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I'm a vidding machine!
I've posted the just-finished Ocean's 11 vid Tumbling Dice, here at my vids site. This is a very fluffy, lightweight vid that I made in land-speed record time, and had no idea I would ever even want to do this but for a strange set of circumstances and my lack of focus on anything lately except vidding, as escapist entertainment/frustration, I suppose. I've always wanted to vid to a couple different Rolling Stones songs, and had been listening to Tumbling Dice a lot lately, wishing I could find something to vid for it. And then I was lying in bed, agitating over my sister's estate, and this song was running in the back of my head the whole time, and I thought, hey! Ocean's 11! And I remembered the wonderful stories that Dorinda and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
keiko_kirin wrote, so it seemed like a cool way to thank them for the stories, so I thought I'd put it on my plate. Then the next day I saw that killabeez was having a really really bad time, and I knew she liked O11, and movies_michelle loves it and always remembers to pick up some food for me on Friday nights when we get together, so I thought, hey, maybe a vid would make Killa feel perkier and help Dorinda slog through her dissertation, and so I did it. Really fast!
Two vids in a week, though, is a weird record for me, and I learned a lot in making them -- the fact that I used different software for both, and they are wildly different styles -- one a movie from a director who favors using mixed color palettes, and the other a television show that not that many people have seen. I realize that pretty much no one cares about my process or how I make vids, but I felt like writing it down, anyway.
It was a long time between when I bought Final Cut Express and when I started this vid. But I had wanted to make this for a long time, only I knew I wanted to do effects that iMovie couldn't do, and that it had to mirror the feeling that it conjured in my mind when I listened to the song and storyboarded it in my head. The problem was, I knew that was pretty beyond me -- as I said in a post a few months ago, sophisticated programs are way above my intelligence level, and I'm still stuck in the bearskins and stone knives phase of VCR vidding, so making another jump up in technology felt way too difficult. But I'd originally intended to make this for the VVC dance show, and so I felt like I had to at least start; when it didn't make the cut, I kind of abandoned it and anyway, things were happening very fast with my sister's illness, so I left where I'd quit -- with the effects I wanted to do not working, and really disgusted with my lack of ability.
The hardest thing I've found about computer editing is that I can no longer storyboard physically -- I used to print out lyrics, write my clips choices alongside the lines, and map out a picture of how the vid would go. With VCR editing, this was the logical thing to do, because you had to work linearly, and you also had to sit there with a pile o' tapes, so it helped to know ahead of time what you needed. But since I can capture clips and they're all right there in front of me, I have lost my ability to do this. I sit now and poke at clip after clip and put things in and take them away. It makes for a frustrating process when you don't know what you're doing -- I wanted to mimic the opening clip of the vid, with those panning superimpositions, and the wonderful cinematography and effects of La Femme Nikita would have made this possible, but I couldn't get the superimpositions to work at all. Nothing that my friends told me to do would get it to work, and my version of FCE seemed to be reacting differently than anyone else's (for instance, I still can't get the keyframes or the Command R render to work at all). So a few months ago, I trashed the whole second timeline of video clips in frustration and tears, and decided to see if I could find something else for the repeating rap samples used throughout the song. There's no place where I can find a sample of each of the effects, and I didn't want to just render every single damn one till I found something I liked, so I was frustrated. I thought additive dissolve sounded like an oxymoron, so just for the heck of it I tried it on one spot, and it was so cool -- it created a kind of dissonant echoey effect that I thought worked really well on the singer's voice echoing "overground". For the hell of it, I tried it on a couple of jump cuts elsewhere, just to see what would happen with those rap samples, and damn if it wasn't even *more* dissonant.
This has been one of the harder things for me to grasp -- making the visuals on the page match my mind's. Because I have synesthesia, music is something that I literally feel in different parts of my body; certain songs will have different effects on where I feel them, and with 6 Underground I get this weird, psychedelic swirly green and blue and white kind of thing behind my eyes. That additive dissolve actually let me do something slightly similar, and I was thrilled to be able to create something close to what I feel. Then I had a harder time matching the flashing white blown-out effects that I used at the beginning, with the superfast cuts of Nikita looking like she's being tortured. Those clips are from a commercial that USA ran for fourth season, and I love how they really show some of the terrible things that happened to her in Section One even though they aren't in the actual series.sdwolfpup was kind enough to come all the way down to my house to help me figure out what to do with the "head full of drought" sequence so that I could find a way to mimic those superfast, blown-out visuals from the ad. We found that the keyframes won't work for me, for some reason, but she figured a workaround, and showed me how to use gamma correction to white things out, and then I noticed that USA had flipped an image and made it almost a reverse negative, so I tried that too. It helped a lot. Then I did the superimpositions, which finally I figured out how to make work, on a couple spots, so it wouldn't seem like the first-clip superimpositions were random.
I'm not sure that it isn't a little too much in the effects department (there are also a few regular dissolves in the mix), but overall I felt it worked, and people I really respect and admire have said it worked, so I'm sticking with it. By the end, I was getting more comfy with FCE, though the titles were baffling and frustrating me for a while until I realized that the playback quality, which I've never had an option for before, had a great deal to do with my problem. Making a DVD file and a web file were also a teethgrating learning experience, but I think I get it a little better now. I doubt sincerely I will ever be able to make the really cool, edgy, beautiful, or what have you vids that so many of my vidding pals do. I'm still very focused on story, and sometimes that makes it harder to see the esoteric and artistic possibilities that might enhance a vid story. And I have a very hard time actually processing the information, so trying to do something like the jittery displaced images that I wanted to mimic in this vid will always be beyond me -- that involves math and x and y vectors and scary things like that. I think that even with FC, I will still be the support hose of vidders, all very matronly and basic and sturdy. I would love to be the fishnet or the ultra-sheer sparkly, but I think I will always be support hose even with jazzy tools. But at least now I'm not afraid when I open the program.
Originally, I'd intended to make this in FCE as well to continue the learning. Also, I really had grown to like two things about FCE that I can't do in iMovie -- try out different clips on the timeline above the main one, just to see if I like them better or not, and to be able to just keep using the same master clip and take different portions out of it at a time. It makes futzing with the start and end points a lot easier. But I still have to capture in iMovie because I don't understand FCE's capture process, and iMovie's is way simpler, so I just left the clips in iMovie for a bit after I grabbed them. I wanted to wait until Ocean's 12 came out this week so I could see if there was anything to use (there so wasn't, and the movie's color palette was horrible comparatively), but work was freaskishly slow at the beginning of the week so in boredom, I fired up the Mac and started just laying in clips, figuring I'd transfer over to FCE later.
But it's like Lay's potato chips sometimes: you can't just lay in one clip. Once I'm in that vid farr stage, I'm so intently focused on stuff that I just keep adding the clips until I realize where I am and what time it is. I wasn't even a fan of this movie at all, but I was a fan of Dorinda and Keiko's stories -- so the weirdest thing was that I really enjoyed watching Brad Pitt's little body and facial gestures, and it was like he was giving me all these tiny cues that perfectly matched the rhythm of the song. It loses so much in a compressed, small, dark file (the movie is very dark, sadly, and so the file gets even darker when it's compressed -- this is definitely one where I wish people would contact me for DVDs!), because the gestures are often quite subtle, but Rusty was definitely speaking to me in these clips. He told me exactly where to put him, and why. Making fluffy vids is often very easy, anyway, but since I wasn't a huge fan, I wasn't sure how well this would go; I think I accidentally pimped myself into the fandom making this.
After working in FCE for a while, it was hard to go back to the less than linear aspect of iMovie -- when you want to change a clip, you have to do a lot of fiddling to get your timing right. That was a lot harder this time. But iMovie's little push wipe was a perfect match for the split-screen shot that introduces Rusty in the movie; since I used that to introduce Danny into the vid, I thought that wipe would be a good device to tie in the "baby" lines into a nice consistent bundle. It was fast, and relatively smple with a few headaches here and there mostly related to the more linear-editing style of iMovie, but overall, a fun experience that I hope I can repeat when we make our Wonderfalls vid.
keiko_kirin wrote, so it seemed like a cool way to thank them for the stories, so I thought I'd put it on my plate. Then the next day I saw that killabeez was having a really really bad time, and I knew she liked O11, and movies_michelle loves it and always remembers to pick up some food for me on Friday nights when we get together, so I thought, hey, maybe a vid would make Killa feel perkier and help Dorinda slog through her dissertation, and so I did it. Really fast!Two vids in a week, though, is a weird record for me, and I learned a lot in making them -- the fact that I used different software for both, and they are wildly different styles -- one a movie from a director who favors using mixed color palettes, and the other a television show that not that many people have seen. I realize that pretty much no one cares about my process or how I make vids, but I felt like writing it down, anyway.
It was a long time between when I bought Final Cut Express and when I started this vid. But I had wanted to make this for a long time, only I knew I wanted to do effects that iMovie couldn't do, and that it had to mirror the feeling that it conjured in my mind when I listened to the song and storyboarded it in my head. The problem was, I knew that was pretty beyond me -- as I said in a post a few months ago, sophisticated programs are way above my intelligence level, and I'm still stuck in the bearskins and stone knives phase of VCR vidding, so making another jump up in technology felt way too difficult. But I'd originally intended to make this for the VVC dance show, and so I felt like I had to at least start; when it didn't make the cut, I kind of abandoned it and anyway, things were happening very fast with my sister's illness, so I left where I'd quit -- with the effects I wanted to do not working, and really disgusted with my lack of ability.
The hardest thing I've found about computer editing is that I can no longer storyboard physically -- I used to print out lyrics, write my clips choices alongside the lines, and map out a picture of how the vid would go. With VCR editing, this was the logical thing to do, because you had to work linearly, and you also had to sit there with a pile o' tapes, so it helped to know ahead of time what you needed. But since I can capture clips and they're all right there in front of me, I have lost my ability to do this. I sit now and poke at clip after clip and put things in and take them away. It makes for a frustrating process when you don't know what you're doing -- I wanted to mimic the opening clip of the vid, with those panning superimpositions, and the wonderful cinematography and effects of La Femme Nikita would have made this possible, but I couldn't get the superimpositions to work at all. Nothing that my friends told me to do would get it to work, and my version of FCE seemed to be reacting differently than anyone else's (for instance, I still can't get the keyframes or the Command R render to work at all). So a few months ago, I trashed the whole second timeline of video clips in frustration and tears, and decided to see if I could find something else for the repeating rap samples used throughout the song. There's no place where I can find a sample of each of the effects, and I didn't want to just render every single damn one till I found something I liked, so I was frustrated. I thought additive dissolve sounded like an oxymoron, so just for the heck of it I tried it on one spot, and it was so cool -- it created a kind of dissonant echoey effect that I thought worked really well on the singer's voice echoing "overground". For the hell of it, I tried it on a couple of jump cuts elsewhere, just to see what would happen with those rap samples, and damn if it wasn't even *more* dissonant.
This has been one of the harder things for me to grasp -- making the visuals on the page match my mind's. Because I have synesthesia, music is something that I literally feel in different parts of my body; certain songs will have different effects on where I feel them, and with 6 Underground I get this weird, psychedelic swirly green and blue and white kind of thing behind my eyes. That additive dissolve actually let me do something slightly similar, and I was thrilled to be able to create something close to what I feel. Then I had a harder time matching the flashing white blown-out effects that I used at the beginning, with the superfast cuts of Nikita looking like she's being tortured. Those clips are from a commercial that USA ran for fourth season, and I love how they really show some of the terrible things that happened to her in Section One even though they aren't in the actual series.
sdwolfpup was kind enough to come all the way down to my house to help me figure out what to do with the "head full of drought" sequence so that I could find a way to mimic those superfast, blown-out visuals from the ad. We found that the keyframes won't work for me, for some reason, but she figured a workaround, and showed me how to use gamma correction to white things out, and then I noticed that USA had flipped an image and made it almost a reverse negative, so I tried that too. It helped a lot. Then I did the superimpositions, which finally I figured out how to make work, on a couple spots, so it wouldn't seem like the first-clip superimpositions were random. I'm not sure that it isn't a little too much in the effects department (there are also a few regular dissolves in the mix), but overall I felt it worked, and people I really respect and admire have said it worked, so I'm sticking with it. By the end, I was getting more comfy with FCE, though the titles were baffling and frustrating me for a while until I realized that the playback quality, which I've never had an option for before, had a great deal to do with my problem. Making a DVD file and a web file were also a teethgrating learning experience, but I think I get it a little better now. I doubt sincerely I will ever be able to make the really cool, edgy, beautiful, or what have you vids that so many of my vidding pals do. I'm still very focused on story, and sometimes that makes it harder to see the esoteric and artistic possibilities that might enhance a vid story. And I have a very hard time actually processing the information, so trying to do something like the jittery displaced images that I wanted to mimic in this vid will always be beyond me -- that involves math and x and y vectors and scary things like that. I think that even with FC, I will still be the support hose of vidders, all very matronly and basic and sturdy. I would love to be the fishnet or the ultra-sheer sparkly, but I think I will always be support hose even with jazzy tools. But at least now I'm not afraid when I open the program.
Originally, I'd intended to make this in FCE as well to continue the learning. Also, I really had grown to like two things about FCE that I can't do in iMovie -- try out different clips on the timeline above the main one, just to see if I like them better or not, and to be able to just keep using the same master clip and take different portions out of it at a time. It makes futzing with the start and end points a lot easier. But I still have to capture in iMovie because I don't understand FCE's capture process, and iMovie's is way simpler, so I just left the clips in iMovie for a bit after I grabbed them. I wanted to wait until Ocean's 12 came out this week so I could see if there was anything to use (there so wasn't, and the movie's color palette was horrible comparatively), but work was freaskishly slow at the beginning of the week so in boredom, I fired up the Mac and started just laying in clips, figuring I'd transfer over to FCE later.
But it's like Lay's potato chips sometimes: you can't just lay in one clip. Once I'm in that vid farr stage, I'm so intently focused on stuff that I just keep adding the clips until I realize where I am and what time it is. I wasn't even a fan of this movie at all, but I was a fan of Dorinda and Keiko's stories -- so the weirdest thing was that I really enjoyed watching Brad Pitt's little body and facial gestures, and it was like he was giving me all these tiny cues that perfectly matched the rhythm of the song. It loses so much in a compressed, small, dark file (the movie is very dark, sadly, and so the file gets even darker when it's compressed -- this is definitely one where I wish people would contact me for DVDs!), because the gestures are often quite subtle, but Rusty was definitely speaking to me in these clips. He told me exactly where to put him, and why. Making fluffy vids is often very easy, anyway, but since I wasn't a huge fan, I wasn't sure how well this would go; I think I accidentally pimped myself into the fandom making this.
After working in FCE for a while, it was hard to go back to the less than linear aspect of iMovie -- when you want to change a clip, you have to do a lot of fiddling to get your timing right. That was a lot harder this time. But iMovie's little push wipe was a perfect match for the split-screen shot that introduces Rusty in the movie; since I used that to introduce Danny into the vid, I thought that wipe would be a good device to tie in the "baby" lines into a nice consistent bundle. It was fast, and relatively smple with a few headaches here and there mostly related to the more linear-editing style of iMovie, but overall, a fun experience that I hope I can repeat when we make our Wonderfalls vid.
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*goes to download*
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I must see it -- is it DLable? something I can get from you on disc? Would love to see it.
And yes, this is my fervent wish -- that Dorinda will write more in that, or heck, in anything else if she's inspired. More Dorinda anywhere is a good thing, only a good thing.
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I'll happily send you an email with a link to dl, if you really want to see it. :) I'll just combine that with my feedback for your vid...multitasking, y'know. *g*
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Re: Utterly unrelated and probably annoying *squee*
BTW, squee? Is never ever annoying!
Re: Utterly unrelated and probably annoying *squee*
I know I appreciate it deeply, and other vidders I know do too.
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I really enjoyed Tumbling Dice, too. The wipes were really fun; in my experience, they're rare in fanvids and you used them to great effect. The vid sent me to a nice, happy Danny/Rusty place. *g*
Thanks for sharing these. I hope your love/hate relationship with FC works itself out.
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Yeah, this is the second vid I've used the wipes on (the Keen Eddie vid being the first) and I never would have thought to use it again, being such a... I don't know, it's not cheesy, but there's a kind of goofy quality to it, but it fit with that first split screen shot of Danny and Rusty and the splits to wipes that Soderbergh used throughout the movie. It's just kind of fun and I think I don't make that many "fun" vids, little squee fests, so I never get a chance to use the sillier effects, but O11 just calls for them. ;-)
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It's been a long time since I watch 11, so it all felt new again. I forgot Pitt's charisma, but woosh, there it is! It's only logical that Clooney's character can't take his eyes off of him, either... I agree with the person above who said she liked the wipes - they fit in perfectly with the mood and visual themes, rather like a dealer picking up the cards after a hand is over.
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A dealer picking up cards!!!! Oh, that is SOOOO cool. I love that!
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Tumbling Dice first, because that's the source I'm more familiar with:
I very much liked the match up between the spirit of the song and the movie. And the Danny/Rusty parts of the movie were my favorite parts anyway (ok, except for Elliot Gould, wo was just so perfect), and what's not to love about men wearing suits that good and that well? Light-hearted, more than a little sly, and rhythmically very watchable. I enjoyed it a lot.
As for 6 Underground--
I never really watched the show; caught a few episodes here and there, but it wasn't really my thing (my adoration for the original movie knows no bounds, but that's another story), so I can't speak for the emotional impact. However, I thought technically, stylistically, it was superb. The mood of the music and images worked very well, and the use of effects was impressive.
And, since my Bro is/was a HUGE Nikita fan, I made him watch it. He really liked it a lot. He was impressed by the way you highlighted key moments in the Nikita/Michael relationship, and he particularly liked the shots you chose for the parts where you superimposed the characters' faces as he says those were really important in each characters' development. I suppose the best praise is that, when the vid finished he asked "You're going to keep that, right?"
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Thank you for the lovely comments, and I'm always tickled to hear when people who don't necessarily watch vids or something see one and get it. That's a really cool thing.
I think I have a long way to go in terms of really getting a handle on effects and such, but I'm thrilled that my first attempt at arty-fartyness has gone over so well. I had a lot of doubts, so it means a lot to me to hear that people are enjoying that aspect.
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The song choice is so brilliant. I'm so bad about actually listening to lyrics but your vid made me listen. The power of vidding! I can tell Rusty was the main focus and...hey, I'm not complaining! I also really liked the push-wipe you did with the split screens. That complements Soderburgh's DOP's camera work quite well.
Also...I definitely want to get a DVD of your stuff and will send off for a request this week. I'd love to see a lot of your stuff uncompressed.
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And hey, even a really good lyrics listener like me? I couldn't get half of this song without having to look up the lyrics, because Mick is such an ass with the weird vowel formations and the way he talks in general. Spit it out, Mick! gah! So I'm glad you enjoyed despite that part of the vid. ;-)
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I've only seen the movie once (on a plane?) and am embarrassed to admit that I didn't really pick up on the slashiness. Later I read Dorinda's "Confidence Men" and realised I'd missed a lot! I was interested to see just how many scenes Danny and Rusty have together. The song seemed to suit the mood very well.
I'd love to get copies of your non-online Mag 7 vids one day, too. I haven't asked because you mentioned that you were planning to remaster them eventually, but I wouldn't want you to think I wasn't interested!