Love Turns 40: A Study in Drafts
This is something I've been meaning to do for, oh, a few years now, and bradcpu mentioning it to me the other day is the kick in the ass I needed to finally set aside time for it.
In 2008 I released the vid Love Turns 40 from the film Closer. I mentioned in the vid notes that it took me a year to make because it went through several incarnations. Not just several drafts, which is how all of my vids are made (changing 25% of clips and 50% of timing), but several completely different versions with their own particular aesthetic/effect gimmick and new batch of clips. Making this vid was truly a process of evolution that I found very interesting (not to mention exhausting, frustrating, and insanity-inducing). I'm posting this on the offchance that others may find it interesting as well. If this appears an exercise in ego, which is unintended, please feel free to scroll on by. (Showing drafts to people is actually kind of scary, so I'm telling myself this is an act in bravery and battling my insecurities, heh.)
Quick notes!
- These drafts are only the first 3 minutes of the vid. I didn't really touch the back section until I got the front section worked out. When the screen goes black, you can stop watching.
- The password for all streaming video in this post is closer.
- Casting: Julia Roberts = Anna, Natalie Portman = Alice, Jude Law = Dan, Clive Owen = Larry
Version 1:
It's been long enough now that I don't remember all the specifics of what my mindset was at the time I made these, but I will try to make this interesting for you, heh. In the beginning (fall 2007) I set out to make this vid look different than my previous work. I started by playing with color. I wanted this vid to use a lot of black and white, which I'd never done before. I was going to use color or b&w to show...well, I didn't really know and I was fine with that. Because it was going to be ARTSY and COOL! I was still very new to vidding and wanted to push the boundaries of my work, which is great in theory, but you have to have a PLAN or something. *handwaves*
What ended up taking shape first was an attempt at using black and white to show the "reality" of the relationships they're in (but don't want to be) while using color to show the "fantasy" world -- the elicit affairs they DO want to be in. Or something like that. You know, b&w = boring, color = alive! (My originality, let me show you it.) See below re: 0:45 when Dan kisses Alice in the b&w and then looks to Anna and it goes to color. But then I found I couldn't sustain it during things like, oh, when it's Anna and Alice together (not a relationship thing) because putting them in the "reality" color meant my default palette for this vid was now black and white and I wasn't sure if I wanted that. Oops. I did know I wanted to use fade to whites instead of fade to blacks, as the movie does, and I overused the Ulead "quick flash" effect (or whatever it's called), as I did a lot in those days.
Love Turns 40, version 1 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
So many things are fun for me when I watch this draft back. First, look! Clips I forgot existed! Daww. ♥ What's really neat, though, is seeing how much stayed the same from this first version in the fourth and final version. (All of this will change as we move forward, so it's neat seeing how I came full-circle and returned to it.)
The basic structure of the vid was established here for me to return to later:
- introduce the two couples, and show that Anna is a big cheat
- bring Alice and Anna into the same room, show the tension, take the picture
- Alice's "don't go" plea for the first chorus, which seems to work
- bring Alice and Anna back together for more tension
- show the Anna/Larry side next, giving them the second chorus
- lots of spinny movement things from the 3-minute mark on, heh
The scenes I used are more or less the same, consequently. The other neat thing to see is the "benchmark" clips I set here and returned to in the final version:
- the pull away from the kiss at 0:13
- the elevator at 0:33
- taking the picture at 1:02
- the rose on the pillow at 1:23
- Larry stepping into the kitchen at 1:29
There are, of course, also key differences between this version and the others. There's a lot of focus on the Larry/Alice relationship here, which I tried doing to balance how heavily I was showing the Dan/Anna relationship. The problem is that in the movie, Larry and Alice never actually have a relationship, just sex, so there wasn't much to show that didn't make Alice look like a big stripper skank. I tried making balance where there is imbalance, and surprise! It didn't work.
You may have also noticed that I used the clip of Alice looking into the mirror 3 times. (WHAT I LIKE THAT CLIP A LOT OKAY.) I can't help if it fits everywhere! *bites lip*
I was very attached to the string bass in the beginning of the vid, and I hung a lot on using those notes to dictate my cutting. Obviously the credits had a makeover as time went on.
All the movement stuff in the instrumental portion is literally me just stringing together clips with no purpose whatsoever. That was how I saw what clips I had at my disposal, lest they get lost in my Ulead library and I forget about them. Pay no attention to the clips behind the curtain.
So, anyway, as you can see, this vid was not working. Didn't know what it was trying to say, the way I was trying to say it was messy, and it's altogether a big pile of mud. Mud that changes color. For no clear reason at all.
Version 2:
Okay, time to strip out everything and start ALL OVER! \o/ Woohoo!
I still wanted to use a lot of black & white, but I had to have real PURPOSE, damnit. I needed some PRINCIPLES. (Like the Church of England.) Through conversation with Courtney (omg hours and hours and HOURS AND HOURS), one of us had the stroke of genius to take Anna's photographer profession and use it to our advantage! I could make the vid look like a collection of photographs intercut with video of real life! And that's how I could work in the black & white -- making the photos in b&w and the video in color! BRILLIANT!
Love Turns 40, version 2 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
To this day I still don't know if it's actually a decent concept that was just not wielded well by my shaky, newbie hands, or if it's a crap concept that unsurprisingly looks like crap here, heh. But either way, it was, shall we say, NOT DAZZLING, so it had to go.
I find this version interesting to watch because I completely redid so, so much of the narrative. There's so much Larry/Anna, while the movie focuses more on Dan/Anna. Yet, I don't seem to show the Dan/Anna ANYWHERE AT ALL. What is this secret she's not telling? WHO KNOWS. APPARENTLY I WON'T TELL YOU EITHER. /o\ I actually made it look like Larry is the one having the affair, not Anna, which isn't true to canon. Oops. And as you can tell by the fact that it cuts out at the 2 minute mark, I had NO IDEA where to go next with this version and pretty much had to scrap the whole thing yet again. (Keep in mind that I was vidding with a linear editor, so I couldn't just throw new stuff on a higher track and keep the old stuff. I could start a new project file, but I had no access to any clip sequences I wanted to move from one version to another.) I chalk a lot of the inconsistencies in this version up to the fact that the first one was still so fresh in my mind, and I was watching this with the knowledge of film context and the memory of the first vid, as if my viewers would have seen all of those Dan/Anna clips and everything else. Whoops.
A few other notes on this version:
While going back through the movie, I found the Strangers invitation and said omg I have to use that, so this was where the credits started to evolve into what they are today. We also have the first appearance of Alice waving to the violin strings at 1:53, which is one of my favorite moments in the final vid.
And okay, I have to address this because it's so RIDICULOUS: at 0:59 we learn that Alice is an "ugly child" by looking through a camera at her and seeing she is sekritly a SKANKY STRIPPER FROM 1922 OMG! (WHAT WAS I THINKING. I HONESTLY DON'T KNOW.) I think I didn't know what other clips to use as photographs of her? Maybe I was holding out on clips to use later in the vid? (That was another problem with this photographs approach -- I didn't want to use the same clip in both still and moving form, so I ended up losing a lot of viable footage from a movie that only has 12 scenes to begin with.) Mostly I just want to apologize to you for insulting your intelligence by making you watch those clips. I'm very sorry. Hopefully that part made you laugh as hard as it makes me laugh.
Version 3:
Not surprisingly, I gutted the vid yet AGAIN and started over. I was really, really flaily at this point and had no idea where the hell to take it or what would work. At this point, something like 8 or 9 months had passed since I started the first version. This vid was my vendetta in life. It HAUNTED me. I was still dead set on it having effects to make it fancy-like, I just didn't know what to do with the narrative. I have pages and pages of notes where I wrote out the scenes I had and the order I could put them in to line up against the lyrics. See, there really are only 2 scenes where Larry and Alice are in the same room, for example, and in only one of those is she not dressed like a stripper, so I had to be really careful about how I built the story to give myself room to use scenes to the fullest against the lyrics without repeating anything. I still had no clue how to do it, but damnit, I just couldn't give up on this vid no matter how much I wanted to.
Love Turns 40, version 3 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
Okay, apparently this movie is actually called Anna Has Two Lovers and did you know Natalie Portman is also in it? Surprise! Because she is clearly not worth being in my vid anymore! I remember this third version was an AU, but for the life of me I can't remember what exactly that AU was. (Other than a movie that starred Natalie Portman but didn't actually include her much.) I think my perspective was that I couldn't find the balance to include Alice's character much because I hated focusing on the stripper aspect, so I decided to scrap her perspective altogether. The movie itself has 4 relationships: each woman with each man. I tried making the vid only focusing on Anna's two relationships, and it didn't really work. Plus, I tooooootally ran out of clips. Which, wow, completely shocking considering I tried eliminating HALF THE MOVIE.
On the other hand, hey now, it's starting to look like the final vid a little! I see some familiar clips in their places! *waves to them* I was still trying the whole photograph angle, as it was now An Anna Vid, but I'm so glad I ended up dropping that. And the credits are there now, yay. You may see that the text is crisper here than in the final version. That's because I actually used this clip, exported from Ulead, in Premiere for the final vid. I didn't know how to use the Premiere title function yet and decided it was easier to do that, even though it pixellated the text.
So yet again, another version of this vid that wasn't the worst thing I'd ever seen but still wasn't right. I opened my brand new copy of Premiere and started over for the fourth and final time, deciding to scrap the effects altogether, save for a few necessary fade-to-whites. I went for a basic retelling of the movie as best I could, showing the balance of the four relationships. I didn't try anything fancy, I just wanted it to make sense. I went back through the three versions and pulled out the bits I liked most about them, and went from there. And much to my surprise, it fell together pretty quickly. I tacked on the last 2 minutes with very little trouble, and suddenly I had a vid.
Love Turns 40 from jarrow on Vimeo.
The morale of this story is, I think, a form of Occam's Razor. When your vid isn't working, cut out all the excess crap and go with simple. You can rebuild from there as needed. This was also a great exercise in sticking with a vid that I knew could be right if I looked at it from the right angle. I still feel this is one of my better vids, and taking into account all the work that went into it, far and away the most of any of my vids, I'm really proud of it.
I hope you have enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the most crazy-making year of my vidding life. *curtsies*
In 2008 I released the vid Love Turns 40 from the film Closer. I mentioned in the vid notes that it took me a year to make because it went through several incarnations. Not just several drafts, which is how all of my vids are made (changing 25% of clips and 50% of timing), but several completely different versions with their own particular aesthetic/effect gimmick and new batch of clips. Making this vid was truly a process of evolution that I found very interesting (not to mention exhausting, frustrating, and insanity-inducing). I'm posting this on the offchance that others may find it interesting as well. If this appears an exercise in ego, which is unintended, please feel free to scroll on by. (Showing drafts to people is actually kind of scary, so I'm telling myself this is an act in bravery and battling my insecurities, heh.)
Quick notes!
- These drafts are only the first 3 minutes of the vid. I didn't really touch the back section until I got the front section worked out. When the screen goes black, you can stop watching.
- The password for all streaming video in this post is closer.
- Casting: Julia Roberts = Anna, Natalie Portman = Alice, Jude Law = Dan, Clive Owen = Larry
Version 1:
It's been long enough now that I don't remember all the specifics of what my mindset was at the time I made these, but I will try to make this interesting for you, heh. In the beginning (fall 2007) I set out to make this vid look different than my previous work. I started by playing with color. I wanted this vid to use a lot of black and white, which I'd never done before. I was going to use color or b&w to show...well, I didn't really know and I was fine with that. Because it was going to be ARTSY and COOL! I was still very new to vidding and wanted to push the boundaries of my work, which is great in theory, but you have to have a PLAN or something. *handwaves*
What ended up taking shape first was an attempt at using black and white to show the "reality" of the relationships they're in (but don't want to be) while using color to show the "fantasy" world -- the elicit affairs they DO want to be in. Or something like that. You know, b&w = boring, color = alive! (My originality, let me show you it.) See below re: 0:45 when Dan kisses Alice in the b&w and then looks to Anna and it goes to color. But then I found I couldn't sustain it during things like, oh, when it's Anna and Alice together (not a relationship thing) because putting them in the "reality" color meant my default palette for this vid was now black and white and I wasn't sure if I wanted that. Oops. I did know I wanted to use fade to whites instead of fade to blacks, as the movie does, and I overused the Ulead "quick flash" effect (or whatever it's called), as I did a lot in those days.
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Love Turns 40, version 1 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
So many things are fun for me when I watch this draft back. First, look! Clips I forgot existed! Daww. ♥ What's really neat, though, is seeing how much stayed the same from this first version in the fourth and final version. (All of this will change as we move forward, so it's neat seeing how I came full-circle and returned to it.)
The basic structure of the vid was established here for me to return to later:
- introduce the two couples, and show that Anna is a big cheat
- bring Alice and Anna into the same room, show the tension, take the picture
- Alice's "don't go" plea for the first chorus, which seems to work
- bring Alice and Anna back together for more tension
- show the Anna/Larry side next, giving them the second chorus
- lots of spinny movement things from the 3-minute mark on, heh
The scenes I used are more or less the same, consequently. The other neat thing to see is the "benchmark" clips I set here and returned to in the final version:
- the pull away from the kiss at 0:13
- the elevator at 0:33
- taking the picture at 1:02
- the rose on the pillow at 1:23
- Larry stepping into the kitchen at 1:29
There are, of course, also key differences between this version and the others. There's a lot of focus on the Larry/Alice relationship here, which I tried doing to balance how heavily I was showing the Dan/Anna relationship. The problem is that in the movie, Larry and Alice never actually have a relationship, just sex, so there wasn't much to show that didn't make Alice look like a big stripper skank. I tried making balance where there is imbalance, and surprise! It didn't work.
You may have also noticed that I used the clip of Alice looking into the mirror 3 times. (WHAT I LIKE THAT CLIP A LOT OKAY.) I can't help if it fits everywhere! *bites lip*
I was very attached to the string bass in the beginning of the vid, and I hung a lot on using those notes to dictate my cutting. Obviously the credits had a makeover as time went on.
All the movement stuff in the instrumental portion is literally me just stringing together clips with no purpose whatsoever. That was how I saw what clips I had at my disposal, lest they get lost in my Ulead library and I forget about them. Pay no attention to the clips behind the curtain.
So, anyway, as you can see, this vid was not working. Didn't know what it was trying to say, the way I was trying to say it was messy, and it's altogether a big pile of mud. Mud that changes color. For no clear reason at all.
Version 2:
Okay, time to strip out everything and start ALL OVER! \o/ Woohoo!
I still wanted to use a lot of black & white, but I had to have real PURPOSE, damnit. I needed some PRINCIPLES. (Like the Church of England.) Through conversation with Courtney (omg hours and hours and HOURS AND HOURS), one of us had the stroke of genius to take Anna's photographer profession and use it to our advantage! I could make the vid look like a collection of photographs intercut with video of real life! And that's how I could work in the black & white -- making the photos in b&w and the video in color! BRILLIANT!
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Love Turns 40, version 2 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
To this day I still don't know if it's actually a decent concept that was just not wielded well by my shaky, newbie hands, or if it's a crap concept that unsurprisingly looks like crap here, heh. But either way, it was, shall we say, NOT DAZZLING, so it had to go.
I find this version interesting to watch because I completely redid so, so much of the narrative. There's so much Larry/Anna, while the movie focuses more on Dan/Anna. Yet, I don't seem to show the Dan/Anna ANYWHERE AT ALL. What is this secret she's not telling? WHO KNOWS. APPARENTLY I WON'T TELL YOU EITHER. /o\ I actually made it look like Larry is the one having the affair, not Anna, which isn't true to canon. Oops. And as you can tell by the fact that it cuts out at the 2 minute mark, I had NO IDEA where to go next with this version and pretty much had to scrap the whole thing yet again. (Keep in mind that I was vidding with a linear editor, so I couldn't just throw new stuff on a higher track and keep the old stuff. I could start a new project file, but I had no access to any clip sequences I wanted to move from one version to another.) I chalk a lot of the inconsistencies in this version up to the fact that the first one was still so fresh in my mind, and I was watching this with the knowledge of film context and the memory of the first vid, as if my viewers would have seen all of those Dan/Anna clips and everything else. Whoops.
A few other notes on this version:
While going back through the movie, I found the Strangers invitation and said omg I have to use that, so this was where the credits started to evolve into what they are today. We also have the first appearance of Alice waving to the violin strings at 1:53, which is one of my favorite moments in the final vid.
And okay, I have to address this because it's so RIDICULOUS: at 0:59 we learn that Alice is an "ugly child" by looking through a camera at her and seeing she is sekritly a SKANKY STRIPPER FROM 1922 OMG! (WHAT WAS I THINKING. I HONESTLY DON'T KNOW.) I think I didn't know what other clips to use as photographs of her? Maybe I was holding out on clips to use later in the vid? (That was another problem with this photographs approach -- I didn't want to use the same clip in both still and moving form, so I ended up losing a lot of viable footage from a movie that only has 12 scenes to begin with.) Mostly I just want to apologize to you for insulting your intelligence by making you watch those clips. I'm very sorry. Hopefully that part made you laugh as hard as it makes me laugh.
Version 3:
Not surprisingly, I gutted the vid yet AGAIN and started over. I was really, really flaily at this point and had no idea where the hell to take it or what would work. At this point, something like 8 or 9 months had passed since I started the first version. This vid was my vendetta in life. It HAUNTED me. I was still dead set on it having effects to make it fancy-like, I just didn't know what to do with the narrative. I have pages and pages of notes where I wrote out the scenes I had and the order I could put them in to line up against the lyrics. See, there really are only 2 scenes where Larry and Alice are in the same room, for example, and in only one of those is she not dressed like a stripper, so I had to be really careful about how I built the story to give myself room to use scenes to the fullest against the lyrics without repeating anything. I still had no clue how to do it, but damnit, I just couldn't give up on this vid no matter how much I wanted to.
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Love Turns 40, version 3 (draft) from jarrow on Vimeo.
Okay, apparently this movie is actually called Anna Has Two Lovers and did you know Natalie Portman is also in it? Surprise! Because she is clearly not worth being in my vid anymore! I remember this third version was an AU, but for the life of me I can't remember what exactly that AU was. (Other than a movie that starred Natalie Portman but didn't actually include her much.) I think my perspective was that I couldn't find the balance to include Alice's character much because I hated focusing on the stripper aspect, so I decided to scrap her perspective altogether. The movie itself has 4 relationships: each woman with each man. I tried making the vid only focusing on Anna's two relationships, and it didn't really work. Plus, I tooooootally ran out of clips. Which, wow, completely shocking considering I tried eliminating HALF THE MOVIE.
On the other hand, hey now, it's starting to look like the final vid a little! I see some familiar clips in their places! *waves to them* I was still trying the whole photograph angle, as it was now An Anna Vid, but I'm so glad I ended up dropping that. And the credits are there now, yay. You may see that the text is crisper here than in the final version. That's because I actually used this clip, exported from Ulead, in Premiere for the final vid. I didn't know how to use the Premiere title function yet and decided it was easier to do that, even though it pixellated the text.
So yet again, another version of this vid that wasn't the worst thing I'd ever seen but still wasn't right. I opened my brand new copy of Premiere and started over for the fourth and final time, deciding to scrap the effects altogether, save for a few necessary fade-to-whites. I went for a basic retelling of the movie as best I could, showing the balance of the four relationships. I didn't try anything fancy, I just wanted it to make sense. I went back through the three versions and pulled out the bits I liked most about them, and went from there. And much to my surprise, it fell together pretty quickly. I tacked on the last 2 minutes with very little trouble, and suddenly I had a vid.
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Love Turns 40 from jarrow on Vimeo.
The morale of this story is, I think, a form of Occam's Razor. When your vid isn't working, cut out all the excess crap and go with simple. You can rebuild from there as needed. This was also a great exercise in sticking with a vid that I knew could be right if I looked at it from the right angle. I still feel this is one of my better vids, and taking into account all the work that went into it, far and away the most of any of my vids, I'm really proud of it.
I hope you have enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the most crazy-making year of my vidding life. *curtsies*