Vividcon 2014: Timing Panel Notes
On Saturday, 
gwyn and I ran a panel entitled "Timing Is Everything." Here's the description for it: How do vidders evoke FEELS? In this panel, we will discuss how timing and pacing help you "land" emotional moments in both comedic and dramatic vids. We will talk about the connection between writing and vidding: what lessons can vidders learn from the narrative structure of fic? A good writer uses timing and pacing to hook readers and carry them through a story. How do vidders replicate that? How can we create a visual "cliffhanger"? We will include a few close readings of vids to explore the concepts discussed in the panel.
I feel like we did a pretty good job of addressing the points in the description, except maybe in regard to humor vids. I seem to be doomed to never talk effectively about humor vids. It is to laugh.
Anyway, I started out the panel by saying that the title is a lie. Timing is, in fact, not everything. A successful vid combines timing with movement, lyric interpretation, clip choice, song choice, etc., to convey its message. But timing is important: vidders work with temporal media, whether it be a song, poem, instrumental music, or some other assortment of sounds. The aural component of a vid has a limited duration, and thus the way we time our cuts and our clips communicates significance to our audience.
I'm quite fascinated by the topic of audience reception, but I realize not all vidders think about it when they're making vids. Some people vid purely for themselves, and I admit I do that as well, but often when I'm putting a vid together, I think very deliberately about placing my clips for maximum emotional impact. How can I draw out the FEELS?
One thing that I've noticed in my years of vidding and vidwatching is that good timing establishes a baseline of technical competence. People like competence; it makes them feel like they are in good hands. When I'm watching a vid and the timing is on-point it gives me a deep, visceral satisfaction, and it creates a bond of trust between me and the vidder. I think, "I can trust her with my eyes and my ears. Maybe I can trust her with my heart." Getting this buy-in on the technical level is the first step in drawing out the FEELS.
Another essential element of gaining an audience's emotional investment is pacing. At this point in the panel,
gwyn shared some excellent narrative theory notes:
The most basic element of pacing is scene and sequel. That is, you have a "scene" in which Stuff Happens--maybe a bit of action, a reveal, something that advances the plot. And each scene is followed by a "sequel," which is the characters reacting to what happened in the scene, processing it, perhaps talking about it, and ultimately coming to some resolution about what to do next.
Some novels are almost all "scenes," like Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. They're very fast paced but tend to feel weak on characters and emotion because they lack the sequels where character development happens. I've also read a few novels that had too many sequels. That is, something would happen (scene), then we'd have character #1 reacting to it (sequel), then character #2 reacting to the same thing (another sequel), then maybe characters 1 and 2 discussing it together (third sequel). This sort of novel can feel very slow, and I don't see this often in successful genre fiction.
Then there's the overarching structure, which begins with an inciting incident, then you have progress and setbacks while steadily increasing the stakes. In the final quarter of the novel, you have a major setback or "black moment" followed by the climactic sequence and then the denouement/resolution. Big-picture structure is best laid out in the books for Hollywood screenwriting, because in screenwriting they follow the structure very precisely (too precisely, IMO). Novelists follow it in general but we have a little more flexibility to experiment.
So I can think of how to adapt this to vids, as in visual breaks from key moments. I think most successful vids that really evoke strong feelings, whether it's laughter or tears, do have that inciting incident/progress and setbacks structure, even if we don't really see it -- we start with a visual explanation of who/what our focus is on, and then build from there. And vidders who wait for the money shots (a la the world exploding in Margie and Seah's iconic Odyssey 5 vid, "Haunted" ) to achieve max feels levels usually make vids that are remembered.
For more on the scene/sequel concept, you can read here: http://www.sfwa.org/members/bell/writingtips/summer11.html
After
gwyn laid out the basic principles of scene/sequel we showed her vid "Orange Crush" to illustrate how she built the vid around a few key "scenes" and surrounded them with enough "sequels" to give the viewer time to process the action and build emotional connections to the characters.
Then we showed
chaila's "Sound the Bells" vid because it is a vid that inspires big emotions, like tears streaming down your face emotions, much of it due to exquisite timing and pacing. We showed the vid once, to great effect according to the audience, and then we tried to deconstruct it a bit to see how she did what she did. We focused on the bridge from 2:00-2:52, and talked about timing in terms of lyric matching (having the lyric land at exactly the right clip), movement of light, rising of light/lifting of sightlines, and the wonderful moment at 2:38 where Mako picks up the red shoe precisely on the beat. Good stuff! Emotionally wrenching stuff.
After that, we had some great comments from the audience, which hopefully somebody made note of, and then we were done.
In conclusion, big thanks to
gwyn for being a fantastic co-mod, and to the audience for saying really smart, interesting things.
gwyn and I ran a panel entitled "Timing Is Everything." Here's the description for it: How do vidders evoke FEELS? In this panel, we will discuss how timing and pacing help you "land" emotional moments in both comedic and dramatic vids. We will talk about the connection between writing and vidding: what lessons can vidders learn from the narrative structure of fic? A good writer uses timing and pacing to hook readers and carry them through a story. How do vidders replicate that? How can we create a visual "cliffhanger"? We will include a few close readings of vids to explore the concepts discussed in the panel.
I feel like we did a pretty good job of addressing the points in the description, except maybe in regard to humor vids. I seem to be doomed to never talk effectively about humor vids. It is to laugh.
Anyway, I started out the panel by saying that the title is a lie. Timing is, in fact, not everything. A successful vid combines timing with movement, lyric interpretation, clip choice, song choice, etc., to convey its message. But timing is important: vidders work with temporal media, whether it be a song, poem, instrumental music, or some other assortment of sounds. The aural component of a vid has a limited duration, and thus the way we time our cuts and our clips communicates significance to our audience.
I'm quite fascinated by the topic of audience reception, but I realize not all vidders think about it when they're making vids. Some people vid purely for themselves, and I admit I do that as well, but often when I'm putting a vid together, I think very deliberately about placing my clips for maximum emotional impact. How can I draw out the FEELS?
One thing that I've noticed in my years of vidding and vidwatching is that good timing establishes a baseline of technical competence. People like competence; it makes them feel like they are in good hands. When I'm watching a vid and the timing is on-point it gives me a deep, visceral satisfaction, and it creates a bond of trust between me and the vidder. I think, "I can trust her with my eyes and my ears. Maybe I can trust her with my heart." Getting this buy-in on the technical level is the first step in drawing out the FEELS.
Another essential element of gaining an audience's emotional investment is pacing. At this point in the panel,
gwyn shared some excellent narrative theory notes:
The most basic element of pacing is scene and sequel. That is, you have a "scene" in which Stuff Happens--maybe a bit of action, a reveal, something that advances the plot. And each scene is followed by a "sequel," which is the characters reacting to what happened in the scene, processing it, perhaps talking about it, and ultimately coming to some resolution about what to do next.
Some novels are almost all "scenes," like Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. They're very fast paced but tend to feel weak on characters and emotion because they lack the sequels where character development happens. I've also read a few novels that had too many sequels. That is, something would happen (scene), then we'd have character #1 reacting to it (sequel), then character #2 reacting to the same thing (another sequel), then maybe characters 1 and 2 discussing it together (third sequel). This sort of novel can feel very slow, and I don't see this often in successful genre fiction.
Then there's the overarching structure, which begins with an inciting incident, then you have progress and setbacks while steadily increasing the stakes. In the final quarter of the novel, you have a major setback or "black moment" followed by the climactic sequence and then the denouement/resolution. Big-picture structure is best laid out in the books for Hollywood screenwriting, because in screenwriting they follow the structure very precisely (too precisely, IMO). Novelists follow it in general but we have a little more flexibility to experiment.
So I can think of how to adapt this to vids, as in visual breaks from key moments. I think most successful vids that really evoke strong feelings, whether it's laughter or tears, do have that inciting incident/progress and setbacks structure, even if we don't really see it -- we start with a visual explanation of who/what our focus is on, and then build from there. And vidders who wait for the money shots (a la the world exploding in Margie and Seah's iconic Odyssey 5 vid, "Haunted" ) to achieve max feels levels usually make vids that are remembered.
For more on the scene/sequel concept, you can read here: http://www.sfwa.org/members/bell/writingtips/summer11.html
After
gwyn laid out the basic principles of scene/sequel we showed her vid "Orange Crush" to illustrate how she built the vid around a few key "scenes" and surrounded them with enough "sequels" to give the viewer time to process the action and build emotional connections to the characters.
Then we showed
chaila's "Sound the Bells" vid because it is a vid that inspires big emotions, like tears streaming down your face emotions, much of it due to exquisite timing and pacing. We showed the vid once, to great effect according to the audience, and then we tried to deconstruct it a bit to see how she did what she did. We focused on the bridge from 2:00-2:52, and talked about timing in terms of lyric matching (having the lyric land at exactly the right clip), movement of light, rising of light/lifting of sightlines, and the wonderful moment at 2:38 where Mako picks up the red shoe precisely on the beat. Good stuff! Emotionally wrenching stuff.
After that, we had some great comments from the audience, which hopefully somebody made note of, and then we were done.
In conclusion, big thanks to
gwyn for being a fantastic co-mod, and to the audience for saying really smart, interesting things.