Vidding: Background reading (2/2)
Color
I don't have any solid recommendations for books on color; I've just started looking into it, and don't feel completely satisfied by anything I've found so far. I've checked out Joseph Albers' Interaction of Color, which may be more what I want than the books below; I suspect I'll find more in Art and Design than I've found in Film Studies. If you have any recommendations for books to check out--particularly on non-Western/non-European color schemas, about which I've found almost nothing--I'd love to hear them.
Patti Bellantoni, If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling
First, the bad stuff: the attempts at scientific and global positioning are ludicrous and contain racefail. (Bellantoni argues on the basis of ridiculously unsound anecdotal data that reactions to color are universal rather than culturally specific, and defines orange as "exotic" because of its use in Indian and Mexican films. She also claims that analysis of color in visual storytelling is a new development, which would be news to several thousand years of painters, potters, and weavers.)
Bellantoni basically assigns each color a set of emotions in Western movie symbolism and goes through a hundred or some films discussing how their color schemes enhance their storytelling. There aren't pictures for every film, but the selections are generally well-known/mainstream enough that I'd seen a good percentage of them. This is a very surface-level text, more description than analysis; I tended to skim chapters as a break after an hour or two of reading Pearlman or one of the After Effects guides.
Leatrice Eisman, Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color
Finally, an explanation of hue/color, saturation/intensity, value/lightness/darkness. (Probably I could have googled. All my software options overwhelmed me, and the help files generally assumed a basic understanding of color I did not have.) Also a breakdown of monotone, monochrome, analogous, and complementary color schemes (vaguely familiar from sockkpuppett's 2006 VVC Color panel, and a discussion about the different illusions of movement generated by different colors.
Very basic, but I needed basic.
Adams Morioka, Color Design Workbook
Finally, an explanation of additive primary colors, subtractive primary colors, and printer colors. (See parenthetical remark above.) This book is mostly sets of color swatches for advertisers, which means it only offers positive readings of color or color combinations; it doesn't cover combinations that convey anger, fear, or distress, for example, which are all emotions that you might want to vid. But the color combinations were interesting to look at, and gave me some ideas for title cards if for nothing else. Also, this was the first of my color books to mention that some color connotations are culturally specific. \o/ Sadly, this mention only consisted of noting that Japanese color symbolism could be different from Western, so you should have a cultural expert review your marketing scheme before you launched it, without any details of what this difference consists of. :(
Software: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
NB: I'm using CS3, but all of the books I've read seem to have CS4 updates. As far as I can tell, the interfaces are identical and the products are pretty similar except for some bugfixes and some additional functionality that I want very much goddamnit Adobe.
My theory of software learning is that you can pretty much learn a decently designed piece of software (and some indecently designed ones) by opening it up and hacking around until you figure things out, and that the only thing that stops this from being a workable strategy for more people is that their anxiety about Scary Machine Will Break! interferes with their ability to learn. So I didn't do much reading about Premiere; I opened it up and read the basics in the Help File and started clipping things and when I wanted to do something besides clipping I looked it up in the Help File again. (The CS3 Help File is pretty well-done, except for the new effects where the poor technical writer was clearly given a one-sentence description by the product manager and could not get a developer online to figure out what exactly the damn thing was supposed to do before it got included in a code push without user experience review. Not that I would know anything about that. Every software project I have worked on has gone out on schedule and been thoroughly tested and documented before being released to the public. I am not laughing even a little bit as I type this.) This worked out pretty well, except for the effects I still don't understand, the effects that appear to be duplicates of one another, and the effects/options that just plain don't work (I AM DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOUR HELP FILE TOLD ME TO DO WITH LENS FLARES AND TRANSPARENT CLIPS, ADOBE PREMIERE. WHY WILL YOU NOT FLARE?!?!)
But I decided to skim a few books in the store to see if I'd missed anything in my journeys through the Help File, because I felt like this was kind of scattershot and I might be missing something really important by not having read every single Help page or taken a course or something. I didn't find anything huge, but I did find some tips and tricks and explanations of puzzling effects in Antony Bolante's Premiere Pro CS3 for Windows and Mac and the Adobe Creative Team's Premiere Pro CS3 Classroom in a Book. The Classroom in a Book series appear to be basically print-outs of the Help File with some exercises added. If you do better learning from books that from hypertext (I find hypertext too distracting for dedicated learning), the Classroom in a Book series appears to be a pretty good option.
Software: Adobe After Effects CS3
The short version, for those who do not care about my software pain: I highly recommend Chris and Trish Meyer's After Effects Apprentice as an introduction to After Effects.
The long version:
You remember how I believed I could learn software by just opening it up and playing around with it? This belief has taken a beating from After Effects. I open it up and I stare at it a while and there are too many things to do and no guidance as to which of them I should do first and there are so many effects and I don't know what they are or what to do with them and I stare a while more and then I close the program and go take a walk until I've calmed down.
Anxiety is the mind-killer! You know it's true.
So, since I knew I'd need After Effects for "Low Red Moon," I poked around Google and YouTube search results and vidding's memories and members until I found a rec from chasarumba for Chris and Trish Meyers' texts, read enough of the tutorials on their Web site to know I liked their instructional style, and ordered After Effects Apprentice and Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. I read through AE Apprentice enough to know what features and workflow I'd need to do the effects for my vid, read the extra information about those features in Creating Motion Graphics, made one effect very easily in two hours and the other painfully over two months, and didn't open After Effects again for a year. I did not remember how to do a single thing I'd done before.
So now I am going through After Effects Apprentice chapter by chapter and doing all the exercises. I hate doing exercises. I like things with direction and clear goals. I can spend an endless amount of time working out how to do a motion graphic I want to do, but spending a much shorter period of time on a motion graphic I have no present need for is vastly more irritating. I am doing it because I would like to retain some more information this time, and because I would like to be more aware of my available options. And it is already paying off -- I'm not sure I've come up with any vidding ideas I wouldn't have had anyway, but I have a much better idea of how to achieve them. I don't always remember how to use the feature I want, but I remember enough to find it in the Help File or the AE Apprentice index, and the result is motion graphics that take me a few hours or days instead of weeks or months. This may change when I want to do more complex graphics -- but then I will be able to do more complex graphics, which is the whole point.
I have more to say about After Effects and especially about After Effects vs. Premiere for some kinds of effects, but most of that should probably go in my year-end summary. I will say that, as frustrating as it is when the two programs implement the same effect with entirely different user interfaces (TIME-REMAPPING I AM LOOKING AT YOU), once I get used the AE interface it often is easier and/or provides more options than the Premiere interface. In particular, if I need to do any kind of masking, I don't do it in Premiere, because it is infinitely easier and more flexible in AE. Even with the peculiarities of my setup, which mean exporting each clip in a composite separately uncompressed and redoing most of the Premiere effects all over again in AE, it's still faster and less frustrating for me to make the masks in AE than it is in Premiere.
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comment(s)
I don't have any solid recommendations for books on color; I've just started looking into it, and don't feel completely satisfied by anything I've found so far. I've checked out Joseph Albers' Interaction of Color, which may be more what I want than the books below; I suspect I'll find more in Art and Design than I've found in Film Studies. If you have any recommendations for books to check out--particularly on non-Western/non-European color schemas, about which I've found almost nothing--I'd love to hear them.
Patti Bellantoni, If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling
First, the bad stuff: the attempts at scientific and global positioning are ludicrous and contain racefail. (Bellantoni argues on the basis of ridiculously unsound anecdotal data that reactions to color are universal rather than culturally specific, and defines orange as "exotic" because of its use in Indian and Mexican films. She also claims that analysis of color in visual storytelling is a new development, which would be news to several thousand years of painters, potters, and weavers.)
Bellantoni basically assigns each color a set of emotions in Western movie symbolism and goes through a hundred or some films discussing how their color schemes enhance their storytelling. There aren't pictures for every film, but the selections are generally well-known/mainstream enough that I'd seen a good percentage of them. This is a very surface-level text, more description than analysis; I tended to skim chapters as a break after an hour or two of reading Pearlman or one of the After Effects guides.
Leatrice Eisman, Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color
Finally, an explanation of hue/color, saturation/intensity, value/lightness/darkness. (Probably I could have googled. All my software options overwhelmed me, and the help files generally assumed a basic understanding of color I did not have.) Also a breakdown of monotone, monochrome, analogous, and complementary color schemes (vaguely familiar from sockkpuppett's 2006 VVC Color panel, and a discussion about the different illusions of movement generated by different colors.
Very basic, but I needed basic.
Adams Morioka, Color Design Workbook
Finally, an explanation of additive primary colors, subtractive primary colors, and printer colors. (See parenthetical remark above.) This book is mostly sets of color swatches for advertisers, which means it only offers positive readings of color or color combinations; it doesn't cover combinations that convey anger, fear, or distress, for example, which are all emotions that you might want to vid. But the color combinations were interesting to look at, and gave me some ideas for title cards if for nothing else. Also, this was the first of my color books to mention that some color connotations are culturally specific. \o/ Sadly, this mention only consisted of noting that Japanese color symbolism could be different from Western, so you should have a cultural expert review your marketing scheme before you launched it, without any details of what this difference consists of. :(
Software: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
NB: I'm using CS3, but all of the books I've read seem to have CS4 updates. As far as I can tell, the interfaces are identical and the products are pretty similar except for some bugfixes and some additional functionality that I want very much goddamnit Adobe.
My theory of software learning is that you can pretty much learn a decently designed piece of software (and some indecently designed ones) by opening it up and hacking around until you figure things out, and that the only thing that stops this from being a workable strategy for more people is that their anxiety about Scary Machine Will Break! interferes with their ability to learn. So I didn't do much reading about Premiere; I opened it up and read the basics in the Help File and started clipping things and when I wanted to do something besides clipping I looked it up in the Help File again. (The CS3 Help File is pretty well-done, except for the new effects where the poor technical writer was clearly given a one-sentence description by the product manager and could not get a developer online to figure out what exactly the damn thing was supposed to do before it got included in a code push without user experience review. Not that I would know anything about that. Every software project I have worked on has gone out on schedule and been thoroughly tested and documented before being released to the public. I am not laughing even a little bit as I type this.) This worked out pretty well, except for the effects I still don't understand, the effects that appear to be duplicates of one another, and the effects/options that just plain don't work (I AM DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOUR HELP FILE TOLD ME TO DO WITH LENS FLARES AND TRANSPARENT CLIPS, ADOBE PREMIERE. WHY WILL YOU NOT FLARE?!?!)
But I decided to skim a few books in the store to see if I'd missed anything in my journeys through the Help File, because I felt like this was kind of scattershot and I might be missing something really important by not having read every single Help page or taken a course or something. I didn't find anything huge, but I did find some tips and tricks and explanations of puzzling effects in Antony Bolante's Premiere Pro CS3 for Windows and Mac and the Adobe Creative Team's Premiere Pro CS3 Classroom in a Book. The Classroom in a Book series appear to be basically print-outs of the Help File with some exercises added. If you do better learning from books that from hypertext (I find hypertext too distracting for dedicated learning), the Classroom in a Book series appears to be a pretty good option.
Software: Adobe After Effects CS3
The short version, for those who do not care about my software pain: I highly recommend Chris and Trish Meyer's After Effects Apprentice as an introduction to After Effects.
The long version:
You remember how I believed I could learn software by just opening it up and playing around with it? This belief has taken a beating from After Effects. I open it up and I stare at it a while and there are too many things to do and no guidance as to which of them I should do first and there are so many effects and I don't know what they are or what to do with them and I stare a while more and then I close the program and go take a walk until I've calmed down.
Anxiety is the mind-killer! You know it's true.
So, since I knew I'd need After Effects for "Low Red Moon," I poked around Google and YouTube search results and vidding's memories and members until I found a rec from chasarumba for Chris and Trish Meyers' texts, read enough of the tutorials on their Web site to know I liked their instructional style, and ordered After Effects Apprentice and Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. I read through AE Apprentice enough to know what features and workflow I'd need to do the effects for my vid, read the extra information about those features in Creating Motion Graphics, made one effect very easily in two hours and the other painfully over two months, and didn't open After Effects again for a year. I did not remember how to do a single thing I'd done before.
So now I am going through After Effects Apprentice chapter by chapter and doing all the exercises. I hate doing exercises. I like things with direction and clear goals. I can spend an endless amount of time working out how to do a motion graphic I want to do, but spending a much shorter period of time on a motion graphic I have no present need for is vastly more irritating. I am doing it because I would like to retain some more information this time, and because I would like to be more aware of my available options. And it is already paying off -- I'm not sure I've come up with any vidding ideas I wouldn't have had anyway, but I have a much better idea of how to achieve them. I don't always remember how to use the feature I want, but I remember enough to find it in the Help File or the AE Apprentice index, and the result is motion graphics that take me a few hours or days instead of weeks or months. This may change when I want to do more complex graphics -- but then I will be able to do more complex graphics, which is the whole point.
I have more to say about After Effects and especially about After Effects vs. Premiere for some kinds of effects, but most of that should probably go in my year-end summary. I will say that, as frustrating as it is when the two programs implement the same effect with entirely different user interfaces (TIME-REMAPPING I AM LOOKING AT YOU), once I get used the AE interface it often is easier and/or provides more options than the Premiere interface. In particular, if I need to do any kind of masking, I don't do it in Premiere, because it is infinitely easier and more flexible in AE. Even with the peculiarities of my setup, which mean exporting each clip in a composite separately uncompressed and redoing most of the Premiere effects all over again in AE, it's still faster and less frustrating for me to make the masks in AE than it is in Premiere.
Dreamwidth: post ,
comment(s)