenes. I don't trust myself to edit frame by frame and be able to maintain a smooth motion with any degree of accuracy. Instead I took the basic glow effect (opacity 30%, brightness/contrast +35ish, blue tint) and constrained it with a 16 pt. garbage matte around Sean Bean...then I keyframed it so that the glowy area followed him when he moved. I tried to keep the scenes out of context (when I needed it out of context) by changing the color...most of the golden sections where Bean was following Bale were originally blue, and thus hopefully unrecognizable at casual glance. (and the slight-of-hand via fast cutting helped as well =D )

In a couple areas I took the Sean Bean from the previous clip and extended it a bit, with a bit of the bottom-non-blurred portion on the layer beneath it. The non-blurred portion has a layer that's just the edge, with gaussian blur, because Premiere is stupid and doesn't let you blur the edge of your garbage matte.

the snowglobe-gunshot sequence is one of my faves...possibly because it worked with the least amount of anguish ::wryyy:: ditto with the 'lovers' sequence.

The martial arts practice was actually a later clip when I stared at the vid and realized I wasn't adding enough 'world' to it. After a certain amount of teeth gnashing I found the clip and went yay!

(::awed and pleased:: I'm very glad that Welcome Home stands up to repeated viewings and that you found it to be emotionally effective. I try to make my vids emotionally accessible, so it's awesome to hear you find it works for you on that level)

Re: You're a God

[jade-kadir.livejournal.com]

You are most welcome. I believe in giving praise where praise is due. And I saw that you have a POTC vid and have been meaning to watch it. Thank you for reminding me.

Re: You're a God

[permetaform]

=) np.

[bionic.livejournal.com]

ok so I commented already but MY GOD, I can't stop watching your vid. The clips, the song, EVERYTHING is PERFECT. I'm in love. So in love. YOU ARE THE GREATES EVAR.

[permetaform]

awww ::GLOMPS:: thank you!

w00t!

[deejay.livejournal.com]

And clips of Angus, too! Yay! =D

[askmehow.livejournal.com]

I was already enjoying this vid -- great song choice, nicely cut and edited -- when I remembered that in the movie Sean Bean wasn't actually following Christian Bale around in his quest of Angst and Doom. Dude, how did you *do* that?

Awesome, awesome vid.

Re: w00t!

[permetaform]

::blink:: angus?

Re: w00t!

[deejay.livejournal.com]

Umm, yeah. He plays Dupont in this film.

*shuffles off in embarrassment*

[permetaform]

heh, thank you!

I explained how I did the effect in the comments here, it also has a screenshot of the project.

Re: w00t!

[permetaform]

ohh! hee! np! =)

[alchemise]

Wow, that was just amazing. I thought the movie was great, but you've created something from it that's leaving me just completely incoherent. *g* Really fantastic work.

I friended you, btw. *waves hello*

[permetaform]

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it! =D and you do meta! cool, ::friends back::

[alchemise]

:D

[voleuse.livejournal.com]

Wow. Just, wow. This is gorgeous.

[permetaform]

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it. =)

[rheostat.livejournal.com]

That was pretty damned spectacular, just thought I'd add my voice to the chorus in congratulations.

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Thanks for a great vid. I saw it at muskratjamboree and was unfamiliar with the source material, so while everyone else was watching the next vid I was frantically writing down the name of the film so I wouldn't forget. And the love I feel now that I've seen it! The fanfic I want to write! Thanks for pimping me into it.

I am not much of a vid person (because I find that I have to be very familiar with the source material to be able to see any emotional resonance), so thanks for creating a vid that didn't rely on the source to create its own story. If that makes sense. The vid was able to transcend the source and say something to me on a totally different level. Needless to say, I've DL'd the vid. I've watched it before and after, and it's like two different vids for me--the uninformed and the informed viewing.

[permetaform]

wow. thank you so very very much for the awesome feedback. I'm so glad that it made sense without any knowledge of the source, 'cause I tried hard to make it clear in that way. I have a problem also with feeling emotional resonance with source I'm unfamiliar with and I'd wanted the vid to be very approachable.

I'd be very excited if you wrote fanfic for it and would love to see it if you do.

I'm kinda curious, if you don't mind me being chatty, as what was the difference for you (as an audience) between the two vids, the before and after. I've watched it so many times that I fear my assumptions about it might be horribly biased and so being able to watch the vid completely objectively to see what a completely unaware audience might get from it is...well, not really an exact science. XD