NEW VID: "Warriors"
My first VVC Premiere in 4 years (unless you count Auction), and lordy, this vid made me work for it. It was worth it.
"Warriors"
Source: The 100
Music: Imagine Dragons
Summary: Here we are. (A recruiter vid)
Warning: Graphic violence
Download: [here] (88MB, mp4)
Tumblr: [here]
This vid wouldn't be what it is without all the help Alicia contributed during our hell week together ♥ Big thanks also to trelkez and Laura Shapiro for great, helpful beta! And thank you anoel for being a great cheerleader the whole way!
password: 100
As a child you would wait and watch from far away.
But you always knew that you'd be the one that work while they all play
In youth, you'd lay awake at night and scheme
Of all the things that you would change, but it was just a dream
Here we are, don't turn away now (don't turn away)
We are the warriors that built this town from dust
The time will come, when you'll have to rise
Above the rest and prove yourself
Your spirit never dies
Farewell, I've gone to take my throne above
Don't weep for me
Cause this will be the labor of my love
Here we are, don't turn away now (don't turn away)
We are the warriors that built this town from dust
I have a lot to say; forgive me. It's been years since I made a vid this "big," and I really enjoy talking about it.
This song first crossed my Pandora a few months ago, and it caught my ear immediately. I filed it away in my mental "exciting songs with potential" folder. The second time it came around, I was further in my initial watch of The 100, early season two I think, but I'd seen enough to know that this could be a great match. I would ask my roommate things like, "Okay, don't spoil me, but there wouldn't happen to be scenes coming up where they march off to war? Maybe?" Then, as I watched the back half of the season (which comprises about 75% of this vid), I was mentally clipping as the episodes played, and I became more and more excited about what was unfolding on my screen. When they DID march off to war, I about lost my mind. \o/ THANK YOU, SHOW.
This show is so rich with plot and characters (for those following along at home, there are TEN strong females with names and lines and stories. TEN.) Trying to follow any particular plot line would leave room for nothing else. It's a short song, so doing a kitchen sink vid with any carry-through would be incredibly difficult and overwhelming. I had to make some tough decisions to pare it down. I decided to go for a basic recruiting vid that introduced the primary conflicts and then had them fighting and stuff. Because, you know, Warriors. Discover the rest on your own. (And, for those of you reading who are familiar with the source, isn't it kind of hilarious how much I had to leave out?!)
The show is, in parts, a territorial pissing contest, but it's so much more than that. So many of the decisions and morally ambiguous conversations around violence are what make the show interesting to me on a critical level; it's not just all blood and guts. But there is no way I could vid, for example, Octavia's backstory and everything Raven goes through and the awesomeness of Abby Griffin and the entire Clarke/Lexa relationship and all the things I like about this show. Those things will have to wait for other vids. For now, I could show some elements that felt familiar because of my work with BSG, and that would still be super fun. Mostly, I wanted to convey: BADASS LADIES BEING BADASSES. PLEASE WATCH THIS SHOW OF BADASS LADIES. That was one point on which I refused to budge -- all the big emotional moments would show female warriors, not males.
It was clear to me right away that the lyrics mandated a focus on the three leaders of the three groups -- Clarke (Sky People), Cage (Mountain Men), and Lexa (Grounders). I mean, it was kind of crazy when I actually listened to the words. Clarke IS the one who was watching from far away and has to work while they all play (quite literally!) Cage IS the one who wants to change things from the way his father runs them! Lexa IS the one who has to rise and prove herself on the throne! (Not to mention they believe in reincarnation of leaders and her "spirit never dies," just a fun tidbit for those with context.) So yeah, I was THRILLED at how the lyrics matched up.
But I don't know if I've vidded a POV switch since maybe Love Turns 40. It's just not something I do much. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to pull it off. (Maybe I didn't! You tell me!) Until I just pasted the lyrics into this post, I thought "In youth" was "and you," so that felt like a fine place for a POV switch mid-verse at the time. (Oh well, it's fine.) So then it became about the anvil strategy of showing at least 3 clips in a row of each face to establish POV for that verse. Plus making it clear it's a person in a new setting. Plus showing they are the leader of that community/setting. Because only then can I show them in conflict with the other groups in the choruses. And I had, like, the space of 8 clips to do all of these things. I did worry that my clip choices would be severely restricted by all these rules and hoops I had to jump through. That it'd be more formulaic than interesting. At this point, I've watched it over 100 times so I've lost every shred of objectivity and don't even know anymore. I can only hope that it's clear enough to be cohesive and nifty enough to be entertaining. I do know that this vid is paced much more slowly than my vids tend to be; there's no fast cutting section, really, unless you could a tiny bit at the end. I wanted to let the clips breathe more so you can really see who's in them. That's important here. I'm trying to tell you something, damnit, not just make you go "oooooh."
So, as I'm battling these structural limitations (that I've created myself, remember), I then faced two big problems. One, spoiler, these people do not actually go to war. Not in the literal sense. There is plenty of fighting on the smaller level, but not some big epic battle scene like in LotR or Narnia or whatever. So, I had to try to manufacture scenes using what I did have. Secondly, the three leaders DO NOT DO ANYTHIIIIIIIIIIING. They just sit around and look angsty all the time! (Clarke does a little bit, but not in ways I needed visually.) So, as I was trying to visually establish my POV characters, I then realized that they are not actually the 'warriors who built this town' at all. It's their sidekicks -- Octavia, Indra, Bellamy, etc -- who bring the action. All my interesting shots, the ones I insisted appear in the vid, the ones that would sell it, were of these secondary characters. So then I had to decide how many to show, and who could appear more than once, because this cast is huge and I had to be selective. (Those of you who go watch this show, you will laugh at how many actors you know from other things who were omitted from this vid. It's literally like five.) And then I had to connect them to the respective leaders visually. Plus, you know, create the gradual escalation of violence to matching the rise in the song without giving away too much plot to those who want to try the show. (Which was hard, because, again, 75% of the vid is from the final 8 episodes that aired to date.) But still show enough fighting to justify the song choice.
It probably doesn't look like it, but there is so much intentionality in every single clip of this vid, heh. More is happening than appears!
But apparently I give no fucks about spoiling you for ladykissing. SPOILER THERE IS LADYKISSING AND IT'S AWESOME.
Actually, this is funny, because I originally didn't have that clip in the vid at all. I felt like it was too easy for me to play that card, and too predictably 'me' to have femslash/lesbians in a jarrow vid. I originally had the kiss over the lyric "labor of my love," but all the clips before and after didn't work with it at all, so I took it out. I sent a draft to Jen and Laura for beta, and this happened:
Laura, in email: You've done all the things that are essential in a recruiter vid: [other stuff], you've hinted at a ship...
me, in reply: Ahahaha, this is delightful. I wasn't really intending to? I mean, well, ok. So, the blonde in the first verse and the brunette in the third verse, I assume you mean them? Well, guess what. Spoiler! They actually become canon! YES. THEY DO. THEY KISS AND EVERYTHING. The kiss was one of the first clips I laid down, and I took it out later because it was just gratuitous and didn't fit. So yes, I am highly amused that you picked up a ship from this :-D I actively tried to not show my lesbian bias!! Heeee.
Laura: PUT THE KISS BACK IN.
trelkez (in chat): all big it's pretty clear to me who is who but I think you are going to have a Lois Lane has two hair colors problem if you don't have a stronger twoshot of them somewhere
jarrow: ok well there is that moment when they kiss
jarrow: so
jarrow: Laura said I should use that, lol
trelkez: ...
trelkez: and you didn't why
[later]
trelkez: do you have a version for me yet with more gay?
SORRY! SORRY FRIENDS FOR FAILING BY LEAVING OUT THE GAY. IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN.
Most of this vid fell into place very quickly. Each verse had its POV character, and I knew which conflict went in which chorus, and I knew the big fire 'splosions went at the end. The very first clips I laid down were Octavia rising up at 2:19 (though, admittedly, a different shot of that same moment) and Indra behind the door opening at 1:30. Those, plus the raised swords at 2:25 were the lynchpins of the vid for me. (THE SOUND I MADE WHEN I FIRST WATCHED THAT CLIP IN THE EPISODE, KNOWING RIGHT WHERE IT WOULD GO. OMG Y'ALL.) I knew the kind of emotional feel I wanted for those moments, I just had to make everything work around them. In the end, given the footage that exists, I think I did okay. I think the show is represented well enough for what it is, but there is A LOT MORE to this show than is displayed here. A part of me feels it's a crime to just strip it down to these basics, but recruiter vid is as recruiter vid does.
Fun fact, aside from those emotional moments, my favorite clip in the vid is when Lexa is walking through the bushes at 1:07. I had no clips at all that showed clearly that Lexa is in charge of the tree people. Nada. You never get a great shot of their camp, even, and bitch is always indoors. I had this moving shot of the trees, then I had Lexa being a boss, but I had no way to connect them. When I found that clip, I was ECSTATIC. There was clapping and squealing.
Trees --> Trees + Lexa --> Lexa. That's what I call A+ vid math, my friends. BOOYAH. TAKE THAT, VID. *karate chop*
Like so many others, this was one of those vids where 80% falls together easily, you work out the other 10% after a draft or two, and then you ABSOLUTELY AGONIZE over one or two spots/sequences/clips. There is a 20-second segment that I am surprised I don't still have nightmares about. Dear god, it took FOREVERRRRRRRR to figure out the right clips for it. But such is vidding. And I'm really pleased with how it turned out in the end, so yay.
OKAY. NOW,
For anyone still reading, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY TECH WOES. Because this vid easily ranks in the top three worst tech experiences I've ever had vidding. I don't even know who the other contenders are, I just know this was AWFUL.
The S2 dvds aren't available yet, but I had rips of the S1 dvds (no logos). I had 720p downloads of S2 with all kinds of gross and huge logos and promos on them, but it was the best I could find. I was just going to have to work around the graphics, as I couldn't crop them out. Because they were mkv files, they were huge and had to be strung together with Avisynth to use in Premiere with any consistency. I precariously managed to build a full timeline, then get to my second or third draft before I discovered there were actually large, gorgeous, HQ logo-less versions of the S2 eps out there after all!
*sigh*
So now I had to remaster the vid as I was making it, effectively. (Better done before releasing it, I guess.) Because I'd only seen the show once, I didn't know where anything was, so I had to go back through S2 slowly to grab everything I might be using. Now, to provide context, this was also the last week of school, so I was crazy busy with finishing out the year and marching band stuff. Thank god my friend Alicia was here visiting and wanted to learn how to vid. "Here, let me show you how to clip!" \o/ She clipped everything from the draft while I was at work. Then, we discovered that for whatever reason, Premiere only liked about 1/4 of the clips, only ones from specific episodes (apparently encoded a certain way). The rest would play in VLC, but not in Premiere. Re-encoding them didn't work. *exhales* So we had to find new versions of the downloads for those episodes and reclip S2 again. (That's 3 round of repetitive clipping, for those keeping track at home. GEE WOW CLIPPING IS SO FUN TOO.) Finally, we had replaced everything on the timeline with shiny new clips that seemed to play fine. Great.
Only, I couldn't export the vid.
I've got a shiny new computer with a bunch of memory, so I don't know why this was such a problem, but it was. My initial drafts all exported fine. But then, once we were pulling in all these new clips (that were large, hard avi files) on top of the mkv files for S2 (alllllll my old virtual clips, in case I had to change anything), it was just too much. It would get maybe halfway through and just crash. It was working maybe 1 out of 5 tries, with shut downs/reboots in between to reset the memory. Eventually I figured out how to move and turn off my avisynth files in a copy of the project file so they wouldn't be loaded by Premiere (but still existed if I needed them), and that helped. Or so I thought.
After completing the remaster with all the new clips, I tried exporting the vid in two halves to see if that would work better. First half exported fine! Second half crashed immediately. It took some hair-pulling, super sleuthing, and hours I'll never get back to determine that two of our twice-fixed remastered clips were somehow still corrupt in Premiere, even though they previewed fine on the timeline. Even once we had All Clips That Worked, Really I Promise This Time, even with the old files not being loaded, it would only export a full timeline about 1 out of 6 tries, with no clear rhyme or reason why. And then, of course, after we would get it, I'd see something else to change or fix (like redoing the entire kiss sequence), and I thought Alicia was going to throw me off my own balcony by the end of it. Final tally: 91 attempted exports, 22 successful encodes. And yes, I just opened the logs and counted. Because I am STILL BITTER.
So, really, this vid is a fucking trophy of my long and bloody war with Adobe Media Encoder. Maybe that's appropriate, I guess, considering it's called Warriors. Hmph.
But more than anything, I'm so glad I made myself sit down and vid this. I really really thought someone else was going to vid the same song to something for Premieres (maybe MCU). I was so scared, y'all. But I did it anyway and got my groove back. VVC was a richer experience having new vids and being a part of that again after several years off. It was so gratifying to hear all the kind words at Vid Review and throughout the weekend. Thank you so much to everyone who said something; it really meant a lot.
NOW GO WATCH THE 100 ALREADY.
"Warriors"
Source: The 100
Music: Imagine Dragons
Summary: Here we are. (A recruiter vid)
Warning: Graphic violence
Download: [here] (88MB, mp4)
Tumblr: [here]
This vid wouldn't be what it is without all the help Alicia contributed during our hell week together ♥ Big thanks also to trelkez and Laura Shapiro for great, helpful beta! And thank you anoel for being a great cheerleader the whole way!
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
password: 100
As a child you would wait and watch from far away.
But you always knew that you'd be the one that work while they all play
In youth, you'd lay awake at night and scheme
Of all the things that you would change, but it was just a dream
Here we are, don't turn away now (don't turn away)
We are the warriors that built this town from dust
The time will come, when you'll have to rise
Above the rest and prove yourself
Your spirit never dies
Farewell, I've gone to take my throne above
Don't weep for me
Cause this will be the labor of my love
Here we are, don't turn away now (don't turn away)
We are the warriors that built this town from dust
I have a lot to say; forgive me. It's been years since I made a vid this "big," and I really enjoy talking about it.
This song first crossed my Pandora a few months ago, and it caught my ear immediately. I filed it away in my mental "exciting songs with potential" folder. The second time it came around, I was further in my initial watch of The 100, early season two I think, but I'd seen enough to know that this could be a great match. I would ask my roommate things like, "Okay, don't spoil me, but there wouldn't happen to be scenes coming up where they march off to war? Maybe?" Then, as I watched the back half of the season (which comprises about 75% of this vid), I was mentally clipping as the episodes played, and I became more and more excited about what was unfolding on my screen. When they DID march off to war, I about lost my mind. \o/ THANK YOU, SHOW.
This show is so rich with plot and characters (for those following along at home, there are TEN strong females with names and lines and stories. TEN.) Trying to follow any particular plot line would leave room for nothing else. It's a short song, so doing a kitchen sink vid with any carry-through would be incredibly difficult and overwhelming. I had to make some tough decisions to pare it down. I decided to go for a basic recruiting vid that introduced the primary conflicts and then had them fighting and stuff. Because, you know, Warriors. Discover the rest on your own. (And, for those of you reading who are familiar with the source, isn't it kind of hilarious how much I had to leave out?!)
The show is, in parts, a territorial pissing contest, but it's so much more than that. So many of the decisions and morally ambiguous conversations around violence are what make the show interesting to me on a critical level; it's not just all blood and guts. But there is no way I could vid, for example, Octavia's backstory and everything Raven goes through and the awesomeness of Abby Griffin and the entire Clarke/Lexa relationship and all the things I like about this show. Those things will have to wait for other vids. For now, I could show some elements that felt familiar because of my work with BSG, and that would still be super fun. Mostly, I wanted to convey: BADASS LADIES BEING BADASSES. PLEASE WATCH THIS SHOW OF BADASS LADIES. That was one point on which I refused to budge -- all the big emotional moments would show female warriors, not males.
It was clear to me right away that the lyrics mandated a focus on the three leaders of the three groups -- Clarke (Sky People), Cage (Mountain Men), and Lexa (Grounders). I mean, it was kind of crazy when I actually listened to the words. Clarke IS the one who was watching from far away and has to work while they all play (quite literally!) Cage IS the one who wants to change things from the way his father runs them! Lexa IS the one who has to rise and prove herself on the throne! (Not to mention they believe in reincarnation of leaders and her "spirit never dies," just a fun tidbit for those with context.) So yeah, I was THRILLED at how the lyrics matched up.
But I don't know if I've vidded a POV switch since maybe Love Turns 40. It's just not something I do much. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to pull it off. (Maybe I didn't! You tell me!) Until I just pasted the lyrics into this post, I thought "In youth" was "and you," so that felt like a fine place for a POV switch mid-verse at the time. (Oh well, it's fine.) So then it became about the anvil strategy of showing at least 3 clips in a row of each face to establish POV for that verse. Plus making it clear it's a person in a new setting. Plus showing they are the leader of that community/setting. Because only then can I show them in conflict with the other groups in the choruses. And I had, like, the space of 8 clips to do all of these things. I did worry that my clip choices would be severely restricted by all these rules and hoops I had to jump through. That it'd be more formulaic than interesting. At this point, I've watched it over 100 times so I've lost every shred of objectivity and don't even know anymore. I can only hope that it's clear enough to be cohesive and nifty enough to be entertaining. I do know that this vid is paced much more slowly than my vids tend to be; there's no fast cutting section, really, unless you could a tiny bit at the end. I wanted to let the clips breathe more so you can really see who's in them. That's important here. I'm trying to tell you something, damnit, not just make you go "oooooh."
So, as I'm battling these structural limitations (that I've created myself, remember), I then faced two big problems. One, spoiler, these people do not actually go to war. Not in the literal sense. There is plenty of fighting on the smaller level, but not some big epic battle scene like in LotR or Narnia or whatever. So, I had to try to manufacture scenes using what I did have. Secondly, the three leaders DO NOT DO ANYTHIIIIIIIIIIING. They just sit around and look angsty all the time! (Clarke does a little bit, but not in ways I needed visually.) So, as I was trying to visually establish my POV characters, I then realized that they are not actually the 'warriors who built this town' at all. It's their sidekicks -- Octavia, Indra, Bellamy, etc -- who bring the action. All my interesting shots, the ones I insisted appear in the vid, the ones that would sell it, were of these secondary characters. So then I had to decide how many to show, and who could appear more than once, because this cast is huge and I had to be selective. (Those of you who go watch this show, you will laugh at how many actors you know from other things who were omitted from this vid. It's literally like five.) And then I had to connect them to the respective leaders visually. Plus, you know, create the gradual escalation of violence to matching the rise in the song without giving away too much plot to those who want to try the show. (Which was hard, because, again, 75% of the vid is from the final 8 episodes that aired to date.) But still show enough fighting to justify the song choice.
It probably doesn't look like it, but there is so much intentionality in every single clip of this vid, heh. More is happening than appears!
But apparently I give no fucks about spoiling you for ladykissing. SPOILER THERE IS LADYKISSING AND IT'S AWESOME.
Actually, this is funny, because I originally didn't have that clip in the vid at all. I felt like it was too easy for me to play that card, and too predictably 'me' to have femslash/lesbians in a jarrow vid. I originally had the kiss over the lyric "labor of my love," but all the clips before and after didn't work with it at all, so I took it out. I sent a draft to Jen and Laura for beta, and this happened:
Laura, in email: You've done all the things that are essential in a recruiter vid: [other stuff], you've hinted at a ship...
me, in reply: Ahahaha, this is delightful. I wasn't really intending to? I mean, well, ok. So, the blonde in the first verse and the brunette in the third verse, I assume you mean them? Well, guess what. Spoiler! They actually become canon! YES. THEY DO. THEY KISS AND EVERYTHING. The kiss was one of the first clips I laid down, and I took it out later because it was just gratuitous and didn't fit. So yes, I am highly amused that you picked up a ship from this :-D I actively tried to not show my lesbian bias!! Heeee.
Laura: PUT THE KISS BACK IN.
trelkez (in chat): all big it's pretty clear to me who is who but I think you are going to have a Lois Lane has two hair colors problem if you don't have a stronger twoshot of them somewhere
jarrow: ok well there is that moment when they kiss
jarrow: so
jarrow: Laura said I should use that, lol
trelkez: ...
trelkez: and you didn't why
[later]
trelkez: do you have a version for me yet with more gay?
SORRY! SORRY FRIENDS FOR FAILING BY LEAVING OUT THE GAY. IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN.
Most of this vid fell into place very quickly. Each verse had its POV character, and I knew which conflict went in which chorus, and I knew the big fire 'splosions went at the end. The very first clips I laid down were Octavia rising up at 2:19 (though, admittedly, a different shot of that same moment) and Indra behind the door opening at 1:30. Those, plus the raised swords at 2:25 were the lynchpins of the vid for me. (THE SOUND I MADE WHEN I FIRST WATCHED THAT CLIP IN THE EPISODE, KNOWING RIGHT WHERE IT WOULD GO. OMG Y'ALL.) I knew the kind of emotional feel I wanted for those moments, I just had to make everything work around them. In the end, given the footage that exists, I think I did okay. I think the show is represented well enough for what it is, but there is A LOT MORE to this show than is displayed here. A part of me feels it's a crime to just strip it down to these basics, but recruiter vid is as recruiter vid does.
Fun fact, aside from those emotional moments, my favorite clip in the vid is when Lexa is walking through the bushes at 1:07. I had no clips at all that showed clearly that Lexa is in charge of the tree people. Nada. You never get a great shot of their camp, even, and bitch is always indoors. I had this moving shot of the trees, then I had Lexa being a boss, but I had no way to connect them. When I found that clip, I was ECSTATIC. There was clapping and squealing.
Trees --> Trees + Lexa --> Lexa. That's what I call A+ vid math, my friends. BOOYAH. TAKE THAT, VID. *karate chop*
Like so many others, this was one of those vids where 80% falls together easily, you work out the other 10% after a draft or two, and then you ABSOLUTELY AGONIZE over one or two spots/sequences/clips. There is a 20-second segment that I am surprised I don't still have nightmares about. Dear god, it took FOREVERRRRRRRR to figure out the right clips for it. But such is vidding. And I'm really pleased with how it turned out in the end, so yay.
OKAY. NOW,
For anyone still reading, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY TECH WOES. Because this vid easily ranks in the top three worst tech experiences I've ever had vidding. I don't even know who the other contenders are, I just know this was AWFUL.
The S2 dvds aren't available yet, but I had rips of the S1 dvds (no logos). I had 720p downloads of S2 with all kinds of gross and huge logos and promos on them, but it was the best I could find. I was just going to have to work around the graphics, as I couldn't crop them out. Because they were mkv files, they were huge and had to be strung together with Avisynth to use in Premiere with any consistency. I precariously managed to build a full timeline, then get to my second or third draft before I discovered there were actually large, gorgeous, HQ logo-less versions of the S2 eps out there after all!
*sigh*
So now I had to remaster the vid as I was making it, effectively. (Better done before releasing it, I guess.) Because I'd only seen the show once, I didn't know where anything was, so I had to go back through S2 slowly to grab everything I might be using. Now, to provide context, this was also the last week of school, so I was crazy busy with finishing out the year and marching band stuff. Thank god my friend Alicia was here visiting and wanted to learn how to vid. "Here, let me show you how to clip!" \o/ She clipped everything from the draft while I was at work. Then, we discovered that for whatever reason, Premiere only liked about 1/4 of the clips, only ones from specific episodes (apparently encoded a certain way). The rest would play in VLC, but not in Premiere. Re-encoding them didn't work. *exhales* So we had to find new versions of the downloads for those episodes and reclip S2 again. (That's 3 round of repetitive clipping, for those keeping track at home. GEE WOW CLIPPING IS SO FUN TOO.) Finally, we had replaced everything on the timeline with shiny new clips that seemed to play fine. Great.
Only, I couldn't export the vid.
I've got a shiny new computer with a bunch of memory, so I don't know why this was such a problem, but it was. My initial drafts all exported fine. But then, once we were pulling in all these new clips (that were large, hard avi files) on top of the mkv files for S2 (alllllll my old virtual clips, in case I had to change anything), it was just too much. It would get maybe halfway through and just crash. It was working maybe 1 out of 5 tries, with shut downs/reboots in between to reset the memory. Eventually I figured out how to move and turn off my avisynth files in a copy of the project file so they wouldn't be loaded by Premiere (but still existed if I needed them), and that helped. Or so I thought.
After completing the remaster with all the new clips, I tried exporting the vid in two halves to see if that would work better. First half exported fine! Second half crashed immediately. It took some hair-pulling, super sleuthing, and hours I'll never get back to determine that two of our twice-fixed remastered clips were somehow still corrupt in Premiere, even though they previewed fine on the timeline. Even once we had All Clips That Worked, Really I Promise This Time, even with the old files not being loaded, it would only export a full timeline about 1 out of 6 tries, with no clear rhyme or reason why. And then, of course, after we would get it, I'd see something else to change or fix (like redoing the entire kiss sequence), and I thought Alicia was going to throw me off my own balcony by the end of it. Final tally: 91 attempted exports, 22 successful encodes. And yes, I just opened the logs and counted. Because I am STILL BITTER.
So, really, this vid is a fucking trophy of my long and bloody war with Adobe Media Encoder. Maybe that's appropriate, I guess, considering it's called Warriors. Hmph.
But more than anything, I'm so glad I made myself sit down and vid this. I really really thought someone else was going to vid the same song to something for Premieres (maybe MCU). I was so scared, y'all. But I did it anyway and got my groove back. VVC was a richer experience having new vids and being a part of that again after several years off. It was so gratifying to hear all the kind words at Vid Review and throughout the weekend. Thank you so much to everyone who said something; it really meant a lot.
NOW GO WATCH THE 100 ALREADY.