Not the Year in Fandom: 2018

[thuviaptarth]

November 11 was the ten-year anniversary of finishing my first vid, and sadly I did not manage to post a commemorative vid that day. But I'm a little chuffed to have seen the anniversary, especially because in 2016 I was considering abandoning the idea of vidding altogether.

I am not going to do the full End of the Year fanworks meme, because for the past two years, I have only managed to post one vid per year. (I have managed to post at least a vid per year, though, so I am pretty happy about that.)

Vid notes 2017-2018
I was going to skip this because I'm not sure I have much to say this time around, but then I looked back at previous years and realized how much I enjoyed rereading them, so here's the not much more than I thought:

• Wriggle
  I couldn't figure out why the timing of the repeated clips felt off because they were in fact timed correctly to the repeated (musical and lyrical) phrases, but now I think it's because they should have accelerated over each section instead of being roughly 1 clip:1 phrase.


• Thousand Eyes
  This took so long to make for two reasons:
  
  1) After an initial steady pace of work March-June, I stopped working on the vid and only picked it back up again after long breaks.
  
  2) This may be the vid where I had the least idea of what the actual clips were going to be before I started. Usually there are speculative places in the timeline, but I also have a pretty solid idea of 2-3 sections and a somewhat less solid idea of most the rest. For "Thousand Eyes", I knew what I wanted to do with the final "It feels like thousand eyes" in the second chorus (this was actually the thing that inspired the vid), with the final clip of MCS disappearing into whiteness, and with the go/wooden marker/game-playing imagery in the second verse. I had no real visual idea what to do with the rest of it. I had a few ideas about the feel, but not what content should be covered: I knew the first part should be slow and mournful and interior, full of long clips and long dissolves; the second part should be fierce and active and determined, with short clips and mostly straight cuts; the final sequence should be a battlestorm of things set loose by MCS, with MCS appearing only as the stillness in the center of the storm.
  
  The upshot of this is that I kept having to redo most sections three times, five times, who can count times, because I'd come up with something that worked in isolation but didn't work as vid storytelling, or that worked as vid storytelling but took up time where I needed to establish something else. (I ended up cutting my very favorite dissolve. It was so beautiful that it made me breathless. But I needed that time to do something else.) I'm not sure I've ever had to discard so much of a working timeline.

Things I learned this year

• Premiere's new color match tool is amazing.
  
• Relatedly, color matching can smooth a jarring clip transition.
  
• You can use vignettes to subtly change the focus of a clip. This again can help a lot to smooth jarring clip transitions.
  
• You can color code source and clips to track useful information.
  
• You can stack timelines vertically as well as tabbing through them horizontally.
  
• Sometimes video tutorials on video editing are helpful.
  

2015 Goals as Accomplished 2017-2018
The last time I posted yearly goals was for ... 2015. Because I did not post any fanwork at all in 2015 or 2016.

1. Make female character studies.
   Wow, I actually did make a depressing female character study in 2017 ("Wriggle"). Good job, self!



2. Make vids way before the deadline.
   This year I only posted the revisions to a premiering vid six months after it showed at a con, so I'm gonna have to go with "no".


3. Send feedback twice a month.
   ... Yeah, no.
   


4. Do recs once a month.
   Also yeah, no.
   


5. I never end up concentrating on the aesthetics I plan to, but I like having them down anyway, so: I'd like to do more with dark/light contrasts, fades to black, and with stillness and slow movements.
   It is again somewhat of a surprise to me that I have managed to accomplish a goal! Or at least I did some experimentation with stillness and slow movements in "Thousand Eyes" (2018).
   

2019 Goals
Let's cut everything back to:

1. Make a Wiscon premiere.
   
2. Send feedback once a month.
   
3. Post a rec once a month.
   
4. Try time-delimited vidding? Make a draft in 3 days?

As usual, stealing this from
kiki_miserychic:

If there is any question you would like to ask me about any one of my vids or stories, then go ahead! What I meant by a particular clip or sequence, why I chose to highlight that characterization, why I chose that song, what crack I was taking and where you can get some...anything. Anything you might like to know about how I made a vid, I shall do my best to answer. Or any questions about vidding or writing that I can answer in general, I guess. Or we could bring back that vidding meme.

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