vid chat: creative growth
I'm very pleased to be hosting this weekend's vid chat, the latest in a series of discussions started by bop_radar. This week's topic is creative growth. Please feel free not only to join in but to signal-boost in whatever way makes sense to you!
I want to start by reiterating what bop_radar said in last week's vid chat post, because I think she put it beautifully:
I hope you will all find this a helpful, friendly and constructive 'space'. It takes a bit of courage to share your thoughts with other vidders, I know, but hopefully this is somewhere where we can all reach out to each other a bit. I'm prepared to be a dork if you are. :p And just a reminder that you are very much encouraged here to reply to other commenters, not just the original post! And you are welcome here any time--there is no 'late' in vid chats.
In the brainstorming post about this latest round of chats, bop_radar and laurashapiro came up with some terrific questions for vidders, which I am borrowing with only very slight modifications:
Growing as a vidder is hugely important to me, but as the role of vidding in my own life has gone from Shiny New Thing to Established Ongoing Activity, my definition of growth has changed. I went through a phase of expecting each of my vids to be better than the one before, and that's no longer true; I take the long view, now. These days, my idea of growth includes the plateaus that used to frustrate me.
I definitely hit plateaus, but I've stopped thinking of them as a problem, because I've realized that when I hit a plateau it's because I'm trying, consciously or not, to work through something I'm still in the middle of learning. I'll try something new, and then I spend a whole bunch of vids kind of sorting through and assimilating that new thing, and then finally I basically get it, and then the cycle starts again: I try something completely different, which launches me off that plateau and gives me a new set of things to try to get better at over the course of several vids.
My entire first year of vidding was a plateau, really: vidding itself was the new thing I'd learned! Some people make fascinating and innovative vids right out of the box, and wow, was I ever not one of those people. Most of my first eight vids (all Buffy the Vampire Slayer vids) are pretty similar to each other in both content and style; I even used a lot of the same clips. (I still remember someone commenting on the first vid I ever showed at a con - the first vividcon - saying "I thought that was really good for a first vid!" And I said "Thank you! It's actually my seventh vid." Heh.) It wasn't until I got really familiar with those clips and secure in what I was doing that I was able to try some different things.
The single biggest growth experience I've had as a vidder was making "Cat-Scan Hist'ry," my Donnie Darko vid [ download | stream ]. "Cat-Scan" was a huge step forward for me in a whole bunch of ways, and if you're curious I've written about that elsewhere, but I think for the purposes of this chat the details of the growth are less important than the question of what enabled me to grow in those ways at that moment.
At the risk of being reductive, I think there were four main reasons that I was able to have that breakthrough.
The first reason was simply that I'd kind of hit a wall; I literally couldn't go on doing what I'd been doing. I'd been vidding BtVS for a long time (eleven vids); it was the only show I'd vidded. I had stretched myself as far as I could with that show, I was out of pressing ideas for the show (though I did have more ideas, a couple of which have become pressing again in the years since then); if I was going to keep vidding at all, I had to turn some kind of corner. This was a totally internal thing; I'd been satisfied vidding BtVS for a long time, and then I just... wasn't.
The second reason is more positive and less reactive: I wanted to try something new - I was actively aiming for that. I wanted to try some new things with my process, to be less of a control freak and more spontaneous and experimental - specifically, I wanted to imitate sockkpuppett and sisabet, not so much their style (although that ended up happening too, to some extent) but the way they thought about vidding, the kinds of things they did when they sat down and opened their vidding software, just to see if I could do that too.
The third reason, which is kind of mixed up with the first two reasons, was that I'd made a pretty successful vid and it freaked me out. I felt that I couldn't possibly live up to that vid, and I certainly couldn't live up to it vidding the same character or even the same source again. I felt that if I was going to move forward at all, and if I was going to keep the respect of the people I knew who really cared about vids, I was going to have to try something different. I don't want to say that my freakout was the result of external pressure - it was very much self-imposed - but it did have a lot to do with my sense of audience, and specifically with my sense that suddenly I had, at least potentially, a much larger audience full of a lot of people I didn't already know. I am not the kind of vidder who vids primarily for herself; there are a lot of things in my life that I do for myself alone, but vidding for me is fundamentally social: I vid to share my ideas and enthusiasms with other people. So my sense of audience is something I am always negotiating and re-negotiating with every vid. And in the case of this vid I was actively resisting the temptation to please the parts of my audience that would have been happy to see me keep on doing the same things I'd been doing.
The fourth reason was the source itself. I didn't feel comfortable experimenting with process stuff while vidding a show with a ton of source (like, say, seven seasons of BtVS). Working with a movie, where I had less than two hours of footage to deal with, felt much more manageable. And the movie Donnie Darko specifically enabled me to play with something else: I wanted to try to vid in a less narrative-oriented way, and in this particular case trying to retell the movie just wasn't going to work, period, because the movie is so weird, which really forced me to think about other ways of progressing through a vid, to think about visual logic rather than narrative logic.
sockkpuppett pointed out after I made the vid that one of the best and most exciting things about it was that it was me working without a net. And in a lot of ways I was working without a net. But looking back, I realize that I did have a net; I couldn't have managed that level of experimentation without a net! It's just that the net wasn't my usual net - storyboards, advance planning. The net was the limited size of the source and the support of my friends who are vidders and vidwatchers - this was the first vid for which I exported snippets to show people before I had a complete draft, and having people encourage me in the middle of that long process made me feel emotionally secure enough to take some creative risks.
So what about you? What's your sense of what "creative growth" means and how it happens?
I want to start by reiterating what bop_radar said in last week's vid chat post, because I think she put it beautifully:
I hope you will all find this a helpful, friendly and constructive 'space'. It takes a bit of courage to share your thoughts with other vidders, I know, but hopefully this is somewhere where we can all reach out to each other a bit. I'm prepared to be a dork if you are. :p And just a reminder that you are very much encouraged here to reply to other commenters, not just the original post! And you are welcome here any time--there is no 'late' in vid chats.
In the brainstorming post about this latest round of chats, bop_radar and laurashapiro came up with some terrific questions for vidders, which I am borrowing with only very slight modifications:
- How important is it to you that you continue to grow as a vidder?
- What does "growth" mean to you as a vidder?
- When/how/why do you feel you grew most as a vidder? What contributed to that?
- Do you feel like you hit plateaus? What do you do when you do?
- What motivates you to try something new? What motivates you to take risks?
- When are you willing to move out of your comfort zone?
- What does "growth" in a vidder mean to you, as a viewer?
- How important is it to you that the vidders whose work you like continue to grow creatively?
- How have you reacted when a vidder whose work you've liked in the past takes off in a direction you didn't expect?
Growing as a vidder is hugely important to me, but as the role of vidding in my own life has gone from Shiny New Thing to Established Ongoing Activity, my definition of growth has changed. I went through a phase of expecting each of my vids to be better than the one before, and that's no longer true; I take the long view, now. These days, my idea of growth includes the plateaus that used to frustrate me.
I definitely hit plateaus, but I've stopped thinking of them as a problem, because I've realized that when I hit a plateau it's because I'm trying, consciously or not, to work through something I'm still in the middle of learning. I'll try something new, and then I spend a whole bunch of vids kind of sorting through and assimilating that new thing, and then finally I basically get it, and then the cycle starts again: I try something completely different, which launches me off that plateau and gives me a new set of things to try to get better at over the course of several vids.
My entire first year of vidding was a plateau, really: vidding itself was the new thing I'd learned! Some people make fascinating and innovative vids right out of the box, and wow, was I ever not one of those people. Most of my first eight vids (all Buffy the Vampire Slayer vids) are pretty similar to each other in both content and style; I even used a lot of the same clips. (I still remember someone commenting on the first vid I ever showed at a con - the first vividcon - saying "I thought that was really good for a first vid!" And I said "Thank you! It's actually my seventh vid." Heh.) It wasn't until I got really familiar with those clips and secure in what I was doing that I was able to try some different things.
The single biggest growth experience I've had as a vidder was making "Cat-Scan Hist'ry," my Donnie Darko vid [ download | stream ]. "Cat-Scan" was a huge step forward for me in a whole bunch of ways, and if you're curious I've written about that elsewhere, but I think for the purposes of this chat the details of the growth are less important than the question of what enabled me to grow in those ways at that moment.
At the risk of being reductive, I think there were four main reasons that I was able to have that breakthrough.
The first reason was simply that I'd kind of hit a wall; I literally couldn't go on doing what I'd been doing. I'd been vidding BtVS for a long time (eleven vids); it was the only show I'd vidded. I had stretched myself as far as I could with that show, I was out of pressing ideas for the show (though I did have more ideas, a couple of which have become pressing again in the years since then); if I was going to keep vidding at all, I had to turn some kind of corner. This was a totally internal thing; I'd been satisfied vidding BtVS for a long time, and then I just... wasn't.
The second reason is more positive and less reactive: I wanted to try something new - I was actively aiming for that. I wanted to try some new things with my process, to be less of a control freak and more spontaneous and experimental - specifically, I wanted to imitate sockkpuppett and sisabet, not so much their style (although that ended up happening too, to some extent) but the way they thought about vidding, the kinds of things they did when they sat down and opened their vidding software, just to see if I could do that too.
The third reason, which is kind of mixed up with the first two reasons, was that I'd made a pretty successful vid and it freaked me out. I felt that I couldn't possibly live up to that vid, and I certainly couldn't live up to it vidding the same character or even the same source again. I felt that if I was going to move forward at all, and if I was going to keep the respect of the people I knew who really cared about vids, I was going to have to try something different. I don't want to say that my freakout was the result of external pressure - it was very much self-imposed - but it did have a lot to do with my sense of audience, and specifically with my sense that suddenly I had, at least potentially, a much larger audience full of a lot of people I didn't already know. I am not the kind of vidder who vids primarily for herself; there are a lot of things in my life that I do for myself alone, but vidding for me is fundamentally social: I vid to share my ideas and enthusiasms with other people. So my sense of audience is something I am always negotiating and re-negotiating with every vid. And in the case of this vid I was actively resisting the temptation to please the parts of my audience that would have been happy to see me keep on doing the same things I'd been doing.
The fourth reason was the source itself. I didn't feel comfortable experimenting with process stuff while vidding a show with a ton of source (like, say, seven seasons of BtVS). Working with a movie, where I had less than two hours of footage to deal with, felt much more manageable. And the movie Donnie Darko specifically enabled me to play with something else: I wanted to try to vid in a less narrative-oriented way, and in this particular case trying to retell the movie just wasn't going to work, period, because the movie is so weird, which really forced me to think about other ways of progressing through a vid, to think about visual logic rather than narrative logic.
sockkpuppett pointed out after I made the vid that one of the best and most exciting things about it was that it was me working without a net. And in a lot of ways I was working without a net. But looking back, I realize that I did have a net; I couldn't have managed that level of experimentation without a net! It's just that the net wasn't my usual net - storyboards, advance planning. The net was the limited size of the source and the support of my friends who are vidders and vidwatchers - this was the first vid for which I exported snippets to show people before I had a complete draft, and having people encourage me in the middle of that long process made me feel emotionally secure enough to take some creative risks.
So what about you? What's your sense of what "creative growth" means and how it happens?