Processing data, VVC vids
Aug. 25th, 2005 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynThese are some of my process thoughts on the vids I showed at VVC. Work is quiet (how we love August!), I'm still pondering things said, and con reports don't seem to be coming, so I feel like it's safe to organize my own thoughts.
I've had this song in the back of my head for years as a possibility for Buffy, and another song planned out for Buffy and Giles's unique relationship. But when I listened to this again about two years ago, it seemed much more imperative than the other song. It felt more intimate, more about Buffy and the development of her character. Then when they aired the last bunch of eps in 7th season, I knew this was the song-choice winner: When Buffy closed the door on Giles and told him that she didn't need him anymore, that was my line -- "Did I learn to walk too soon?" and the way her friends turned on her, the friends she'd needed so badly, in the following line "Is it time to turn the screw?" She survives: everything thrown at her, her destiny, her death, her loss, her exile, and she survives because of who she is and who Giles taught her to be.
This is a vid about Buffy, and about how her relationship with Giles made her what she was. A couple people have said there's not enough Giles in the vid, that I failed at having the correct Giles ratio, something I find baffling. Giles is in more than 90% of the sequences -- any more, and it becomes about BuffyandGiles, rather than about Buffy, and who she became through her relationships with Giles and the Scoobies. To me, that balance is integral. One person said that it wasn't the vid she wanted to see because of not enough Giles, and I thought, well, probably not, then, because it's about Buffy primarily, and secondarily about Buffy and Giles as a relationship (not a 'ship, please!). If someone went into this wanting only a BuffyandGiles relationship-definition vid, then they'd be disappointed because it was never intended that way. It's a vid about... becoming, not to get too punny on ep titles, and how all these things have led her to become the woman she was, how they helped her survive. How Giles helped her to be that, and when he had to let go of her. I plan to make a BuffyandGiles relationship vid another time; this just wasn't it, for me.
Someone described it as snapshots of a life, and I liked that -- I chose the freeze-frame effect because I wanted to pick up on the title and the phrase "Polaroid me". Buffy looking back and seeing what she's made of. Someone else also noticed (and I'm so grateful about this) that many of the moments are just before the big moment, rather than during whatever big moment there was. I'm not so good with the tech stuff, and it took me a while to figure the whole thing out with creating a picture look, a stopping at the cusp of the big moment look. There are only three effects in the vid -- the freeze frames, the dissolves, and the fade-in/fade-out. So it's pretty basic. But I wanted to draw a lot on the episode Restless, with the dreams and the fears, so there were some effects (the posterizing of Buffy's face in the two "celluloid, monochrome" lines, the blurring of Giles's face on "color") that come from the show, as well as the altered reality shots from the ep where Buffy finds out Dawn's the key. Since I feel like Buffy's dreams are almost reality in what comes true, and Giles's dream in that episode gets at his fears about what his status is as Watcher and as Buffy's mentor, it became a huge part of the vid.
I made this right after my sister died, so there is a lot of that emotion -- about severing ties, about loss and growing up and changing -- in there. About grief, too -- because Giles loses something as Buffy changes. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to end on Buffy turning to jump off the tower. Everyone in the world uses that damn leap off the tower, and I wanted to avoid that like the plague. Most people know it even though they don't watch Buffy, and I like that it's implied through earlier shots. We know. We know what's gonna happen to her, what she sacrifices, and earlier we see her after she's died. So it's there, but not there, and I loved that the music ends abruptly, so I could just freeze it. The moment of her sacrifice, the moment when everything Giles taught her takes hold, and she does this impossible thing. Death is her gift, and one that Giles gave her the courage to give.
This was a total lark.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
feochadn (Jo), movies_michelle (Christy) and I had been watching Wonderfalls when it was cancelled (you killed Jaye! You bastards!), and we knew there were eps out there on bit torrent, but we only snagged a couple. I love this Fountains of Wayne album, so when I was listening to it one day, I thought, you know, this could be a song about Jaye! They agreed, and we started plotting out the idea; I told them we had to pretty much jettison the lyrics. With songs with such incredibly specific lyrics, you just have to go for broke -- forget literalism, you just try to get close to the feel of it, and go from there. You can't match the bus ticket, or the brand new account, or the sitting on a planter at the Port Authority, so you just find stuff that works on a connect the dots level. And we knew right away that the repeating "yeah yeah"s were going to be the talking animals.
So we patiently waited for the DVDs. I watched them as soon as I got them, and started capturing for the vid. Since it was quiet at work, I just started laying in clips and next thing I knew I'd finished the vid! I brought it to my collaborators and we went over everything and changed a few things. But it was an astonishingly easy vid to make, I think just because the song is so bright and bouncy and the show is just such a gift with the visuals. I knew I wanted to go from her job to her family to Eric to the world at large in progression, and I think that works subtly to show Jaye in all her fucked-up glory.
One thing Jo and Christy and I agreed on was that reactions are funnier than just the event. Meaning, there are people we know that don't get why we'd have the Mouth Breather watching her fall to the floor when she faints, because the event of Jaye fainting is supposed to be the joke, right? But the funny, to us, is the Mouth Breather's face as he stares dully at her -- it makes the punchline, really. Delivery is everything in comedy. So I looked for a lot of reactions along those lines, and the show gives them to us in abundance. Just a fun, fun time making this, and a fun time watching it.
I'd thought of this song a lot during season 4 of Angel. It conjures up images of apocalyptic horror to me, a song I've loved since I was a little kid -- the eerie music at the beginning, Marianne Faithful's ravaged wail of a voice, especially on the "rape, murder" lines, the whole tone of the song. So I'd wanted to do an "if it's Tuesday, it must be an apocalypse" vid, and when the milestones theme for the challenge show was mentioned last year, I panicked. Milestones as such don't interest me -- firsts, lasts, whatever -- but I kept wondering, is an apocalypse a milestone? I decided yes.
This was a hard vid for me in that I threw story out altogether. I don't consider myself much of a visual talent, so throwing out my one strength in favor of a visual pastiche was challenging for me. But that's why I do the challenge vids -- I normally hate the whole challenge idea, particularly the sekrit stuff, but it puts me outside my normal box and sometimes that's really good. I spent a lot of time on how to approach it, more than I ever have -- beat heavy, effects heavy, what? I tried multiple approaches till I settled on one that I liked somewhere in between, working with the "oooo-ooo-oooo" stuff that constantly underlines the song's rhythm. That's why the cutting is arhythmic, which I thought worked nicely because it helps with the overall edge. I also didn't want to get too linear -- it's linear in that it starts with a mostly S3 reprise, but I wanted to also mix up the visuals a bit so that it created a feeling of dread at first, with random stuff that only starts to cohere after we see other elements of the story.
It was interesting hearing people's opinions on the milestone (and also a little surreal, because one person was absolutely convinced about something that just struck me as bizarro-world). Almost everyone believed it was the fulfillment of the prophecy, because it starts with "The father will kill the son" and ends with the father killing the son. I wanted to do that (bring the story full-circle, because day-um, I love that story), definitely, but for me when I made it, this felt more about "if it's not one apocalypse, it's another." That was my only "milestone" -- Angel season 4 was just Apocalypses 'R Us, and I thought this song would be a cool way to represent that. I like the idea that maybe I made a different vid than that, though, for other people. That's one of the coolest things about making art -- other people see it differently, and that can add much more meaning to the art you made.
I've had this song in the back of my head for years as a possibility for Buffy, and another song planned out for Buffy and Giles's unique relationship. But when I listened to this again about two years ago, it seemed much more imperative than the other song. It felt more intimate, more about Buffy and the development of her character. Then when they aired the last bunch of eps in 7th season, I knew this was the song-choice winner: When Buffy closed the door on Giles and told him that she didn't need him anymore, that was my line -- "Did I learn to walk too soon?" and the way her friends turned on her, the friends she'd needed so badly, in the following line "Is it time to turn the screw?" She survives: everything thrown at her, her destiny, her death, her loss, her exile, and she survives because of who she is and who Giles taught her to be.
This is a vid about Buffy, and about how her relationship with Giles made her what she was. A couple people have said there's not enough Giles in the vid, that I failed at having the correct Giles ratio, something I find baffling. Giles is in more than 90% of the sequences -- any more, and it becomes about BuffyandGiles, rather than about Buffy, and who she became through her relationships with Giles and the Scoobies. To me, that balance is integral. One person said that it wasn't the vid she wanted to see because of not enough Giles, and I thought, well, probably not, then, because it's about Buffy primarily, and secondarily about Buffy and Giles as a relationship (not a 'ship, please!). If someone went into this wanting only a BuffyandGiles relationship-definition vid, then they'd be disappointed because it was never intended that way. It's a vid about... becoming, not to get too punny on ep titles, and how all these things have led her to become the woman she was, how they helped her survive. How Giles helped her to be that, and when he had to let go of her. I plan to make a BuffyandGiles relationship vid another time; this just wasn't it, for me.
Someone described it as snapshots of a life, and I liked that -- I chose the freeze-frame effect because I wanted to pick up on the title and the phrase "Polaroid me". Buffy looking back and seeing what she's made of. Someone else also noticed (and I'm so grateful about this) that many of the moments are just before the big moment, rather than during whatever big moment there was. I'm not so good with the tech stuff, and it took me a while to figure the whole thing out with creating a picture look, a stopping at the cusp of the big moment look. There are only three effects in the vid -- the freeze frames, the dissolves, and the fade-in/fade-out. So it's pretty basic. But I wanted to draw a lot on the episode Restless, with the dreams and the fears, so there were some effects (the posterizing of Buffy's face in the two "celluloid, monochrome" lines, the blurring of Giles's face on "color") that come from the show, as well as the altered reality shots from the ep where Buffy finds out Dawn's the key. Since I feel like Buffy's dreams are almost reality in what comes true, and Giles's dream in that episode gets at his fears about what his status is as Watcher and as Buffy's mentor, it became a huge part of the vid.
I made this right after my sister died, so there is a lot of that emotion -- about severing ties, about loss and growing up and changing -- in there. About grief, too -- because Giles loses something as Buffy changes. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to end on Buffy turning to jump off the tower. Everyone in the world uses that damn leap off the tower, and I wanted to avoid that like the plague. Most people know it even though they don't watch Buffy, and I like that it's implied through earlier shots. We know. We know what's gonna happen to her, what she sacrifices, and earlier we see her after she's died. So it's there, but not there, and I loved that the music ends abruptly, so I could just freeze it. The moment of her sacrifice, the moment when everything Giles taught her takes hold, and she does this impossible thing. Death is her gift, and one that Giles gave her the courage to give.
This was a total lark.
feochadn (Jo), movies_michelle (Christy) and I had been watching Wonderfalls when it was cancelled (you killed Jaye! You bastards!), and we knew there were eps out there on bit torrent, but we only snagged a couple. I love this Fountains of Wayne album, so when I was listening to it one day, I thought, you know, this could be a song about Jaye! They agreed, and we started plotting out the idea; I told them we had to pretty much jettison the lyrics. With songs with such incredibly specific lyrics, you just have to go for broke -- forget literalism, you just try to get close to the feel of it, and go from there. You can't match the bus ticket, or the brand new account, or the sitting on a planter at the Port Authority, so you just find stuff that works on a connect the dots level. And we knew right away that the repeating "yeah yeah"s were going to be the talking animals.So we patiently waited for the DVDs. I watched them as soon as I got them, and started capturing for the vid. Since it was quiet at work, I just started laying in clips and next thing I knew I'd finished the vid! I brought it to my collaborators and we went over everything and changed a few things. But it was an astonishingly easy vid to make, I think just because the song is so bright and bouncy and the show is just such a gift with the visuals. I knew I wanted to go from her job to her family to Eric to the world at large in progression, and I think that works subtly to show Jaye in all her fucked-up glory.
One thing Jo and Christy and I agreed on was that reactions are funnier than just the event. Meaning, there are people we know that don't get why we'd have the Mouth Breather watching her fall to the floor when she faints, because the event of Jaye fainting is supposed to be the joke, right? But the funny, to us, is the Mouth Breather's face as he stares dully at her -- it makes the punchline, really. Delivery is everything in comedy. So I looked for a lot of reactions along those lines, and the show gives them to us in abundance. Just a fun, fun time making this, and a fun time watching it.
I'd thought of this song a lot during season 4 of Angel. It conjures up images of apocalyptic horror to me, a song I've loved since I was a little kid -- the eerie music at the beginning, Marianne Faithful's ravaged wail of a voice, especially on the "rape, murder" lines, the whole tone of the song. So I'd wanted to do an "if it's Tuesday, it must be an apocalypse" vid, and when the milestones theme for the challenge show was mentioned last year, I panicked. Milestones as such don't interest me -- firsts, lasts, whatever -- but I kept wondering, is an apocalypse a milestone? I decided yes.
This was a hard vid for me in that I threw story out altogether. I don't consider myself much of a visual talent, so throwing out my one strength in favor of a visual pastiche was challenging for me. But that's why I do the challenge vids -- I normally hate the whole challenge idea, particularly the sekrit stuff, but it puts me outside my normal box and sometimes that's really good. I spent a lot of time on how to approach it, more than I ever have -- beat heavy, effects heavy, what? I tried multiple approaches till I settled on one that I liked somewhere in between, working with the "oooo-ooo-oooo" stuff that constantly underlines the song's rhythm. That's why the cutting is arhythmic, which I thought worked nicely because it helps with the overall edge. I also didn't want to get too linear -- it's linear in that it starts with a mostly S3 reprise, but I wanted to also mix up the visuals a bit so that it created a feeling of dread at first, with random stuff that only starts to cohere after we see other elements of the story.
It was interesting hearing people's opinions on the milestone (and also a little surreal, because one person was absolutely convinced about something that just struck me as bizarro-world). Almost everyone believed it was the fulfillment of the prophecy, because it starts with "The father will kill the son" and ends with the father killing the son. I wanted to do that (bring the story full-circle, because day-um, I love that story), definitely, but for me when I made it, this felt more about "if it's not one apocalypse, it's another." That was my only "milestone" -- Angel season 4 was just Apocalypses 'R Us, and I thought this song would be a cool way to represent that. I like the idea that maybe I made a different vid than that, though, for other people. That's one of the coolest things about making art -- other people see it differently, and that can add much more meaning to the art you made.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-25 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-25 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 05:29 pm (UTC)Re: #1 of 3: totallly uninformed feedback yay!
Date: 2005-08-26 05:32 pm (UTC)Thank you for the kind words -- you think you don't have the vocab, but every time you've commented on a vid, you've said some really amazingly insightful things. The comment about motion being the imp thing -- that's exactly it, and you really do see this stuff. Even if you don't have the tech terms, you know exactly what you're looking at!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 01:01 am (UTC)*Wibble*
Just a fun, fun time making this, and a fun time watching it.
I concur.
working with the "oooo-ooo-oooo" stuff that constantly underlines the song's rhythm. That's why the cutting is arhythmic, which I thought worked nicely because it helps with the overall edge.
And here's the part where you lose me completely. I should probably never be a vidder, because I still don't get this stuff.
Anyway, as much as I adore all three of these vids, getting the depths of your perspective on them is double the treat. Thanks for taking the time to put up some thoughts!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 05:42 pm (UTC)One of these days we should plan some time to do that.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 11:58 pm (UTC)I would absolutely love to. Not sure when, though! I've just made plans for a couple of trips, so the next two weekends (not counting this one) will be busy.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-26 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 04:42 am (UTC)It really is. Jaye is just a phenomenally well-developed character, under the circumstances, and the world is so fully realized... It was such a treat to work with, despite the limited source. I very much hope that more people will find other angles to vid.
I'm still bitter as bitter can be that we don't get any more eps of either Wonderfalls or Firefly. But I'm REALLY looking forward to Serenity -- not least because I think we're going to get some damn good vids out of it. SHINY!