Vid rec and meta
Someone on metafandom made a post about finding it difficult toget vids and parts of the subsequent discussion turned to accounts of ‘why we vid’ or why vids make sense. This would have been my contribution except that it got too rambly and off-topic.
A while ago the ipod was playing an old Joni Michell song from her jazzy experimental era. Hejira to be precise, it’s the title song of the eponymous album with the picture of her dressed like a crow, the open road visible behind/through her on the front cover and a similarly, desaturated shot of a frozen river on the back. So I was doing the washing up and singing along when I caught myself making up pictures to match the music. Very literal ones, very tied to the lyrics - for the line “there’s a man and a woman sitting on the rock” for example, I’d zoom in to the far bank of the river from the back cover to reveal, yes, a man and a woman sitting on a rock. The thing is, it also reminded me that I do this all the time with music and always have. Joni and I go back a long way and I think that particular image has been coming to mind ever since I first heard the song back in the days before I’d ever seen a fanvid or for that matter a music video - it was pre-MTV. So OK there was the one Queen did for Bohemian Rhapsody but that was about the only precedent. Still, even without the MTV experience growing up the idea of music being associated with images or narratives was hardly foreign. Movies and music go together like two very mixy things and most of my favourite movies are musicals. Sure dance sequences aren’t just a visual response to music and they don’t all tell stories but the idea that they might would be intuitive to any ballet fan.
I think visually, I solve genetic problems by conjuring up pictures, I read books and run mini-movies as I process the words, I listen to music and it evokes serial images and words set to music have even more power. They get caught in the crevices of your mind, sometimes I finds myself thinking in song lyrics, like an adult-onset form of echolia. All of which is to say that vidding, both making vids and reading them, seems an intuitively natural process. It feels right even while I’m not very good at it.
The original post was in response to lim’s new Harry Potter vid In exchange for all your tomorrows to House of the Rising Sun so while in a tl;dr mood, for illustrative purposes here’s the thoughts I had on it after obsessively watching it for most of this afternoon.
Most vids I feel at all analytical about I have to watch two or three times just absorbing the shiny. This one was unusual because for those first few viewings I was actually a little resistant to it (completely for personal foibles nothing to do with the vid). First, it’s set to a classic song House of the Rising Sun but radically re-mixed and it took a while to adjust to that. Second it’s a Harry Potter vid and it always takes me a while to adjust to Harry Potter being vidded, I think of the series as the books and having a much lighter tone than does this or indeed the later movies. It took me about 10 minutes to settle into Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkhaban and about the same time to adjust to this vid and that’s 5-10% of the movie but three-four showings of the vid.
My first concrete thoughts on the vid start to come when I have an idea of the song’s structure, who it’s about and have picked up on some of the repeated images and symbols and their associations. It begins with an overture, the singer unaccompanied other by a big echo effect. This is clearly a scene setting exercise, it’s telling you who the song is about and setting up metaphors. Who is most obviously Snape, his is the first face we see and the shot comes immediately after the lyric “what your name is,” but there’s also a quick flash to Harry in a similar pose that links them together. However, this reveal doesn’t happen immediately, the vid leads up to it with a pair of images , which by implication are to be associated with Snape and may represent him. Snape, by this logic is a crow or an umbrella blowing away in the rain, both black flappy things, physically very fitting. The shot of the umbrella is prolonged and runs over the lyric about the road he will travel so rather than being a stand in for Snape himself it feels more like a metaphor for his life.
Having established the who(s), the vid move on to the other players. Voldemort bows matching Snape’s immediately previous actions. The next line begins describing opposite poles. Visually it starts with Dumbledore (implied to be a chess player) and ends with Voldemort again. “Mind to mind,’ here is quite a literal match to the source, (he’s stroking his head) as is the next phrase “generation to generation.” Motion beautifully links the next series of images and that one, a turret, an endless staircase, the pupil of an eye darkening and opening to eventually reveal the identity of one final character, the House of the Rising Sun itself, a shot of Harry looking out on the courtyard of Hogwarts school. We get downtown , however, via a sequence of Snape and Karkarov and the black mark suggesting that the House is not simply the building of Hogwarts but its function as a symbol of Wizard society. It’s the place they all came from and the place they return to in the end.
The music starts up for the first of two verses to be followed by a bridge and then a final verse. As with the overture the first image is of crows attempting to fly free only for the pendulum to swing past an image of Snape (rather than Harry this time) watching the Hogwarts door closing and the portcullis falling. Trapped within the walls an inner door opens on a closeted Snape and fades via spinning alchemical drawings and newspaper headlines to reveal Tom Riddle as the singer begins to sing. Voldemort dominates the first two lines of this verse, he’s the gambling man and then Dumbledore is never satisfied - if the last line were as it was in the original it would seem that the vid had changed POV. But a subtle change in the lyric from “when he’s all drunk” to “when he’s on some poor drunk” changes it from a verse describing the actor to those who act on him. Voldemort and Dumbledort the manipulators of a fallen Harry who segues via newsprint to Snape, young Severus, Lily in the mirror reached for by Harry as Snape looms behind her linking the three of them mother, son and reluctant-protector.
The transition to the next verse presents in rapid succession the crows in the belfry, Dumbledore apparating and the falling umbrella from the overture. This verse is the one about going back to New Orleans and cartoons of the umbrella flutter through the Daily Prophet pages headlining Voldemort’s return. The black umbrella produces and is replaced by a white clone, changing allegiances. More text written in Voldemort’s diary “Can you tell me?” “No.” “But I can show you,” interspersed with a quite moving piece of created text including the words “potions”, “benches” and “we sat together.”
The 'showing' begins with another door opening on to the bridge of the song, which depicts Snape and the marauderers’ past history leading up to Voldemort’s attempt on the infant Harry. The animal forms of both Lupin and James appear, first wolf!Lupin howling at the moon and shocking Snape into the flashback sequence of him being bullied. In the later stages this is intercut with Voldemore rising, Snape trapped in a bubble, flashes of Sirius imprisoned, Dumbledore in text following, a spinning roundabout foreshadowing other childish things, a mobile destroyed as Voldemort attacks Lily, a sword passed on to Harry and then the bridge transitions into the final verse.
This is the one asking mothers to tell their children. It focuses on Harry watching himself being carried off injured and ends over gears grinding through Lily’s shade and Snape’s agony before rising up from the house of Hogwarts into the coda. The umbrella flaps by for a last time around Harry caught in the same gale-force wind and seeming, after all that’s happened, a strangely fitting symbol of one man’s sacrificial attempt to be a shield against the storm, a warning “not to do what I have done.”
A while ago the ipod was playing an old Joni Michell song from her jazzy experimental era. Hejira to be precise, it’s the title song of the eponymous album with the picture of her dressed like a crow, the open road visible behind/through her on the front cover and a similarly, desaturated shot of a frozen river on the back. So I was doing the washing up and singing along when I caught myself making up pictures to match the music. Very literal ones, very tied to the lyrics - for the line “there’s a man and a woman sitting on the rock” for example, I’d zoom in to the far bank of the river from the back cover to reveal, yes, a man and a woman sitting on a rock. The thing is, it also reminded me that I do this all the time with music and always have. Joni and I go back a long way and I think that particular image has been coming to mind ever since I first heard the song back in the days before I’d ever seen a fanvid or for that matter a music video - it was pre-MTV. So OK there was the one Queen did for Bohemian Rhapsody but that was about the only precedent. Still, even without the MTV experience growing up the idea of music being associated with images or narratives was hardly foreign. Movies and music go together like two very mixy things and most of my favourite movies are musicals. Sure dance sequences aren’t just a visual response to music and they don’t all tell stories but the idea that they might would be intuitive to any ballet fan.
I think visually, I solve genetic problems by conjuring up pictures, I read books and run mini-movies as I process the words, I listen to music and it evokes serial images and words set to music have even more power. They get caught in the crevices of your mind, sometimes I finds myself thinking in song lyrics, like an adult-onset form of echolia. All of which is to say that vidding, both making vids and reading them, seems an intuitively natural process. It feels right even while I’m not very good at it.
The original post was in response to lim’s new Harry Potter vid In exchange for all your tomorrows to House of the Rising Sun so while in a tl;dr mood, for illustrative purposes here’s the thoughts I had on it after obsessively watching it for most of this afternoon.
Most vids I feel at all analytical about I have to watch two or three times just absorbing the shiny. This one was unusual because for those first few viewings I was actually a little resistant to it (completely for personal foibles nothing to do with the vid). First, it’s set to a classic song House of the Rising Sun but radically re-mixed and it took a while to adjust to that. Second it’s a Harry Potter vid and it always takes me a while to adjust to Harry Potter being vidded, I think of the series as the books and having a much lighter tone than does this or indeed the later movies. It took me about 10 minutes to settle into Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkhaban and about the same time to adjust to this vid and that’s 5-10% of the movie but three-four showings of the vid.
My first concrete thoughts on the vid start to come when I have an idea of the song’s structure, who it’s about and have picked up on some of the repeated images and symbols and their associations. It begins with an overture, the singer unaccompanied other by a big echo effect. This is clearly a scene setting exercise, it’s telling you who the song is about and setting up metaphors. Who is most obviously Snape, his is the first face we see and the shot comes immediately after the lyric “what your name is,” but there’s also a quick flash to Harry in a similar pose that links them together. However, this reveal doesn’t happen immediately, the vid leads up to it with a pair of images , which by implication are to be associated with Snape and may represent him. Snape, by this logic is a crow or an umbrella blowing away in the rain, both black flappy things, physically very fitting. The shot of the umbrella is prolonged and runs over the lyric about the road he will travel so rather than being a stand in for Snape himself it feels more like a metaphor for his life.
Having established the who(s), the vid move on to the other players. Voldemort bows matching Snape’s immediately previous actions. The next line begins describing opposite poles. Visually it starts with Dumbledore (implied to be a chess player) and ends with Voldemort again. “Mind to mind,’ here is quite a literal match to the source, (he’s stroking his head) as is the next phrase “generation to generation.” Motion beautifully links the next series of images and that one, a turret, an endless staircase, the pupil of an eye darkening and opening to eventually reveal the identity of one final character, the House of the Rising Sun itself, a shot of Harry looking out on the courtyard of Hogwarts school. We get downtown , however, via a sequence of Snape and Karkarov and the black mark suggesting that the House is not simply the building of Hogwarts but its function as a symbol of Wizard society. It’s the place they all came from and the place they return to in the end.
The music starts up for the first of two verses to be followed by a bridge and then a final verse. As with the overture the first image is of crows attempting to fly free only for the pendulum to swing past an image of Snape (rather than Harry this time) watching the Hogwarts door closing and the portcullis falling. Trapped within the walls an inner door opens on a closeted Snape and fades via spinning alchemical drawings and newspaper headlines to reveal Tom Riddle as the singer begins to sing. Voldemort dominates the first two lines of this verse, he’s the gambling man and then Dumbledore is never satisfied - if the last line were as it was in the original it would seem that the vid had changed POV. But a subtle change in the lyric from “when he’s all drunk” to “when he’s on some poor drunk” changes it from a verse describing the actor to those who act on him. Voldemort and Dumbledort the manipulators of a fallen Harry who segues via newsprint to Snape, young Severus, Lily in the mirror reached for by Harry as Snape looms behind her linking the three of them mother, son and reluctant-protector.
The transition to the next verse presents in rapid succession the crows in the belfry, Dumbledore apparating and the falling umbrella from the overture. This verse is the one about going back to New Orleans and cartoons of the umbrella flutter through the Daily Prophet pages headlining Voldemort’s return. The black umbrella produces and is replaced by a white clone, changing allegiances. More text written in Voldemort’s diary “Can you tell me?” “No.” “But I can show you,” interspersed with a quite moving piece of created text including the words “potions”, “benches” and “we sat together.”
The 'showing' begins with another door opening on to the bridge of the song, which depicts Snape and the marauderers’ past history leading up to Voldemort’s attempt on the infant Harry. The animal forms of both Lupin and James appear, first wolf!Lupin howling at the moon and shocking Snape into the flashback sequence of him being bullied. In the later stages this is intercut with Voldemore rising, Snape trapped in a bubble, flashes of Sirius imprisoned, Dumbledore in text following, a spinning roundabout foreshadowing other childish things, a mobile destroyed as Voldemort attacks Lily, a sword passed on to Harry and then the bridge transitions into the final verse.
This is the one asking mothers to tell their children. It focuses on Harry watching himself being carried off injured and ends over gears grinding through Lily’s shade and Snape’s agony before rising up from the house of Hogwarts into the coda. The umbrella flaps by for a last time around Harry caught in the same gale-force wind and seeming, after all that’s happened, a strangely fitting symbol of one man’s sacrificial attempt to be a shield against the storm, a warning “not to do what I have done.”