Songvid: 'Lalita!' by cupidsbow (Bride and Prejudice, PG-13)
The big reveal! I ended up really enjoying festivids, despite my brief emo moment in which I felt totally inadequate as a vidder. You can find some notes on the making behind the cut.
Title: Lalita!
Author: cupidsbow/
cupidsbow
Fandom: Bride and Prejudice
Pairing: Lalita/Wickham, Lalita/Darcy
Rating: PG-13
Music: 'Exotica' by Pepe Jamarillo
Summary: Love, dancing and Lalita!
For: For bop_radar for festivids, 2009. Here's the original splashpage (the streaming version there is on BAM, and the framerate does the vid no favours), and the Festivids 2009 Masterlist.
Beta: Thanks to Hope for the beta.
ETA: Links now go through to the remastered version (December 2010).
Download: MegaUpload (wmv 42.26MB).
Streaming: YouTube.
Notes on Lalita!
This is the last vid I'm ever likely to make on MovieMaker, as I will finally be getting my new computer tomorrow, and I will be celebrating by buying Sony Vegas.
This is how I feel about that: \o/
All of the problems with MovieMaker really show with this vid. For instance: because of the dimensions of the source, it was hard to port the vid out without it looking smooshed; the quality of the clips is kind of crappy, even though the source files were clean; the palate of effects are so cheesy, and I wanted to stretch out and do other things. But! Despite all that, the vid was huge fun to make. Lalita is gorgeous, and the dancing in the film is delightful. It was not a hardship to look at these lovely people for many days and weeks.
The hardest part of the whole process was choosing the music, which was a bit of a marathon. bop_radar had asked for a vid with dancing and Lalita, so I needed something fast-paced I could cut the dancing to. I must have listened to a hundred songs, but none of them seemed right, until I heard the instrumental "Exotica" by Pepe Jamarillo on a crappy old CD a friend palmed off on me. The song pinged me right away, but I was a bit worried it was, as Hope said, "too much like elevator music". Also, there was no way on earth I was going to call a vid based on a Bollywood movie "Exotica". Just, no!
So I listened to a heap more music, and tried some mashups, but in the end, I decided my first instinct was the best, and I went with the instrumental track. That aspect of it worked out pretty well, I think.
What I learned in the editing: It turns out editing dancing is labour intensive. Very labour intensive. And that was true even though the track I chose synched up with the dances! (In hindsight, I think that must be why I picked it, even though I didn't consciously know that it was a match at the time.) When I came to edit the stick dance, every raw clip matched the music perfectly. It was a bit gobsmacking. That bit with the guy shaking his shoulders in time to the music? I totally didn't edit that, it just did it all on its own! It's my favourite bit of the whole vid. Anyway, once I started moving things around, that gorgeous synchronicity went away, and it took many hours to get it right again. And that's why there's that one clip in the stick dance sequence that is jarring -- I quite simply ran out of time to fix it (and if you don't know which clip I mean, I'm not telling ;). Fortunately, the jarring kind of works, narrative-wise, but every time I see it I grit my teeth and itch to change it.
I'm not going to though -- the vid is what it is.
That's one of the downsides to making something for any fest -- even if I work on the project steadily, I nearly always run out of time to do those final tweaks.
That's it really. I don't have anything else deep to say, except thank goodness I'm never using MovieMaker again. *channels Scarlett O'Hara and shakes fist*
This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/341395.html.
Title: Lalita!
Author: cupidsbow/
cupidsbow
Fandom: Bride and Prejudice
Pairing: Lalita/Wickham, Lalita/Darcy
Rating: PG-13
Music: 'Exotica' by Pepe Jamarillo
Summary: Love, dancing and Lalita!
For: For bop_radar for festivids, 2009. Here's the original splashpage (the streaming version there is on BAM, and the framerate does the vid no favours), and the Festivids 2009 Masterlist.
Beta: Thanks to Hope for the beta.
ETA: Links now go through to the remastered version (December 2010).
Download: MegaUpload (wmv 42.26MB).
Streaming: YouTube.
Click to viewNotes on Lalita!
This is the last vid I'm ever likely to make on MovieMaker, as I will finally be getting my new computer tomorrow, and I will be celebrating by buying Sony Vegas.
This is how I feel about that: \o/
All of the problems with MovieMaker really show with this vid. For instance: because of the dimensions of the source, it was hard to port the vid out without it looking smooshed; the quality of the clips is kind of crappy, even though the source files were clean; the palate of effects are so cheesy, and I wanted to stretch out and do other things. But! Despite all that, the vid was huge fun to make. Lalita is gorgeous, and the dancing in the film is delightful. It was not a hardship to look at these lovely people for many days and weeks.
The hardest part of the whole process was choosing the music, which was a bit of a marathon. bop_radar had asked for a vid with dancing and Lalita, so I needed something fast-paced I could cut the dancing to. I must have listened to a hundred songs, but none of them seemed right, until I heard the instrumental "Exotica" by Pepe Jamarillo on a crappy old CD a friend palmed off on me. The song pinged me right away, but I was a bit worried it was, as Hope said, "too much like elevator music". Also, there was no way on earth I was going to call a vid based on a Bollywood movie "Exotica". Just, no!
So I listened to a heap more music, and tried some mashups, but in the end, I decided my first instinct was the best, and I went with the instrumental track. That aspect of it worked out pretty well, I think.
What I learned in the editing: It turns out editing dancing is labour intensive. Very labour intensive. And that was true even though the track I chose synched up with the dances! (In hindsight, I think that must be why I picked it, even though I didn't consciously know that it was a match at the time.) When I came to edit the stick dance, every raw clip matched the music perfectly. It was a bit gobsmacking. That bit with the guy shaking his shoulders in time to the music? I totally didn't edit that, it just did it all on its own! It's my favourite bit of the whole vid. Anyway, once I started moving things around, that gorgeous synchronicity went away, and it took many hours to get it right again. And that's why there's that one clip in the stick dance sequence that is jarring -- I quite simply ran out of time to fix it (and if you don't know which clip I mean, I'm not telling ;). Fortunately, the jarring kind of works, narrative-wise, but every time I see it I grit my teeth and itch to change it.
I'm not going to though -- the vid is what it is.
That's one of the downsides to making something for any fest -- even if I work on the project steadily, I nearly always run out of time to do those final tweaks.
That's it really. I don't have anything else deep to say, except thank goodness I'm never using MovieMaker again. *channels Scarlett O'Hara and shakes fist*
This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/341395.html.