vid commentary: "People Get Ready"
oyceter, 12_12_12 and shati asked questions about " People Get Ready"; I've tried to organize my answers into sections rather than just rambling on. Let's see if it worked...
auction
oyceter asked: How was working for the auction? I know you mentioned it was a lot tougher, but how did it impact your process?
I really enjoyed doing an auction vid, although I'll definitely need a break before I do it again. *g* The most stressful thing about it was the time pressure; I've vidded to a deadline before, of course, but always under circumstances where if worst came to worst I could simply say "Sorry! I'm not done! I suck!" and not have a vid in the show. I didn't have that option this time, because there were other people involved, not to mention money on the line! And it was really important to me that the vid be not just done but at least reasonably good, because there were going to be a lot of people's names on it besides mine, and I didn't want to embarrass them.
The other way in which vidding for auction affected my process was that I tried to share drafts with the bidders, get their reactions, and take those reactions into account as I revised. (I wish I'd been able to do more of this, actually, but by the time I got a first full draft done I didn't have very many days left before it was due.) The differences between bidder reactions and beta comments (both formal and informal) on the draft were really interesting; all of the bidder comments were thoughtful, and many were quite helpful, but some appeared to assume that the vid was much more finished than it was, when in fact my vids usually change significantly, and sometimes change quite radically, between early draft(s) and final version - something I realized after the fact that I had neglected to mention, because I assumed (incorrectly) that it was obvious.
The auction experience therefore made me think about our collective language (or lack of language) for the vidding process, and how differently people use that language. For me, a first round of beta comments means conceptual discussion geared towards figuring out what's working and what needs to change, and only several drafts later, in the very final stages of beta, do we get to what we might call editing issues (tweaking timing and so on); that progression from higher-order to lower-order concerns is an approach that I've worked out with renenet and the other people who beta my vids with any regularity. But it isn't the way everybody thinks, of course, as I found when one bidder sent me final-stage editing suggestions rather than revision-oriented questions and observations. They weren't bad comments, but they were so profoundly different from what I expected (and needed) that I had to acknowledge just how completely I'd failed to communicate the most fundamental elements of my vidding processes or to interpret what this commenter meant by "beta". That was kind of embarrassing.
planning
shati wanted to know: How much of the vid was planned out before you went a-clipping?
Before I began, I had a fairly clear sense of how I wanted different sections of the vid to look and feel: I wanted the first verse to be quiet and still, lots of close-ups and small motions, and then to start using more dramatic external motion when the music swells at the end of that verse. I wanted momentum to build throughout the vid; I wanted the three iterations of the chorus to build on each other, so that the first would be fairly quiet but the later iterations would be more fraught, more dramatic or painful or ironic. I wanted the long instrumental section at the end to be about chaos and sacrifices.
So I had that big picture idea; and I had some more or less specific ideas about individual clips, which fell into three categories.
12_12_12 asked: What changed most between your initial conception/draft of the vid and the final version?
The ending, definitely; I started planning the vid before the last few eps of the season had aired, so I deliberately held off on thinking about the ending until after the finale, which meant that when the finale failed to provide me with a ready-made ending I was screwed. Putting the ending together was a process that did not go at all smoothly (more on that later).
More generally, my sense of the vid's structure - the focus points of individual sections, the relationships between those sections - got much more precise as I went along, and particularly after I got beta comments. I began with a sense of the big picture and ideas about some specific clips (see above), but I had very little sense of how to connect the macro and the micro.
Put another way: if we parse the title - "people get ready" - the people never changed, but my ideas about what it meant for them to "get ready" became much more focused as I built the vid.
process
Both oyceter and shati asked about the ensemble-ness of the vid: How did you manage to balance out the characters in the cast? Were there spreadsheets and charts, or did you use only the power of your mind?
I am deeply flattered by the assumption that I am even potentially capable of making an ensemble vid using only the power of my mind. Sadly, I cannot hold that many things in my head at one time. (This is what I get for having vast sectors of my internal hard drive devoted to retaining the lyrics of a truly alarming quantity of '80s college rock.) Not being organized enough to use spreadsheets and charts, I used lists. Lots and lots of lists.
So, for example, I have a note on the original storyboard that says "Start with core group: Peter, Claire, Hiro, Matt, Niki, Mohinder, Micah, Nathan, Isaac." I checked off each name as I placed a shot of that character in the first verse. (Micah's shot ultimately got deleted because I decided I needed to show Bob The Haitian instead and had to do some reorganizing; in the final version, Micah doesn't appear until "all the love in the world.") Based on the first verse and the instrumental lead-in to the first chorus, I made another list of characters I wanted to try to show in the first chorus: Claire, Matt, Nathan, Isaac, Micah, Ando, Mr. Bennet. The vidding diary is littered with similar little lists.
One of the things I did after I had a full draft, and then again after VividCon, was to make after-the-fact lists of clips in particular sections that felt imbalanced so I could identify exactly what was causing that imbalance. After VividCon, I did this for the second bridge and I realized that I had five clips of Niki and three each of Eden and Peter, and the most any of the other characters had was two; Claire and Hiro only had one each, Micah and Mohinder didn't appear at all, and Nathan appeared but only in the background - all of which seemed wrong to me, so I swapped out some clips of Niki and Eden for some clips of other characters. I also realized that the section felt Niki-heavy not only because she had a disproportionate number of clips but because I kept putting those clips on major downbeats, so I shuffled things around to distribute not only the clips but the moments of emphasis a little more evenly.
12_12_12 wanted to know: What were the parts of the vid you found most difficult, and how did you resolve the difficulties?
The ending was by far the most difficult. Three days before I had to upload the vid for VVC, I still had no coherent exit strategy for the vid; that was not a good realization. I did three distinct and completely different drafts of the final section (all of which sucked) before I got to the VVC version, and then I tinkered with it again for the final version.
I resolved this particular difficulty by writing about it - a lot - in order to sort out what I thought my options were; I brainstormed five more-or-less different possibilities for the ending, and then I couldn't decide between them. So I cornered merryish and begged her to help me, which she very kindly did; she prodded me to talk through my ideas, made some suggestions, and articulated something that helped me enormously as I tried to figure out why certain parts of the vid were and weren't working:
Merry: It seems to me that this is a vid about what they're risking and why they're fighting more than about what happens.
As soon as she said that, many things about the vid became clear to me. I realized that I had, not surprisingly, been thinking of the endpoint of the vid as NYC GO BOOM OH NOES, not least because that is the major motivating crisis of S1. But especially in the wake of the finale, I was not actually interested in the crisis qua crisis; I was (and am) more interested in what the impending crises (large or small) in the various characters' lives inspire them to do. To use geek-speak, I had to disentangle the vid's narrative telos from the show's. I really did not want to turn the end of the vid into a Sylar/Peter face-off or into The Flying Petrelli Brothers Show, because both of those things basically bored me to tears. So my goal for the ending became to avoid the finale to a great extent, and yet to reference some of the important emotional stuff going on there. And to do that, I had to think through what each character is fighting for and how I could convey something about that purpose with the limited number of clips I could put at each character's disposal, and I had to set all that stuff up in the two instrumental bridges where I didn't have lyrics to contend with. (It is a sign of my development as a vidder, I think, that I now sometimes think of lyrics as something to contend with rather than my only port in a musical storm.)
The ending was far from the only major difficulty, though; I also struggled with the pacing. absolutedestiny pointed out that the vid kind of drags in the middle - the visuals really don't keep up with the changes in the music - which is one of those things I knew and was hoping no one would notice (yeah, well, I can dream) because I really had to leave somewhere to go in the last instrumental section. Eventually I just shrugged and banked on the music and the content of the visuals adding enough tension that the less-than-optimal tempo wouldn't be too distracting.
shati was curious: Did you by any chance keep count of how many clips you flipped horizontally, and if you did, how many was it?
I did not keep track, but I can tell you five for sure:
After rewatching I suspect that I may also have flipped
favorite moments
12_12_12 asked: What are your favorite aspects/clip choices/moments of the vid, and why?
Favorite moments: Peter's hand rising as the music picks up; Hiro in Times Square; Mohinder's post-it note going up and Peter's copy of Isaac's painting going down; Isaac shoving things off his table followed by Claire crashing the car; Hiro and Charlie and the thousand paper cranes; Niki snapping the guard's stick; Hiro coming into focus behind Peter on the subway car; Claire hugging her daddy on "all the love in the world"; Sylar's shards of glass turning into Nathan's balloons; Claire smiling through her tears at having saved Peter.
As for why... half of them are because the clips look cool, and half are because I have a heart made of pudding. I am only intermittently capable of being deep about the show; mostly it inspires me to "awwww" or "pretty!"
I think my favorite aspect of the vid as a whole is that I was able to represent what I love about these characters - I was able to vid them the way I saw them by the end of the season.
commentary
Before I start my commentary, I want to point out that 12_12_12's commentary in her review of the vid is as least as interesting as anything you'll hear from me; if you're interested in seeing a terrific example of how to do a detailed reading of a vid, check out her post. She even uses visual aids!
[credits]
The credits were a huge pain in the ass, especially making the first eclipse line up with the second eclipse. Way, way worse than the whole ball-into-planet thing in Thistledown Tears. No more effects for me. I know I say that every time, but this time I mean it. Although getting the letters to move was pretty cool...
people all get ready
'cause we're tearing down the stand
rebuild what's got unsteady
and see it through with newer hands
It took me a while to figure out the order I wanted for these clips, but I knew from the beginning how I wanted this section to feel: I wanted a sense of stillness, to match the hush of the music. There's lots of external motion, of course, but in conjunction with the quiet music it mostly serves to underscore the relative stillness of the characters in the frame. I wanted a sense of being on the brink of something, of - well, of getting ready for something, even though the characters themselves don't yet know what it is.
I wish I could have made Hiro the third character to appear, to parallel the end of the vid, but I tried switching him with Matt and it just didn't work, no matter how badly I wanted it to; the rhythm was off.
and what has gone between us
is a lot, is a lot
The first few shots are all about isolation; here I wanted to introduce characters' connections to each other, starting with Mohinder's pushpins and string - the forerunner of Hiro's string timelines - and continuing with relationships, both romantic and parent/child, that are complicated or troubled but still tremendously significant to our main characters.That shot of the map was a gimme; when the show hands me a literal visual like that for "threads of connections among characters," I'm not gonna not use it.
Several people, beginning as early as beta comments, have observed that "is a lot" can easily be heard as "is a lie"; personally, I hear it as written, but since I assumed that most people wouldn't know the song and wouldn't necessarily check the lyrics before listening, I tried to choose clips that wouldn't seem distractingly incomprehensible to someone hearing it the other way.
and who'll be there to clean us
when you're not, when you're not
Bob the Haitian, Bennet, Chandra Suresh: sympathetic but ambiguous characters who nevertheless stand a bit outside our core group, whose motives are not always clear, and who, in the case of Chandra Suresh, is present largely in his absence, present largely in Mohinder's struggles to understand his father's discoveries, his father's death.
[chorus #1 intro]
The tipping point: Hiro makes time go backwards for a second; Peter prepares to jump; Niki tries to see clearly (I love the metaphor of the pinhole camera and could not pass up a chance to use that visual); Mohinder discovers his father's key; Claire tests the limits of her powers.
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
First (or near-first) uses of powers. I tried to work in Hiro's martini-saving, but the tone was so different from the rest of the clips that it just didn't feel right.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
These clips are mostly uncomplicated affections between friends or between parents and children; Isaac's yearning for Simone is a little out of place in that sense, I suppose. And I put Charlie at the end of the chorus because I didn't want to introduce her as a dead girl; I wanted to show her alive and cheerful first.
people all get ready
'cause we're breaking down the bands
I love Molly and Micah, and I love seeing them use their gifts to bridge distances, to make connections.
rewrite what's gone already
Isaac's vision of Claire, Charlie's death: two unhappy fates our heroes are trying to avert.
and see it through with angry hands
"Angry hands" was always Ted for me, even though I wanted to avoid the literalism of actually showing his burning hands. And seeing it through - I wanted Peter's determination, his commitment to saving the cheerleader in order to save the world, even if it means that, as Ando points out, he's going to die.
and what has gone before us
is a lot, is a lot
and who'll be there to ignore us
when you're not, when you're not
I figured out pretty early on that "what has gone before us" would be the older generation, but it took 12_12_12's beta comments to help me figure out that this entire stanza should be about the older generation: "The theme for this part could be how the older generation (Mrs. Petrelli, Charles [Deveaux], Linderman, Papa Nakamura) have tried to 'ignore' the autonomy of the younger, and tried to force the next generation into their plans." Hey, I know enough to steal a good idea when I see it.
I was glad to be able to work Claude into this section, too, because he's so important not only to Peter (and Bennet, though we don't see that in the vid) but to the themes of the show as I understand them; Peter is looking for a new father, a mentor, a guide - and yeah, Claude is that for him, just briefly, but part of what Peter learns from Claude is that he has to be responsible for himself, for his decisions and his actions. He has to grow up.
[chorus #2 intro]
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
Aside from the ending, this is the chunk of the vid that was probably the most incoherent in the beta export (although the entire last half was, uh, pretty bad in that regard). I really had no idea what I was doing. Once again, 12_12_12 found a thread running through the labyrinth; she noted that a few shots did seem to be working, and observed that "All of these elements are linked by the fact that these characters are looking at these strange symbols and/or encoded messages, and are trying to figure out what they mean." elynross noted the same thing in her beta comments, referring to the "guides" in this section. So that became the center of gravity: signs and symbols, keys and connections, and getting it right means figuring out not just what they mean but also what to do with that knowledge.
In the beta draft, the "Are you sure you want to quit?" clip was followed immediately by the shot of Mohinder choosing "NO," but I came to realize that this was wrong, that what I needed to show (here and elsewhere in the vid) was the moment before: the moment before deciding, the moment before acting, the moment before the climax. Those of us who watch the show already know what happens; I wanted to emphasize the hesitation, the indrawn breath, the acceptance of responsibility. At this moment, Mohinder really ISN'T sure. He WANTS to be sure; he wants to do the right thing. But the answer is not as obvious to him as it is to us in retrospect; it is not as clear as the first draft made it seem.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
Nathan splashing paint on the canvas is a shot that was in the beta version, but not in a place that made much sense (or that made use of the visual drama of the gesture); once I knew what I was doing with the first half of the chorus, the clip turned out to be a logical transition between the first half of the chorus (the interpretation of symbols) and the second half (the longing, though not always the power, to protect loved ones): Nathan destroys the painting in an attempt to save Peter. This section was the hardest of the three iterations of the chorus; it was fairly easy to see how to begin and end, but finding the right shots for this one took a while; I had way too many quiet/static moments at first.
just look up
just look up
just look up
[instrumental bridge #1]
I knew I wanted this section to have a sense of impending doom, but the beta version was really a mess; it took this crazy left turn into straight-up narrative and had way too much Sylar in it, way too many shots from "Homecoming." Because it was so narrative-heavy, it pretty much completely lacked thematic coherence, which meant that the net effect was less "impending doom" than "WTF?" The one thing in it that I really liked was the sequence of Isaac shoving stuff off the table followed by Claire crashing the quarterback's car. I liked that sequence because it was visually nifty, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a possible template for the rest of the section: a combination of helplessness and agency, especially as symbolized through hands. And then the focus on hands brought in other thematic stuff about discovery and power and learning to control one's power - or, in the shot from Peter's vision that closes the section, failing to do so: helplessness again.
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
This section turned into free association spinning off from future!Hiro's string timelines in "Five Years Gone," combined with a continuation of the keys-and-clues motif from the previous iteration of these lines. I started by scattering in various shots from the timelines and from the future(s) that our heroes are trying to avert, and then linked in tangentially-connected visuals and bits of information: the trail of blood leading to the gun near Isaac's body suggested the shot of Mohinder raising the gun to shoot Sylar; Hiro's appearing to Peter to tell him to save the cheerleader" linked up in my head with Mohinder's realization that his sister is another one of the keys to the mystery.
I wasn't sure, at first, that I wanted to deal with the whole "alternate future" plotline, but eventually I realized I just had to go there; post-explosion NYC is exactly what our heroes are trying to get right, or put right, and future!Hiro is the perfect emblem of that. I desperately wanted to include the shot of the dates he's scribbled on the door of Isaac's loft - all the interventions that he's tried that have failed - but the clip has credits over it and I just could not get it to work in a way that I was sure people would be able to grasp on the fly.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
merryish noted in beta that the progression of the "all the love in the world" sections was one of the things I was actually starting to make good use of: "each repetition, the love gets more desperate - starts off gentle, then gets hard." Which was exactly what I wanted. I tweaked the exact shots and the timing of this section many times, but this is one of the few pieces of the song that I felt I had a handle on from the get-go.
One of the things I love most about the show is these characters' willingness to admit that they NEED each other - Peter needs his big brother to support him, Nathan needs his little brother to keep him honest; Claire needs her daddy to be there for her, Bennet needs his little girl to be safe; Hiro and Ando need each other as examples of the different things "courage" can mean; Niki and DL need Micah as the touchstone that keeps them from giving up on themselves or each other. And over the course of the season, as the characters grow up, that need stops being dependence and becomes simply a source of strength. That's part of what I was trying to get across in the various iterations of these lines.
just look up
just look up
[instrumental bridge #2]
Putting together the Crazy Momentum section in an ensemble vid was tricky because I couldn't use the intercutting tricks that I used in the equivalent sections of "Cat-Scan Hist'ry" and "New Frontier"; I simply had too many characters to juggle. So I needed to find defining moments for our major characters, visual representations of their strength and determination, moments where they do more than they knew they were capable of, moments in which they face tough decisions.The way I put it to myself in my post-beta planning notes was: "This section needs to include the ends of the heroes' journeys - the ones set up in the first bridge. It needs to show them succeeding where they struggled before."
And at the same time I wanted to complicate that story, because there's so much power in all these characters, and it's not always used for good. One of the moments that still makes me shiver is Angela Petrelli's hand on Nathan's back juxtaposed with Micah fixing the election and Sylar scattering the glass shards: three different motivations for acts that are in some ways not so dissimilar as we might wish.
[fade to static]
shati inquired about the ending: Why that particular tone for the last section of the vid? Why did you decide to kick it off with the shots of Peter backing away from Nathan?
I wanted to return to "Five Years Gone" as a sort of shorthand for all that our heroes are working to avert, but also to end that section with a sense of hope: Mohinder moves the intersection of strings. (Hands again!) The timeline can be changed; another world is possible.
I finished up the previous section, the one about defining moments, with the shot of Peter backing away from Nathan because in my reading of the show that moment is really monumentally important; it's the moment when Peter grows up, when he realizes that no matter how much he loves his brother, he can't necessarily trust him, and he can't expect him to fix everything; it's the last step of the path that Claude put him on, his ultimate realization that he has to take responsibility for his own powers and his own actions. That's not where the show left the story, obviously, but for me it's the endpoint of Peter's emotional journey in S1.
people all get ready
'cause we're coming to a stop
Visually, this section hits the reset button: we're back to the relatively still clips of the opening lines, with Claire, Peter, and Hiro representing all our heroes. But it's repetition with a difference: they're getting ready for specific tasks, confronting specific fears, making specific choices. I wanted to end the vid with the sense that these characters can do more than they could possibly have imagined when we met them, that they can make hard choices, that they will do what they believe to be right even if it is hard, even if it hurts them. They're scared, but they're also determined. They're ready.
The penultimate shot, Suresh's map, was intended to 1) suggest all the heroes I couldn't show in this last section, 2) echo back to the earlier clips of the map, pins, and string, and 3) because the photo of Nathan is the intial focal point, reference the events of the finale without having to actually show them.
last thoughts (for now)
12_12_12 wanted to know: Were there any subtle connections/choices in the vid that you want to point out to people now, in case they missed it? On the flip side, were there any cool things reviewers pointed out that were unintentional (or possibly subconsciously inserted)?
As I hope I've made clear, I benefited tremendously from my betas' pointing out interesting things I'd done accidentally and finding connections I hadn't seen or intended; once they were pointed out to me, I tried to follow through on them, build on them, make the most of them to the best of my abilities.
A couple of my favorite observations are from 12_12_12's feedback, expanded and posted in her review.
The first is about showing Molly and Micah on "breaking down the band": "It works perfectly to have Molly and Micah here: they are the future, the next generation, the next step in evolution." I hadn't thought about those clips in that light, but I think she's exactly right: it is the right lyric for them.
The second is about the parent/child relationships that are so important in the vid: "At the beginning, we see the characters depending on their parents, being comforted and protected by them, but then they're cut loose.... Ultimately, all the heroes have to realize their destiny without the physical presence of their parents to guide them. They have to grow up."
Having once again gone on at considerable length, I want to conclude by emphasizing that, in my opinion, vids should be able to stand alone without benefit of commentary or explanatory notes; so while I've talked at length here about my own intentions and goals, I don't believe that what I meant can or should outweigh whatever a viewer finds (or doesn't find) in the vid itself.
auction
oyceter asked: How was working for the auction? I know you mentioned it was a lot tougher, but how did it impact your process?
I really enjoyed doing an auction vid, although I'll definitely need a break before I do it again. *g* The most stressful thing about it was the time pressure; I've vidded to a deadline before, of course, but always under circumstances where if worst came to worst I could simply say "Sorry! I'm not done! I suck!" and not have a vid in the show. I didn't have that option this time, because there were other people involved, not to mention money on the line! And it was really important to me that the vid be not just done but at least reasonably good, because there were going to be a lot of people's names on it besides mine, and I didn't want to embarrass them.
The other way in which vidding for auction affected my process was that I tried to share drafts with the bidders, get their reactions, and take those reactions into account as I revised. (I wish I'd been able to do more of this, actually, but by the time I got a first full draft done I didn't have very many days left before it was due.) The differences between bidder reactions and beta comments (both formal and informal) on the draft were really interesting; all of the bidder comments were thoughtful, and many were quite helpful, but some appeared to assume that the vid was much more finished than it was, when in fact my vids usually change significantly, and sometimes change quite radically, between early draft(s) and final version - something I realized after the fact that I had neglected to mention, because I assumed (incorrectly) that it was obvious.
The auction experience therefore made me think about our collective language (or lack of language) for the vidding process, and how differently people use that language. For me, a first round of beta comments means conceptual discussion geared towards figuring out what's working and what needs to change, and only several drafts later, in the very final stages of beta, do we get to what we might call editing issues (tweaking timing and so on); that progression from higher-order to lower-order concerns is an approach that I've worked out with renenet and the other people who beta my vids with any regularity. But it isn't the way everybody thinks, of course, as I found when one bidder sent me final-stage editing suggestions rather than revision-oriented questions and observations. They weren't bad comments, but they were so profoundly different from what I expected (and needed) that I had to acknowledge just how completely I'd failed to communicate the most fundamental elements of my vidding processes or to interpret what this commenter meant by "beta". That was kind of embarrassing.
planning
shati wanted to know: How much of the vid was planned out before you went a-clipping?
Before I began, I had a fairly clear sense of how I wanted different sections of the vid to look and feel: I wanted the first verse to be quiet and still, lots of close-ups and small motions, and then to start using more dramatic external motion when the music swells at the end of that verse. I wanted momentum to build throughout the vid; I wanted the three iterations of the chorus to build on each other, so that the first would be fairly quiet but the later iterations would be more fraught, more dramatic or painful or ironic. I wanted the long instrumental section at the end to be about chaos and sacrifices.
So I had that big picture idea; and I had some more or less specific ideas about individual clips, which fell into three categories.
- In some cases I had fairly specific images linked to particular lines: Isaac at the window on "rebuild what's got unsteady," the push-pins and map on "what has gone between us," Peter raising his hand at the end of the first verse, Niki and Micah's forehead touch on "all the love in the world," Mohinder picking up Bennet's glasses at the beginning of the second verse, Isaac's painting of Claire on "rewrite what's gone already," the flame in Claire's mother's palm on "what has gone before us is a lot," Hiro in Times Square for the first "all the time in the world," the homecoming clock for the second "all the time in the world," Claire hugging her father after he's taken a bullet to protect her on the third "all the love in the world."
- In other cases, I had a very general sense of which characters or scenes I wanted to associate with particular lines, but I didn't have specific clips in mind yet. I knew, for example, that "newer hands" meant Mohinder and "angry hands" meant Ted; I knew I wanted shots of Isaac and Simone and Niki and DL on "what has gone between us is a lot"; I knew that "what has gone before us" meant the older generation.
- And then there were some specific images that I knew I wanted to use but hadn't settled on a placement for. This is a fairly long list, and includes some images that did not in fact make it into the final version of the vid, but also includes such clips as Hiro beaming at the clock after he makes it go backwards, Mohinder holding up a key, Claire in the train fire, Peter and his mother touching foreheads, Mohinder with his father's ashes, Micah at the pay phone, the homecoming clock, Peter fitting the painting of Claire into place, Hiro and Charlie and the thousand paper cranes, Eden shooting herself, Claire diving through the window.
12_12_12 asked: What changed most between your initial conception/draft of the vid and the final version?
The ending, definitely; I started planning the vid before the last few eps of the season had aired, so I deliberately held off on thinking about the ending until after the finale, which meant that when the finale failed to provide me with a ready-made ending I was screwed. Putting the ending together was a process that did not go at all smoothly (more on that later).
More generally, my sense of the vid's structure - the focus points of individual sections, the relationships between those sections - got much more precise as I went along, and particularly after I got beta comments. I began with a sense of the big picture and ideas about some specific clips (see above), but I had very little sense of how to connect the macro and the micro.
Put another way: if we parse the title - "people get ready" - the people never changed, but my ideas about what it meant for them to "get ready" became much more focused as I built the vid.
process
Both oyceter and shati asked about the ensemble-ness of the vid: How did you manage to balance out the characters in the cast? Were there spreadsheets and charts, or did you use only the power of your mind?
I am deeply flattered by the assumption that I am even potentially capable of making an ensemble vid using only the power of my mind. Sadly, I cannot hold that many things in my head at one time. (This is what I get for having vast sectors of my internal hard drive devoted to retaining the lyrics of a truly alarming quantity of '80s college rock.) Not being organized enough to use spreadsheets and charts, I used lists. Lots and lots of lists.
So, for example, I have a note on the original storyboard that says "Start with core group: Peter, Claire, Hiro, Matt, Niki, Mohinder, Micah, Nathan, Isaac." I checked off each name as I placed a shot of that character in the first verse. (Micah's shot ultimately got deleted because I decided I needed to show Bob The Haitian instead and had to do some reorganizing; in the final version, Micah doesn't appear until "all the love in the world.") Based on the first verse and the instrumental lead-in to the first chorus, I made another list of characters I wanted to try to show in the first chorus: Claire, Matt, Nathan, Isaac, Micah, Ando, Mr. Bennet. The vidding diary is littered with similar little lists.
One of the things I did after I had a full draft, and then again after VividCon, was to make after-the-fact lists of clips in particular sections that felt imbalanced so I could identify exactly what was causing that imbalance. After VividCon, I did this for the second bridge and I realized that I had five clips of Niki and three each of Eden and Peter, and the most any of the other characters had was two; Claire and Hiro only had one each, Micah and Mohinder didn't appear at all, and Nathan appeared but only in the background - all of which seemed wrong to me, so I swapped out some clips of Niki and Eden for some clips of other characters. I also realized that the section felt Niki-heavy not only because she had a disproportionate number of clips but because I kept putting those clips on major downbeats, so I shuffled things around to distribute not only the clips but the moments of emphasis a little more evenly.
12_12_12 wanted to know: What were the parts of the vid you found most difficult, and how did you resolve the difficulties?
The ending was by far the most difficult. Three days before I had to upload the vid for VVC, I still had no coherent exit strategy for the vid; that was not a good realization. I did three distinct and completely different drafts of the final section (all of which sucked) before I got to the VVC version, and then I tinkered with it again for the final version.
I resolved this particular difficulty by writing about it - a lot - in order to sort out what I thought my options were; I brainstormed five more-or-less different possibilities for the ending, and then I couldn't decide between them. So I cornered merryish and begged her to help me, which she very kindly did; she prodded me to talk through my ideas, made some suggestions, and articulated something that helped me enormously as I tried to figure out why certain parts of the vid were and weren't working:
Merry: It seems to me that this is a vid about what they're risking and why they're fighting more than about what happens.
As soon as she said that, many things about the vid became clear to me. I realized that I had, not surprisingly, been thinking of the endpoint of the vid as NYC GO BOOM OH NOES, not least because that is the major motivating crisis of S1. But especially in the wake of the finale, I was not actually interested in the crisis qua crisis; I was (and am) more interested in what the impending crises (large or small) in the various characters' lives inspire them to do. To use geek-speak, I had to disentangle the vid's narrative telos from the show's. I really did not want to turn the end of the vid into a Sylar/Peter face-off or into The Flying Petrelli Brothers Show, because both of those things basically bored me to tears. So my goal for the ending became to avoid the finale to a great extent, and yet to reference some of the important emotional stuff going on there. And to do that, I had to think through what each character is fighting for and how I could convey something about that purpose with the limited number of clips I could put at each character's disposal, and I had to set all that stuff up in the two instrumental bridges where I didn't have lyrics to contend with. (It is a sign of my development as a vidder, I think, that I now sometimes think of lyrics as something to contend with rather than my only port in a musical storm.)
The ending was far from the only major difficulty, though; I also struggled with the pacing. absolutedestiny pointed out that the vid kind of drags in the middle - the visuals really don't keep up with the changes in the music - which is one of those things I knew and was hoping no one would notice (yeah, well, I can dream) because I really had to leave somewhere to go in the last instrumental section. Eventually I just shrugged and banked on the music and the content of the visuals adding enough tension that the less-than-optimal tempo wouldn't be too distracting.
shati was curious: Did you by any chance keep count of how many clips you flipped horizontally, and if you did, how many was it?
I did not keep track, but I can tell you five for sure:
- Isaac looking out the window
- Niki coming into her house
- Niki raising the pinhole camera
- Claude stepping forward
- the thousand paper cranes
After rewatching I suspect that I may also have flipped
- Charlie's wink
- Claire spinning around
favorite moments
12_12_12 asked: What are your favorite aspects/clip choices/moments of the vid, and why?
Favorite moments: Peter's hand rising as the music picks up; Hiro in Times Square; Mohinder's post-it note going up and Peter's copy of Isaac's painting going down; Isaac shoving things off his table followed by Claire crashing the car; Hiro and Charlie and the thousand paper cranes; Niki snapping the guard's stick; Hiro coming into focus behind Peter on the subway car; Claire hugging her daddy on "all the love in the world"; Sylar's shards of glass turning into Nathan's balloons; Claire smiling through her tears at having saved Peter.
As for why... half of them are because the clips look cool, and half are because I have a heart made of pudding. I am only intermittently capable of being deep about the show; mostly it inspires me to "awwww" or "pretty!"
I think my favorite aspect of the vid as a whole is that I was able to represent what I love about these characters - I was able to vid them the way I saw them by the end of the season.
commentary
Before I start my commentary, I want to point out that 12_12_12's commentary in her review of the vid is as least as interesting as anything you'll hear from me; if you're interested in seeing a terrific example of how to do a detailed reading of a vid, check out her post. She even uses visual aids!
[credits]
The credits were a huge pain in the ass, especially making the first eclipse line up with the second eclipse. Way, way worse than the whole ball-into-planet thing in Thistledown Tears. No more effects for me. I know I say that every time, but this time I mean it. Although getting the letters to move was pretty cool...
people all get ready
'cause we're tearing down the stand
rebuild what's got unsteady
and see it through with newer hands
It took me a while to figure out the order I wanted for these clips, but I knew from the beginning how I wanted this section to feel: I wanted a sense of stillness, to match the hush of the music. There's lots of external motion, of course, but in conjunction with the quiet music it mostly serves to underscore the relative stillness of the characters in the frame. I wanted a sense of being on the brink of something, of - well, of getting ready for something, even though the characters themselves don't yet know what it is.
I wish I could have made Hiro the third character to appear, to parallel the end of the vid, but I tried switching him with Matt and it just didn't work, no matter how badly I wanted it to; the rhythm was off.
and what has gone between us
is a lot, is a lot
The first few shots are all about isolation; here I wanted to introduce characters' connections to each other, starting with Mohinder's pushpins and string - the forerunner of Hiro's string timelines - and continuing with relationships, both romantic and parent/child, that are complicated or troubled but still tremendously significant to our main characters.That shot of the map was a gimme; when the show hands me a literal visual like that for "threads of connections among characters," I'm not gonna not use it.
Several people, beginning as early as beta comments, have observed that "is a lot" can easily be heard as "is a lie"; personally, I hear it as written, but since I assumed that most people wouldn't know the song and wouldn't necessarily check the lyrics before listening, I tried to choose clips that wouldn't seem distractingly incomprehensible to someone hearing it the other way.
and who'll be there to clean us
when you're not, when you're not
Bob the Haitian, Bennet, Chandra Suresh: sympathetic but ambiguous characters who nevertheless stand a bit outside our core group, whose motives are not always clear, and who, in the case of Chandra Suresh, is present largely in his absence, present largely in Mohinder's struggles to understand his father's discoveries, his father's death.
[chorus #1 intro]
The tipping point: Hiro makes time go backwards for a second; Peter prepares to jump; Niki tries to see clearly (I love the metaphor of the pinhole camera and could not pass up a chance to use that visual); Mohinder discovers his father's key; Claire tests the limits of her powers.
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
First (or near-first) uses of powers. I tried to work in Hiro's martini-saving, but the tone was so different from the rest of the clips that it just didn't feel right.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
These clips are mostly uncomplicated affections between friends or between parents and children; Isaac's yearning for Simone is a little out of place in that sense, I suppose. And I put Charlie at the end of the chorus because I didn't want to introduce her as a dead girl; I wanted to show her alive and cheerful first.
people all get ready
'cause we're breaking down the bands
I love Molly and Micah, and I love seeing them use their gifts to bridge distances, to make connections.
rewrite what's gone already
Isaac's vision of Claire, Charlie's death: two unhappy fates our heroes are trying to avert.
and see it through with angry hands
"Angry hands" was always Ted for me, even though I wanted to avoid the literalism of actually showing his burning hands. And seeing it through - I wanted Peter's determination, his commitment to saving the cheerleader in order to save the world, even if it means that, as Ando points out, he's going to die.
and what has gone before us
is a lot, is a lot
and who'll be there to ignore us
when you're not, when you're not
I figured out pretty early on that "what has gone before us" would be the older generation, but it took 12_12_12's beta comments to help me figure out that this entire stanza should be about the older generation: "The theme for this part could be how the older generation (Mrs. Petrelli, Charles [Deveaux], Linderman, Papa Nakamura) have tried to 'ignore' the autonomy of the younger, and tried to force the next generation into their plans." Hey, I know enough to steal a good idea when I see it.
I was glad to be able to work Claude into this section, too, because he's so important not only to Peter (and Bennet, though we don't see that in the vid) but to the themes of the show as I understand them; Peter is looking for a new father, a mentor, a guide - and yeah, Claude is that for him, just briefly, but part of what Peter learns from Claude is that he has to be responsible for himself, for his decisions and his actions. He has to grow up.
[chorus #2 intro]
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
Aside from the ending, this is the chunk of the vid that was probably the most incoherent in the beta export (although the entire last half was, uh, pretty bad in that regard). I really had no idea what I was doing. Once again, 12_12_12 found a thread running through the labyrinth; she noted that a few shots did seem to be working, and observed that "All of these elements are linked by the fact that these characters are looking at these strange symbols and/or encoded messages, and are trying to figure out what they mean." elynross noted the same thing in her beta comments, referring to the "guides" in this section. So that became the center of gravity: signs and symbols, keys and connections, and getting it right means figuring out not just what they mean but also what to do with that knowledge.
In the beta draft, the "Are you sure you want to quit?" clip was followed immediately by the shot of Mohinder choosing "NO," but I came to realize that this was wrong, that what I needed to show (here and elsewhere in the vid) was the moment before: the moment before deciding, the moment before acting, the moment before the climax. Those of us who watch the show already know what happens; I wanted to emphasize the hesitation, the indrawn breath, the acceptance of responsibility. At this moment, Mohinder really ISN'T sure. He WANTS to be sure; he wants to do the right thing. But the answer is not as obvious to him as it is to us in retrospect; it is not as clear as the first draft made it seem.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
Nathan splashing paint on the canvas is a shot that was in the beta version, but not in a place that made much sense (or that made use of the visual drama of the gesture); once I knew what I was doing with the first half of the chorus, the clip turned out to be a logical transition between the first half of the chorus (the interpretation of symbols) and the second half (the longing, though not always the power, to protect loved ones): Nathan destroys the painting in an attempt to save Peter. This section was the hardest of the three iterations of the chorus; it was fairly easy to see how to begin and end, but finding the right shots for this one took a while; I had way too many quiet/static moments at first.
just look up
just look up
just look up
[instrumental bridge #1]
I knew I wanted this section to have a sense of impending doom, but the beta version was really a mess; it took this crazy left turn into straight-up narrative and had way too much Sylar in it, way too many shots from "Homecoming." Because it was so narrative-heavy, it pretty much completely lacked thematic coherence, which meant that the net effect was less "impending doom" than "WTF?" The one thing in it that I really liked was the sequence of Isaac shoving stuff off the table followed by Claire crashing the quarterback's car. I liked that sequence because it was visually nifty, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a possible template for the rest of the section: a combination of helplessness and agency, especially as symbolized through hands. And then the focus on hands brought in other thematic stuff about discovery and power and learning to control one's power - or, in the shot from Peter's vision that closes the section, failing to do so: helplessness again.
and we have all the time in the world
to get it right, to get it right
This section turned into free association spinning off from future!Hiro's string timelines in "Five Years Gone," combined with a continuation of the keys-and-clues motif from the previous iteration of these lines. I started by scattering in various shots from the timelines and from the future(s) that our heroes are trying to avert, and then linked in tangentially-connected visuals and bits of information: the trail of blood leading to the gun near Isaac's body suggested the shot of Mohinder raising the gun to shoot Sylar; Hiro's appearing to Peter to tell him to save the cheerleader" linked up in my head with Mohinder's realization that his sister is another one of the keys to the mystery.
I wasn't sure, at first, that I wanted to deal with the whole "alternate future" plotline, but eventually I realized I just had to go there; post-explosion NYC is exactly what our heroes are trying to get right, or put right, and future!Hiro is the perfect emblem of that. I desperately wanted to include the shot of the dates he's scribbled on the door of Isaac's loft - all the interventions that he's tried that have failed - but the clip has credits over it and I just could not get it to work in a way that I was sure people would be able to grasp on the fly.
and we have all the love in the world
to set alight, to set alight
merryish noted in beta that the progression of the "all the love in the world" sections was one of the things I was actually starting to make good use of: "each repetition, the love gets more desperate - starts off gentle, then gets hard." Which was exactly what I wanted. I tweaked the exact shots and the timing of this section many times, but this is one of the few pieces of the song that I felt I had a handle on from the get-go.
One of the things I love most about the show is these characters' willingness to admit that they NEED each other - Peter needs his big brother to support him, Nathan needs his little brother to keep him honest; Claire needs her daddy to be there for her, Bennet needs his little girl to be safe; Hiro and Ando need each other as examples of the different things "courage" can mean; Niki and DL need Micah as the touchstone that keeps them from giving up on themselves or each other. And over the course of the season, as the characters grow up, that need stops being dependence and becomes simply a source of strength. That's part of what I was trying to get across in the various iterations of these lines.
just look up
just look up
[instrumental bridge #2]
Putting together the Crazy Momentum section in an ensemble vid was tricky because I couldn't use the intercutting tricks that I used in the equivalent sections of "Cat-Scan Hist'ry" and "New Frontier"; I simply had too many characters to juggle. So I needed to find defining moments for our major characters, visual representations of their strength and determination, moments where they do more than they knew they were capable of, moments in which they face tough decisions.The way I put it to myself in my post-beta planning notes was: "This section needs to include the ends of the heroes' journeys - the ones set up in the first bridge. It needs to show them succeeding where they struggled before."
And at the same time I wanted to complicate that story, because there's so much power in all these characters, and it's not always used for good. One of the moments that still makes me shiver is Angela Petrelli's hand on Nathan's back juxtaposed with Micah fixing the election and Sylar scattering the glass shards: three different motivations for acts that are in some ways not so dissimilar as we might wish.
[fade to static]
shati inquired about the ending: Why that particular tone for the last section of the vid? Why did you decide to kick it off with the shots of Peter backing away from Nathan?
I wanted to return to "Five Years Gone" as a sort of shorthand for all that our heroes are working to avert, but also to end that section with a sense of hope: Mohinder moves the intersection of strings. (Hands again!) The timeline can be changed; another world is possible.
I finished up the previous section, the one about defining moments, with the shot of Peter backing away from Nathan because in my reading of the show that moment is really monumentally important; it's the moment when Peter grows up, when he realizes that no matter how much he loves his brother, he can't necessarily trust him, and he can't expect him to fix everything; it's the last step of the path that Claude put him on, his ultimate realization that he has to take responsibility for his own powers and his own actions. That's not where the show left the story, obviously, but for me it's the endpoint of Peter's emotional journey in S1.
people all get ready
'cause we're coming to a stop
Visually, this section hits the reset button: we're back to the relatively still clips of the opening lines, with Claire, Peter, and Hiro representing all our heroes. But it's repetition with a difference: they're getting ready for specific tasks, confronting specific fears, making specific choices. I wanted to end the vid with the sense that these characters can do more than they could possibly have imagined when we met them, that they can make hard choices, that they will do what they believe to be right even if it is hard, even if it hurts them. They're scared, but they're also determined. They're ready.
The penultimate shot, Suresh's map, was intended to 1) suggest all the heroes I couldn't show in this last section, 2) echo back to the earlier clips of the map, pins, and string, and 3) because the photo of Nathan is the intial focal point, reference the events of the finale without having to actually show them.
last thoughts (for now)
12_12_12 wanted to know: Were there any subtle connections/choices in the vid that you want to point out to people now, in case they missed it? On the flip side, were there any cool things reviewers pointed out that were unintentional (or possibly subconsciously inserted)?
As I hope I've made clear, I benefited tremendously from my betas' pointing out interesting things I'd done accidentally and finding connections I hadn't seen or intended; once they were pointed out to me, I tried to follow through on them, build on them, make the most of them to the best of my abilities.
A couple of my favorite observations are from 12_12_12's feedback, expanded and posted in her review.
The first is about showing Molly and Micah on "breaking down the band": "It works perfectly to have Molly and Micah here: they are the future, the next generation, the next step in evolution." I hadn't thought about those clips in that light, but I think she's exactly right: it is the right lyric for them.
The second is about the parent/child relationships that are so important in the vid: "At the beginning, we see the characters depending on their parents, being comforted and protected by them, but then they're cut loose.... Ultimately, all the heroes have to realize their destiny without the physical presence of their parents to guide them. They have to grow up."
Having once again gone on at considerable length, I want to conclude by emphasizing that, in my opinion, vids should be able to stand alone without benefit of commentary or explanatory notes; so while I've talked at length here about my own intentions and goals, I don't believe that what I meant can or should outweigh whatever a viewer finds (or doesn't find) in the vid itself.