Interview Series 2011: Kuwdora - Part 1
This is it for us for the foreseeable future. All questions posed to the vidder were submitted by you, the members of the community; and though several questions were addressed to all vidders taking part, there are a few specific to this particular vidder as well.
Additional questions, as well as discussion is welcome in the comment section; however, the interviewed vidders are under no obligation to respond, or to respond in a timely manner. Any questions on additional interviews or the Series as a whole can be directed to me at death_is_your_art (at) yahoo (dot) ca.
Currently there are no plans to hold more challenges or interviews; however, if any member would like to submit a commentary, or any content that they believe is appropriate for the community, then they are welcome to do so. All posting will be moderated to avoid spam and accidental vid announcement posting in the community.
Vidding name: Kuwdora
Vidding since: Febuarary 2007
First vid and source: Ameno. Stargate Atlantis
Most recent vid and source: Walk This Way. Ironman & Ironman 2
Total number of vids to date: I’ve lost count. Diya told me it’s 75 (not including Insane August Vidding Project). It’s probably more than that since I don’t release all my vids because some of them are better off just being for my eyes only.
Link to vids: Masterpost on Livejournal
How did you first get into vidding? Where did you learn about it, and what made you decide to try it?
Back when I still had dialup, linzbnl would send me copies of Stargate SG-1 that she burned to disc for me so I could watch on my computer, since I didn’t have enough VHS tapes to record all of the episodes when they were shown in syndication. A few times she had put some of these funny little things that were of Daniel and the team, set to pop music, and some such. They seemed kind of cute and stuff. I specifically remember the “I’m A Slave for Yu” video by MartoufMarty and how silly it was. And I’m pretty sure there was a little tiny .wmv file that was a Daniel-centric Full Circle video that registered in my brain. I thought they were cute but I didn’t make much of them at the time. That was around 2004 or 2005, maybe?
Fast forward to 2007. I had visited tafkfarfanfic during my Christmas break. We had watched a buncha Stargate and other things, and firstly I was amazed that the technology to hook your laptop up to the TV was already at the consumer level because I just didn’t know such things at the time. Then she started showing me these things called vids. Now these were vids that were better than the ones that Linz had dropped on a disc as an afterthought. These had a sense of humor, a style, they moved and grooved and some of them were just so fucking interesting that I had to know more and watch them over and over again. It’s something that looked really fun and I wanted to try to emulate it.
The first vids I remember ever seeing that made me go WOW were cesperanza and astolat’s Stargate Atlantis vid Rumble, because it was hilarious and cute and interesting. But then there was That One With the Polar Bears by sisabet because it was just so PRETTY and interesting even though I didn’t even know what the hell due South was at that time, but I remedied that pretty quickly, and mainlined due South and began working on my own first due South vid. At that time I quickly fell in love with sdwolfpup’s due South vids and once I saw You Can Call Me Al I was gone and I NEEDED to learn how to make awesome vids like THAT.
Was your first experience easier or harder than you expected it to be?
Oh my god, it was so much harder than I thought it’d be. I opened up iMovie and was amused for a bit and spent enough time digging around the LJ vidding comm’s memories section learning how to make these things called ‘clips’ -- but I was aghast at how you had to vid linearly. So when I was building on my timeline and decided I wanted to change a clip, I pulled it out of the timeline and OMG everything shifted to the left and snapped together and messed everything else up. I don’t know how long I could last that way.
But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself here. I told myself that I would stick with iMovie for at least 4 months because, fuck, this could just be a passing thing and I might just return to writing poetry and fanfic and short stories again after a few weeks, and I didn’t have any money for anything in the first place. I’d try this out. If it was a serious thing then I would upgrade my software and see what else there was to learn about this. But after my first half dozen vids I was just so sick of the limitations and ugly filters on iMovie.
I saved all of my summer job moneys for an actual student license for Final Cut Express and went on from there. The first experience with FCE was not much easier than iMovie because there was a lot to learn, and I had pulled a book out of the local library to learn the terminology and figure out what else I could google to help me make sense of anything.
Do different things tend to trigger your desire to make a vid, or does it tend to be something similar each time?
At first it was always the source. A character, or a character relationship. Later it always became specific moments in the source that set me off. The longer that I have been viding, the more I really hang so much of my thoughts on the lyrics of songs. If the lyrics ping me in some fashion--if I can twist it, turn it upside down or make it ironic, or if it just speaks to me about even a single aspect of a character or a show--I’ll have to vid it. I’ve noticed in the last year and a half that it’s the song that’s weighing more on my mind before I have the source idea, even if the lyrics haven’t flashed in neon colors with the source idea, I’ll seek out a source for a song because I’m having the same kind of initial fannish reaction to vidsongs as I am to my sources and characters. They’ve become a character of it’s own to me that I squee and adore.
But quite often if there’s something monumental enough in the source that trips my trigger-- I will leap upon it with wild abandon. Like Peter nailing Sylar for instance, homfg. I went absolutely WILD when that episode aired around Thanksgiving. I pulled out all the stops and spent, god. 10 hours at a time for the next few days trying to rip, clip and vid as fast as I could. I became so incoherent that when my roommates asked me a question I literally had to sit and stare blankly for several moments until I could actually find myself able to speak, since I was so focused on thinking in visuals and feeling the beats of Hot Mess. SO. MUCH. SQUEE.
Once you've been inspired, what's the first aspect of a vid that comes to you? Is it the visuals of the source? The song edit? The colors? Something else?
It’s lyric associations first off for me. It’s a pre-vidding stage, you know? I listen to the song over and over and over until it’s embedded in every fiber of my being, and figure out what kind of clips can go where.
But with different vids it’s invariably different. I don’t have any specific lyric associations with my vidsongs but I know how it’s suppose to feel with the colors and the way it’s shot, how the show’s composition will go with my song choice. If I’m doing Ke$ha, I’m figuring out what facial expressions or outrageous scene will work best on the over-the-top-beats.
What is your planning process like? Do you visualize with storyboard drawings, write out notes, or something else? Do you start with the music/lyrics/concept/atmosphere?
I usually make a text file, paste out the lyrics and in parentheses I would list my notes-usually a shorthand of sorts-with a name or a scene. Sometimes an emotion or a concept, and a lot of other times question marks fill up the space until I find something suitable to go there. Sometimes I’ll also throw down timestamps of things that I specifically found and wanted to remember to clip later for that line.
I don’t do spreadsheets of clip notes or permanently keep clip galleries. The only clip galleries I’ve kept in the past was for Heroes-for the bulk of my Sylar vids, cause it made it easier to revisit the source and work on my ongoing Sylar projects when all my clips were there. I did, however, purge my Sylar clip gallery in an attempt to wash the taste from my mouth for the time being, until I’m less hurt about how the show turned out and what it did to my favorite characters.
When I do clip, I tend to clip more than I will ever need. I clip in huge chunks and just break scenes down into more mangable pieces for me to sculpt away; and I tend to label things by scene because my visual memory is as such that if I have the scene listed out as sylar_clubscene01, sylar_clubscene02, through clubscene14, I will know at what point the scene is at by clip-chunk 12.
How about your preferred editorial process? Is it highly regimented or an organic process? And how do you know when you are DONE?
When I vid, I have to vid for hours and hours at a time, especially when I’m first starting out. Otherwise I feel like it takes me forever to get anything done and somehow I grew accustomed to sitting for 5-6 hours in an evening and vidding and then coming back and putting another 6-8 hours on it the following evening.
I have found that I want-or at least need to get the first draft out of my system as quickly as possible because I NEEEEEEEEEEEEED TO VIIIIIIIIIIIIIID, NEEEEEEEED TO GET IT OUT, GET IT DOWN. I need to see my idea come to life and move and work with the music.
For the most part I have gone through 3 drafts of a vid before I’ve come to some feeling that it’s Done. Draft 1 is clunky, but probably has a good assortment of what I think needs to be on the timeline. I mean this can differ from vid to vid but going back and rewatching some old vid drafts, I usually have agood handle on things. It’s just a lot and lot and lot of refining that goes on afterwards in Drafts 2 and 3.
Are there any books, websites, magazines, or other resources that you've used during vidding?
VideoCopilot for After Effects tutorials. Some of these are entirely complex and beyond any use that I would ever need for my vidding purposes but it’s really amazing to at least see step-by-step how someone is using After Effects since I can’t transport myself to dualbunny’s house and demand she show me everything that she knows. Not yet, anyway.
RNELdotNET has all kinds of photoshop tutorials that I came across. It didn’t help me specifically when I was looking for a tutorial on Inception-style motion graphics, but it was something I bookmarked for future use cause it had a good variety of stuff that I wanted to revisit.
I think any vidder interested or curious about After Effects, vidding and Photoshop needs to visit CreativeCow, check out the… unholy amount of tutorials and download the video podcasts. Check out the forums. Granted, a lot of the questions in the forums are by professional or semi-professional videographers and whatnot who are trying to do other kinds of things, but I’ve spent a lot of time trawling through what I could, just to see what was there and if I’d ever want to use something in a future project. And I’ve got a boatload of the video podcasts that I keep on my ipod to watch when I’m on the bus and need to remind myself of how to mask or rewatch something more complicated for when I have the patience to try and do half the tutorial myself with my lagging Macbook.
FXGuide is more of an industry-level portal that has news and much more theoretical and art-development aspect of FX happening in media. It’s cool stuff. A bit more meaty and less practical if all you want to know how to do is make Sylar’s eyes sparkle, but I really got a kick out of reading the Scott Pilgrim and VFX Against the World.
I have done an infinite amount of searches on YouTube when I was looking to figure out how to create certain titles/end credits. I combined some elements of a YouTube After Effects tutorial with a VideoCopilot tutorial in order to to achieve the look I got for the credits on High Voltage. YouTube is amazing for that kind of thing if you can get your search terms right and the vidding gods are with you.
What factors contribute to the design decisions when creating titles for your vids? Are they determined just from qualities inherent to the source or are there outside influences?
I find titles to be extremely hard to conceptualize and yet I can never just let myself do a centered Times New Roman and be done with it. In the past year or so I’ve begun to flex some After Effects muscles to get some titles down-PASIV Face and High Voltage, for instance. I’m probably not exaggerating when I say it took me more time to put those credits together than it took me to figure out how to make the damn vids themselves. Drives me fucking nuts. But PASIV Face is one that I’m most proud of because of the in-joke I placed at the beginning while mimicking the Inception credits. Big-name directors have the ‘from the director of’ to catch people’s attention and since I was vidding Inception and had vidded Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect several years earlier, the coincidence was too sweet and fun not to play upon that in the credits.
I try to figure out what kind of mood or tone a song or character is giving off in my vid and try to find the best font that would visually meld with that. Grace Cathedral Hill is a bit of a melancholy ordeal for Maya Herrera, but it’s elegant in it’s tragedy so it’s a simple and easy-to-read script. With Filthy/Gorgeous and Hold Music, my first Club Vivid vids, I realllly wanted to make a good impression-even as simple as they were as titles. But also with Hold Music I had been experimenting with keyframing for the first time and was attached to the idea of movement even in my title.
The most thoughtful title I’ve made was either High Voltage or Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect-the latter in which I elaborated upon (ad nauseum) in my commentary but I just felt proud of myself for having something that wasn’t a plain background and something that several layers to it-layers related to the lyrics of the song but also to the meta of how I saw his character. This is because as I have mentioned in a previous question, I had the most emotional connection to these vids so I worked 10x harder to make sure it had the perfect look and feel to match the vid.
High Voltage was an ancient stone background with the title engraved in it because in in the Milky Way galaxy the Ancients had carved everthing into the stone oblesiks they left behind, so it was replicating the look and feel that was intrinsic to the Ancients.
I will admit that there’s a bit of fun in opening the pre-set animations in AE and just dinking around to see what would be easy to plunk down with not a lot of stress like what you see in Who Found Mr. Fabulous?
While I’m on the subject, I want to recommend Art of the Title which is a fantastic web resource where the editors and staff deconstruct title sequences from film and television. It’s art/design oriented and doesn’t have an immediate and practical application to my own vidding and title needs, but it definitely is food for thought and is essentially a hunk of meat I want to gnaw on in the future.
What brings you the most satisfaction about vidding? Seeing the final piece onscreen? Or is it the process that brings you joy?
Getting the first draft down is the first blush of love, the first tumble against the sheets, it’s full of rapture for me when I can get it done as fast as I can. Then once I have been through my seemingly endless revisions, it’s the intense beta sessions that I love. It’s incredible fun to nitpick the hell out of my own stuff as I’m in the thick of it, even if it does drive me batty on occasion. I love releasing it into the wild but just being able to sit down and revel in all the minute details for hours and days on end after I thought all was said and done… it’s incredible, to me.
Which of your vids do you consider to be the biggest creative turning points in your vidding history? Are these the pieces you are most proud of? Why or why not?
Reinvent Yourself (Dec 2007) - this was my first long-term project that I edited in Final Cut Express… which amounts to about 3 months, I think, since I released it in December and had purchased FCE in August. It’s a huge stepping stone for me to begin vidding linearly. When I rewatch Reinvent Yourself what I see is the sheer joy I have in being able to make much more detailed cuts to the beats than I could ever hope to achieve with iMovie. Lyrically it’s not a complicated song, but I was trying so hard-even then, to figure out how to make the clips flow and feel right without feeling forced. There’s this haphazard way that the internal motion/external motion of the clips clash because I wanted to-I needed to cut on this beat, then use a swirly arm gesture with this sound. The freedom I had with transitions, dear god, I had so much glee. This vid definitely illustrates my first taste of indepence.
Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect (2009) - This was such a profound creative project in my life and I was trying to go to suuuuuch lengths to reconcile what the show had given me in terms of retconning and twisting the character into something that was barely recognizable. I needed to relcaim it. I had to, because somehow I had known enough about Sylar that I had this vidsong picked out years ago for Sylar, and then season 3 happened and I had to fix it, I had to show people how Sylar made sense to me, how I could see how they have shaped his character on screen. This vid also helped me realize that I can vid deeply into context and achieve awesome things, that I could make a very tight, thematic narrative.
2020 (2010) - My Spartacus vid was definitely another turning point as I began to embrace a music genre I had been too afraid of approacing in vidding for so long: hip-hop, tackling fast-paced rap lyrics, the message beneath and between the lines of the song. It was a very daunting project and I have never sent so many whining and frightened, frustrated and excited emails to my betas about any other vid as I did with this one. Being able to get through this vid with the story that it had, I felt I had the confidence to do anything now.
High Voltage (2011) - High Voltage is the vid that I had spent the last 5 years learning how to make. After I made Ameno, my First Ever Vid-which was about the Ancients-I was sitting at my summer job, listening to my ipod when my shuffle turned to High Voltage. A track I had downloaded off KaZaa via dial-up some four years earlier. I heard it and I knew it was about the Ancients. Except I didn’t even know how to hear the song for a vid. I just knew it was about the Ancients and that one day I might be able to make an awesome Ancients vid about Oma being all superior with her moral high ground and all that.
I would revisit my song maybe once a year and think about whether or not I was ready for it, whether I understood how to put it together. Whenever I would watch Stargate as it aired, or re-visit old episodes that might not have had anything to do with the Ancients, I would be thinking about how the Ancients were in the background of so much of the show, even when they didn’t have a character voice other than Oma and Sam’s Ancient Boyfriend. Then I had to re-orient my brain when seasons 9 and 10 happened, then I had to go back and reassert my thoughts about Stargate Atlantis and the Ancients involvement there. I had to feel comfortable with vidding something so specific, so contextual, so dense; I had to make all the pieces fit because I knew they could fit. But more than that-I had to know how to actually Tell a Big Story with a little amount of time. I had to know how to listen and hear the music for what it is and be able to edit to the all beats and fit all the details of an entire franchise into these three minutes. By the end of 2010 I realized that I was ready. The level of contextual complexity of my Spartacus vid warmed me up, and it helped that 2020 was also hip-hop with a very authoritative beat intensity.
I had spent so much time just mentally vidding, thinking, rewatching, thinking some more about this vid that by the time that I started vidding, most of my first draft was done in less than 24 hours. High Voltage - 1/1/11. It wasn’t perfect, but I had worked through so much story over the last few years that it all came out the way it should and I just had to fine tune over the course of two months. I can’t be more proud of anything I’ve ever made than this, because it was my first fandom and it was the vid that I’ve been waiting so long to know how to make. And I did, I did and people got it at Vividcon, and they have responded so kindly online that… it’s so epic how happy it makes me feel.
These are definitely the vids I am most proud of, yes a million times yes. All of them were thoroughly difficult and my sweat and tears went into each and every and I can say with certainty that I was more emotionally involved in these four videos than anything else I’ve made.
What has been your single most rewarding moment as a vidder? Why?
High Voltage premiering at Vividcon. I knew I had to premiere it at Vividcon, to have that audience there, to have that in person reaction. And then after it premiered - to see, to hear that people got what the vid was saying, omg. lapillus spent the last seven months hearing me whingeeeee about how frightened I was about premiering it on the big screen but it turned out so well because people got it, got it, got it… and then I was shocked when it got selected for In Depth Vid Review. Because. omg, all these people in a room, talking about my vid, this thing that I had poured so much of my life into for years and years. Even those who didn’t have the canon context for the show could grasp enough to follow along with the rollercoaster that was the Stargate franchise with the Ancients and their moral superiority. My heart was beating so fast during Premieres but it beat even faster and harder during In Depth Vid Review once I realized that people were overwhelmed in the best way possible by the vid.
There is nothing that beats that feeling to know that your hard work connected with people.
On the opposite side, do you feel like you've ever failed at executing a vid idea, why?
Yes, yes. In 2008 I made a challenge vid for the ‘fuck you’ challenge and it was awful, so awful that I deleted the journal post and removed the link from my masterpost. I know kiki_miserychic said she liked it and it was the only comment I ever got on it but the audio was awful, the song was bad for a con setting since you couldn’t hear it but just bad for any setting. I thought I was making a sort of “me” point of view/commentary on how people like John Sheppard, Jack Harkness and all the other white men in positions of power on Heroes, Torchwood and Stargate Atlantis were fucking up the earth. (Atlantis because god I hated John Sheppard, and I hated the Michael arc and wanted to critique it so badly, and I did it so poorly.) There were too many sources, too many characters in a too-fast song with lyrics that were too difficult to parse. Looking back at the vid, I only just remembered that I cropped the footage because I didn’t know how to hide the edges of the zoomed clips. I didn’t realize how much I was sacrificing for coherency by cramming everything else into a small space with a punk rock song like that.
It embarresses me to this day and I know it’s a vid that if people ever rewatch the 2008 challenge show on their DVD sets, they are skipping over because it’s that bad. Hell, it’s my own vid and it bores me as much as it embarresses me. Don’t watch it.
What was the hardest vid (for whatever reason--technical, emotional, timing, etc.) that you have made? How did you persevere? Were you happy with it in the end?
Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect was the most difficult because of the emotional context of the show-how to piece together all these different variations of a single character with the way that I saw and understod him. But also the vid was difficult to work on because I was going through my own emotional crisis at that time and in a way it kept me tethered to my sanity. But, like it says in the vid, it turned out the way it should and I trusted the vid and myself and just followed it through as long as possible.
I Kissed a Boy was the AGHHHHHH-inducing vid for the tech because it was the first time I used After Effects. Of course the perfect porn scene had to involve two white dudes and I had to spend an obscene amount of time masking one guy so I could make him match Mohinder’s complexion. Plus those sparkles were harder than they looked, okay. And so was me deciding on how and where to use color in the verses and choruses. ARGH. There was a lot of bitching involved but I was vidding on a sort of deadline and still coming fresh out of my post-Vividcon squee which was propelling me forward through this new territory. And it turned out way better than I could have ever imagined, omg. \o/
The Spartacus vid 2020 was... just... Everything about that was hard. The timing. The clip choices. Being able to hold the narrative steady with the emotional context of the clips, while also being on a decent beat. Nothing has caused me more grief than that vid but I had good betas to keep me in check and stroke my hair and watch my drafts and squee and talk with me through my issues, so I would stop hyperventilating enough to crack my knuckles and dive back in and trust my vision and what the vid felt like it was shaping up to be, and JUST BREATHE AND VID TO THE END.
Are there vids that you have ideas for that you're putting off vidding? What are your reasons for not making it?
I have lots of vids that I put off for one reason or another. Mostly it’s due to my attention span. I change my mind every other day (I don’t know how my friends and betas deal with me, vidding mind like a goldfish, really.)
But other times I feel like I have to wait things out before I can begin. I don’t have the Fringe source I want to complete my general-series vid, ergo, no Fringe vid. Yet.
I have another vid that has been (more or less) in progress since 2008 because I haven’t been able to learn After Effects well enough to complete the things I know I need to do on it before I can call it finished. And I haven’t been able to learn AE well enough because my machine can barely run the program so that’s on the back burner for… hopefully not indefinitely, because I’ve put years of work into that thing and I can’t abandon it.
There are other instances in which I need to be in the mood for to return to the source. I need time to heal from Heroes. Other times I need to put it off to rewatch my source several times so I can make sure I’m in the right headspace for the work. And in yet other instances I’m hoping that my fannishness took a hiatus with my show like with Sanctuary so I can go back and make my epic Will vid, or tackle my Kate/Helen thing that I so desperately want to want to feel like vidding.
Other times I want closed canon before I reconsider how to approach my vidsong and idea (like for my House, House/Wilson vid, or in a better example: High Voltage. I had the idea in 2007, a bit before the end of the show, and I had to re-orient my brain several times before canon closed for SG-1 and then SGA before I could set out to make that happen.)
Other times I put off vid ideas I get simply because the source is not out yet (*cough* SHAME, MICHAEL FASSBENDER IN SHAME).
Other times I put off vidding certain things because I can’t ever find the right kind of song for what I think I want to say.
Then there are vids that I put off because I think I could ‘save’ it for a vidshow or try to meet a deadline. (and then hilariously I don’t have time to pull it off. Woe to the Planet of the Apes franchise vid that I wasn’t able to start for the Blast from the Past Challenge vidshow. Sigh.)
Are there any types of vids that you won't make? Why?
Types of vids? Like what types? I kind of surprised myself when I… somehow made Eli Roth cybering with fangirls into an actual vid-[Real Person] type of vid. And RPF vids were the type of thing I had seen in Supernatural/J2 fandom which I always thought was interesting but, Not For Me. And a source that I simply cannot vid. And yet when the time came I was able to take what I had seen and learned about RPF vids from J2 (and also wistfuL_fever’s earlier vids) and funnel it into something of my own making.
I was primed to vid SPN once-had my song edited and clips made and then by the time I was going to start plunking them down, I felt like a deflated balloon. I think it’s just the oversaturation of the source and the fandom itself that put me off, I don’t have any particularly insightful Dean/Cas things to say in a vid, so I don’t need to make it. Not when there are excellent Dean/Cas vids out there already. But I think I just don’t like the source enough to vid it. So I guess… I just have to have a certain level of fannishness about what I’m vidding for me to be able to vid it, right? That’s not an uncommon thing to feel.
I find the longer that I’ve been vidding, the more my taste expands to trying out different things. Newbie Vidder Me would never have been able to imagine I would ever make Blood Tears and Gold. There’s friggin’ suicide and non-underage stuff in it. And yet I made it. I like making serious vids and I like making my squee for my show/character/pairing tangible in a vid. But it’s hard to say whether or not there’s anything else that I wouldn’t vid aside from SPN and things I’m just not into enough, fannishly-speaking.
Is there a particular type of music or type of song you find yourself gravitating toward? Why/why not?
Pop music, rap. Remixes and mash-ups in particular have a very strong appeal to me now. In 2007 and through most of 2008 I just turned my nose up at the idea of vidding something as “banal” as pop music (even though deep down I love it) but I’ve obviously come into my own, seeing as when I vid pop music of sorts, it appears to be a good combination with whatever source combine it with. FYI: I can say with all honesty that I don’t actually like listening to Ke$ha unless I’m listening to it with a vidding mindset and how it makes me feel that way.
But it’s not just pop music. I mean, one of my (sadly not updated) vidding playlists is comprised of underground steampunk, acapella, Lady Gaga, eurodance and omg, I loves me some techno remixes and 80s dance/rave stuff. I have an enormous affinity for the singer-songwriter folk/acoustic/indie genre like Mike Doughty, Patty Larkin. Tegan and Sara, stuff that I definitely want to vid in the future but just haven’t had the time/motivation to tackle.
As I’ve been reflecting on this question and looking at my back catalog and thinking about projects I want to do in the future, it’s hard to pin down what I’m thoroughly gravitating to unless I frame it as what kind of mood I’m in for vidding. My very dense and serious character studies (If you Stayed Over, Grace Cathedral Hill, Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect) have been a different music genre than when I’m going for technicals and visuals like in Hook Shot, Love Letter and PASIV Face, of which are more beat-oriented, with synthesizers and a faster tempo.
I do think it’s safe to admit that I’m falling in more love with the hip-hop genre and will be vidding a lot more of it. I’ve got some mainstream’ish tracks I’d love to vid but I am taken with regional/underground hip-hop and the different kind of intensity these MCs from Seattle and Minneapolis have, what these rap groups from Australia and MCs from Canada are spitting. It’s incredible stuff. In fact, I have a short playlist of tracks I’ve compiled on YouTube if you want a listen. Blue Scholars, Macklemore, Matisyahu, Narcicyst, Downsyde, Fort Minor and a few others. The song Blink is definitely on my to-vid list in the next year because - unf. Because of everything about it. It’s unmistakably forthright, epic with musicality that makes me swoon. And even though ‘And We Danced’ has a pop feeling, Macklemore was actually making fun of mainstream music by just rapping about sex to a mainstream beat but it still sounds GREAT. The others all have their own flair and flow and this stuff is reallllllly tripping my vidder trigger, so to speak. *Flails*
Along those same lines, is there a music genre you won't vid?
I can’t say that I’m a country music fan but if the particular country music song caught my attention for whatever reason and spoke ot me, or reminded me of a character, show, the atmosphere of something, I wouldn’t rule it out. Not if it would make for a compelling story.
Do you have a 'To-Vid' list of songs? If so, what is one song you've had on your list forever but can never seem to find something that fits it?
I have several to-vid lists that I cycle songs in and out of every few years. I tend to save my playlists in a text file in case I have another hard drive failure and lose my itunes library again.
This song: The Message - Cops
I feel like I’ve gone through every permutation of characters, pairing, shows and I still am no closer to knowing what source thie vidsong belongs to yet. It’s possible that it might not exist or I haven’t asked the right person for their thoughts-so if you have an idea, please let me know because I need to vid this song. The lyrics, that drum and the guitar rifts combined with the strings in the chorus, omg drive me into the best kind of tizzy. Nrrgh. Plus the lyrics are just so damned interesting and colorful that there is some story it can amplify in a source…
How does your editing style reflect the music style that you choose for vids? Parallel, contrast, or is your editing style consistent to you and independant of the music used?
I think I generally have a fluid editing style (and eye for certain sources) that can-and has-been identifable as intrinsically mine.
In 2009 people guessed that I made All For Swinging You Around (probably because of the source alone), but also for the following festivids, I noticed a few people suspecting me of having made Big Pimpin’/Papercut, which I don’t think is an accident.
Earlier in the summer I had thrown my Kirk Poker Face vid draft at sweetestdrain who happened to be with greensilver at dualbunny’s. sweetestdrain pulled open my vid and started playing it when she recalled to me greensilver leaned over and asked if that was a vid of mine because it “felt” like one of my vids.
I think there’s a certain consisentency in the way that I utlize internal and external motion together, regardless of music choices, because it ends up feeling right when it feels smooth to me. I really feel like the kinetic energy and movement is part of how I see and visualize my timelines, from everything what you see in Chuck from the Burbank to Let There Be Guns. But even looking at the Deep Space 9 video, I Wish I Was James Bond, the show is shot entirely differently than later science fiction shows, but I’m still twisting my clips and being ever mindful of the internal motion so it doesn’t look or feel static. I get really panicky when I feel like I’m lingering on clip too long, which is why I think vidding slower songs is much more difficult.
Do you have any tricks when editing audio?
Oh god, pick songs that are easy to edit. I am super embarressed by how crummy my audio edits have been. See: King of Spain, the random snipping of the verse I didn’t think fit with the source. I cut out a line about the 9/11 from my Spartacus vid because I thought it would throw people too much-even though the edit itself is enough to throw people, fuuuck. Songs that are repetitive are usually easier to edit, which is why I think pop music lends itself for easy editing. Try and cut a Decemberist song down for size and you are just fucked.
I feel like I’m perpetually fumbling with Audacity when I’m cutting down my songs, zooming into the timeline and trying to cut out just enough beats or an extra chorus here… fade out without it sounding abrupt.
I wish I had actual tricks but it’s more of a trial and error and holding my breath when I’ snipping and clipping the audio waveform.
Do you have any "tricks" for making multiple sources meld visually?
I try to be smart and maintain a similar naming scheme when I’m vidding multiple sources so that way in my browser window in Final Cut, I can do a clt+f - enter my key clip name, ‘anger’ or ‘gun’ and have Final Cut open up a new bin/window with all of the clips with that in it’s name appear right there in a handy dandy list. That way I don’t have to go digging around everywhere for the same kind of clips. Here’s an example screen shot from my Hook Shot project file: Source_clipname#
Do you feel that your body of work up until this point is an accurate reflection of you as a person, or only a reflection of your viewing habits and musical collection?
It’s certainly both. My vids are a manifestation of my squee and media interest, my emotional level at that point in my life as well as illustrating my music tastes that continues to unfurl into new genres that I never thought I’d ever love or admit that I love.
Are there certain symbols, colours, metaphors or themes that you naturally gravitate towards and repeatedly use? In other words, does your vidding catalogue contain a little black dress?
I HAS A TYPE AND THY NAME IS BAD GUY WITH POWERS.
Okay, yeah, so I’m really taken with the smirking, evil/morally ambigious bad guy who is so fucking self-important but is equally (okay, SOMETIMES) self-aware of their awesomeness and that is just… my catnip kuwdoranip. And yes, I plan on vidding Sylar/Nikola/Erik to Ke$ha at some point because it just seems too fitting. And it will be awesome and I somehow don’t care that I have such a hilariously fannish type right here and am essentially vidding the same thing over and over. My squee is miiiiiiine.
I also love vidding the slash relationships on my shows, but I’m just all about vidding my squee. The bigger my squee the better and that’s a near constant that you’ll see me coming back to in different iterations of source whether it’s science-fiction or a criminal procedural thing or quirky Canadian shows of my heart. It’s a tangible thing when you watch my vids, or so I like to think.
Are there certain vidding techniques that you feel are uniquely your own? Like a certain signature style that you find yourself defaulting to? If so, what would that be?
I feel like I’ve really come into my own in terms of how I pace and make my vids flow in a particular way that is probably uniquely me. Or at least very me. Also the content of my vids is usually pretty easy to see and feel from a distance. In 2009, sol_se initally guessed that I made her festivid [All For Swinging You Around] (even if tried to convince her otherwise… though, to be fair, we are the only two people who have watched and vidded it so it was a fair guess that I could have made it.) But in 2010 MissBreese also guessed the festivid treat I made for her which was Event Horizon to the Jay-Z/Linkin Park Big Pimpin’/Papercut of epic horror and cannbalism.
I also remember being kind of frothingly at the end of a vid draft for my Kirk Poker Face and throwing it at sweetestdrain to look at. I guess that’s when she was at dualbunny’s for dualbunny’s birthday and greensilver was also there and had looked over sweetestdrain’s shoulder and asked, without seeing title credit or knowing that I was even vidding Star Trek at the time, if that was a vid by me. So there’s… clearly something there that is me, that is finally coming out in a consistent manner in the way I’m rendering my squee and attention for movement in my vids that people pick up.
PART 2
Additional questions, as well as discussion is welcome in the comment section; however, the interviewed vidders are under no obligation to respond, or to respond in a timely manner. Any questions on additional interviews or the Series as a whole can be directed to me at death_is_your_art (at) yahoo (dot) ca.
Currently there are no plans to hold more challenges or interviews; however, if any member would like to submit a commentary, or any content that they believe is appropriate for the community, then they are welcome to do so. All posting will be moderated to avoid spam and accidental vid announcement posting in the community.
Vidding name: Kuwdora
Vidding since: Febuarary 2007
First vid and source: Ameno. Stargate Atlantis
Most recent vid and source: Walk This Way. Ironman & Ironman 2
Total number of vids to date: I’ve lost count. Diya told me it’s 75 (not including Insane August Vidding Project). It’s probably more than that since I don’t release all my vids because some of them are better off just being for my eyes only.
Link to vids: Masterpost on Livejournal
How did you first get into vidding? Where did you learn about it, and what made you decide to try it?
Back when I still had dialup, linzbnl would send me copies of Stargate SG-1 that she burned to disc for me so I could watch on my computer, since I didn’t have enough VHS tapes to record all of the episodes when they were shown in syndication. A few times she had put some of these funny little things that were of Daniel and the team, set to pop music, and some such. They seemed kind of cute and stuff. I specifically remember the “I’m A Slave for Yu” video by MartoufMarty and how silly it was. And I’m pretty sure there was a little tiny .wmv file that was a Daniel-centric Full Circle video that registered in my brain. I thought they were cute but I didn’t make much of them at the time. That was around 2004 or 2005, maybe?
Fast forward to 2007. I had visited tafkfarfanfic during my Christmas break. We had watched a buncha Stargate and other things, and firstly I was amazed that the technology to hook your laptop up to the TV was already at the consumer level because I just didn’t know such things at the time. Then she started showing me these things called vids. Now these were vids that were better than the ones that Linz had dropped on a disc as an afterthought. These had a sense of humor, a style, they moved and grooved and some of them were just so fucking interesting that I had to know more and watch them over and over again. It’s something that looked really fun and I wanted to try to emulate it.
The first vids I remember ever seeing that made me go WOW were cesperanza and astolat’s Stargate Atlantis vid Rumble, because it was hilarious and cute and interesting. But then there was That One With the Polar Bears by sisabet because it was just so PRETTY and interesting even though I didn’t even know what the hell due South was at that time, but I remedied that pretty quickly, and mainlined due South and began working on my own first due South vid. At that time I quickly fell in love with sdwolfpup’s due South vids and once I saw You Can Call Me Al I was gone and I NEEDED to learn how to make awesome vids like THAT.
Was your first experience easier or harder than you expected it to be?
Oh my god, it was so much harder than I thought it’d be. I opened up iMovie and was amused for a bit and spent enough time digging around the LJ vidding comm’s memories section learning how to make these things called ‘clips’ -- but I was aghast at how you had to vid linearly. So when I was building on my timeline and decided I wanted to change a clip, I pulled it out of the timeline and OMG everything shifted to the left and snapped together and messed everything else up. I don’t know how long I could last that way.
But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself here. I told myself that I would stick with iMovie for at least 4 months because, fuck, this could just be a passing thing and I might just return to writing poetry and fanfic and short stories again after a few weeks, and I didn’t have any money for anything in the first place. I’d try this out. If it was a serious thing then I would upgrade my software and see what else there was to learn about this. But after my first half dozen vids I was just so sick of the limitations and ugly filters on iMovie.
I saved all of my summer job moneys for an actual student license for Final Cut Express and went on from there. The first experience with FCE was not much easier than iMovie because there was a lot to learn, and I had pulled a book out of the local library to learn the terminology and figure out what else I could google to help me make sense of anything.
Do different things tend to trigger your desire to make a vid, or does it tend to be something similar each time?
At first it was always the source. A character, or a character relationship. Later it always became specific moments in the source that set me off. The longer that I have been viding, the more I really hang so much of my thoughts on the lyrics of songs. If the lyrics ping me in some fashion--if I can twist it, turn it upside down or make it ironic, or if it just speaks to me about even a single aspect of a character or a show--I’ll have to vid it. I’ve noticed in the last year and a half that it’s the song that’s weighing more on my mind before I have the source idea, even if the lyrics haven’t flashed in neon colors with the source idea, I’ll seek out a source for a song because I’m having the same kind of initial fannish reaction to vidsongs as I am to my sources and characters. They’ve become a character of it’s own to me that I squee and adore.
But quite often if there’s something monumental enough in the source that trips my trigger-- I will leap upon it with wild abandon. Like Peter nailing Sylar for instance, homfg. I went absolutely WILD when that episode aired around Thanksgiving. I pulled out all the stops and spent, god. 10 hours at a time for the next few days trying to rip, clip and vid as fast as I could. I became so incoherent that when my roommates asked me a question I literally had to sit and stare blankly for several moments until I could actually find myself able to speak, since I was so focused on thinking in visuals and feeling the beats of Hot Mess. SO. MUCH. SQUEE.
Once you've been inspired, what's the first aspect of a vid that comes to you? Is it the visuals of the source? The song edit? The colors? Something else?
It’s lyric associations first off for me. It’s a pre-vidding stage, you know? I listen to the song over and over and over until it’s embedded in every fiber of my being, and figure out what kind of clips can go where.
But with different vids it’s invariably different. I don’t have any specific lyric associations with my vidsongs but I know how it’s suppose to feel with the colors and the way it’s shot, how the show’s composition will go with my song choice. If I’m doing Ke$ha, I’m figuring out what facial expressions or outrageous scene will work best on the over-the-top-beats.
What is your planning process like? Do you visualize with storyboard drawings, write out notes, or something else? Do you start with the music/lyrics/concept/atmosphere?
I usually make a text file, paste out the lyrics and in parentheses I would list my notes-usually a shorthand of sorts-with a name or a scene. Sometimes an emotion or a concept, and a lot of other times question marks fill up the space until I find something suitable to go there. Sometimes I’ll also throw down timestamps of things that I specifically found and wanted to remember to clip later for that line.
I don’t do spreadsheets of clip notes or permanently keep clip galleries. The only clip galleries I’ve kept in the past was for Heroes-for the bulk of my Sylar vids, cause it made it easier to revisit the source and work on my ongoing Sylar projects when all my clips were there. I did, however, purge my Sylar clip gallery in an attempt to wash the taste from my mouth for the time being, until I’m less hurt about how the show turned out and what it did to my favorite characters.
When I do clip, I tend to clip more than I will ever need. I clip in huge chunks and just break scenes down into more mangable pieces for me to sculpt away; and I tend to label things by scene because my visual memory is as such that if I have the scene listed out as sylar_clubscene01, sylar_clubscene02, through clubscene14, I will know at what point the scene is at by clip-chunk 12.
How about your preferred editorial process? Is it highly regimented or an organic process? And how do you know when you are DONE?
When I vid, I have to vid for hours and hours at a time, especially when I’m first starting out. Otherwise I feel like it takes me forever to get anything done and somehow I grew accustomed to sitting for 5-6 hours in an evening and vidding and then coming back and putting another 6-8 hours on it the following evening.
I have found that I want-or at least need to get the first draft out of my system as quickly as possible because I NEEEEEEEEEEEEED TO VIIIIIIIIIIIIIID, NEEEEEEEED TO GET IT OUT, GET IT DOWN. I need to see my idea come to life and move and work with the music.
For the most part I have gone through 3 drafts of a vid before I’ve come to some feeling that it’s Done. Draft 1 is clunky, but probably has a good assortment of what I think needs to be on the timeline. I mean this can differ from vid to vid but going back and rewatching some old vid drafts, I usually have agood handle on things. It’s just a lot and lot and lot of refining that goes on afterwards in Drafts 2 and 3.
Are there any books, websites, magazines, or other resources that you've used during vidding?
VideoCopilot for After Effects tutorials. Some of these are entirely complex and beyond any use that I would ever need for my vidding purposes but it’s really amazing to at least see step-by-step how someone is using After Effects since I can’t transport myself to dualbunny’s house and demand she show me everything that she knows. Not yet, anyway.
RNELdotNET has all kinds of photoshop tutorials that I came across. It didn’t help me specifically when I was looking for a tutorial on Inception-style motion graphics, but it was something I bookmarked for future use cause it had a good variety of stuff that I wanted to revisit.
I think any vidder interested or curious about After Effects, vidding and Photoshop needs to visit CreativeCow, check out the… unholy amount of tutorials and download the video podcasts. Check out the forums. Granted, a lot of the questions in the forums are by professional or semi-professional videographers and whatnot who are trying to do other kinds of things, but I’ve spent a lot of time trawling through what I could, just to see what was there and if I’d ever want to use something in a future project. And I’ve got a boatload of the video podcasts that I keep on my ipod to watch when I’m on the bus and need to remind myself of how to mask or rewatch something more complicated for when I have the patience to try and do half the tutorial myself with my lagging Macbook.
FXGuide is more of an industry-level portal that has news and much more theoretical and art-development aspect of FX happening in media. It’s cool stuff. A bit more meaty and less practical if all you want to know how to do is make Sylar’s eyes sparkle, but I really got a kick out of reading the Scott Pilgrim and VFX Against the World.
I have done an infinite amount of searches on YouTube when I was looking to figure out how to create certain titles/end credits. I combined some elements of a YouTube After Effects tutorial with a VideoCopilot tutorial in order to to achieve the look I got for the credits on High Voltage. YouTube is amazing for that kind of thing if you can get your search terms right and the vidding gods are with you.
What factors contribute to the design decisions when creating titles for your vids? Are they determined just from qualities inherent to the source or are there outside influences?
I find titles to be extremely hard to conceptualize and yet I can never just let myself do a centered Times New Roman and be done with it. In the past year or so I’ve begun to flex some After Effects muscles to get some titles down-PASIV Face and High Voltage, for instance. I’m probably not exaggerating when I say it took me more time to put those credits together than it took me to figure out how to make the damn vids themselves. Drives me fucking nuts. But PASIV Face is one that I’m most proud of because of the in-joke I placed at the beginning while mimicking the Inception credits. Big-name directors have the ‘from the director of’ to catch people’s attention and since I was vidding Inception and had vidded Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect several years earlier, the coincidence was too sweet and fun not to play upon that in the credits.
I try to figure out what kind of mood or tone a song or character is giving off in my vid and try to find the best font that would visually meld with that. Grace Cathedral Hill is a bit of a melancholy ordeal for Maya Herrera, but it’s elegant in it’s tragedy so it’s a simple and easy-to-read script. With Filthy/Gorgeous and Hold Music, my first Club Vivid vids, I realllly wanted to make a good impression-even as simple as they were as titles. But also with Hold Music I had been experimenting with keyframing for the first time and was attached to the idea of movement even in my title.
The most thoughtful title I’ve made was either High Voltage or Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect-the latter in which I elaborated upon (ad nauseum) in my commentary but I just felt proud of myself for having something that wasn’t a plain background and something that several layers to it-layers related to the lyrics of the song but also to the meta of how I saw his character. This is because as I have mentioned in a previous question, I had the most emotional connection to these vids so I worked 10x harder to make sure it had the perfect look and feel to match the vid.
High Voltage was an ancient stone background with the title engraved in it because in in the Milky Way galaxy the Ancients had carved everthing into the stone oblesiks they left behind, so it was replicating the look and feel that was intrinsic to the Ancients.
I will admit that there’s a bit of fun in opening the pre-set animations in AE and just dinking around to see what would be easy to plunk down with not a lot of stress like what you see in Who Found Mr. Fabulous?
While I’m on the subject, I want to recommend Art of the Title which is a fantastic web resource where the editors and staff deconstruct title sequences from film and television. It’s art/design oriented and doesn’t have an immediate and practical application to my own vidding and title needs, but it definitely is food for thought and is essentially a hunk of meat I want to gnaw on in the future.
What brings you the most satisfaction about vidding? Seeing the final piece onscreen? Or is it the process that brings you joy?
Getting the first draft down is the first blush of love, the first tumble against the sheets, it’s full of rapture for me when I can get it done as fast as I can. Then once I have been through my seemingly endless revisions, it’s the intense beta sessions that I love. It’s incredible fun to nitpick the hell out of my own stuff as I’m in the thick of it, even if it does drive me batty on occasion. I love releasing it into the wild but just being able to sit down and revel in all the minute details for hours and days on end after I thought all was said and done… it’s incredible, to me.
Which of your vids do you consider to be the biggest creative turning points in your vidding history? Are these the pieces you are most proud of? Why or why not?
Reinvent Yourself (Dec 2007) - this was my first long-term project that I edited in Final Cut Express… which amounts to about 3 months, I think, since I released it in December and had purchased FCE in August. It’s a huge stepping stone for me to begin vidding linearly. When I rewatch Reinvent Yourself what I see is the sheer joy I have in being able to make much more detailed cuts to the beats than I could ever hope to achieve with iMovie. Lyrically it’s not a complicated song, but I was trying so hard-even then, to figure out how to make the clips flow and feel right without feeling forced. There’s this haphazard way that the internal motion/external motion of the clips clash because I wanted to-I needed to cut on this beat, then use a swirly arm gesture with this sound. The freedom I had with transitions, dear god, I had so much glee. This vid definitely illustrates my first taste of indepence.
Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect (2009) - This was such a profound creative project in my life and I was trying to go to suuuuuch lengths to reconcile what the show had given me in terms of retconning and twisting the character into something that was barely recognizable. I needed to relcaim it. I had to, because somehow I had known enough about Sylar that I had this vidsong picked out years ago for Sylar, and then season 3 happened and I had to fix it, I had to show people how Sylar made sense to me, how I could see how they have shaped his character on screen. This vid also helped me realize that I can vid deeply into context and achieve awesome things, that I could make a very tight, thematic narrative.
2020 (2010) - My Spartacus vid was definitely another turning point as I began to embrace a music genre I had been too afraid of approacing in vidding for so long: hip-hop, tackling fast-paced rap lyrics, the message beneath and between the lines of the song. It was a very daunting project and I have never sent so many whining and frightened, frustrated and excited emails to my betas about any other vid as I did with this one. Being able to get through this vid with the story that it had, I felt I had the confidence to do anything now.
High Voltage (2011) - High Voltage is the vid that I had spent the last 5 years learning how to make. After I made Ameno, my First Ever Vid-which was about the Ancients-I was sitting at my summer job, listening to my ipod when my shuffle turned to High Voltage. A track I had downloaded off KaZaa via dial-up some four years earlier. I heard it and I knew it was about the Ancients. Except I didn’t even know how to hear the song for a vid. I just knew it was about the Ancients and that one day I might be able to make an awesome Ancients vid about Oma being all superior with her moral high ground and all that.
I would revisit my song maybe once a year and think about whether or not I was ready for it, whether I understood how to put it together. Whenever I would watch Stargate as it aired, or re-visit old episodes that might not have had anything to do with the Ancients, I would be thinking about how the Ancients were in the background of so much of the show, even when they didn’t have a character voice other than Oma and Sam’s Ancient Boyfriend. Then I had to re-orient my brain when seasons 9 and 10 happened, then I had to go back and reassert my thoughts about Stargate Atlantis and the Ancients involvement there. I had to feel comfortable with vidding something so specific, so contextual, so dense; I had to make all the pieces fit because I knew they could fit. But more than that-I had to know how to actually Tell a Big Story with a little amount of time. I had to know how to listen and hear the music for what it is and be able to edit to the all beats and fit all the details of an entire franchise into these three minutes. By the end of 2010 I realized that I was ready. The level of contextual complexity of my Spartacus vid warmed me up, and it helped that 2020 was also hip-hop with a very authoritative beat intensity.
I had spent so much time just mentally vidding, thinking, rewatching, thinking some more about this vid that by the time that I started vidding, most of my first draft was done in less than 24 hours. High Voltage - 1/1/11. It wasn’t perfect, but I had worked through so much story over the last few years that it all came out the way it should and I just had to fine tune over the course of two months. I can’t be more proud of anything I’ve ever made than this, because it was my first fandom and it was the vid that I’ve been waiting so long to know how to make. And I did, I did and people got it at Vividcon, and they have responded so kindly online that… it’s so epic how happy it makes me feel.
These are definitely the vids I am most proud of, yes a million times yes. All of them were thoroughly difficult and my sweat and tears went into each and every and I can say with certainty that I was more emotionally involved in these four videos than anything else I’ve made.
What has been your single most rewarding moment as a vidder? Why?
High Voltage premiering at Vividcon. I knew I had to premiere it at Vividcon, to have that audience there, to have that in person reaction. And then after it premiered - to see, to hear that people got what the vid was saying, omg. lapillus spent the last seven months hearing me whingeeeee about how frightened I was about premiering it on the big screen but it turned out so well because people got it, got it, got it… and then I was shocked when it got selected for In Depth Vid Review. Because. omg, all these people in a room, talking about my vid, this thing that I had poured so much of my life into for years and years. Even those who didn’t have the canon context for the show could grasp enough to follow along with the rollercoaster that was the Stargate franchise with the Ancients and their moral superiority. My heart was beating so fast during Premieres but it beat even faster and harder during In Depth Vid Review once I realized that people were overwhelmed in the best way possible by the vid.
There is nothing that beats that feeling to know that your hard work connected with people.
On the opposite side, do you feel like you've ever failed at executing a vid idea, why?
Yes, yes. In 2008 I made a challenge vid for the ‘fuck you’ challenge and it was awful, so awful that I deleted the journal post and removed the link from my masterpost. I know kiki_miserychic said she liked it and it was the only comment I ever got on it but the audio was awful, the song was bad for a con setting since you couldn’t hear it but just bad for any setting. I thought I was making a sort of “me” point of view/commentary on how people like John Sheppard, Jack Harkness and all the other white men in positions of power on Heroes, Torchwood and Stargate Atlantis were fucking up the earth. (Atlantis because god I hated John Sheppard, and I hated the Michael arc and wanted to critique it so badly, and I did it so poorly.) There were too many sources, too many characters in a too-fast song with lyrics that were too difficult to parse. Looking back at the vid, I only just remembered that I cropped the footage because I didn’t know how to hide the edges of the zoomed clips. I didn’t realize how much I was sacrificing for coherency by cramming everything else into a small space with a punk rock song like that.
It embarresses me to this day and I know it’s a vid that if people ever rewatch the 2008 challenge show on their DVD sets, they are skipping over because it’s that bad. Hell, it’s my own vid and it bores me as much as it embarresses me. Don’t watch it.
What was the hardest vid (for whatever reason--technical, emotional, timing, etc.) that you have made? How did you persevere? Were you happy with it in the end?
Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect was the most difficult because of the emotional context of the show-how to piece together all these different variations of a single character with the way that I saw and understod him. But also the vid was difficult to work on because I was going through my own emotional crisis at that time and in a way it kept me tethered to my sanity. But, like it says in the vid, it turned out the way it should and I trusted the vid and myself and just followed it through as long as possible.
I Kissed a Boy was the AGHHHHHH-inducing vid for the tech because it was the first time I used After Effects. Of course the perfect porn scene had to involve two white dudes and I had to spend an obscene amount of time masking one guy so I could make him match Mohinder’s complexion. Plus those sparkles were harder than they looked, okay. And so was me deciding on how and where to use color in the verses and choruses. ARGH. There was a lot of bitching involved but I was vidding on a sort of deadline and still coming fresh out of my post-Vividcon squee which was propelling me forward through this new territory. And it turned out way better than I could have ever imagined, omg. \o/
The Spartacus vid 2020 was... just... Everything about that was hard. The timing. The clip choices. Being able to hold the narrative steady with the emotional context of the clips, while also being on a decent beat. Nothing has caused me more grief than that vid but I had good betas to keep me in check and stroke my hair and watch my drafts and squee and talk with me through my issues, so I would stop hyperventilating enough to crack my knuckles and dive back in and trust my vision and what the vid felt like it was shaping up to be, and JUST BREATHE AND VID TO THE END.
Are there vids that you have ideas for that you're putting off vidding? What are your reasons for not making it?
I have lots of vids that I put off for one reason or another. Mostly it’s due to my attention span. I change my mind every other day (I don’t know how my friends and betas deal with me, vidding mind like a goldfish, really.)
But other times I feel like I have to wait things out before I can begin. I don’t have the Fringe source I want to complete my general-series vid, ergo, no Fringe vid. Yet.
I have another vid that has been (more or less) in progress since 2008 because I haven’t been able to learn After Effects well enough to complete the things I know I need to do on it before I can call it finished. And I haven’t been able to learn AE well enough because my machine can barely run the program so that’s on the back burner for… hopefully not indefinitely, because I’ve put years of work into that thing and I can’t abandon it.
There are other instances in which I need to be in the mood for to return to the source. I need time to heal from Heroes. Other times I need to put it off to rewatch my source several times so I can make sure I’m in the right headspace for the work. And in yet other instances I’m hoping that my fannishness took a hiatus with my show like with Sanctuary so I can go back and make my epic Will vid, or tackle my Kate/Helen thing that I so desperately want to want to feel like vidding.
Other times I want closed canon before I reconsider how to approach my vidsong and idea (like for my House, House/Wilson vid, or in a better example: High Voltage. I had the idea in 2007, a bit before the end of the show, and I had to re-orient my brain several times before canon closed for SG-1 and then SGA before I could set out to make that happen.)
Other times I put off vid ideas I get simply because the source is not out yet (*cough* SHAME, MICHAEL FASSBENDER IN SHAME).
Other times I put off vidding certain things because I can’t ever find the right kind of song for what I think I want to say.
Then there are vids that I put off because I think I could ‘save’ it for a vidshow or try to meet a deadline. (and then hilariously I don’t have time to pull it off. Woe to the Planet of the Apes franchise vid that I wasn’t able to start for the Blast from the Past Challenge vidshow. Sigh.)
Are there any types of vids that you won't make? Why?
Types of vids? Like what types? I kind of surprised myself when I… somehow made Eli Roth cybering with fangirls into an actual vid-[Real Person] type of vid. And RPF vids were the type of thing I had seen in Supernatural/J2 fandom which I always thought was interesting but, Not For Me. And a source that I simply cannot vid. And yet when the time came I was able to take what I had seen and learned about RPF vids from J2 (and also wistfuL_fever’s earlier vids) and funnel it into something of my own making.
I was primed to vid SPN once-had my song edited and clips made and then by the time I was going to start plunking them down, I felt like a deflated balloon. I think it’s just the oversaturation of the source and the fandom itself that put me off, I don’t have any particularly insightful Dean/Cas things to say in a vid, so I don’t need to make it. Not when there are excellent Dean/Cas vids out there already. But I think I just don’t like the source enough to vid it. So I guess… I just have to have a certain level of fannishness about what I’m vidding for me to be able to vid it, right? That’s not an uncommon thing to feel.
I find the longer that I’ve been vidding, the more my taste expands to trying out different things. Newbie Vidder Me would never have been able to imagine I would ever make Blood Tears and Gold. There’s friggin’ suicide and non-underage stuff in it. And yet I made it. I like making serious vids and I like making my squee for my show/character/pairing tangible in a vid. But it’s hard to say whether or not there’s anything else that I wouldn’t vid aside from SPN and things I’m just not into enough, fannishly-speaking.
Is there a particular type of music or type of song you find yourself gravitating toward? Why/why not?
Pop music, rap. Remixes and mash-ups in particular have a very strong appeal to me now. In 2007 and through most of 2008 I just turned my nose up at the idea of vidding something as “banal” as pop music (even though deep down I love it) but I’ve obviously come into my own, seeing as when I vid pop music of sorts, it appears to be a good combination with whatever source combine it with. FYI: I can say with all honesty that I don’t actually like listening to Ke$ha unless I’m listening to it with a vidding mindset and how it makes me feel that way.
But it’s not just pop music. I mean, one of my (sadly not updated) vidding playlists is comprised of underground steampunk, acapella, Lady Gaga, eurodance and omg, I loves me some techno remixes and 80s dance/rave stuff. I have an enormous affinity for the singer-songwriter folk/acoustic/indie genre like Mike Doughty, Patty Larkin. Tegan and Sara, stuff that I definitely want to vid in the future but just haven’t had the time/motivation to tackle.
As I’ve been reflecting on this question and looking at my back catalog and thinking about projects I want to do in the future, it’s hard to pin down what I’m thoroughly gravitating to unless I frame it as what kind of mood I’m in for vidding. My very dense and serious character studies (If you Stayed Over, Grace Cathedral Hill, Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect) have been a different music genre than when I’m going for technicals and visuals like in Hook Shot, Love Letter and PASIV Face, of which are more beat-oriented, with synthesizers and a faster tempo.
I do think it’s safe to admit that I’m falling in more love with the hip-hop genre and will be vidding a lot more of it. I’ve got some mainstream’ish tracks I’d love to vid but I am taken with regional/underground hip-hop and the different kind of intensity these MCs from Seattle and Minneapolis have, what these rap groups from Australia and MCs from Canada are spitting. It’s incredible stuff. In fact, I have a short playlist of tracks I’ve compiled on YouTube if you want a listen. Blue Scholars, Macklemore, Matisyahu, Narcicyst, Downsyde, Fort Minor and a few others. The song Blink is definitely on my to-vid list in the next year because - unf. Because of everything about it. It’s unmistakably forthright, epic with musicality that makes me swoon. And even though ‘And We Danced’ has a pop feeling, Macklemore was actually making fun of mainstream music by just rapping about sex to a mainstream beat but it still sounds GREAT. The others all have their own flair and flow and this stuff is reallllllly tripping my vidder trigger, so to speak. *Flails*
Along those same lines, is there a music genre you won't vid?
I can’t say that I’m a country music fan but if the particular country music song caught my attention for whatever reason and spoke ot me, or reminded me of a character, show, the atmosphere of something, I wouldn’t rule it out. Not if it would make for a compelling story.
Do you have a 'To-Vid' list of songs? If so, what is one song you've had on your list forever but can never seem to find something that fits it?
I have several to-vid lists that I cycle songs in and out of every few years. I tend to save my playlists in a text file in case I have another hard drive failure and lose my itunes library again.
This song: The Message - Cops
I feel like I’ve gone through every permutation of characters, pairing, shows and I still am no closer to knowing what source thie vidsong belongs to yet. It’s possible that it might not exist or I haven’t asked the right person for their thoughts-so if you have an idea, please let me know because I need to vid this song. The lyrics, that drum and the guitar rifts combined with the strings in the chorus, omg drive me into the best kind of tizzy. Nrrgh. Plus the lyrics are just so damned interesting and colorful that there is some story it can amplify in a source…
How does your editing style reflect the music style that you choose for vids? Parallel, contrast, or is your editing style consistent to you and independant of the music used?
I think I generally have a fluid editing style (and eye for certain sources) that can-and has-been identifable as intrinsically mine.
In 2009 people guessed that I made All For Swinging You Around (probably because of the source alone), but also for the following festivids, I noticed a few people suspecting me of having made Big Pimpin’/Papercut, which I don’t think is an accident.
Earlier in the summer I had thrown my Kirk Poker Face vid draft at sweetestdrain who happened to be with greensilver at dualbunny’s. sweetestdrain pulled open my vid and started playing it when she recalled to me greensilver leaned over and asked if that was a vid of mine because it “felt” like one of my vids.
I think there’s a certain consisentency in the way that I utlize internal and external motion together, regardless of music choices, because it ends up feeling right when it feels smooth to me. I really feel like the kinetic energy and movement is part of how I see and visualize my timelines, from everything what you see in Chuck from the Burbank to Let There Be Guns. But even looking at the Deep Space 9 video, I Wish I Was James Bond, the show is shot entirely differently than later science fiction shows, but I’m still twisting my clips and being ever mindful of the internal motion so it doesn’t look or feel static. I get really panicky when I feel like I’m lingering on clip too long, which is why I think vidding slower songs is much more difficult.
Do you have any tricks when editing audio?
Oh god, pick songs that are easy to edit. I am super embarressed by how crummy my audio edits have been. See: King of Spain, the random snipping of the verse I didn’t think fit with the source. I cut out a line about the 9/11 from my Spartacus vid because I thought it would throw people too much-even though the edit itself is enough to throw people, fuuuck. Songs that are repetitive are usually easier to edit, which is why I think pop music lends itself for easy editing. Try and cut a Decemberist song down for size and you are just fucked.
I feel like I’m perpetually fumbling with Audacity when I’m cutting down my songs, zooming into the timeline and trying to cut out just enough beats or an extra chorus here… fade out without it sounding abrupt.
I wish I had actual tricks but it’s more of a trial and error and holding my breath when I’ snipping and clipping the audio waveform.
Do you have any "tricks" for making multiple sources meld visually?
I try to be smart and maintain a similar naming scheme when I’m vidding multiple sources so that way in my browser window in Final Cut, I can do a clt+f - enter my key clip name, ‘anger’ or ‘gun’ and have Final Cut open up a new bin/window with all of the clips with that in it’s name appear right there in a handy dandy list. That way I don’t have to go digging around everywhere for the same kind of clips. Here’s an example screen shot from my Hook Shot project file: Source_clipname#
Do you feel that your body of work up until this point is an accurate reflection of you as a person, or only a reflection of your viewing habits and musical collection?
It’s certainly both. My vids are a manifestation of my squee and media interest, my emotional level at that point in my life as well as illustrating my music tastes that continues to unfurl into new genres that I never thought I’d ever love or admit that I love.
Are there certain symbols, colours, metaphors or themes that you naturally gravitate towards and repeatedly use? In other words, does your vidding catalogue contain a little black dress?
I HAS A TYPE AND THY NAME IS BAD GUY WITH POWERS.
Okay, yeah, so I’m really taken with the smirking, evil/morally ambigious bad guy who is so fucking self-important but is equally (okay, SOMETIMES) self-aware of their awesomeness and that is just… my catnip kuwdoranip. And yes, I plan on vidding Sylar/Nikola/Erik to Ke$ha at some point because it just seems too fitting. And it will be awesome and I somehow don’t care that I have such a hilariously fannish type right here and am essentially vidding the same thing over and over. My squee is miiiiiiine.
I also love vidding the slash relationships on my shows, but I’m just all about vidding my squee. The bigger my squee the better and that’s a near constant that you’ll see me coming back to in different iterations of source whether it’s science-fiction or a criminal procedural thing or quirky Canadian shows of my heart. It’s a tangible thing when you watch my vids, or so I like to think.
Are there certain vidding techniques that you feel are uniquely your own? Like a certain signature style that you find yourself defaulting to? If so, what would that be?
I feel like I’ve really come into my own in terms of how I pace and make my vids flow in a particular way that is probably uniquely me. Or at least very me. Also the content of my vids is usually pretty easy to see and feel from a distance. In 2009, sol_se initally guessed that I made her festivid [All For Swinging You Around] (even if tried to convince her otherwise… though, to be fair, we are the only two people who have watched and vidded it so it was a fair guess that I could have made it.) But in 2010 MissBreese also guessed the festivid treat I made for her which was Event Horizon to the Jay-Z/Linkin Park Big Pimpin’/Papercut of epic horror and cannbalism.
I also remember being kind of frothingly at the end of a vid draft for my Kirk Poker Face and throwing it at sweetestdrain to look at. I guess that’s when she was at dualbunny’s for dualbunny’s birthday and greensilver was also there and had looked over sweetestdrain’s shoulder and asked, without seeing title credit or knowing that I was even vidding Star Trek at the time, if that was a vid by me. So there’s… clearly something there that is me, that is finally coming out in a consistent manner in the way I’m rendering my squee and attention for movement in my vids that people pick up.
PART 2