December 4th: Vidding Process

[jetpack_monkey]

thirdblindmouse requests: "Tell us about your vidding process. In general, or of one specific vid you've made if you prefer."

I have different kinds of vids that I make, depending on how heavily they lean on one corner of absolutedestiny's Pyramid of Vidding (Song Choice, Edited Footage, Idea). I'll talk about my process in making the handful of vids that have been the perfect synthesis of those.

My process is going to have some overlap with what fan_eunice describes here. She is far more eloquent than I can probably muster at the moment, so I recommend heading over there.

Anyway, this gets much more lengthy than I anticipated, so it's going under a cut.



1. Long before there is a vid, there is a source. This step occurs before the vid is a glimmer in my eye. I watch something. I absorb it into myself. I've often said that there's no movie I've ever watched that didn't increase my understanding of film or give me some memorable moment to hang onto. This goes for great films, mediocre films, and crappy films. I speak of film here because I feel more comfortable talking about my film-based vids. I've made very few TV vids I am wholly satisfied with. In any case, everything I've ever given my full attention (which is fewer and fewer things these days) is part of me somehow.

2. It used to be that I would hear a song randomly and a vid would come, but I'm honestly not a music listener by habit. So I tend to go on music binges where I abuse my Rdio subscription in search of potential vidding music. I listen for songs that are specifically viddable, but keep an open mind on fandoms. I look for songs that invoke a specific kind of motion or emotion, that have a strong structure, and that have that special kind of unspecifically specific poetry in the lyrics (if there are lyrics) (who am I kidding there are always lyrics).

3. If I am very, very lucky, during one of these music binges, I instantly ping on a fandom. Alternately, I will be moaning to a friend that I need a song for "X" and they'll pipe up with one that is just. perfect. Or, as was the case with at least one vid, fandom and song were given to me and I ran the rest of the way. What pings is a combination of factors I can barely describe. During certain parts of the song, does specific footage from the source flit before my eyes? Is this even true on instrumental sections? Am I mentally holding characters by the cheeks and purring, "This? This is your song."

Of course, sometimes it's something incredibly mundane like a weird lyrical association. With my Godfather vid All the Rowboats, for some reason that is completely beyond me, I heard "Rowboats" and thought "Fredo Corleone". Which, you know, not even accurate because it's a motorboat at the end of The Godfather Part II. Anyway. Having that association was nice, but I also really loved the song and listened to it infinitely and eventually it occurred to me that it was really the song of Michael Corleone's rise to power/fall from grace.

Also, sometimes a song will ping me on a great idea, but the source will change. For instance, Martin Scorsese -- my vid to The Lonely Island's Jack Sparrow -- was originally supposed to be about David Cronenberg's move away from horror. However, I couldn't really make the associations work the way I wanted them to. I got as far as Erin Brockovich is probably M. Butterfly. However, at the same time, I was musing on the fact that I'd pre-emptively rejected Hugo as a Martin Scorsese picture because it didn't fit my idea of him as a director. Then when I actually saw the film, I absolutely fell in love with it. Pigeon-holing sucks. So I made that vid. I am so glad I did, because not only did it turn out well, but it allowed me to do David Cronenberg properly later with SexyBack.

4. I listen to the song a few billion times. I'm almost never 100% happy with the song as song, so I tend to seek out covers, remixes, and mash-ups at the same time, although 99.99999% of the time, I end up back where I started. Still, listening to all of those helps me understand lyrics I missed or tune into possible alternate readings.

5. I watch the source again. If it's small (under 3 hours), I go straight through without stopping, all the while making mental notes about images, motion, and key moments. If the source is large, I do my clipping. I prefer to do my clipping in front of the television, with a notebook, pen, and the pause button. My PS3 is good for this because I can leave a persistent time code on the screen at all times for DVDs and Netflix. I tend to work in recurrent tropes in large source vids, so the basic components of the vid often make themselves known here. If you look at my notes for my James Bond vid, you'll see that my notes expand from 15 for the first film to nearly a page per movie, with recurrent notes like "Car Chase", "Gun fight", "Gadgets", "Leap from/on Moving Vehicle", and "Sexy Tiem".

5a. If I don't have the source in a viddable format, I fix that shit.

6. I open Final Cut, start a project! Note that if I am super-excited about this vid and the images are already floating around my head, I may have already done this step. And the next one.

7. I lay down what I have in my head. Typically these are the beginning, end, and major "moments" in the vid. I think of these like a clothesline upon which the rest of the clips will hang. Usually at about this time, a few additional ideas will occur to me and I will lay those down as well.

8. I play what I have. It's usually working for me because I'm a raging egomaniac. I am convinced this will be the greatest vid I have ever made. Unless I'm not. That happens too.

9a. If this vid is feeling like it's going to be largely intuitive -- like Slippery Slope or Wolfsbane -- the structure forms as I'm vidding and I just start throwing clips down. I tend to vid to fill gaps. Obviously at the beginning, there are very few gaps, but they are massive. And daunting.

9b. If this vid feels like it's going to be more complex than I can reasonably just keep stored in my brain's RAM, I'll do some basic outlining. Sometimes this takes the form of chopping up the song on the timeline and then renaming segments to sections. With All the Rowboats, I created a map of the vid in SimpleMind on my iPad while waiting to be called in for jury duty, with a general layout of which clips went where. It was just a guide, not a commandment, and I ended up changing a few things in the final product.

10. Keep vidding! Vid vid vid! If I have an idea for where a clip can go, I do that. If I have a great clip, but nowhere to put it, I replay what I have and see where it fits. If I'm at a loss, I sometimes look for either the smallest or largest gap on the timeline and work on that.

11. Get distracted. Last year during Festivids it was a combination of Mass Effect and other Festivids. The first was less useful for vidding, but the second kept the vidding parts of my brain open for processing information. It also helped to have another project to switch to when I was frustrated.

12. Oh yeah. Frustration. Remember when I said I thought the vid was going to be my masterpiece? I still think that at this point, but the footage I need for that isn't always there. Or I have too many things I need to jam in. This is usually the point where I either do a song cut or refactor my expectations about the vid's layout to accommodate the space I have in the song.

13. Starting when I have a half-full timeline, I do regular exports of the incomplete vid, showing them to my close victims friends to make sure that I'm on the right track. Half of the time it's because I've started to doubt my ability to make this vid. The other half of the time -- although I don't tell them this -- it's because I haven't started doubting my ability to make this vid and I'm concerned that's made me blind to any problems it might actually have. I may be a raging egomaniac, but I am also a neurotic raging egomaniac. Also, watching with other people makes me more critical of the work than I would be otherwise and I usually find a couple things I want to fix.

14. Kill your darlings. Well, my darlings. Inevitably, one of the first sequences I laid down -- one of the sequences that inspired the making of the vid -- just isn't working anymore in tandem with what I have now. It's typically somewhere in the middle of the vid, although sometimes it's the ending. It's very rarely the opening of the vid. The sequence in question is probably perfectly fine on its own, but the needs of the narrative flow of the vid (or the musical flow or the "fuck I found a way to do this that is so much better, booyah I am a badass" flow) take precedence. I can usually salvage some part of the sacrificed sequence, but not always.

15. As the vid nears completion, I start honing in on the gaps and murdering them. The closer the vid is to finished, the more willing I am to put down a clip that just works rather than a clip that sends my brain into an explosion of joy kittens.

16. The last clip! It's usually terrible. At this point, I've run out of the good stuff and I'm just passing time. If you ever see me wince while watching one of my vids, it's probably on the very last clip I laid down in the first draft (if I didn't murder it later).

17. Put the vid aside for a day or two, if I have that kind of time. Maybe send an exported draft to a vid cheerleader for an ego boost.

18. I start running through the vid in Final Cut, just playing it over and over. Every time I hit something that doesn't work or bugs me, I stop and fix it. Then I keep playing. Once I hit the end of the vid, I play it again, fixing anything that comes up. I do this on repeat until I'm able to get through a play with only one or two minor issues.

19. Export! Send to betas! If I am unlucky, I get a ream of timing notes. If I am lucky, I get a few minor notes. If I am super unlucky, I get "Awesome. Good job. No suggestions whatsoever." This makes me nervous. If I am super unbelievably lucky in such a way that I can't actually recognize it at the time, I get a major structural note that changes everything and makes everything much, much better when I finally stop pissing and moaning and actually get around to handling it.

20. At some point during 18 or 19, I also play the vid on the television, because problems just seem to enlarge themselves there.

21. Make any revisions needed from 19 or 20. Very rarely, I don't agree with one of my betas and their cruel note about my precious baby and then they are dead to me. Or, more likely, I ignore the note, but bear in mind that something around that area wasn't working and give that area a more critical eye.

22. Finish vid. I'm not one of those people who thinks vids are never finished, just abandoned. Vid is done when vid is done. I always know when vid is done. It's usually the point where I am so done with it, y'know. Just done.

23. Export vid. Excitedly show friends victims if it's a vid I'm proud of. Nervously show them if it's a vid I'm iffy on.

24. I do one last check for tech issues like stray frames before I upload the vid to where it's going.

25. If the vid is for a con or Festivids, I dearly hope I am working on another vid so I will stop being so goddamn nervous. People will love me if they love my vid, right? So they have to love my vid. Please love my vid.

A note on vids I am proud of versus vids I am iffy on. I usually know about one-third to one-half of the way through the process where a particular vid is going to be in that spectrum. Sometimes this leads me to abandon the vid. Other times I am stubborn and keep pushing through. I lean heavily on Step 13 during the process if it's a vid I'm not totally behind.

Tomorrow is Universal Monsters! Yay!

Comments

[grammarwoman]

Lots of good, thinky squishy here - thanks for listing it all out!

[bradcpu.livejournal.com]

During certain parts of the song, does specific footage from the source flit before my eyes? Is this even true on instrumental sections? Am I mentally holding characters by the cheeks and purring, "This? This is your song.
When you're in new love with a fandom, do you find that you have that reaction to ALL the songs? Cause that's me sometimes, and then I look back and think "what was I thinking?"

I'm almost never 100% happy with the song as song, so I tend to seek out covers, remixes, and mash-ups at the same time, although 99.99999% of the time, I end up back where I started.
I'm doing this much more often lately. I highly recommend it as a way to feel like you're making progress without actually making any progress.

with recurrent notes like "Car Chase", "Gun fight", "Gadgets", "Leap from/on Moving Vehicle", and "Sexy Tiem"
I love seeing people's clip names/notes. Sometimes for me it's just a color or a direction.

Last year during Festivids it was a combination of Mass Effect and other Festivids
Two great things to get distracted by!

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I rarely get too deeply tied in a fandom and when I do, I find I can't find a single blessed song for it.

I can imagine you reading the post here and going "Oh dear GOD, how is that even... this hurts."

Y'know, given that our processes are so different.