Imaginary vidding
Unless vidding tech gets a lot simpler, or I get a lot more patient, I'll never be an accomplished vidder. Still, I can dream...
If I were going to vid The Sopranos, I would choose "Twa Corbies" by Maddy Prior. An unorthodox choice to be sure: a version of the old ballad. It would certainly never get played on the show, and the show had a very wide range of musical taste. When it comes down to it, though, not much has changed since medieval times. I think the song gets across the essential bleakness of the show's worldview. The vid would focus on Janice Soprano and her lovers, but would spread out to include other murders within the Sopranos inner circle. It would need to be done with quick flashes of imagery--Ralphie Cifaretto's bare head, the ducks flying away from the pond, the horse in its stable, the sea rolling in as Tony reflects on "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero's death. There is an art to doing quick cuts over a slower song. The effect would have to be something similar to the Harry Potter vid that Lim did to "House of the Rising Sun."
While there are songs that I have lined up for a TNG vid, I don't think that I'd actually want to spend the time making one. Even in my dreams, the visuals are just not striking enough to inspire. Having said that, I would like to reserve "These Things Take Time" by The Smiths for my Picard/Crusher masterpiece. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
On to The X-Files. Where to start? With a guilty pleasure. I've always wanted to make a Lord King Bad Vid out of "Super Freak" by Rick James. About Scully, naturally, because she is a very kinky girl. Worth the price of admission alone would be the joy of setting Skinner to the lines Menage a trois/We love that. For the kind of girl you read about/in new wave magazines, I would pair a clip of Mulder reading his porn with a few of the racier shots of Gillian Anderson. No, I never said that this one was going to be deep.
A little deeper, if not much, would be Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." When it comes to vids, I'm not about wallowing in the Mulder angst. I'm about making fun of him for being paranoid. But I'm torn. The other great Mulder vid would be Michael Jackson's "Beat It." There's a sort of an "oof" sound that would be perfect for showing him get shoved up against cars and handcuffed by various guards at various shadowy military bases.
I am greatly enamored with the opening to "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" by Dans le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip. It sounds like an old-fashioned slide projector changing slides. You could so start the vid with a montage of all the slideshows to which Mulder subjected Scully, with the title cards for the vid slipped in there somewhere. Unfortunately the rest of the song is too monotonous to do anything productive with, but I like the idea of the intro.
When it comes to more serious X-Files vids, I would dearly love to use Iron and Wine's "Freedom Hangs Like Heaven" if it weren't for the fact that I got the idea from kiki_miserychic's excellent Veritas vid to the same song. It has such movement and rhythm to it. You could do something great with the whole Madonna-and-Child imagery, paralleling Scully with Teena Mulder, and bringing William into the mix in an almost entirely non-sappy sort of way. I definitely like the idea of using two different generations because it seems to me that you could do something non-obvious with it. You couldn't really make a whole vid about Teena but this is a good compromise.
Slightly more on the sappy side when it comes to the use of William would be "Spark" by Tori Amos. In my view it is *the* later-seasons Scully song, but perhaps it's not as well-suited to vidding as it ought to be. All I know is that I get chills every time from the lines She believes she could hold back a glacier/But she couldn't keep baby alive. It would be rather dark, rather meditative, perhaps rather slow. Something like frey_at_last's "No One Would Riot for Less"? I'm not actually convinced I could pull it off, which is somewhat depressing considering that this is imaginary vidding. Still.
Much better would be "Wednesday" by Tori Amos, which gets across the quirky energy of the Mulder/Scully partnership, and has enough musical variety to go the distance as a vid. I love the way the song slows on But one day the Eagle has to land... the subsequent single repeated piano note would work very well for a close-up on the Apollo 11 keychain. Most of the vid would be very upbeat, but the final stanza would go on to the events of "Never Again," and the final America would be that clip panning down the flag into the FBI lobby.
Are you a real vidder? Do you want to use these ideas? Go ahead. I'll keep dreaming.
If I were going to vid The Sopranos, I would choose "Twa Corbies" by Maddy Prior. An unorthodox choice to be sure: a version of the old ballad. It would certainly never get played on the show, and the show had a very wide range of musical taste. When it comes down to it, though, not much has changed since medieval times. I think the song gets across the essential bleakness of the show's worldview. The vid would focus on Janice Soprano and her lovers, but would spread out to include other murders within the Sopranos inner circle. It would need to be done with quick flashes of imagery--Ralphie Cifaretto's bare head, the ducks flying away from the pond, the horse in its stable, the sea rolling in as Tony reflects on "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero's death. There is an art to doing quick cuts over a slower song. The effect would have to be something similar to the Harry Potter vid that Lim did to "House of the Rising Sun."
While there are songs that I have lined up for a TNG vid, I don't think that I'd actually want to spend the time making one. Even in my dreams, the visuals are just not striking enough to inspire. Having said that, I would like to reserve "These Things Take Time" by The Smiths for my Picard/Crusher masterpiece. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
On to The X-Files. Where to start? With a guilty pleasure. I've always wanted to make a Lord King Bad Vid out of "Super Freak" by Rick James. About Scully, naturally, because she is a very kinky girl. Worth the price of admission alone would be the joy of setting Skinner to the lines Menage a trois/We love that. For the kind of girl you read about/in new wave magazines, I would pair a clip of Mulder reading his porn with a few of the racier shots of Gillian Anderson. No, I never said that this one was going to be deep.
A little deeper, if not much, would be Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." When it comes to vids, I'm not about wallowing in the Mulder angst. I'm about making fun of him for being paranoid. But I'm torn. The other great Mulder vid would be Michael Jackson's "Beat It." There's a sort of an "oof" sound that would be perfect for showing him get shoved up against cars and handcuffed by various guards at various shadowy military bases.
I am greatly enamored with the opening to "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" by Dans le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip. It sounds like an old-fashioned slide projector changing slides. You could so start the vid with a montage of all the slideshows to which Mulder subjected Scully, with the title cards for the vid slipped in there somewhere. Unfortunately the rest of the song is too monotonous to do anything productive with, but I like the idea of the intro.
When it comes to more serious X-Files vids, I would dearly love to use Iron and Wine's "Freedom Hangs Like Heaven" if it weren't for the fact that I got the idea from kiki_miserychic's excellent Veritas vid to the same song. It has such movement and rhythm to it. You could do something great with the whole Madonna-and-Child imagery, paralleling Scully with Teena Mulder, and bringing William into the mix in an almost entirely non-sappy sort of way. I definitely like the idea of using two different generations because it seems to me that you could do something non-obvious with it. You couldn't really make a whole vid about Teena but this is a good compromise.
Slightly more on the sappy side when it comes to the use of William would be "Spark" by Tori Amos. In my view it is *the* later-seasons Scully song, but perhaps it's not as well-suited to vidding as it ought to be. All I know is that I get chills every time from the lines She believes she could hold back a glacier/But she couldn't keep baby alive. It would be rather dark, rather meditative, perhaps rather slow. Something like frey_at_last's "No One Would Riot for Less"? I'm not actually convinced I could pull it off, which is somewhat depressing considering that this is imaginary vidding. Still.
Much better would be "Wednesday" by Tori Amos, which gets across the quirky energy of the Mulder/Scully partnership, and has enough musical variety to go the distance as a vid. I love the way the song slows on But one day the Eagle has to land... the subsequent single repeated piano note would work very well for a close-up on the Apollo 11 keychain. Most of the vid would be very upbeat, but the final stanza would go on to the events of "Never Again," and the final America would be that clip panning down the flag into the FBI lobby.
Are you a real vidder? Do you want to use these ideas? Go ahead. I'll keep dreaming.