History of My Future by Clucking Belles, commentary by killabeez
Title: History of My Future
Vidders: Clucking Belles, aka sherrold and wickedwords - for kadymae
Fandom: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Link to vid: here
Commentary by: killabeez
As an intro to this commentary, I'll note that these two vidders (and their cohorts the Media Cannibals) created many of the vids that introduced me to vidding, that made me start vidding, and that heavily influenced my views on what makes a good vid, how vids can be used to tell a story, and what vids are all about. sherrold's views on vidding, in particular, inform most of the vids I've ever made.
The reason I picked this vid is that it's a departure for them. They made this as an auction vid for kadymae, and it's a great example of how auction vids can push and stretch us sometimes. When the song choice is taken out of your hands, and your goal is to please someone other than yourself, it often pushes you outside your comfort zone. Sometimes, as with this vid, the result is eye-opening.
Song Choice
Beyond the obvious parity between the song's title and the show's time-twisty plot, it's an angry, intense song, with deeply meaningful, emotional lyrics that punch you right in the face. That... sounds exactly like the character of Derek Reese, to me.
A character study like this can either choose a song that matches the canon, or one that subverts it by going against the grain and showing a side of a character we don't usually get to see. In this case, we get both. The musical style matches Derek's role in the show: he's a soldier, a man of few words, a man who leads a violent (and short) life. But the lyrics reveal the fundamental damage and desires that lie beneath the character's surface.
The lyrics are also quite hard to understand in places, but crystal clear on the refrains and on the lines that pack the greatest emotional impact. Nothing but trouble. You slept like an angel, woke like the devil. Don't lie to me. I wanna believe, I wanna believe, I wanna believe. I wanna believe but I'm having trouble. sherrold once told me that when it comes to lyrics, what will help you or kill you is the throughline - the repeated line in the refrain that contains the song's most essential message. Either the throughline matches what you're trying to do, or else it doesn't, and if it doesn't, no amount of "perfect" lyrics elsewhere will make your vid work. In this case, the meaning of the vid, Derek himself, and most of the emotional themes of Terminator: SCC can be boiled down to that one line: "I wanna believe, I wanna believe, I wanna believe, but I'm having trouble."
Editing Style and Eye Movement
This is where the vidders really stretched themselves, with impressive results. The energy of the song demands the kind of editing I call, "cut cut cut flashy flash flash" - meaning, the clips are sharp, frenetic, full of internal motion, and so short that they become virtually a strobe stop-action slideshow at times: images flickering past so quickly that you can't follow them unless the vidder is skilled at directing the eye. I've seen a whole lot of fan vids like this that failed for me because, while the vidder may have had a good sense of story and rhythm, he or she didn't have the visual composition skills to put together a series of clips my eye and brain could follow easily. (For that matter, I've seen dozens of professionally-made movie trailers that failed for the same reason.)
A lot of visual elements come into play when you talk about composition: color, line, shape, texture, value, negative space - not to mention design principles like emphasis, repetition, harmony, contrast, etc. My opinion when it comes to visually processing fast-cut vids is that there are two visual factors that count more than the others: emphasis (what do I look at first?) and line (where does my eye go when I look at the next point of emphasis?) (There's a vid that I consider to be a masterwork when it comes to this idea: To Be a Ghost by astartexx.)
"History of My Future" succeeds on many levels, most notably in succinct and powerful storytelling, but its visual composition is a big part of that. I loved seeing the same sensitivity to facial expression, eye movement, and internal clip motion that these vidders mastered long ago applied to this new style of vidding. As you watch the vid, pay attention to where your eye moves, and how the internal clip motion, use of light and shadow, and precise timing (particularly when it comes to facial expressions) allow you to process a lot of information and emotion very quickly.
Commentary
00:00 - 00:08
instrumental intro
So, this is fun. The very first clip of the vid? Is Derek getting shot dead. Hey, did you get a look at that title card? It's not like they didn't warn you, right? The future is the past, the past is the future, and everything comes around again.
This is a very short intro, and they don't have time to create a big lead-in to the story they want to tell, which means that what we get is the essentials: Derek getting shot (a lot); Derek shooting people (a lot); Derek getting betrayed by the woman he loves (in slow motion, emphasizing it); an open grave (waiting for him, one presumes); Derek in a stand-off with Sarah (with whom he has too much in common); a tiny clip of Sarah with a strobing red Danger! light on her; Cameron likewise looking ominous and scary (and lit by a red laser).
Intros are hard. Short intros are even harder. No matter how long or short it is, that intro counts for a lot, so when you only have a few seconds, you get right to it. This is an exciting action vid about a guy who is destined to die young. He's got three women in his life, and they're all various brands of trouble. Got it? Here we go.
00:09 - 00:18
Livin' life dealin' you've got feathers in your head
Pack up your home, pack it up and take your bed
If you have a short, frenetic song and you want to tell a story that's more than just pretty action shots to the music, structure is key. This vid uses a simple structure, focusing on Derek's relationships with the three women the vidders set up in the intro. First, Sarah Connor. She struggles with Derek as an equal; she stands in the way, arms waving (she can't be ignored!); she comforts him and protects him; he wants to protect her.
The most interesting clip juxtaposition to me in this section is the one of him covering the little girl's eyes at 00:14, followed by the clip of Sarah sheltering younger (long-haired) John. It clarifies what I was pretty sure they were trying to tell me about Derek's relationship to Sarah - that they are both people who have lost their innocence, but are still trying to protect the innocent. Also, the lyrics tell me that they are both displaced (homeless) and on the run. Pack up your home, pack it up and take your bed. They are mirror images of each other, and should have every reason to rely on and understand each other. Derek has just saved John's life.
But then, Sarah looks down (an expression of guilt). And right after that, the clip of Derek on the phone with her - but he's getting up from Jesse's bed, and lying to Sarah about where he is. He doesn't trust her. He can't trust her, because she's harboring a monster.
00:19 - 00:26
Now that I can see you're nothing but trouble
You slept like an angel, woke like the devil
Enter Cameron. One of my favorite moments of the vid is at 00:24-00:26, "You slept like an angel, woke like the devil."
It's key, because this whole vid is about Derek's trust issues, and can we blame him? When your world is full of monsters walking around looking like pretty girls who dance ballet, and who are wearing the face of someone they killed, who are you supposed to trust?
The vid elaborates on that next:
00:27 - 00:38
The history of my future's like a picture of my past
It's elastic, you can stretch it, and I snap
Derek's whole experience of reality is twisted and turned in on itself many times. It's made him who he is. The machines Cameron represents to him are responsible for that - and he never forgets it.
He'd like to kill her. He'd like to, in fact, set her on fire. He might be, just a little bit, (justifiably) angry.
00:39 - 00:42
I wanna believe, I wanna believe, I wanna believe
But despite all the ugliness in his life, he's the kind of guy who can't quite seem to give up looking for something to believe in. Kyle, Sarah, John... he can't help himself. But he also can't make himself believe that it'll do him any good. "I wanna believe-" It's the tragedy of this character in three little words - and about 15 seconds of vid. We know everything that matters about him.
00:43 - 00:52
I wanna believe but I'm having trouble
You slept like an angel, woke like the devil
Things that come in threes are great in vids, and I think most of us agree that three works best if you save the strongest one for last. In this case, the vidders have set up an overall structure of three (Sarah/Cameron/Jesse), but the chorus actually repeats the "I wanna believe" line four times. So, what to do? Their solution is to switch up the first three repetitions to round out Derek's story a bit more (with the minor triad of Kyle/Sarah/John) and then transition into the next verse with their third major character, Jesse. It's a neat structural trick.
So, the refrain transitions on the last "I wanna believe" into the third woman in Derek's life, and the one whose betrayal hurts him the worst, because she's the one he really should have been able to count on.
This section is particularly nice visual poetry, too. It moves into an instrumental section (00:53-01:06) that kind of makes the hairs stand up on my arms and brings home the grim reality of living constantly under the gun. There's a great moment of responsiveness to the music at 01:06-01:07 where Cameron's delicate feet are contrasted against the combat boots of another terminator - reminding us that despite appearances, she's a killing machine who can literally stop a Mack truck.
This is the beginning of a section that comes back around to the three women again: Cameron, then Sarah, then Jesse, and we get to the heart of the matter: they're going to betray him and let him down, over and over, and he knows it.
01:06 - 01:17
If
If you're gonna lie
Lie down
Down next to me
Don't lie to me
01:18 - 01:29
If you're gonna lie down next to me don't lie to me
If your gonna lie on top of me don't lie to me
Aw, Derek. You can say "don't lie to me" all you want, but the truth is that you don't matter enough to any of these women to make it stick - a fact of which you are all too aware. And...
...if your show gives you visual gold like this? Use it. And do what these vidders did - save it for where you need it the most. This image says it all. Derek, the women in your life are toxic, and you are fucked, my man. It's not like you didn't know.
01:30 - 01:46
instrumental
In fact, let me show you how fucked.
There's a cool little moment here where they show each of the three women betraying a hint of vulnerability. Sarah empathizes. Jesse regrets what she's doing. Cameron shows her true face. Could it be that there's mercy after all?
Nah. It's all gonna get blown to hell.
01:46 - 01:53
So don't talk about a feeling you will never understand
Just pack it up and leave and take the rings from my hand
We've gotten most of the important stuff about Derek's character by now, but the vid manages to sneak a few more heart-twisty facets in there. The shot of Derek's one single good memory (playing baseball with Kyle) is the perfect choice for "feeling you will never understand." The slow-motion shot of him raising the gun to shoot Jesse in the back gives us plenty of time to agonize with him.
But wait. Scroll back a sec to 01:55 - that's his own back (and Kyle's) he's raising the gun at.
Oh, Derek! Don't hate yourself for wanting to believe in something. It's not your fault that everybody chose somebody or something else over you in the end. *sobs* But I love that they connected the two people Derek loved most, and whose abandonment hurt the worst.
01:57 - 02:13
I wanna believe, I wanna believe, I wanna believe
I wanna believe but I'm having trouble
I slept like an angel, woke like a devil
Around this point of the vid, the vidders started doing something I found fascinating: they broke one of the "cardinal rules" of vidding, which is, don't reuse clips within a vid. They'd actually done it several times before in the vid, but they were just flashes, so I hadn't thought too much of it. But it happens here more obviously, and I love that they went ahead and said fuck it and broke that rule repeatedly and with intent, because it fits. First, they foreshadowed that they were going to do it from the start, with the opening clip of Derek getting shot. Second, it absolutely fits the plot of the show and the title of the song - the future is the past. And third, it continues to bring home the intrinsic truth of Derek's character: that he knows what's going to happen, and he rebels against it even as he accepts that it's inevitable.
This is an amazing character study, of a character I love to study. *g*