Process Notes
Oct. 1st, 2017 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThis is Part three of my vid notes on my Jewish dancing vid Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing. These are the boring notes about my process.
I conceived of the idea for Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing in early October. I mean, I've long wanted to do a big multifandom Jews vid, and this was just the latest of a long list of songs I considered, but it's the one that I actually committed to making. I think I had a burst of vid-making energy and confidence coming out of Vividcon 2016, a new sense that the ambitious was achievable. I also think I went to two weddings in a month that played this song, and it gelled in my head as saying the right things to the right beat. At about that time,ghost_lingering asked me to look through my Jewish music collection for vid song suggestions for another project, and I think the idea rumbled to the front while I was flipping through song ideas for her.
I made a list of about 50 fandoms I thought might have Jewish dancing scenes I could use to collect, using my memory, and various online listicles of "The Top 50 Jewish Movie Moments" and so on. To organize it, I usedjetpack_monkey's multifandom vid spreadsheet, at least at first. I ripped the relevant DVDs that I already owned and borrowed some of my top target DVDs from the library and originally I thought I was going to do a long collection phase before I started vidding, so I could get a sense of what the source was going to look like. I'd gather source, I'd clip, and then when I had a lot of dancing, I'd vid. This was boring, though. Making this vid was such a time commitment that I decided pretty quickly that to get me through it I needed to frontload the fun part as much as possible. That actually became a mantra, and I think it was wise. By the time I got to the miserable and tedious parts of vidding I was full-on committed and willing to put in the time. At the start, I did minimal organization, minimal technical fiddling, and maximal throwing things on the timeline and playing around. So I made a draft of the first 30 seconds or so using vobs of the 7 fandoms I'd gathered in mid-October. I felt instant glee that yes, this could work. I passed it to sanguinity and got a very similar instant glee response.
Aspect ratios between the TV stuff in 4:3 or 16:9 and the movie stuff in anamorphic widescreen was not accommodated for in this first draft. Some clips were interlaced, some were telecined, There where ghost frames all over the place, and jerky motion and jagged artifacts caused by the video quality. I didn't care about any of that. In terms of the technical aspects of vidding, my vid looked like shit. In terms of pure fannish id, it was a well needed shot of happiness from the very first draft. All the joy of the finished product is there in the first draft. Every time I got a new DVD in, I ripped it and then added its dance scenes to the timeline and rewatched again. Two seconds or six seconds a week, the vid grew. Watching even my ugliest drafts of this vid was such a joy. This slow sense of accumulating depth as more and more fandoms got added was such a joy.
I signed up for Netflix DVD on the one DVD plan. This meant I was getting in roughly one DVD a week to add to the vid. I also got some DVDs from the library system- these would typically come in batches of about four DVDs every week or two that I'd rip all at once and then review over the course of a week. So by the by, I steadily added about three fandoms to the vid each week for six months, with peak weeks being weeks where I added six fandoms at most. I don't think I could have done the vid if sources had been coming in faster, I'd have felt overwhelmed. I totally understand now why most of these massive multifandom vids are co-vidded, it would have made things go much faster if you could split the source evaluation stuff into multiple parts and divide the labor and the frustration. Nothing is more frustrating than checking through twenty episodes of some show and not finding any Jews dancing (Grace and Leo have three weddings in one mega-sweeps-week episode of Will and Grace and we don't see Grace dancing at all.).
I had a full timeline, via this slow process, by the last week in December. But it was very much not a finished vid. Of my targeted 50 fandoms, there were about 35 in the vid. Much of the timeline was taken up with stuff from Fiddler on the Roof, probably a third of the timeline was Fiddler. Another quarter was The Chosen. I knew most of that Fiddler and Chosen material was going to get pared back, but again in terms of frontloading the fun, I wanted to have a full timeline as quickly as possible. So that I could watch it and see the joy, so that I could get an image of the shape of the whole vid, and so I could show it off to people and have them see what I was doing. [This is whensanguinity started playing the guessing game of Fiddler or Chosen? Especially in the scenes of blackhatted dancing, she initially had trouble telling which ones were from Fiddler and which from The Chosen, but trained herself over several rewatches to recognize the presence or lack of electric lighting, certain background details, and other clues about whether the dancing was from Fiddler or The Chosen. I have the best betas.] Fiddler had so much dancing material in it that it let me see the overall shape of the vid very nicely. I could use a Fiddler clip and see the kind of clip from another fandom that would have to replace it.
Having the full timeline let me see what was missing and where the vid didn't celebrate the diversity of Judaism I wanted to, and I altered my priority list of things to add, deprioritizing a few things I'm fannish about but which overlapped too much with things I already had. The final vid ended up with two Seth Rogen films and three Barbra Streisand films, and I don't begrudge them that, because Barbra's the best, and because both of them have made careers out of refusing to deny their Jewishness for anything (Rogen starred in a Christmas movie and still played a Jew!),. But I could have easily had five Barbras and four Seths, and that would have been overmuch. And more broadly I took survey of the kinds of Jewish identities I was and wasn't highlighting yet. I particularly had a goal of increasing the representation of queer Jews in the vid, and Jews of color. It turns out that most such films are incredibly depressing, so that was an interesting adventure when trying to make a dance vid. The initial 30 second draft had only two queer Jews- Susan Ivanova and Willow Rosenberg, both of whom have female lovers die over the course of their series. I watched a whole bunch of queer Jews die stupid, futile deaths designed to make me feel sad. It did make me feel sad, but it also made me feel weary. It didn't make it in, because the only dancing is underneath the final credits, but I watched a movie called "Oy Vey, My Son is Gay." Yes, that is a thing that exists. It was terrible, as you'd expect given the title, but the queer Jew didn't die, and I think it was the first time in the whole process that happened. Representing Jews of color was harder. I managed to find a few to include, Cristina Yang and Lester Patel and maybe one or two others, but there simply isn't much out there, and what there is doesn't dance much on film.
Early January:
By late January I had hit 50 fandoms. And it was clear that I was not done, that I had room for more fandoms. In the process of tracking down the 50 sources, I'd gotten lines on some more things to check out, in a cascading process. So with 50 fandoms, I tentatively predicted I could fit 60 fandoms in the vid. And then I hit 60 and predicted I could maybe fit 70. And then I hit 75... I kept finding new things I wanted to add, by following up on other things a Jewish director had made, by following up on other things a Jewish actor had made, by skimming the DVD section of more and more libraries in my county system, by going on Wikpedia crawls, by talking to friends. And I kept getting better at the choreography, at figuring out how to match movement in one clip to movement in another, and use shorter clips to fit more movement in without it seeming jerky. So there kept being places I'd look at and think I have room to squeeze in another fandom here, and the more fandoms I stuck in, the better my eye got at spotting those little places.
I just rewatched one of my November drafts and it's striking a)how many clips from those early drafts stayed in the same place in the final version and b)how many of those clips have been dramatically shortened to now contain three or four other fandoms in the same time stretch. Cutting faster has always been one of my week points as a vidder, I've struggled to make faster cuts legible. I don't struggle with that anywhere near as much anymore- the new vids I've been working on this summer feature much bolder, more aggressive cutting, technique I've become comfortable with because of this project.
Mid March:
In mid-March, with about 80 fandoms in the vid, I decided it was time to eat my vegetables, since the CVV deadline was in less than two months. I took a little over a week (mostly two weekends, really) to re-encode all of my vid clips. I cropped everything to a consistent 16:9 aspect ratio, making decisions about what part of the frame to include, and converted to an editing format that helped me get rid of ghost frames and do speed adjustments in clips easier. It was mostly a pretty brainless process, and I'd gotten practice at it when making my West Wing vid, since West Wing switches from 4:3 to 16:9 halfway through the show and a vidder needs to decide which aspect ratio to work with. But there are decisions to be made. About 60% of anamorphic or 4:3 clips can just be evenly cropped from each side because the action is centered, but the rest you need to make compositional choices about what to crop to make things fit 16:9 nicely. A few clips just got rejected in this phase as unworkable in 16:9.
The process was tedious and annoying but straightforward. I moved to this two step vidding process a couple years ago and it feels counterintuitive, like I'm creating double work for myself, but it seems to work better. Clipping as a process unconnected to my final identification of where useable clips will end up on the timeline rarely works for me. I end up clipping a bunch of stuff I'll never use, have trouble figuring out which clips are which and what I want to use. By roughing out the vid using low quality source, I save time when I do clip and keep my workflow way more organized. For very generous definition of 'organized'.
Early April:
From this point on, I kept going, adding more fandoms as I acquired them. I hit 94 in Mid-April and basically said "This vid is done." And I was truly right, I could have submitted it, it was a great vid. But the number 94 nagged at me. I was so close to 100! And then they announced an extension to the submission date for CVV and I said okay, I'm going for 100. Then I blinked and I had 104 fandoms. (It was kind of a slow blink. I think I hit 97 and then I identified ten more possibles and put them on Netflix/library hold and seven came in within time for me to add them. I distinctly remember a conversation withghost_lingering where I said "I'm just shy of 100, just going to add a couple more fandoms to finish at 100, and she said "There's no way you're going to just stop at 100." She was right.)
The day before Club Vivid vids were due, I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of Slivovitz. I'm... not sure it's fair to say I dislike Slivovitz. Most of the time I dislike Slivovitz, but then I get into moods where it feels like the right thing to drink. It is the drink of the old country. This was one of those nights. I poured myself a shot, uploaded the vid to the Vividcon site, and then downed the shot. I felt lightheaded and relieved.
Timeline:
-10/1 First conceive of vid idea
-10/15 Started collecting sources
-11/29 First export, just first 30 seconds, 7 fandoms, no deinterlacing or cropping aspect ratio mismatches. Expected to use about 50 fandoms
-12/28 First full timeline render. ~35 fandoms
-1/21 Up to 58 fandoms, expecting to use about 5 more and then run out of space
-1/28 Up to 61 fandoms, thought was up to maximum
-2/26 up to 74 fandoms
-3/14 up to 78 fandoms, discover another 10-15 possibles
-3/23 begin remaster for finished clips, finally fix all the aspect ratio mismatches
-4/1 remaster finished, up to 85 fandoms
-4/16 up to 94 fandoms, happy with draft but gnawed by the sense of how close to 100 I am
-4/23 up to 97 fandoms
-4/27 up to 99 fandoms
-5/7 up to 104 fandoms
-5/11 SUBMITTED HOLY HELL 7 MONTHS OF WORK
I conceived of the idea for Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing in early October. I mean, I've long wanted to do a big multifandom Jews vid, and this was just the latest of a long list of songs I considered, but it's the one that I actually committed to making. I think I had a burst of vid-making energy and confidence coming out of Vividcon 2016, a new sense that the ambitious was achievable. I also think I went to two weddings in a month that played this song, and it gelled in my head as saying the right things to the right beat. At about that time,
ghost_lingering asked me to look through my Jewish music collection for vid song suggestions for another project, and I think the idea rumbled to the front while I was flipping through song ideas for her. I made a list of about 50 fandoms I thought might have Jewish dancing scenes I could use to collect, using my memory, and various online listicles of "The Top 50 Jewish Movie Moments" and so on. To organize it, I used
jetpack_monkey's multifandom vid spreadsheet, at least at first. I ripped the relevant DVDs that I already owned and borrowed some of my top target DVDs from the library and originally I thought I was going to do a long collection phase before I started vidding, so I could get a sense of what the source was going to look like. I'd gather source, I'd clip, and then when I had a lot of dancing, I'd vid. This was boring, though. Making this vid was such a time commitment that I decided pretty quickly that to get me through it I needed to frontload the fun part as much as possible. That actually became a mantra, and I think it was wise. By the time I got to the miserable and tedious parts of vidding I was full-on committed and willing to put in the time. At the start, I did minimal organization, minimal technical fiddling, and maximal throwing things on the timeline and playing around. So I made a draft of the first 30 seconds or so using vobs of the 7 fandoms I'd gathered in mid-October. I felt instant glee that yes, this could work. I passed it to sanguinity and got a very similar instant glee response.
Aspect ratios between the TV stuff in 4:3 or 16:9 and the movie stuff in anamorphic widescreen was not accommodated for in this first draft. Some clips were interlaced, some were telecined, There where ghost frames all over the place, and jerky motion and jagged artifacts caused by the video quality. I didn't care about any of that. In terms of the technical aspects of vidding, my vid looked like shit. In terms of pure fannish id, it was a well needed shot of happiness from the very first draft. All the joy of the finished product is there in the first draft. Every time I got a new DVD in, I ripped it and then added its dance scenes to the timeline and rewatched again. Two seconds or six seconds a week, the vid grew. Watching even my ugliest drafts of this vid was such a joy. This slow sense of accumulating depth as more and more fandoms got added was such a joy.
I signed up for Netflix DVD on the one DVD plan. This meant I was getting in roughly one DVD a week to add to the vid. I also got some DVDs from the library system- these would typically come in batches of about four DVDs every week or two that I'd rip all at once and then review over the course of a week. So by the by, I steadily added about three fandoms to the vid each week for six months, with peak weeks being weeks where I added six fandoms at most. I don't think I could have done the vid if sources had been coming in faster, I'd have felt overwhelmed. I totally understand now why most of these massive multifandom vids are co-vidded, it would have made things go much faster if you could split the source evaluation stuff into multiple parts and divide the labor and the frustration. Nothing is more frustrating than checking through twenty episodes of some show and not finding any Jews dancing (Grace and Leo have three weddings in one mega-sweeps-week episode of Will and Grace and we don't see Grace dancing at all.).
I had a full timeline, via this slow process, by the last week in December. But it was very much not a finished vid. Of my targeted 50 fandoms, there were about 35 in the vid. Much of the timeline was taken up with stuff from Fiddler on the Roof, probably a third of the timeline was Fiddler. Another quarter was The Chosen. I knew most of that Fiddler and Chosen material was going to get pared back, but again in terms of frontloading the fun, I wanted to have a full timeline as quickly as possible. So that I could watch it and see the joy, so that I could get an image of the shape of the whole vid, and so I could show it off to people and have them see what I was doing. [This is when
sanguinity started playing the guessing game of Fiddler or Chosen? Especially in the scenes of blackhatted dancing, she initially had trouble telling which ones were from Fiddler and which from The Chosen, but trained herself over several rewatches to recognize the presence or lack of electric lighting, certain background details, and other clues about whether the dancing was from Fiddler or The Chosen. I have the best betas.] Fiddler had so much dancing material in it that it let me see the overall shape of the vid very nicely. I could use a Fiddler clip and see the kind of clip from another fandom that would have to replace it. Having the full timeline let me see what was missing and where the vid didn't celebrate the diversity of Judaism I wanted to, and I altered my priority list of things to add, deprioritizing a few things I'm fannish about but which overlapped too much with things I already had. The final vid ended up with two Seth Rogen films and three Barbra Streisand films, and I don't begrudge them that, because Barbra's the best, and because both of them have made careers out of refusing to deny their Jewishness for anything (Rogen starred in a Christmas movie and still played a Jew!),. But I could have easily had five Barbras and four Seths, and that would have been overmuch. And more broadly I took survey of the kinds of Jewish identities I was and wasn't highlighting yet. I particularly had a goal of increasing the representation of queer Jews in the vid, and Jews of color. It turns out that most such films are incredibly depressing, so that was an interesting adventure when trying to make a dance vid. The initial 30 second draft had only two queer Jews- Susan Ivanova and Willow Rosenberg, both of whom have female lovers die over the course of their series. I watched a whole bunch of queer Jews die stupid, futile deaths designed to make me feel sad. It did make me feel sad, but it also made me feel weary. It didn't make it in, because the only dancing is underneath the final credits, but I watched a movie called "Oy Vey, My Son is Gay." Yes, that is a thing that exists. It was terrible, as you'd expect given the title, but the queer Jew didn't die, and I think it was the first time in the whole process that happened. Representing Jews of color was harder. I managed to find a few to include, Cristina Yang and Lester Patel and maybe one or two others, but there simply isn't much out there, and what there is doesn't dance much on film.
Early January:
By late January I had hit 50 fandoms. And it was clear that I was not done, that I had room for more fandoms. In the process of tracking down the 50 sources, I'd gotten lines on some more things to check out, in a cascading process. So with 50 fandoms, I tentatively predicted I could fit 60 fandoms in the vid. And then I hit 60 and predicted I could maybe fit 70. And then I hit 75... I kept finding new things I wanted to add, by following up on other things a Jewish director had made, by following up on other things a Jewish actor had made, by skimming the DVD section of more and more libraries in my county system, by going on Wikpedia crawls, by talking to friends. And I kept getting better at the choreography, at figuring out how to match movement in one clip to movement in another, and use shorter clips to fit more movement in without it seeming jerky. So there kept being places I'd look at and think I have room to squeeze in another fandom here, and the more fandoms I stuck in, the better my eye got at spotting those little places.
I just rewatched one of my November drafts and it's striking a)how many clips from those early drafts stayed in the same place in the final version and b)how many of those clips have been dramatically shortened to now contain three or four other fandoms in the same time stretch. Cutting faster has always been one of my week points as a vidder, I've struggled to make faster cuts legible. I don't struggle with that anywhere near as much anymore- the new vids I've been working on this summer feature much bolder, more aggressive cutting, technique I've become comfortable with because of this project.
Mid March:
In mid-March, with about 80 fandoms in the vid, I decided it was time to eat my vegetables, since the CVV deadline was in less than two months. I took a little over a week (mostly two weekends, really) to re-encode all of my vid clips. I cropped everything to a consistent 16:9 aspect ratio, making decisions about what part of the frame to include, and converted to an editing format that helped me get rid of ghost frames and do speed adjustments in clips easier. It was mostly a pretty brainless process, and I'd gotten practice at it when making my West Wing vid, since West Wing switches from 4:3 to 16:9 halfway through the show and a vidder needs to decide which aspect ratio to work with. But there are decisions to be made. About 60% of anamorphic or 4:3 clips can just be evenly cropped from each side because the action is centered, but the rest you need to make compositional choices about what to crop to make things fit 16:9 nicely. A few clips just got rejected in this phase as unworkable in 16:9.
The process was tedious and annoying but straightforward. I moved to this two step vidding process a couple years ago and it feels counterintuitive, like I'm creating double work for myself, but it seems to work better. Clipping as a process unconnected to my final identification of where useable clips will end up on the timeline rarely works for me. I end up clipping a bunch of stuff I'll never use, have trouble figuring out which clips are which and what I want to use. By roughing out the vid using low quality source, I save time when I do clip and keep my workflow way more organized. For very generous definition of 'organized'.
Early April:
From this point on, I kept going, adding more fandoms as I acquired them. I hit 94 in Mid-April and basically said "This vid is done." And I was truly right, I could have submitted it, it was a great vid. But the number 94 nagged at me. I was so close to 100! And then they announced an extension to the submission date for CVV and I said okay, I'm going for 100. Then I blinked and I had 104 fandoms. (It was kind of a slow blink. I think I hit 97 and then I identified ten more possibles and put them on Netflix/library hold and seven came in within time for me to add them. I distinctly remember a conversation with
ghost_lingering where I said "I'm just shy of 100, just going to add a couple more fandoms to finish at 100, and she said "There's no way you're going to just stop at 100." She was right.)The day before Club Vivid vids were due, I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of Slivovitz. I'm... not sure it's fair to say I dislike Slivovitz. Most of the time I dislike Slivovitz, but then I get into moods where it feels like the right thing to drink. It is the drink of the old country. This was one of those nights. I poured myself a shot, uploaded the vid to the Vividcon site, and then downed the shot. I felt lightheaded and relieved.
Timeline:
-10/1 First conceive of vid idea
-10/15 Started collecting sources
-11/29 First export, just first 30 seconds, 7 fandoms, no deinterlacing or cropping aspect ratio mismatches. Expected to use about 50 fandoms
-12/28 First full timeline render. ~35 fandoms
-1/21 Up to 58 fandoms, expecting to use about 5 more and then run out of space
-1/28 Up to 61 fandoms, thought was up to maximum
-2/26 up to 74 fandoms
-3/14 up to 78 fandoms, discover another 10-15 possibles
-3/23 begin remaster for finished clips, finally fix all the aspect ratio mismatches
-4/1 remaster finished, up to 85 fandoms
-4/16 up to 94 fandoms, happy with draft but gnawed by the sense of how close to 100 I am
-4/23 up to 97 fandoms
-4/27 up to 99 fandoms
-5/7 up to 104 fandoms
-5/11 SUBMITTED HOLY HELL 7 MONTHS OF WORK
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 01:42 am (UTC)Wow. Wow. I just... wow. :-)
Unpopular opinion time: I actually quite like slivovitz, under the right circumstances. It was what my family always had on hand to drink during Pesach when whiskey was no longer kosher, and although I didn't drink it when I was a kid, there's something about the fact that it was what my grandparents drank at Pesach that made me want to try it when I was old enough, and I quite like plum brandy of all kinds, even when it's not Pesach.
In other news, this vid rocks my socks.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 02:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 02:54 am (UTC):: I just rewatched one of my November drafts and it's striking a)how many clips from those early drafts stayed in the same place in the final version and b)how many of those clips have been dramatically shortened to now contain three or four other fandoms in the same time stretch. ::
Hee. I had exactly the same experience. Edit to edit, there was much more infilling than moving things around.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-03 09:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-03 09:39 pm (UTC):: I don't know if I'm ever going to want to do it again, but I'm glad I did it once. ::
I'm, um, brainstorming another one. :-/
I keep saying to myself, "There's not that much source out there! It'll be fine! Fine!" But I suspect that there's more source than I imagine (isn't there usually?), and even if there really isn't all that much source, you know I'm going to keep scratching scraping clawing, looking for every last scrap of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-03 11:28 pm (UTC)I will happily enable this in any way possible. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-04 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 09:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's too bad, I have more than a few clips of him just sitting here, including the bar mitzvah ones and the end credits of season 3, cropped for the dancing, and a couple other odds and ends. Well, next time you do a huge undertaking, I will be here!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-02 10:13 pm (UTC)