"Out Here," commentary by here's luck
Title: Out Here
Vidder: heresluck
Fandom: due South
Link to vid: LJ post here
Commentary by: heresluck
Warnings: I talk a lot, and kinda fast.
Download the commentary: here (zipped xvid, 80MB)
Streaming version:
Find more videos like this on BAM Vid Vault
Transcript
NOTE: I edited some comments out of the audio commentary (yes, it used to be longer) that I have included in brackets in the transcript.
This is here's luck, and you're listening to the audio commentary on the due South vid "Out Here," which I made in secret as a present for sisabet and renenet because they love Fraser. And through making the vid I came to love Fraser a little bit too. Which was cool, and also slightly disconcerting.
intro
So, the intro. The intro was one of the most difficult parts of the vid, for two reasons. The first reason is that for a basically smart person I can be kind of slow. The opening shots changed a dozen times or more; when I started vidding I was convinced that I had to use the intro to contrast Canada and Chicago-because clearly Fraser isn't enough of a contrast to Chicago all on his own; it's not like that's the premise of the show or anything.
[It took me more than a month to see that the initial idea wasn't working, and then I latched onto the idea that I needed to show Fraser missing Canada and spent days worrying about whether I could mask Fraser's dad out of the ice-fishing scenes at the start of CotW. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that these ideas were unfortunate and misguided and needed to be stopped.]
The second reason that the intro was so difficult was actually not my fault; it's the same reason that a lot of intro sequences are difficult, which is that the intro of a vid often has to do a really staggering amount of work. In this case, the intro had to do three main things: 1) it needed to establish the central metaphor of the vid, which is that "out here" is Chicago; this is potentially tricky, because the song is actually about having an emotional breakdown and moving to rural Massachusetts, like you do; 2) it needed to establish that the vid is a character study of Fraser, which seems fairly straightforward until you remember that 3) it has to establish that the vid is also a 'shipper vid about Fraser and RayK. Those are the three main threads of the vid, and I hope they're pretty well braided together in the final version, but I had to anchor them all here at the beginning. And I had about twenty seconds to do it.
out here when you light a smoke on the porch
you can hear the paper burning
the moon is the only light
in the silence you can hear it turning
A lot of the shots in the first two-thirds of the vid are night shots, or interior shots; I wanted to set up as great a contrast as possible between these early shots and the vast snowy openness of Canada at the climax of the vid. One of the first things I knew about the vid was that I wanted the first couple of verses to convey a sense of stillness, and also that I wanted to use relatively long clips, because I wanted to build some momentum and urgency later on, and that meant that I needed to leave myself somewhere to go-this is just basic vid pacing. The problem with this is that in the context of a vid, stillness and long clips can be incredibly boring. This is where the jump cuts came in: I listened to the syncopated guitar line and thought "wow, I should do something with that"; the jump cuts were a way of acknowledging what was going on with the guitar while still staying on the same clip for the duration of the whole two-measure musical phrase.
From a content point of view this verse is mostly bringing together those first two points I talked about a minute ago, metaphor and character study: Chicago is Fraser's wilderness, a place where he feels isolated even when surrounded by people, and we get the camera pulling back to really emphasize that alone-ness.
out here you find out who your friends are
when the darkness comes to kill the day
there's an ache in every corner of the heart
for the ones who are miles away
And then RayK shows up, and now we've got all three things in play. I knew that the darkness in the second line needed to be metaphorical or emotional, like, say, Fraser getting the snot beat out of him when he's trying to do the right thing. The line about "there's an ache in every corner of the heart" needed to be about Fraser's longing for RayK, to set up the relationship part of the vid, and then "miles away" had to be about the emotional distances between the two of them, because that's the conflict that drives the rest of the vid. Which sounds great, but it turns out that representing emotional distance visually is kind of a pain in the ass. I didn't want the vid to be just a string of endless emo closeups.
[It's sort of the inverse of the problem that Laura Shapiro has talked about with the vid "Wonder of Birds": she and MorganDawn were so focused on getting the vid to fly that they lost some of the emotional connection and had to go back and put that stuff in. I was facing the opposite problem, the prospect of All Emo All The Time.]
I mean, I couldn't totally avoid the emo closeups, but I also wanted something to actually happen occasionally. Which is one way we know that I'm growing as a vidder. So I tried to represent that emotional distance visually by showing RayK walking away from Fraser and Fraser responding by holding very, very still-except, again, you have that problem where stillness is potentially boring, so I broke up those longer shots with a clip of Fraser being all resigned and emotional and, conveniently, looking down: same mood, but at least something is happening to keep your eyes occupied.
[As a side note, this section is also the point where, if you know the original song, you start asking yourself "hey, where'd the second half of the first verse go?" And the answer is that I got rid of it and subbed in the second half of the second verse instead. I've written about this at length elsewhere, so I won't go into it here, but from my point of view drastically editing the audio to the point of rearranging the song was absolutely critical to constructing the story I was trying to tell.]
out here there's always work to be done
and I do what I can
it came down to a choice: love or run
I ran
The lyrics here are one of the reasons I decided to vid this song for Fraser in the first place, so this section actually came together relatively quickly. These were some of the first clips I ever laid for the vid-it was pretty clear from the beginning that these lyrics just had to be about this scene, cliche or not, and so one of the challenges was to earn that cliche by using less-familiar clips in the rest of the vid.
Figuring out how to handle the motion here was tricky. The lead-in to the verse was difficult because, again, I had to find a clip that would fit with what I was doing thematically and let me make the visual transition from stillness to motion. So, for example, I originally had a hero shot of Fraser with the Canadian flag at the start of this verse, but the motion didn't match; I replaced it with this shot of him putting on his hat as he walks down the street, because I wanted the motion as a visual lead-in to the shots that follow. But then I also had to show the motion stopping; I had to show that Fraser may be action!Mountie, but when it comes to RayK he's still frozen in place, so I decided to show the two of them skidding to a halt at the start of MotB, which conveniently leads into the next sequence of shots, also from MotB. And here again I tried to hit the metaphor pretty hard: Fraser's not literally running away to rural Massachusetts or the Northwest Territories or wherever; he's just closing himself off from Ray and refusing to engage.
winter will come and get a hold of my heart and squeeze
and I will long for your touch
wonder what kind of fool am I
why'd I leave it if I loved it so much
I call you on the phone, struggle for the words to say
I swear that I am working on what keeps me miles away
The challenge with this verse was that the emotional stuff could be handled fairly literally, but the details (winter, phone) had to be handled much more metaphorically, and once again "miles away" had to mean emotional rather than geographical distance. I'd already shown them walking away from each other, so here I went for something different: Fraser knows he's not getting this right, but he doesn't know what to do about it, and so we end up with the two of them standing there at the door, stuck, unable to move forward.
bridge
Aaaaand the bridge. I avoided working on the bridge for weeks because it's a solid twenty seconds of music with no lyrics and I really had no idea what to do with it, and so I did what I suspect most vidders do in that kind of situation, which was to recoil from it as if from a poisonous snake. Eventually, after like 87 drafts, I decided it needed to be about frustration and failed attempts at connection: they really are trying to communicate, but they kind of suck at it. So we get lots of closed-off and accusatory body language here-Ray with his arms crossed, Fraser unable to look directly at Ray; lots of talking, no communicating, walking together, not connecting, all of which culminates in Ray slamming the door between himself and Fraser, leaving Fraser as isolated and still as he was at the beginning of the vid.
out here I make the only human light
I am the only human sound
it is my privilege to lie awake at night and think of what I've lost
and hope for what might be found
This section starts with one of the visuals I'd conceptualized most clearly before I started vidding: Fraser's alone in Chicago again, and his red uniform is the only spot of brightness and hope and humanity in a city that sometimes seems to be trying to crush the humanity out of people. sisabet mentions the "think of what I've lost" line in her commentary track and argues that it's all about Victoria, which is certainly how *I* saw it; in fact I was originally going to use some clips from "Victoria's Secret" in this section, but I worried that that might actually be kind of distracting, so I settled for a more generic shot of Fraser once again reading alone at night. And of course Ray had to be "what might be found."
out here it's so silent
you can hear your heart talking
one day that heart might tell you which way to go
you might start walking
[At the beginning of this section I decided I needed to throw in a reminder of that central metaphor of Chicago, and specifically Chicago as a dark place for Fraser, because it's really important to the transition that happens in the next section, so we're back to a shot of the city and the El at night, and the moon looking really far away and kind of overwhelmed.]
I wanted this verse to be the setup for what I hoped would be the big emotional payoff of the next section. In a vid where I was obsessed with keeping things moving along, this whole section has basically no external motion at all and very little internal motion; the goal here was to build up tension, to give tremendous weight to the tiny bits of motion that we do see. The clips are taken from a bunch of different episodes, obviously, but I wanted this verse to be a coherent little narrative of its own.
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
I thought of this section as a series of related and overlapping transitions: from stillness to motion, dark to light, slow to fast, Chicago to Canada, Fraser alone to Fraser with Ray. It's sort of a miniature version of the vid as a whole. Fraser approaches Ray, Ray leans in to him, they're on the same page, they're approaching that door again...
know that I will
...and there they go, they're through that door and off and running.
you know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
you know that I will
you know that I will
know that I will...
This section took a long time to get right; the first few lines worked pretty well, and I was really happy about that hat toss, but then I sort of dithered around and dumped the guys on a mountaintop in Canada with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER, and Kat and Flo, my two betas, both said, as kindly as possible, "Why is there suddenly a mountain?" (I have to take a second here to thank them both, because they really went above and beyond the call of duty with this vid-they were amazing.) So anyway, after they had very gently explained that I was on crack, I had to go back and figure out how to get the guys to Canada. So: start them running in snowy Chicago, keep them moving in roughly the same direction in snowy Canada, throw in some sledding for momentum (idea totally stolen from "Wonder of Birds" because I have no shame and also I love that vid), quick close-up of the two of them in the snow (where we can't linger because Ray's completely ridiculous hat will make me laugh and ruin the moment!), and then we see the mountain as the vocals give me chills. (I really love this song.)
out here when you light a smoke on the porch
you can hear the paper burning
the moon is the only light
I hear it turning
This last verse is a repeat of the first verse, and I wanted to echo that repetition visually; so once again we have the camera panning across a landscape, except it's mountains rather than city; we have jump cuts again, except it's a dogsled instead of a train; and we have Fraser, except he's no longer alone. (And if you want to imagine that, after the fade to black, Fraser is going to go get into Ray's sleeping bag, I can personally vouch for the fact that renenet can tell you where to find about seven hundred versions of that fic.)
for renenet and sisabet
I've said on more than one occasion that this is my favorite part of the whole vid, and I meant it. This vid was a labor of love for two people who are very dear to me, and the fact that they liked it made the whole thing worthwhile.
And that's it; thanks for listening.
Vidder: heresluck
Fandom: due South
Link to vid: LJ post here
Commentary by: heresluck
Warnings: I talk a lot, and kinda fast.
Download the commentary: here (zipped xvid, 80MB)
Streaming version:
Find more videos like this on BAM Vid Vault
Transcript
NOTE: I edited some comments out of the audio commentary (yes, it used to be longer) that I have included in brackets in the transcript.
This is here's luck, and you're listening to the audio commentary on the due South vid "Out Here," which I made in secret as a present for sisabet and renenet because they love Fraser. And through making the vid I came to love Fraser a little bit too. Which was cool, and also slightly disconcerting.
intro
So, the intro. The intro was one of the most difficult parts of the vid, for two reasons. The first reason is that for a basically smart person I can be kind of slow. The opening shots changed a dozen times or more; when I started vidding I was convinced that I had to use the intro to contrast Canada and Chicago-because clearly Fraser isn't enough of a contrast to Chicago all on his own; it's not like that's the premise of the show or anything.
[It took me more than a month to see that the initial idea wasn't working, and then I latched onto the idea that I needed to show Fraser missing Canada and spent days worrying about whether I could mask Fraser's dad out of the ice-fishing scenes at the start of CotW. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that these ideas were unfortunate and misguided and needed to be stopped.]
The second reason that the intro was so difficult was actually not my fault; it's the same reason that a lot of intro sequences are difficult, which is that the intro of a vid often has to do a really staggering amount of work. In this case, the intro had to do three main things: 1) it needed to establish the central metaphor of the vid, which is that "out here" is Chicago; this is potentially tricky, because the song is actually about having an emotional breakdown and moving to rural Massachusetts, like you do; 2) it needed to establish that the vid is a character study of Fraser, which seems fairly straightforward until you remember that 3) it has to establish that the vid is also a 'shipper vid about Fraser and RayK. Those are the three main threads of the vid, and I hope they're pretty well braided together in the final version, but I had to anchor them all here at the beginning. And I had about twenty seconds to do it.
out here when you light a smoke on the porch
you can hear the paper burning
the moon is the only light
in the silence you can hear it turning
A lot of the shots in the first two-thirds of the vid are night shots, or interior shots; I wanted to set up as great a contrast as possible between these early shots and the vast snowy openness of Canada at the climax of the vid. One of the first things I knew about the vid was that I wanted the first couple of verses to convey a sense of stillness, and also that I wanted to use relatively long clips, because I wanted to build some momentum and urgency later on, and that meant that I needed to leave myself somewhere to go-this is just basic vid pacing. The problem with this is that in the context of a vid, stillness and long clips can be incredibly boring. This is where the jump cuts came in: I listened to the syncopated guitar line and thought "wow, I should do something with that"; the jump cuts were a way of acknowledging what was going on with the guitar while still staying on the same clip for the duration of the whole two-measure musical phrase.
From a content point of view this verse is mostly bringing together those first two points I talked about a minute ago, metaphor and character study: Chicago is Fraser's wilderness, a place where he feels isolated even when surrounded by people, and we get the camera pulling back to really emphasize that alone-ness.
out here you find out who your friends are
when the darkness comes to kill the day
there's an ache in every corner of the heart
for the ones who are miles away
And then RayK shows up, and now we've got all three things in play. I knew that the darkness in the second line needed to be metaphorical or emotional, like, say, Fraser getting the snot beat out of him when he's trying to do the right thing. The line about "there's an ache in every corner of the heart" needed to be about Fraser's longing for RayK, to set up the relationship part of the vid, and then "miles away" had to be about the emotional distances between the two of them, because that's the conflict that drives the rest of the vid. Which sounds great, but it turns out that representing emotional distance visually is kind of a pain in the ass. I didn't want the vid to be just a string of endless emo closeups.
[It's sort of the inverse of the problem that Laura Shapiro has talked about with the vid "Wonder of Birds": she and MorganDawn were so focused on getting the vid to fly that they lost some of the emotional connection and had to go back and put that stuff in. I was facing the opposite problem, the prospect of All Emo All The Time.]
I mean, I couldn't totally avoid the emo closeups, but I also wanted something to actually happen occasionally. Which is one way we know that I'm growing as a vidder. So I tried to represent that emotional distance visually by showing RayK walking away from Fraser and Fraser responding by holding very, very still-except, again, you have that problem where stillness is potentially boring, so I broke up those longer shots with a clip of Fraser being all resigned and emotional and, conveniently, looking down: same mood, but at least something is happening to keep your eyes occupied.
[As a side note, this section is also the point where, if you know the original song, you start asking yourself "hey, where'd the second half of the first verse go?" And the answer is that I got rid of it and subbed in the second half of the second verse instead. I've written about this at length elsewhere, so I won't go into it here, but from my point of view drastically editing the audio to the point of rearranging the song was absolutely critical to constructing the story I was trying to tell.]
out here there's always work to be done
and I do what I can
it came down to a choice: love or run
I ran
The lyrics here are one of the reasons I decided to vid this song for Fraser in the first place, so this section actually came together relatively quickly. These were some of the first clips I ever laid for the vid-it was pretty clear from the beginning that these lyrics just had to be about this scene, cliche or not, and so one of the challenges was to earn that cliche by using less-familiar clips in the rest of the vid.
Figuring out how to handle the motion here was tricky. The lead-in to the verse was difficult because, again, I had to find a clip that would fit with what I was doing thematically and let me make the visual transition from stillness to motion. So, for example, I originally had a hero shot of Fraser with the Canadian flag at the start of this verse, but the motion didn't match; I replaced it with this shot of him putting on his hat as he walks down the street, because I wanted the motion as a visual lead-in to the shots that follow. But then I also had to show the motion stopping; I had to show that Fraser may be action!Mountie, but when it comes to RayK he's still frozen in place, so I decided to show the two of them skidding to a halt at the start of MotB, which conveniently leads into the next sequence of shots, also from MotB. And here again I tried to hit the metaphor pretty hard: Fraser's not literally running away to rural Massachusetts or the Northwest Territories or wherever; he's just closing himself off from Ray and refusing to engage.
winter will come and get a hold of my heart and squeeze
and I will long for your touch
wonder what kind of fool am I
why'd I leave it if I loved it so much
I call you on the phone, struggle for the words to say
I swear that I am working on what keeps me miles away
The challenge with this verse was that the emotional stuff could be handled fairly literally, but the details (winter, phone) had to be handled much more metaphorically, and once again "miles away" had to mean emotional rather than geographical distance. I'd already shown them walking away from each other, so here I went for something different: Fraser knows he's not getting this right, but he doesn't know what to do about it, and so we end up with the two of them standing there at the door, stuck, unable to move forward.
bridge
Aaaaand the bridge. I avoided working on the bridge for weeks because it's a solid twenty seconds of music with no lyrics and I really had no idea what to do with it, and so I did what I suspect most vidders do in that kind of situation, which was to recoil from it as if from a poisonous snake. Eventually, after like 87 drafts, I decided it needed to be about frustration and failed attempts at connection: they really are trying to communicate, but they kind of suck at it. So we get lots of closed-off and accusatory body language here-Ray with his arms crossed, Fraser unable to look directly at Ray; lots of talking, no communicating, walking together, not connecting, all of which culminates in Ray slamming the door between himself and Fraser, leaving Fraser as isolated and still as he was at the beginning of the vid.
out here I make the only human light
I am the only human sound
it is my privilege to lie awake at night and think of what I've lost
and hope for what might be found
This section starts with one of the visuals I'd conceptualized most clearly before I started vidding: Fraser's alone in Chicago again, and his red uniform is the only spot of brightness and hope and humanity in a city that sometimes seems to be trying to crush the humanity out of people. sisabet mentions the "think of what I've lost" line in her commentary track and argues that it's all about Victoria, which is certainly how *I* saw it; in fact I was originally going to use some clips from "Victoria's Secret" in this section, but I worried that that might actually be kind of distracting, so I settled for a more generic shot of Fraser once again reading alone at night. And of course Ray had to be "what might be found."
out here it's so silent
you can hear your heart talking
one day that heart might tell you which way to go
you might start walking
[At the beginning of this section I decided I needed to throw in a reminder of that central metaphor of Chicago, and specifically Chicago as a dark place for Fraser, because it's really important to the transition that happens in the next section, so we're back to a shot of the city and the El at night, and the moon looking really far away and kind of overwhelmed.]
I wanted this verse to be the setup for what I hoped would be the big emotional payoff of the next section. In a vid where I was obsessed with keeping things moving along, this whole section has basically no external motion at all and very little internal motion; the goal here was to build up tension, to give tremendous weight to the tiny bits of motion that we do see. The clips are taken from a bunch of different episodes, obviously, but I wanted this verse to be a coherent little narrative of its own.
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
I thought of this section as a series of related and overlapping transitions: from stillness to motion, dark to light, slow to fast, Chicago to Canada, Fraser alone to Fraser with Ray. It's sort of a miniature version of the vid as a whole. Fraser approaches Ray, Ray leans in to him, they're on the same page, they're approaching that door again...
know that I will
...and there they go, they're through that door and off and running.
you know that I will
know that I will
know that I will
you know that I will
you know that I will
know that I will...
This section took a long time to get right; the first few lines worked pretty well, and I was really happy about that hat toss, but then I sort of dithered around and dumped the guys on a mountaintop in Canada with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER, and Kat and Flo, my two betas, both said, as kindly as possible, "Why is there suddenly a mountain?" (I have to take a second here to thank them both, because they really went above and beyond the call of duty with this vid-they were amazing.) So anyway, after they had very gently explained that I was on crack, I had to go back and figure out how to get the guys to Canada. So: start them running in snowy Chicago, keep them moving in roughly the same direction in snowy Canada, throw in some sledding for momentum (idea totally stolen from "Wonder of Birds" because I have no shame and also I love that vid), quick close-up of the two of them in the snow (where we can't linger because Ray's completely ridiculous hat will make me laugh and ruin the moment!), and then we see the mountain as the vocals give me chills. (I really love this song.)
out here when you light a smoke on the porch
you can hear the paper burning
the moon is the only light
I hear it turning
This last verse is a repeat of the first verse, and I wanted to echo that repetition visually; so once again we have the camera panning across a landscape, except it's mountains rather than city; we have jump cuts again, except it's a dogsled instead of a train; and we have Fraser, except he's no longer alone. (And if you want to imagine that, after the fade to black, Fraser is going to go get into Ray's sleeping bag, I can personally vouch for the fact that renenet can tell you where to find about seven hundred versions of that fic.)
for renenet and sisabet
I've said on more than one occasion that this is my favorite part of the whole vid, and I meant it. This vid was a labor of love for two people who are very dear to me, and the fact that they liked it made the whole thing worthwhile.
And that's it; thanks for listening.