the Year In Vids meme
I think I swiped this version from sisabet. She's definitely where I got the "what I learned!" sections.
videos I made this year:
"Cat-Scan Hist'ry" (Donnie Darko)
"Window of Opportunity" (Wonderfalls)
"Thistledown Tears" (Firefly)
my favorite of my own vids this year:
"Thistledown Tears." I just rewatched them all to answer this question, and "Thistledown" still gets to me the most.
my best vid this year:
I could quibble here about the value of "best" we're endorsing, and I think each of the three vids is the best at different things, but I think "Thistledown" is probably the best overall.
vid of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
"Cat-Scan Hist'ry," due largely to the source. Movie vid reception is not like TV vid reception, especially where the movie doesn't come pre-equipped with either an active fandom or slashiness (the first lack being due perhaps to the second). On the other hand, renenet and Lum and sisabet all liked it, so calling it "underappreciated" seems a little disingenuous on my part.
most fun video:
"Window of Opportunity," by default. But I do actually think it's a fun vid. I still kinda wish I'd been at the VividCon Nearly New show to gauge audience reaction to it.
video with single sexiest moment:
This is a baffling question to ask about these three vids - which, it occurs to me, is good, since it means I've expanded my thematic range. Donnie kissing Gretchen isn't so much sexy as doomed. So something from "Thistledown": that circling shot of Mal and Zoe drawing their guns, maybe, or Zoe coming up out of that somersault with her guns at the ready.
hardest video to make:
"Cat-Scan" and "Thistledown" both - and for some of the same reasons.
most unintentionally *telling* video:
Well, the most telling is certainly "Thistledown," but I think most if not all of that was intentional: MY SHOW! You know, I think renenet is probably way better equipped to answer this question than I am. Possibly better equipped to do this whole part of the meme, in fact.
Cat-Scan Hist'ry
"Cat-Scan" is, not coincidentally, the vid I was working on when I wrote my post on narrative and non-narrative modes of vidding. It is in many ways the necessary extension of "Superstar": I had deliberately abandoned the idea of conveying Donnie Darko's story (because, let's face it, I'd only watched the movie once and couldn't have summed up the story if you'd asked) and was thus trying to construct the vid through visual juxtapositions rather than through narrative. I was also trying to practice some of the things about motion that I had figured out in "Superstar."
This is the first vid that I ever made without a storyboard. It is likely to remain the only such vid. I had a painfully hard time vidding without a storyboard - as I suspected I would. I made the experiment because I wanted to force myself to try just throwing clips at the timeline to see what stuck, the way Lum and sisabet so often do. So I captured a bunch of scenes and images that I was sure I wanted to use in the vid, and just started messing around. It worked in the literal sense - I ended up with a vid - but it also worked in the more general sense of getting me over my fear of vidding without planning first. I have gone back to planning and specifically to storyboarding, but my storyboards for the subsequent two vids have been much more flexible, more open-ended, and have allowed for more experimentation - which I have understood *as* experimentation rather than as lame flailing about. This is also the only vid for which I've exported a snippet (the last 40 seconds or so) and foisted it on people over AIM to see whether it's working.
And this is the first vid for which I made a clip database (actually a spreadsheet in this case). Time-consuming, but very helpful.
As if all that weren't enough, this vid had more audio editing than any vid I'd done up to that point. The original song is 6:25; the finished vid is 3:25. That's a total of three minutes cut out, and unlike "Atropine" it didn't get done by just sticking in a fade-out three minutes before the end; I chopped from at least half a dozen different places and then had to suture the song back together. Patience not being one of my great virtues, this task had me halfway to great clomping hysterics.
All told: I learned to think about motion not just as decoration added in revision but as an organizing principle that can be thought about during a vid's earliest stages; I continued to work on learning to build a vid around recurring images rather than around a story; I practiced using images of objects and scenery as well as images of character faces; I practiced audio editing at a much higher level of complexity than I had in the past; I experimented with setting up a climax through both tempo of cuts and speed of motion within the frame; I learned to let go of my obsessive need to (over)plan; and, of course, I learned that little girls in shiny dresses are much scarier than demonic bunnies.
Window of Opportunity
I learned (again) that my first idea is not always my best idea. The entire last third of this vid - maybe more like the entire second half - was removed and reconstructed after beta. Thank goodness for renenet's willingness to say "Sweetie, you do realize you've completely switched gears here, right? And that it's not working?" I still have the original export, complete with Wrong Ending, stashed somewhere on the hard drive. It will never see the light of day.
This vid was a lot harder to make than I managed to make it look, which is itself something of an accomplishment. There was the whole red herring of an ending problem, and there were various tech problems, and there was the question of how to begin and end, and then there was the problem of getting the mood right. The song captures, I think, something about the cynical/snarky/jaded/sweet mood of the show itself, which is why I wanted to use the song in the first place, but what I came to realize is that I associate most of those elements with the show's (frequently brilliant) dialogue, and finding ways to convey it visually was more of a challenge than I'd anticipated.
I also learned that sometimes you have to cut the entire first verse of a song to make it viddable, and that if you pick a sufficiently obscure song nobody will notice, let alone care.
Thistledown Tears
This vid is both the logical culmination of a lot of things I'd been practicing for a while *and* my first attempt to do several things I'd never tried before.
Things I'd been working on: making a non-linear, non-narrative vid; connecting clips through motion; using a clip database when planning (and it was so utterly indispensable here that it's likely to be a crucial part of every one of my vids in future); planning in such a way as to leave room for changing my mind about things; editing audio on a really micro level.
Things I hadn't tried before: making an ensemble vid; connecting clips through the manipulation of color and levels; messing around with motion and size effects (the ball-into-planet sequence).
What I learned: Balancing all the characters in an ensemble vid is hard for me. Finding the visual center of gravity for an ensemble vid is hard, even if the thematic stuff is relatively clear. Vidding under serious deadline pressure is hard. ...I feel like there should be other stuff, more positive stuff, but honestly this one's kind of a blur. (Well, I guess I did learn not to fear manipulating color, etc; I'm sure that it'll take me several vids to develop to the point of feeling comfortable with it, just as motion did, but I think I laid the foundations.)
This vid is also really hard for me to be objective about, even now. I'd been thinking about this vid and planning this vid for so long - over a year and a half - and when I finally got to it... I said to renenet at some point, "This is the vid of my heart," and I meant it; more than any other vid that I've done, this vid is the expression of my love for a whole show - not a character or a relationship or an idea, but a show. laurashapiro has been talking about feeling like she's vidding from a different place these days, from a commitment to the vidding process itself as much as, or more than, from love of the source, and I can really feel that too when I think about most of the projects I have on tap. But this vid - this vid came out of a place of intense love.
videos I made this year:
"Cat-Scan Hist'ry" (Donnie Darko)
"Window of Opportunity" (Wonderfalls)
"Thistledown Tears" (Firefly)
my favorite of my own vids this year:
"Thistledown Tears." I just rewatched them all to answer this question, and "Thistledown" still gets to me the most.
my best vid this year:
I could quibble here about the value of "best" we're endorsing, and I think each of the three vids is the best at different things, but I think "Thistledown" is probably the best overall.
vid of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion:
"Cat-Scan Hist'ry," due largely to the source. Movie vid reception is not like TV vid reception, especially where the movie doesn't come pre-equipped with either an active fandom or slashiness (the first lack being due perhaps to the second). On the other hand, renenet and Lum and sisabet all liked it, so calling it "underappreciated" seems a little disingenuous on my part.
most fun video:
"Window of Opportunity," by default. But I do actually think it's a fun vid. I still kinda wish I'd been at the VividCon Nearly New show to gauge audience reaction to it.
video with single sexiest moment:
This is a baffling question to ask about these three vids - which, it occurs to me, is good, since it means I've expanded my thematic range. Donnie kissing Gretchen isn't so much sexy as doomed. So something from "Thistledown": that circling shot of Mal and Zoe drawing their guns, maybe, or Zoe coming up out of that somersault with her guns at the ready.
hardest video to make:
"Cat-Scan" and "Thistledown" both - and for some of the same reasons.
most unintentionally *telling* video:
Well, the most telling is certainly "Thistledown," but I think most if not all of that was intentional: MY SHOW! You know, I think renenet is probably way better equipped to answer this question than I am. Possibly better equipped to do this whole part of the meme, in fact.
Cat-Scan Hist'ry
"Cat-Scan" is, not coincidentally, the vid I was working on when I wrote my post on narrative and non-narrative modes of vidding. It is in many ways the necessary extension of "Superstar": I had deliberately abandoned the idea of conveying Donnie Darko's story (because, let's face it, I'd only watched the movie once and couldn't have summed up the story if you'd asked) and was thus trying to construct the vid through visual juxtapositions rather than through narrative. I was also trying to practice some of the things about motion that I had figured out in "Superstar."
This is the first vid that I ever made without a storyboard. It is likely to remain the only such vid. I had a painfully hard time vidding without a storyboard - as I suspected I would. I made the experiment because I wanted to force myself to try just throwing clips at the timeline to see what stuck, the way Lum and sisabet so often do. So I captured a bunch of scenes and images that I was sure I wanted to use in the vid, and just started messing around. It worked in the literal sense - I ended up with a vid - but it also worked in the more general sense of getting me over my fear of vidding without planning first. I have gone back to planning and specifically to storyboarding, but my storyboards for the subsequent two vids have been much more flexible, more open-ended, and have allowed for more experimentation - which I have understood *as* experimentation rather than as lame flailing about. This is also the only vid for which I've exported a snippet (the last 40 seconds or so) and foisted it on people over AIM to see whether it's working.
And this is the first vid for which I made a clip database (actually a spreadsheet in this case). Time-consuming, but very helpful.
As if all that weren't enough, this vid had more audio editing than any vid I'd done up to that point. The original song is 6:25; the finished vid is 3:25. That's a total of three minutes cut out, and unlike "Atropine" it didn't get done by just sticking in a fade-out three minutes before the end; I chopped from at least half a dozen different places and then had to suture the song back together. Patience not being one of my great virtues, this task had me halfway to great clomping hysterics.
All told: I learned to think about motion not just as decoration added in revision but as an organizing principle that can be thought about during a vid's earliest stages; I continued to work on learning to build a vid around recurring images rather than around a story; I practiced using images of objects and scenery as well as images of character faces; I practiced audio editing at a much higher level of complexity than I had in the past; I experimented with setting up a climax through both tempo of cuts and speed of motion within the frame; I learned to let go of my obsessive need to (over)plan; and, of course, I learned that little girls in shiny dresses are much scarier than demonic bunnies.
Window of Opportunity
I learned (again) that my first idea is not always my best idea. The entire last third of this vid - maybe more like the entire second half - was removed and reconstructed after beta. Thank goodness for renenet's willingness to say "Sweetie, you do realize you've completely switched gears here, right? And that it's not working?" I still have the original export, complete with Wrong Ending, stashed somewhere on the hard drive. It will never see the light of day.
This vid was a lot harder to make than I managed to make it look, which is itself something of an accomplishment. There was the whole red herring of an ending problem, and there were various tech problems, and there was the question of how to begin and end, and then there was the problem of getting the mood right. The song captures, I think, something about the cynical/snarky/jaded/sweet mood of the show itself, which is why I wanted to use the song in the first place, but what I came to realize is that I associate most of those elements with the show's (frequently brilliant) dialogue, and finding ways to convey it visually was more of a challenge than I'd anticipated.
I also learned that sometimes you have to cut the entire first verse of a song to make it viddable, and that if you pick a sufficiently obscure song nobody will notice, let alone care.
Thistledown Tears
This vid is both the logical culmination of a lot of things I'd been practicing for a while *and* my first attempt to do several things I'd never tried before.
Things I'd been working on: making a non-linear, non-narrative vid; connecting clips through motion; using a clip database when planning (and it was so utterly indispensable here that it's likely to be a crucial part of every one of my vids in future); planning in such a way as to leave room for changing my mind about things; editing audio on a really micro level.
Things I hadn't tried before: making an ensemble vid; connecting clips through the manipulation of color and levels; messing around with motion and size effects (the ball-into-planet sequence).
What I learned: Balancing all the characters in an ensemble vid is hard for me. Finding the visual center of gravity for an ensemble vid is hard, even if the thematic stuff is relatively clear. Vidding under serious deadline pressure is hard. ...I feel like there should be other stuff, more positive stuff, but honestly this one's kind of a blur. (Well, I guess I did learn not to fear manipulating color, etc; I'm sure that it'll take me several vids to develop to the point of feeling comfortable with it, just as motion did, but I think I laid the foundations.)
This vid is also really hard for me to be objective about, even now. I'd been thinking about this vid and planning this vid for so long - over a year and a half - and when I finally got to it... I said to renenet at some point, "This is the vid of my heart," and I meant it; more than any other vid that I've done, this vid is the expression of my love for a whole show - not a character or a relationship or an idea, but a show. laurashapiro has been talking about feeling like she's vidding from a different place these days, from a commitment to the vidding process itself as much as, or more than, from love of the source, and I can really feel that too when I think about most of the projects I have on tap. But this vid - this vid came out of a place of intense love.