The O.C. vid - Ryan/Luke - My Way
My Way
Fandom: The O.C.
Song/Artist: My Way by Limp Bizkit
Duration: 3:09 minutes
Summary: Ryan. Luke. Violence & subtext. Contains minor language.
Spoilers: Season one only.
Click to viewNotes
When I finally got myself a set of shiny OC DVDs, I went about watching them with the express purpose of finding footage for a Seth/Ryan vid (which is coming… albeit in the very far future). What I didn't count on was burning subtext between Ryan and Luke, but oh boy, was there ever subtext.
Now, the idea of Ryan/Luke is just… snigger-inducing. It's hot and hilarious in equal measures. And so I wanted a song that was capable of being taken completely seriously, while at the same time - if you want to see it that way - can be also completely tongue-in-cheek. As the Ryan/Luke dynamic is about 85% macho posturing, it just made sense to go with Limp Bizkit.
These days, vidding nu-metal can be a bit of a taboo, but you can see exactly why it's so overused - it's just plain old fun. And "fun" is the thing that characterised this vid for me. For a few weeks I had been reading a lot of meta and watching a bunch of vids that focused on more subtle "vidder" elements, the kind of things that the casual viewer most likely wouldn't even notice, and my head was swimming with notions of movement and composition and colour and structure and narrative and reading goddamn meaning into everything, and it was freaking me out. Luckily, I freaked out at Anja, who gave me good counsel in the immortal words of Nathan from Queer As Folk UK: "Just fuck 'em." And so I threw all "vidding" considerations aside. This is very much a "fandom" vid. (After all that crippling self-doubt I'm not sure if I ever really want to get into making "vidders' vids".)
That said - and now we move onto the more technical part of the show - I managed to use up all the violent footage available in the first chorus, and in the end did have to resort to using a lot of external movement just to keep up the pace. Mark fell about laughing at the second chorus, because the golf-cart race was so incredibly lame, but hey, lame is probably Ryan/Luke in a nutshell. One good thing about making a vid that could well be ironic is that when things don't turn out so well, you can pretend you were being ironic all along. :D The O.C. is shot beautifully, with gorgeous colours and a lot of great movement shots on the Steadicam, which I tried to utilise as much as I could. There was a lot of music editing because I simply couldn't keep up with the choruses and amount of action-type footage it demanded; so the choruses got wittled down... and wittled down some more... and then some more after that. I hope it's not too obvious. For some godforsaken reason, the wmv format really screwed with the colouring of some clips also. (Part of the problem is still using two programs at this stage - can't wait to get more RAM/HD space so I can finally move on to Premiere.)
I've never sped clips up because I think they look unerringly odd, but I fell in love with the Queer As Folk (US version this time) "signature move" of the camera moving in, and then the clip is sped up and made high-brightness, high-contrast. So there's one shot in here that's "homage". In the end, it's all about the queer subtext. ;)