No way out
Oct. 3rd, 2005 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI've posted the digital remaster of my old multimedia vid (Buffy, Scully, and Nikita) "There's No Way Out of Here" at my site. (oh, and it's QT Divx .avi, and a whopping 33MB) The password is still the same if you have it; if not, please use the link there to request it and I'll autorespond back. I'm still baffled by the why of projects like this. When you get them compressed into web-sized files, all the pixelization and blurring and everything else makes it seem, to my eyes, like a waste of time -- all the supposed benefits of using digital source and making everything shiny are lost, so what on earth have I gained? Almost no one ever asks for vids on DVDs, and kids today seem to prefer to watch washed-out, jerky, pixelated vids online rather than on a disc, so that's the only way this vid is going to be seen... and all the value of the digital source is pretty much moot at that point. I don't get it. My favorite clip, for instance, of Scully getting rousted out of her car by the army guys, is nothing but a big pixelated mush. It frustrates me mightily. Anyway.
I think the date on this vid is fall of 1998, although I'm not certain. I don't know how people figure out dates of when they made VCR vids; I never kept track of things nor dated them on my masters. But that makes the most sense, as Buffy and LFN had just finished their second seasons (LFN ended in August) and for some inexplicable reason, I have two clips from fall of 5th season X-Files. That posed a problem for this remaster, because I had no idea that XF had been filmed in widescreen at all, ever, and so when I got the discs (to my dismay, I got to the end of capturing for the vid only to find out that the shots I needed of Scully weren't in the damn S4 set I borrowed, and I had to actually buy the discs because no one had them to rent) I found out that they were letterboxed. I know how to widescreen clips that are full screen, but the reverse ends up making things look squeezey and unpleasant, so I just left them. They're two freaking clips, people can live with it.
This was the first vid I did alone. To kids these days, that doesn't mean much; back in the day, however, we most often tended to learn vidding from a vidder, and they would show us everything from how to hook up decks so they would talk to each other and to the TV, how to work the buttons, how to time, pretty much everything.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sherrold had been teaching me to vid when I got this idea and she kept encouraging me to try it on my own, but I had no editing deck and wasn't totally comfortable without some guidance at the time. So one day, when a bunch of people were visiting the Media Cannibals in Seattle, I think it was around Labor day holiday weekend, Sandy had brought the editing decks to Nicole's house so we could work on some group vids, and everyone had taken off to the airport for goodbyes and shuttling of visitors, and I sat down and started to lay in clips because I had nothing better to do. Every once in a while, I'd ask Jo or Nicole what things looked like, and they would thumbs up or down. The decks stayed at Nicole's house, and she invited me up for her usual stupendous cooking and to work on the vid if I wanted while she and hubby went out, and so I laid in much of the Nikita portion and the rest of the XF portion. Then the decks migrated over to Jo's place while Sandy was in Europe, and I would take my tapes and trundle over to Jo's for a couple of weekends to finish this vid and start the one I wanted to make the most, a vid called Trust for Mulder and Scully, to a Cure song that everyone said was impossible to vid. In truth, I wanted to finish No Way Out only so I could work on Trust. ;-)
When I first showed this, everyone wanted to know how I did the dissolves, which were unheard of for VCR vids. Fades were, too -- in fact, one of the things you made mental notes about in your fandoms was where you could find a good fadeout of your characters so that you could have them in a situation where an abrupt cutoff wasn't preferred. We were incredibly lucky in that Katharine had bought a "prosumer" Panasonic mixing board, a very expensive toy, and had visited us twice in Seattle that summer. The first trip up, she left us the board, and Sandy and I sat down one weekend to make the opening montage dissolves. It's impossible to describe how difficult this is; those of you who were at the Wayback Machine panel at VVC got a slight intro to this, but it involved three decks and the mixing board, and about 50 tries. I made Sandy do them because I was terrified of touching it. But they worked beautifully, and then on that Labor Day weekend, Katharine came back, with board, and Jo, Sandy, and she did the ending dissolves. My challenge was to fill up the rest of the vid in between! I had had the idea to use dissolves because I knew that all three women enter a room in the series pilots and I wanted to start drawing their parallel lines immediately; the ending dissolves idea came from noticing that at one point, all of them are on some mode of transportation looking really damn sad. We couldn't get the last two -- Buffy and Nikita -- to work well, until Jo came up with the brilliant idea of reversing the dissolve concept: not from face to face, but train to bus, and ending on Buffy's face. Worked perfectly and I didn't have to lift a finger! (Yes, I was a chicken about tech even back then.) I nearly destroyed their hard work, though, when I got to the end, because I had forgotten to set the zero counter (which forced the VCR to stop so you didn't overwrite your previously set clips; zero counters fail, and the resulting damage is just... a vidder's worst nightmare) and I overwrote into the scene of Scully getting in the car. Fortunately I remembered at the last minute and panicked, hitting all the buttons, stopping it in time. There is no equivalent for a computer vidder of this disaster; even losing your file and hard drive, you can rebuild eventually.
I knew this was a good vid when I made it, which is rare for me (I generally hate everything I do). There were things I didn't like, and I've fixed a few of them here, but I can't fix all of them or it would change the vid entirely. With VCR vidding, you tended to rely heavily on their edits -- so there were places where I used coverage shots (meaning, the camera focuses on one character, usually over another's shoulder, then they switch back to cover the other character, and so on) that I didn't like the second shot on much, but needed to keep their edit, and so on. Places, too, where I had damaged my source or master tape from trying so hard to get an action on the beat. Computer vidders who whine (me included) about how hard it is to get something just right make me laugh (I mock myself for griping that it's so hard on the computer), because, dude... nothing compares to making the 15th attempt at getting a clip right, damaging your master tape, and having to move on knowing that it sucks but you have to live with it. The worst pain of computer vidding doesn't compare to the easiest day VCR vidding.
But even knowing that it was a good vid when I finished... didn't prepare me for the response. The room at Escapade went nuts, and over the years, every time this is shown in public, there's this huge response I am never quite prepared for. People have told me off and on that this was the first vid they saw that made them understand the power of vids, or how narratives could be used, or that vids were interesting, or whatever... and I'm really bewildered (though pleased) by the comments. When I look at it now, all I see is this ponderous, long, heavy old thing. It's hard to separate what it is like for other people from what it is like for me. When I was talking with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
theshoshanna and a vidder who was worried that her first effort was terrible (it so wasn't), Shoshanna suggested that we have a show at VVC of first efforts and then everyone would feel good that they made beginner mistakes others made, show what they'd learned, etc. And I said, but There's No Way Out of Here was my first vid, and Shoshanna was all, well, thanks a lot for blowing my plans!
The truth is, I had the best opportunity to learn, which most computer vidders don't get. I had people teaching me and working with me who were the best of the best, and being able to kind of drift around from house to house, working on the vid in pieces, allowed me to get input from various sources as I worked in a much diferent way than having a beta of a draft does. And I think that shows in the vid... I would love to take all the credit and say yes, I'm so brilliant, but honestly, this vid wasn't made alone. The ideas and concepts were mine, but it does take a village sometimes to make something really good.
Today, I see people crediting computer vidders as "groundbreaking" and "raising the bar" and they never ever talk about the VCR vidders who really did that -- most of the real groundbreaking was done back then, by people like the Cannibals. It makes me sad that only certain computer vidders get credit for that, because the past doesn't exist for most fans online anymore. We don't count, us old dinosaurs. But I think this vid is a good example of the kind of changes that people were able to bring to vids, and I see a lot of influence from vids like this in the really good vids of today. It's not that I think I'm Miss Thang or that I'm an extraordinary vidder -- in fact, I think I'm kind of a crappy vidder but I have great ideas, just not the mad skilz to pull off a lot of my better concepts. This was the rare time when my skilz were up to the task for the most part, maybe because I was so new that I didn't know enough to be scared of my Giant Overarching Idea.
It was a very, very different vid for a lot of reasons, most notably that it was a multimedia vid with a very dark and tragic storyline. MM vids weren't only funny or silly; there had been serious ones before, such as the Cannibals' Heard It Through the Grapevine, but they weren't at the same level of serious drama, and I know a lot of people were startled by just how different this was from any MM vid they'd seen before. I never understood why there weren't more dramatic and tragic MM vids at that point, but there weren't. It also used the dissolves, as I mentioned, so there was a technical standpoint it broke ground on as well. The parallel lines use was also a refinement of something the Cannibals were doing in a way other vidders weren't back then -- they had taken the concept of finding similar shots, similar ideas in different shows, and really bringing them out (the bus shots, for instance, in What I Like About You are always what people remember about that vid). Since I knew all these shows intimately (and keep in mind, at the time, only a few people were watching Buffy, and I knew only about four people who watched LFN), I was inspired by all the parallel imagery to make this: the shots of their own gravestones, coming into mysterious rooms, etc. And not a lot of people really looked for things like that in vids at the time.
But I think one of the most lingering effects I saw from this vid is far more subtle. When I first showed it, I was asked by more people than I could count why I opened with the three different women, and then went into the long section about Scully. Some people had big issues with that or they didn't get it. In the past, MM vids would have the first character, the second, and so on, each intro'd in turn at their point in the song. People seemed flummoxed by introducing all the characters first, and then starting the individual stories afterwards. I come to vidding solely as a storyteller. My first love and my strongest ability is writing and telling stories, so the artistry, the visual quality and the technology are not my strong suit (duh, you say). In a fictional story, you would set up your main characters at the beginning, introducing lesser characters later. I felt this was imperative for such a long, serious vid. I think over time, that viewpoint won out, because even recently at VVC, I heard someone who'd once criticized that No Way Out intro complaining about a MM vid that it "introduced characters at the end of the vid instead of the beginning." That made me smile. So, people today think that the only thing groundbreaking is tech or using rap or whatever, but this just proves to me that you can break ground in smaller, more subtle ways, and still have an effect on how people view vids.
So, I have a love hate relationship with this old warhorse. I love that I did something different, more by accident than design. I love that it means something to people, and they feel it transcends its clunky VCR origins. And I still love me some Scully and Buffy and Nikita, fiercely. But I do wish I could change it. Some people griped about the too-fast cuts in some spots (hah! too fast!!!! HAH!) and now they are so quaint and lumbering... I would love to Atom Bomb-ize this. That would be a girl-fest wing ding, I tell you what.
I think the date on this vid is fall of 1998, although I'm not certain. I don't know how people figure out dates of when they made VCR vids; I never kept track of things nor dated them on my masters. But that makes the most sense, as Buffy and LFN had just finished their second seasons (LFN ended in August) and for some inexplicable reason, I have two clips from fall of 5th season X-Files. That posed a problem for this remaster, because I had no idea that XF had been filmed in widescreen at all, ever, and so when I got the discs (to my dismay, I got to the end of capturing for the vid only to find out that the shots I needed of Scully weren't in the damn S4 set I borrowed, and I had to actually buy the discs because no one had them to rent) I found out that they were letterboxed. I know how to widescreen clips that are full screen, but the reverse ends up making things look squeezey and unpleasant, so I just left them. They're two freaking clips, people can live with it.
This was the first vid I did alone. To kids these days, that doesn't mean much; back in the day, however, we most often tended to learn vidding from a vidder, and they would show us everything from how to hook up decks so they would talk to each other and to the TV, how to work the buttons, how to time, pretty much everything.
sherrold had been teaching me to vid when I got this idea and she kept encouraging me to try it on my own, but I had no editing deck and wasn't totally comfortable without some guidance at the time. So one day, when a bunch of people were visiting the Media Cannibals in Seattle, I think it was around Labor day holiday weekend, Sandy had brought the editing decks to Nicole's house so we could work on some group vids, and everyone had taken off to the airport for goodbyes and shuttling of visitors, and I sat down and started to lay in clips because I had nothing better to do. Every once in a while, I'd ask Jo or Nicole what things looked like, and they would thumbs up or down. The decks stayed at Nicole's house, and she invited me up for her usual stupendous cooking and to work on the vid if I wanted while she and hubby went out, and so I laid in much of the Nikita portion and the rest of the XF portion. Then the decks migrated over to Jo's place while Sandy was in Europe, and I would take my tapes and trundle over to Jo's for a couple of weekends to finish this vid and start the one I wanted to make the most, a vid called Trust for Mulder and Scully, to a Cure song that everyone said was impossible to vid. In truth, I wanted to finish No Way Out only so I could work on Trust. ;-) When I first showed this, everyone wanted to know how I did the dissolves, which were unheard of for VCR vids. Fades were, too -- in fact, one of the things you made mental notes about in your fandoms was where you could find a good fadeout of your characters so that you could have them in a situation where an abrupt cutoff wasn't preferred. We were incredibly lucky in that Katharine had bought a "prosumer" Panasonic mixing board, a very expensive toy, and had visited us twice in Seattle that summer. The first trip up, she left us the board, and Sandy and I sat down one weekend to make the opening montage dissolves. It's impossible to describe how difficult this is; those of you who were at the Wayback Machine panel at VVC got a slight intro to this, but it involved three decks and the mixing board, and about 50 tries. I made Sandy do them because I was terrified of touching it. But they worked beautifully, and then on that Labor Day weekend, Katharine came back, with board, and Jo, Sandy, and she did the ending dissolves. My challenge was to fill up the rest of the vid in between! I had had the idea to use dissolves because I knew that all three women enter a room in the series pilots and I wanted to start drawing their parallel lines immediately; the ending dissolves idea came from noticing that at one point, all of them are on some mode of transportation looking really damn sad. We couldn't get the last two -- Buffy and Nikita -- to work well, until Jo came up with the brilliant idea of reversing the dissolve concept: not from face to face, but train to bus, and ending on Buffy's face. Worked perfectly and I didn't have to lift a finger! (Yes, I was a chicken about tech even back then.) I nearly destroyed their hard work, though, when I got to the end, because I had forgotten to set the zero counter (which forced the VCR to stop so you didn't overwrite your previously set clips; zero counters fail, and the resulting damage is just... a vidder's worst nightmare) and I overwrote into the scene of Scully getting in the car. Fortunately I remembered at the last minute and panicked, hitting all the buttons, stopping it in time. There is no equivalent for a computer vidder of this disaster; even losing your file and hard drive, you can rebuild eventually.
I knew this was a good vid when I made it, which is rare for me (I generally hate everything I do). There were things I didn't like, and I've fixed a few of them here, but I can't fix all of them or it would change the vid entirely. With VCR vidding, you tended to rely heavily on their edits -- so there were places where I used coverage shots (meaning, the camera focuses on one character, usually over another's shoulder, then they switch back to cover the other character, and so on) that I didn't like the second shot on much, but needed to keep their edit, and so on. Places, too, where I had damaged my source or master tape from trying so hard to get an action on the beat. Computer vidders who whine (me included) about how hard it is to get something just right make me laugh (I mock myself for griping that it's so hard on the computer), because, dude... nothing compares to making the 15th attempt at getting a clip right, damaging your master tape, and having to move on knowing that it sucks but you have to live with it. The worst pain of computer vidding doesn't compare to the easiest day VCR vidding.
But even knowing that it was a good vid when I finished... didn't prepare me for the response. The room at Escapade went nuts, and over the years, every time this is shown in public, there's this huge response I am never quite prepared for. People have told me off and on that this was the first vid they saw that made them understand the power of vids, or how narratives could be used, or that vids were interesting, or whatever... and I'm really bewildered (though pleased) by the comments. When I look at it now, all I see is this ponderous, long, heavy old thing. It's hard to separate what it is like for other people from what it is like for me. When I was talking with
theshoshanna and a vidder who was worried that her first effort was terrible (it so wasn't), Shoshanna suggested that we have a show at VVC of first efforts and then everyone would feel good that they made beginner mistakes others made, show what they'd learned, etc. And I said, but There's No Way Out of Here was my first vid, and Shoshanna was all, well, thanks a lot for blowing my plans! The truth is, I had the best opportunity to learn, which most computer vidders don't get. I had people teaching me and working with me who were the best of the best, and being able to kind of drift around from house to house, working on the vid in pieces, allowed me to get input from various sources as I worked in a much diferent way than having a beta of a draft does. And I think that shows in the vid... I would love to take all the credit and say yes, I'm so brilliant, but honestly, this vid wasn't made alone. The ideas and concepts were mine, but it does take a village sometimes to make something really good.
Today, I see people crediting computer vidders as "groundbreaking" and "raising the bar" and they never ever talk about the VCR vidders who really did that -- most of the real groundbreaking was done back then, by people like the Cannibals. It makes me sad that only certain computer vidders get credit for that, because the past doesn't exist for most fans online anymore. We don't count, us old dinosaurs. But I think this vid is a good example of the kind of changes that people were able to bring to vids, and I see a lot of influence from vids like this in the really good vids of today. It's not that I think I'm Miss Thang or that I'm an extraordinary vidder -- in fact, I think I'm kind of a crappy vidder but I have great ideas, just not the mad skilz to pull off a lot of my better concepts. This was the rare time when my skilz were up to the task for the most part, maybe because I was so new that I didn't know enough to be scared of my Giant Overarching Idea.
It was a very, very different vid for a lot of reasons, most notably that it was a multimedia vid with a very dark and tragic storyline. MM vids weren't only funny or silly; there had been serious ones before, such as the Cannibals' Heard It Through the Grapevine, but they weren't at the same level of serious drama, and I know a lot of people were startled by just how different this was from any MM vid they'd seen before. I never understood why there weren't more dramatic and tragic MM vids at that point, but there weren't. It also used the dissolves, as I mentioned, so there was a technical standpoint it broke ground on as well. The parallel lines use was also a refinement of something the Cannibals were doing in a way other vidders weren't back then -- they had taken the concept of finding similar shots, similar ideas in different shows, and really bringing them out (the bus shots, for instance, in What I Like About You are always what people remember about that vid). Since I knew all these shows intimately (and keep in mind, at the time, only a few people were watching Buffy, and I knew only about four people who watched LFN), I was inspired by all the parallel imagery to make this: the shots of their own gravestones, coming into mysterious rooms, etc. And not a lot of people really looked for things like that in vids at the time.
But I think one of the most lingering effects I saw from this vid is far more subtle. When I first showed it, I was asked by more people than I could count why I opened with the three different women, and then went into the long section about Scully. Some people had big issues with that or they didn't get it. In the past, MM vids would have the first character, the second, and so on, each intro'd in turn at their point in the song. People seemed flummoxed by introducing all the characters first, and then starting the individual stories afterwards. I come to vidding solely as a storyteller. My first love and my strongest ability is writing and telling stories, so the artistry, the visual quality and the technology are not my strong suit (duh, you say). In a fictional story, you would set up your main characters at the beginning, introducing lesser characters later. I felt this was imperative for such a long, serious vid. I think over time, that viewpoint won out, because even recently at VVC, I heard someone who'd once criticized that No Way Out intro complaining about a MM vid that it "introduced characters at the end of the vid instead of the beginning." That made me smile. So, people today think that the only thing groundbreaking is tech or using rap or whatever, but this just proves to me that you can break ground in smaller, more subtle ways, and still have an effect on how people view vids.
So, I have a love hate relationship with this old warhorse. I love that I did something different, more by accident than design. I love that it means something to people, and they feel it transcends its clunky VCR origins. And I still love me some Scully and Buffy and Nikita, fiercely. But I do wish I could change it. Some people griped about the too-fast cuts in some spots (hah! too fast!!!! HAH!) and now they are so quaint and lumbering... I would love to Atom Bomb-ize this. That would be a girl-fest wing ding, I tell you what.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 06:48 pm (UTC)So remix yourself. *g* If it's really what you want to do, go for it.
I have to say that I'm one of the people who really loves this vid; but then, you've heard that from me in person, too. When I look at moments that were really pivotal to my development as a vidder, this is probably the second one--the first being Sandy's panel on vidding at Escapade in...1998, I think. It really drove home the idea that a vid could have a complex narrative. I'm so glad you remastered it; I really thing it's an important point in vidding history.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-07 06:28 am (UTC)I am downloading your remaster now and I have tomorrow off to watch it and coo over it. (: I'm sorry I wasn't around to help you out with those stupid bezier curves, but I hope I can give you some help with that next time. Feel free to grab me on AIM next time you see me.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-29 07:22 am (UTC)I'm also really impressed with you doing VCR vidding, I'm still in amazement about that process. I think the history of vidding is really important and I'm glad to have a chance to learn more about it. Thanks for making this again!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-29 07:27 pm (UTC)