[vid] Take Your Guess (Sports Night, festivids)
I vidded a vid! I festively vidded a festivid!
password is festivids
festivids 2014: Take Your Guess (Sports Night) from bingeling on Vimeo.
fandom: Sports Night
music: Take Your Guess by Tom Rosenthal
Or download as *.mp4 (39 MB)
I have to thank neongelbgruen and y_ctrl and also David (ikr), because they all provided useful feedback and advice. Especially y_ctrl was so excited about me making this vid and was great at cheerleading me on. <3
Vidding Tales [yawn]
When I got my assignment and saw it was Sports Night I was so psyched. There's a difference between a source that I love and a source that's an actual proper fandom of mine. I know it deeply, I have a myriad of thoughts and feelings about it, there's a reading of the source that fandom has shaped over the years, I GOT DIS!
I started a rewatch a few minutes after I received my assignment. And quickly thereafter I was panicking all over the place because haw haw haw Sorkin show! Haw haw haw 95% heads talking a lot! I will never be able to make this vid! Why didn't I think of this?!
Well, everyone loves a challenge.
My signup process for festivids is considering a source and if I can't think of at least a vague idea of what a vid of mine for this source would look like, then I'm not offering it. No matter how much I love the source. Too worried about not being able to vid it.
Kass’ request was pretty similar to mine (I had also requested SN), so I was relieved I wouldn't have to vid anything that goes against my reading of the source. I don't know if that actually ever happens, it's just one of my many festivids fears. This is only my second time signing up, I don't know when I got around to collecting all these fears.
I had a few ideas for vids at that time. The one I liked most was basically a bouncy upbeat vid about the shenanigans and particular brand of crazy that is Sports Night. If you have watched my vid you will know that it is not ... that. But a bit of it *did* make it in.
Basically I really latched on to the family part of Kass' festivids letter. I am a huge sucker for found family. So that was an angle I wanted to cover in my vid for her.
Possibly my favorite part of vidding is finding music for it. I love music so much and I love digging for this perfect match. It's a symbiosis of finding my idea in the tone and the lyrics of the song and the song awakening new ideas in me in return. It's just the best.
That being said, I didn't have the greatest of time finding music for this vid. ^^ By that time I was pretty sure I was going to make a Danny vid and Danny is not an easy customer, I have to say! So every Danny song I found was depressing as fuck and I did not want to vid it and I didn't think Kass would have appreciated it. I had this theoretic idea of a perfect Sports Night song and it was "That's The Way We Get By" by Spoon. Except not that because the lyrics don't fit and also I already associate that with the best Arrested Development vid in the world.
So I listened to a lot of new music, trying to find The One, failed, and then ended up using a song that wasn't new to me at all and had already considered and disregarded at an earlier time in my music-finding process.
Also, the next time I will have to make a Dana/Natalie vid, because when I asked y_ctrl for music recommendations, she gave me 5 perfect Dana/Natalie songs and 0 Dan songs.
It was basically torture to do this Sports Night rewatch without livetweeting the whole shebang. It’s amazing how big the urge gets to tweet „a neighbourhood park all covered with cheese“ once you can’t do it. I actually stopped my rewatch before Draft Day, because I didn't think I would be able to stand the pain without yelling at twitter about it. But then
sarken tweeted about Sports Night and I latched onto that and simply blamed her tweets as the cause for my rewatch of Draft Day. ;)
(I later found out that she rewatched SN, because she was writing it for yuletide. Funny how that turns out.)
I guess the point I'm making with this vid, or the story I'm trying to tell, is that Danny is very good at telling people that he's fine, even when he isn't. He's striving on chaos, because it allows him to hide his problems and to get lost in the fleury of action.
But also, never mind the shit that's going on with him, because he always has his Sports Night family and they give him hold even though they might not be aware how much he needs it.
I didn't plan for this when I started making it, but here's the thing I like most about this vid: Every time the lyrics say "That's fine." I rest on a shot of Danny in varying degrees of not-fine. But on the final "That's fine." I have Danny and Casey hugging and it's Casey that I'm showing on "That's fine." and I'm only showing Danny after that. My idea behind it being that Danny needed somebody else to tell him that it's fine and that this might actually make him believe it at some point. Again, this wasn't planned at all, but I thought it was pretty neat when I noticed it, so I did some adjusting here and there to embrace it. :D
So the actual vidding part... The source material was already such low quality (curse you, 90s!) that I didn't want to do the clipping externally, I didn't want to lose anything by the additional rendering. So I did all my clipping inside my Premiere project file and I must say, I was positively surprised! I feared that Premiere would crash with so many clips in one project, but it didn't bat an eyelash, the project file size was minimal and the file filter options were a blessing. I guess the downside is that all those clips are trapped inside this project and not easily reusable elsewhere. But where else would I need them? If I wanted to make another Sports Night vid I could keep using this project for it, without losing anything from my festivid.
The thing with this show being 95% talking heads? Might have actually been a blessing. My ~natural vidding style~ is pretty fast-paced. And all the clips I had from this dumbass show were super short, because there were only ever short moments before some character started blabbering again (I hate them), so I pretty much *had* to make a fast cut vid, I simply didn't have any long scenes to drag it out. xD
The first WIP rendering I made was of a pretty crap quality, way worse than the source. So I had to make several adjustments and test runs until I got a video file I thought was acceptable. There was a moment where I was seriously worried that I had to redo the whole thing, but thankfully that didn't happen. And I *know* that you have to ensure that you have all the specs right at the very start of your project, just so you don't end up in the position I was in! And I did test renderings before I got down to the actual vidding, I just somehow didn't notice the crap quality until I added titles and saw how pixelated crap they were. So, learning for next time: When doing test renderings, also always do test renderings of text!
This entry was originally posted at http://bingeling.dreamwidth.org/540944.html. Please comment there using OpenID. (
comments so far)
password is festivids
festivids 2014: Take Your Guess (Sports Night) from bingeling on Vimeo.
fandom: Sports Night
music: Take Your Guess by Tom Rosenthal
Or download as *.mp4 (39 MB)
I have to thank neongelbgruen and y_ctrl and also David (ikr), because they all provided useful feedback and advice. Especially y_ctrl was so excited about me making this vid and was great at cheerleading me on. <3
Vidding Tales [yawn]
When I got my assignment and saw it was Sports Night I was so psyched. There's a difference between a source that I love and a source that's an actual proper fandom of mine. I know it deeply, I have a myriad of thoughts and feelings about it, there's a reading of the source that fandom has shaped over the years, I GOT DIS!
I started a rewatch a few minutes after I received my assignment. And quickly thereafter I was panicking all over the place because haw haw haw Sorkin show! Haw haw haw 95% heads talking a lot! I will never be able to make this vid! Why didn't I think of this?!
Well, everyone loves a challenge.
My signup process for festivids is considering a source and if I can't think of at least a vague idea of what a vid of mine for this source would look like, then I'm not offering it. No matter how much I love the source. Too worried about not being able to vid it.
Kass’ request was pretty similar to mine (I had also requested SN), so I was relieved I wouldn't have to vid anything that goes against my reading of the source. I don't know if that actually ever happens, it's just one of my many festivids fears. This is only my second time signing up, I don't know when I got around to collecting all these fears.
I had a few ideas for vids at that time. The one I liked most was basically a bouncy upbeat vid about the shenanigans and particular brand of crazy that is Sports Night. If you have watched my vid you will know that it is not ... that. But a bit of it *did* make it in.
Basically I really latched on to the family part of Kass' festivids letter. I am a huge sucker for found family. So that was an angle I wanted to cover in my vid for her.
Possibly my favorite part of vidding is finding music for it. I love music so much and I love digging for this perfect match. It's a symbiosis of finding my idea in the tone and the lyrics of the song and the song awakening new ideas in me in return. It's just the best.
That being said, I didn't have the greatest of time finding music for this vid. ^^ By that time I was pretty sure I was going to make a Danny vid and Danny is not an easy customer, I have to say! So every Danny song I found was depressing as fuck and I did not want to vid it and I didn't think Kass would have appreciated it. I had this theoretic idea of a perfect Sports Night song and it was "That's The Way We Get By" by Spoon. Except not that because the lyrics don't fit and also I already associate that with the best Arrested Development vid in the world.
So I listened to a lot of new music, trying to find The One, failed, and then ended up using a song that wasn't new to me at all and had already considered and disregarded at an earlier time in my music-finding process.
Also, the next time I will have to make a Dana/Natalie vid, because when I asked y_ctrl for music recommendations, she gave me 5 perfect Dana/Natalie songs and 0 Dan songs.
It was basically torture to do this Sports Night rewatch without livetweeting the whole shebang. It’s amazing how big the urge gets to tweet „a neighbourhood park all covered with cheese“ once you can’t do it. I actually stopped my rewatch before Draft Day, because I didn't think I would be able to stand the pain without yelling at twitter about it. But then
sarken tweeted about Sports Night and I latched onto that and simply blamed her tweets as the cause for my rewatch of Draft Day. ;)
(I later found out that she rewatched SN, because she was writing it for yuletide. Funny how that turns out.)
I guess the point I'm making with this vid, or the story I'm trying to tell, is that Danny is very good at telling people that he's fine, even when he isn't. He's striving on chaos, because it allows him to hide his problems and to get lost in the fleury of action.
But also, never mind the shit that's going on with him, because he always has his Sports Night family and they give him hold even though they might not be aware how much he needs it.
I didn't plan for this when I started making it, but here's the thing I like most about this vid: Every time the lyrics say "That's fine." I rest on a shot of Danny in varying degrees of not-fine. But on the final "That's fine." I have Danny and Casey hugging and it's Casey that I'm showing on "That's fine." and I'm only showing Danny after that. My idea behind it being that Danny needed somebody else to tell him that it's fine and that this might actually make him believe it at some point. Again, this wasn't planned at all, but I thought it was pretty neat when I noticed it, so I did some adjusting here and there to embrace it. :D
So the actual vidding part... The source material was already such low quality (curse you, 90s!) that I didn't want to do the clipping externally, I didn't want to lose anything by the additional rendering. So I did all my clipping inside my Premiere project file and I must say, I was positively surprised! I feared that Premiere would crash with so many clips in one project, but it didn't bat an eyelash, the project file size was minimal and the file filter options were a blessing. I guess the downside is that all those clips are trapped inside this project and not easily reusable elsewhere. But where else would I need them? If I wanted to make another Sports Night vid I could keep using this project for it, without losing anything from my festivid.
The thing with this show being 95% talking heads? Might have actually been a blessing. My ~natural vidding style~ is pretty fast-paced. And all the clips I had from this dumbass show were super short, because there were only ever short moments before some character started blabbering again (I hate them), so I pretty much *had* to make a fast cut vid, I simply didn't have any long scenes to drag it out. xD
The first WIP rendering I made was of a pretty crap quality, way worse than the source. So I had to make several adjustments and test runs until I got a video file I thought was acceptable. There was a moment where I was seriously worried that I had to redo the whole thing, but thankfully that didn't happen. And I *know* that you have to ensure that you have all the specs right at the very start of your project, just so you don't end up in the position I was in! And I did test renderings before I got down to the actual vidding, I just somehow didn't notice the crap quality until I added titles and saw how pixelated crap they were. So, learning for next time: When doing test renderings, also always do test renderings of text!
This entry was originally posted at http://bingeling.dreamwidth.org/540944.html. Please comment there using OpenID. (
comments so far)