Ancient vidding meme
Your software: Final Cut Express 4.0.1
Favourite video: Hard to answer because it changes so often. I think Scarlet Ribbons is my best but it’s rarely my favourite, possibly for that exact reason. Favourite right-now, this-minute would be the Gilda vid I did to Rock Steady, I’m thinking of getting back into movie vidding or at least source where I’ll know how it ends before I start and the footage is guaranteed logo-free.
Least favourite video: I have some affection for all my vids even the crappy ones (especially the crappy ones) so I’m going to cheat and go for the one vid I started but never finished. It was going to be an Oliver Cromwell vid to John Lennon’s “Free the People” using The Devil’s Whore and bits of David Starkey’s “Monarchy” series as source. I got as far as half filling the time line but it was a struggle. Partly through lack of source since The Devil’s Whore really wasn’t about Oliver Cromwell but more because, although that series was very shiny to look at, making the vid it became clear that it was a very painterly kind of shininess, great for set pieces and tableaux but I was finding it impossible to get it to move. At about that I point I also discovered that I’d completely screwed up calculating the aspect ratios when I was ripping and screwed it up in different ways for the two different sources so I decided to take this as a sign from the vidding Powers That Be and press the abort button. It felt good.
A video that got surprisingly good feedback, but you are not completely satisfied with it: I think Nobody Loves You benefited from coming out when it did, just after the series ended. It was a vid that took a long time to make. Life was getting in the way but I was also making it in series realtime and gambling that the season was ultimately going to give me something I could use, so it couldn't be finished until the end of the show. I think, partly because of that long gestation, it feels a little less than the sum of its parts.
A video you like a lot that didn't get the good reaction you were expecting: An older Buffy vid Mr. Sellack. I like it because it seemed a different take on the character (there are still surprisingly few vids about Buffy qua Buffy) and the song is an old favourite. I wasn’t actually expecting much feedback, so was pretty happy with what it got at the time (and it also got a really good write up on The Reel).
Best song/video combo (the song you chose was just perfect for the theme): I’m going with Mandalay, which is possibly cheating again because this was one where I had a theme ready to go and scanned through all the Kurt Weill tracks on iTunes to find the best fit. I was pretty sure I’d come across something but this one jumped out and headbutted me with its appropriateness within the first few seconds.
Video you had the most fun with: Babies. Because I am twelve and mixing space porn with evolutionary theory is never not funny.
Video you had trouble editing because of the song: Scarlet Ribbons was hard because the song was so slow and practically a cappella. My brain doesn’t do music theory, I think I ended up calculating a tempo by tapping out the beat and averaging, making all the clips fractions or multiples of the number of frames that gave and then tweaking things until they looked about right. In other words making it up as I went along.
A video you'd like to remaster: If they ever make avisynth for Macs. All of them.
Most inspired sequence you made: I like the intro to Safe a lot. That was a sequence that worked almost exactly as I’d hoped it would, plus the fact that it did legitimized using the ‘papers/documents’ as a recurring metaphor throughout the vid.
Movie/show you have most enjoyed using for a video: Minority Report. Movies are different from TV and I didn’t fully appreciate the sheer precision of Spielberg until making Silence.
Pet peeves: Most of my peeves aren’t specific to vidding. Excessive manpain for example. Or they’re not peeves so much as peevishness. Like being annoyed by people making good vids to shows/movies I hate - if I ever see a decent vid of The English Patient I think my head will explode. Vids that are all boyface or girlface make me uncomfortable, which could be a proto-autistic thing but I think varying focal length and including footage of things as well as people is to be encouraged.
Favourite video: Hard to answer because it changes so often. I think Scarlet Ribbons is my best but it’s rarely my favourite, possibly for that exact reason. Favourite right-now, this-minute would be the Gilda vid I did to Rock Steady, I’m thinking of getting back into movie vidding or at least source where I’ll know how it ends before I start and the footage is guaranteed logo-free.
Least favourite video: I have some affection for all my vids even the crappy ones (especially the crappy ones) so I’m going to cheat and go for the one vid I started but never finished. It was going to be an Oliver Cromwell vid to John Lennon’s “Free the People” using The Devil’s Whore and bits of David Starkey’s “Monarchy” series as source. I got as far as half filling the time line but it was a struggle. Partly through lack of source since The Devil’s Whore really wasn’t about Oliver Cromwell but more because, although that series was very shiny to look at, making the vid it became clear that it was a very painterly kind of shininess, great for set pieces and tableaux but I was finding it impossible to get it to move. At about that I point I also discovered that I’d completely screwed up calculating the aspect ratios when I was ripping and screwed it up in different ways for the two different sources so I decided to take this as a sign from the vidding Powers That Be and press the abort button. It felt good.
A video that got surprisingly good feedback, but you are not completely satisfied with it: I think Nobody Loves You benefited from coming out when it did, just after the series ended. It was a vid that took a long time to make. Life was getting in the way but I was also making it in series realtime and gambling that the season was ultimately going to give me something I could use, so it couldn't be finished until the end of the show. I think, partly because of that long gestation, it feels a little less than the sum of its parts.
A video you like a lot that didn't get the good reaction you were expecting: An older Buffy vid Mr. Sellack. I like it because it seemed a different take on the character (there are still surprisingly few vids about Buffy qua Buffy) and the song is an old favourite. I wasn’t actually expecting much feedback, so was pretty happy with what it got at the time (and it also got a really good write up on The Reel).
Best song/video combo (the song you chose was just perfect for the theme): I’m going with Mandalay, which is possibly cheating again because this was one where I had a theme ready to go and scanned through all the Kurt Weill tracks on iTunes to find the best fit. I was pretty sure I’d come across something but this one jumped out and headbutted me with its appropriateness within the first few seconds.
Video you had the most fun with: Babies. Because I am twelve and mixing space porn with evolutionary theory is never not funny.
Video you had trouble editing because of the song: Scarlet Ribbons was hard because the song was so slow and practically a cappella. My brain doesn’t do music theory, I think I ended up calculating a tempo by tapping out the beat and averaging, making all the clips fractions or multiples of the number of frames that gave and then tweaking things until they looked about right. In other words making it up as I went along.
A video you'd like to remaster: If they ever make avisynth for Macs. All of them.
Most inspired sequence you made: I like the intro to Safe a lot. That was a sequence that worked almost exactly as I’d hoped it would, plus the fact that it did legitimized using the ‘papers/documents’ as a recurring metaphor throughout the vid.
Movie/show you have most enjoyed using for a video: Minority Report. Movies are different from TV and I didn’t fully appreciate the sheer precision of Spielberg until making Silence.
Pet peeves: Most of my peeves aren’t specific to vidding. Excessive manpain for example. Or they’re not peeves so much as peevishness. Like being annoyed by people making good vids to shows/movies I hate - if I ever see a decent vid of The English Patient I think my head will explode. Vids that are all boyface or girlface make me uncomfortable, which could be a proto-autistic thing but I think varying focal length and including footage of things as well as people is to be encouraged.