vidding! whee!
I have three (THREE) vids in progress these days, and this weekend I finally had several hours of uninterrupted time (for two days running!) to sit down and work on them, and I made progress! My original intention was to work on the Firefly vid, but I ended up accidentally opening the RayK vid file yesterday afternoon, and then I said "what the hell" and just kind of went with it, and now after two days of vidding I have... wow, I think I have at least 45 seconds of the timeline filled in fairly definitively, and another ten or fifteen seconds of placeholder-y maybe-not-this-exact-clip-but-something-along-these-lines stuff. It's not all consecutive, so it's not really looking like a draft yet, but hey, progress, you know? I mean, more than a third of the way towards a draft. I'm finally vidding again, after more than nine months. It's not like I've been totally inactive in that time - I've been thinking and planning and remastering and thinking and planning some more - but this is the real deal, this screwing around in Premiere; this is what sucked me into vidding in the first place, and god I've missed it.
I'm sure a lot of the clips I've thrown down will get switched out or moved around before I even do the first export, let alone send it off for beta, and by the time it gets to beta, I mean, who knows - renenet could end up telling me to rip out the entire last half third and start again (she's done it before, because she is hateful wants what's best for the vid), but I finally feel like I've really started - after all the prep work I've been doing for the past few weeks, storyboarding and virtual clipping and audio editing and so on, I'm finally in there slinging clips around and figuring out what needs to land on what beat and starting to discover the vid's internal logic. The vid's not vidding itself - I've never had a vid do that - but it's gaining some momentum, and it feels amazing.
I'm keeping a vidding diary again, and doing so is making me realize just how much my process has changed in the last few years - how much it's changed, specifically, since and because of Cat-Scan Hist'ry, which really is my watershed vid in terms of process as well as skill. My storyboard for this RayK vid looks nothing like the storyboards I used to do; there are a few notes about specific clips, but many more notes about the moods I'm after or the mental state I'm trying to represent at different moments in the vid. And the process of putting down clips has become... not necessarily more random, but a lot less linear. When I first started vidding, I would begin at the beginning, continue to the end, and then stop (which I could do because I'd planned almost every shot in advance); later on I got more flexible about this, and was as apt to begin at the end as at the beginning, but still tended to vid very much in sections, working on one section at a time until I had at least a temporary version, and then moving on to the next section for which I had enough key clips to give me a jumping-off point.
Now... I've laid a bunch of key clips that I want for particular lyrics or musical moments, and they're all over the timeline; and I've grabbed some secondary clips and found places where they match up thematically or visually with something going on in the key clips, and I've thrown them into the mix. I think the next step is to go through the virtual clips and start plucking out moments I want to try to get in there somewhere, and see if I can figure out places for them; and then it'll just (!) be a matter of connecting the dots, so to speak, which can be the trickiest part but is also where some of the most interesting new ideas come up - the spinny brain clip in New Frontier, for example, came out of that part of the process.
Part of what has me so gleeful (aside from the general glee-inducingness of OMG VIDDING!!!) is that I do have two other projects set up and ready to go, and if I get stuck or stalled or whatever with this one I can just open up a different file and take the plunge there instead.
Vidding seems, more and more, to be seasonal for me. Part of this is because of the rhythms of the school year, of course, but I am beginning to wonder whether it really does have to do with the weather. Today was a gorgeous day, bright sunshine and crunching snow and bone-cracking cold, which is one of the kinds of weather I most love; so I sat here all afternoon, with the cats sleeping in the pool of sunshine on the desk and the rabbits leaving tracks all over the backyard, and looked out at the bright white world through my frost-framed window, and then looked back at the colorful little pictures on the screen, and I made patterns out of what I found there; and I went off to dinner with friends feeling cheerful and happy and energetic and full of life. I love that rush of rightness; I get it most often from teaching, and from music, and also from certain kinds of reading; I experience it less often with vidding, simply because I spend so much less time vidding, but it's no less valuable for all that.
I have so many goals for myself and my vidding in the coming year, but one is simply to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak. I am thinking about this especially because I have been thinking about the vids I want to work on in the next few months and none of them are Big Idea Vids; I have a few of those on tap, god knows, but for various reasons they're not at the top of my list right now. And I admitted to myself this weekend that I've been kind of worrying about that, feeling like I ought to be working on those vids. And then I thought about Tre Sorelle, which I have described only half-jokingly as being a quarter-inch deep, and I realized that that vid could actually be a really good vid - not a deep vid, but still a good vid - and part of the reason it isn't is that I gave it such short shrift in terms of time; I mean, I genuinely didn't have a lot of time, but I also didn't commit to the vid like I should have, because it wasn't a Big Idea. And that was just really dumb.
So I have these various ideas that are calling to me right now, all these very old-skool vids about connections and relationships (some romantic, some not), and they're not deep and they're not mindblowing and they're not going to encourage me to play around with special effects and they're not going to change anybody's ideas about vidding or be anybody's favorite anything, but, you know, I made two really huge vids last year - huge for me personally, huge in terms of the attention they got, for which I will never stop being grateful - so I guess I think my Serious Vidder cred is okay for a while. And it's not like these vids won't be challenging; they're going to make me stretch in various ways - I mean, some of these I don't know whether I can pull off at all; the fact that they're not going to be flashy-splashy obvious challenges isn't going to make them any less work for me (although they might be less work to watch, which frankly might not be a bad thing for a change).
Plus, as I was rewatching some of my old stuff this weekend (doing some converting and archiving), I realized that Window of Opportunity, which is not exactly a paradigm-shifter of a vid, and is in fact so slight that a puff of wind could blow it away, is still one of my favorites of my own work, because, my god, Jaye; and Cat-Scan, which is the least-downloaded of all my vids, is, though not the most universally accessible to other people, possibly the most important to my own history and process. And if there's a lesson there, it's that I just have to throw myself at the ideas that are moving me right now, and commit to them with my whole heart, and at the end of the process I will have something that is worth having, whether it's the vid itself or what I learned from doing it or simply how it makes me feel to have done it.
Right now, that's all I want.
I'm sure a lot of the clips I've thrown down will get switched out or moved around before I even do the first export, let alone send it off for beta, and by the time it gets to beta, I mean, who knows - renenet could end up telling me to rip out the entire last half third and start again (she's done it before, because she is hateful wants what's best for the vid), but I finally feel like I've really started - after all the prep work I've been doing for the past few weeks, storyboarding and virtual clipping and audio editing and so on, I'm finally in there slinging clips around and figuring out what needs to land on what beat and starting to discover the vid's internal logic. The vid's not vidding itself - I've never had a vid do that - but it's gaining some momentum, and it feels amazing.
I'm keeping a vidding diary again, and doing so is making me realize just how much my process has changed in the last few years - how much it's changed, specifically, since and because of Cat-Scan Hist'ry, which really is my watershed vid in terms of process as well as skill. My storyboard for this RayK vid looks nothing like the storyboards I used to do; there are a few notes about specific clips, but many more notes about the moods I'm after or the mental state I'm trying to represent at different moments in the vid. And the process of putting down clips has become... not necessarily more random, but a lot less linear. When I first started vidding, I would begin at the beginning, continue to the end, and then stop (which I could do because I'd planned almost every shot in advance); later on I got more flexible about this, and was as apt to begin at the end as at the beginning, but still tended to vid very much in sections, working on one section at a time until I had at least a temporary version, and then moving on to the next section for which I had enough key clips to give me a jumping-off point.
Now... I've laid a bunch of key clips that I want for particular lyrics or musical moments, and they're all over the timeline; and I've grabbed some secondary clips and found places where they match up thematically or visually with something going on in the key clips, and I've thrown them into the mix. I think the next step is to go through the virtual clips and start plucking out moments I want to try to get in there somewhere, and see if I can figure out places for them; and then it'll just (!) be a matter of connecting the dots, so to speak, which can be the trickiest part but is also where some of the most interesting new ideas come up - the spinny brain clip in New Frontier, for example, came out of that part of the process.
Part of what has me so gleeful (aside from the general glee-inducingness of OMG VIDDING!!!) is that I do have two other projects set up and ready to go, and if I get stuck or stalled or whatever with this one I can just open up a different file and take the plunge there instead.
Vidding seems, more and more, to be seasonal for me. Part of this is because of the rhythms of the school year, of course, but I am beginning to wonder whether it really does have to do with the weather. Today was a gorgeous day, bright sunshine and crunching snow and bone-cracking cold, which is one of the kinds of weather I most love; so I sat here all afternoon, with the cats sleeping in the pool of sunshine on the desk and the rabbits leaving tracks all over the backyard, and looked out at the bright white world through my frost-framed window, and then looked back at the colorful little pictures on the screen, and I made patterns out of what I found there; and I went off to dinner with friends feeling cheerful and happy and energetic and full of life. I love that rush of rightness; I get it most often from teaching, and from music, and also from certain kinds of reading; I experience it less often with vidding, simply because I spend so much less time vidding, but it's no less valuable for all that.
I have so many goals for myself and my vidding in the coming year, but one is simply to vid more - to be faster, messier, sillier, less of a control freak. I am thinking about this especially because I have been thinking about the vids I want to work on in the next few months and none of them are Big Idea Vids; I have a few of those on tap, god knows, but for various reasons they're not at the top of my list right now. And I admitted to myself this weekend that I've been kind of worrying about that, feeling like I ought to be working on those vids. And then I thought about Tre Sorelle, which I have described only half-jokingly as being a quarter-inch deep, and I realized that that vid could actually be a really good vid - not a deep vid, but still a good vid - and part of the reason it isn't is that I gave it such short shrift in terms of time; I mean, I genuinely didn't have a lot of time, but I also didn't commit to the vid like I should have, because it wasn't a Big Idea. And that was just really dumb.
So I have these various ideas that are calling to me right now, all these very old-skool vids about connections and relationships (some romantic, some not), and they're not deep and they're not mindblowing and they're not going to encourage me to play around with special effects and they're not going to change anybody's ideas about vidding or be anybody's favorite anything, but, you know, I made two really huge vids last year - huge for me personally, huge in terms of the attention they got, for which I will never stop being grateful - so I guess I think my Serious Vidder cred is okay for a while. And it's not like these vids won't be challenging; they're going to make me stretch in various ways - I mean, some of these I don't know whether I can pull off at all; the fact that they're not going to be flashy-splashy obvious challenges isn't going to make them any less work for me (although they might be less work to watch, which frankly might not be a bad thing for a change).
Plus, as I was rewatching some of my old stuff this weekend (doing some converting and archiving), I realized that Window of Opportunity, which is not exactly a paradigm-shifter of a vid, and is in fact so slight that a puff of wind could blow it away, is still one of my favorites of my own work, because, my god, Jaye; and Cat-Scan, which is the least-downloaded of all my vids, is, though not the most universally accessible to other people, possibly the most important to my own history and process. And if there's a lesson there, it's that I just have to throw myself at the ideas that are moving me right now, and commit to them with my whole heart, and at the end of the process I will have something that is worth having, whether it's the vid itself or what I learned from doing it or simply how it makes me feel to have done it.
Right now, that's all I want.