Vidding Strategy
Jun. 24th, 2019 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretVidding strategy is not a thing I usually think about in those terms, but here we are. I entered a youtube vidding contest and the first round was scored and "The Engineer" finished tied for 13th out of 19 entries.
I didn't expect to score particularly highly, even though I am proud of the vid. But I thought I'd do better than 13th, it is kind of bugging me.
The prompt was to use the vid to explain "Why We Vid". Mine was one of the only vids that didn't use any explanatory text to do so. My aesthetic preference was to make a vid that used the combination of music, lyrics, and cutting in a way so telegraphically clear that I didn't need to supplement it with any text. I think I achieved that goal quite well, so well even that I could vid in Welsh and people who don't speak Welsh know exactly what my vid is saying about joyful creativity. The vid is necessarily simple in some ways to achieve those aesthetic goals. I only use source from about five scenes in one movie, I make very limited color adjustment to my source, I use very limited transitions. It is not intended to be a flashy vid, it's intended to be a pretty vid. And it's intended to be an clear and effective vid. I'm happy with the vid, I think it is successful on the terms I made it.
The winners made beautiful vids. The way they use color, the way they use transitions, the way they integrate different kinds of imagery and language together. But they are vids that I personally find a lot less clear; without the support of text, I would find it difficult to understand their relation to the prompt, and even with the text there are parts I find unclear. But they are unquestionably beautiful vidlets, in the way of the Vidding as Poetry conceptlola defined in a memorable VVC vidshow/panel two years ago.
But there's no technique in the winners that I haven't use at some point, to serve some aesthetic and narrative purpose in my vidding. So there's no reason I couldn't make a vid in that style, if I were willing to sacrifice some of the things that are important in my vidding, this one time. So I am contemplating vidding strategy for round 2.
So what does that strategy look like? Maybe the first step is shifting from Kdenlive to Da Vinci Resolve, for access to better coloring tools, and integration with Fusion, which I've increasingly been using anyway for the last five vids or so as a supplement to Kdenlive for motion graphics, fancier compositing effects, and sometimes even simpler effects when I find the Kdenlive controls too limited. Except it turns out installing Da Vinci Resolve on Linux is a pain and I haven't totally sorted it out yet. I've figured out how to get the splash screen to pop up, at least!
And step two is deciding on what things I want to try to copy from the winners. Do I want to use text to emphasize lyrics (even though I usually don't understand the connections the vidder is making between image and lyric)? Do I want to do weird things with color (even though I have even less understanding how making random shots black and white or skew crazily to red helps make the vid better) Are there things I can do in my music selection to make my vid seem more like the winning style of vids (you know, not a Welsh folk song)?
I didn't expect to score particularly highly, even though I am proud of the vid. But I thought I'd do better than 13th, it is kind of bugging me.
The prompt was to use the vid to explain "Why We Vid". Mine was one of the only vids that didn't use any explanatory text to do so. My aesthetic preference was to make a vid that used the combination of music, lyrics, and cutting in a way so telegraphically clear that I didn't need to supplement it with any text. I think I achieved that goal quite well, so well even that I could vid in Welsh and people who don't speak Welsh know exactly what my vid is saying about joyful creativity. The vid is necessarily simple in some ways to achieve those aesthetic goals. I only use source from about five scenes in one movie, I make very limited color adjustment to my source, I use very limited transitions. It is not intended to be a flashy vid, it's intended to be a pretty vid. And it's intended to be an clear and effective vid. I'm happy with the vid, I think it is successful on the terms I made it.
The winners made beautiful vids. The way they use color, the way they use transitions, the way they integrate different kinds of imagery and language together. But they are vids that I personally find a lot less clear; without the support of text, I would find it difficult to understand their relation to the prompt, and even with the text there are parts I find unclear. But they are unquestionably beautiful vidlets, in the way of the Vidding as Poetry concept
lola defined in a memorable VVC vidshow/panel two years ago.But there's no technique in the winners that I haven't use at some point, to serve some aesthetic and narrative purpose in my vidding. So there's no reason I couldn't make a vid in that style, if I were willing to sacrifice some of the things that are important in my vidding, this one time. So I am contemplating vidding strategy for round 2.
So what does that strategy look like? Maybe the first step is shifting from Kdenlive to Da Vinci Resolve, for access to better coloring tools, and integration with Fusion, which I've increasingly been using anyway for the last five vids or so as a supplement to Kdenlive for motion graphics, fancier compositing effects, and sometimes even simpler effects when I find the Kdenlive controls too limited. Except it turns out installing Da Vinci Resolve on Linux is a pain and I haven't totally sorted it out yet. I've figured out how to get the splash screen to pop up, at least!
And step two is deciding on what things I want to try to copy from the winners. Do I want to use text to emphasize lyrics (even though I usually don't understand the connections the vidder is making between image and lyric)? Do I want to do weird things with color (even though I have even less understanding how making random shots black and white or skew crazily to red helps make the vid better) Are there things I can do in my music selection to make my vid seem more like the winning style of vids (you know, not a Welsh folk song)?
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-24 04:29 pm (UTC)I find using both those really distracting, even worse than using the original audio, which seems to be a trend now, and often can be hugely distracting especially when it's dialogue. There are some vids I love that use it, but there's even more vids I can't finish because the audio input is too jarring for me between the music and the original audio.
I've watched some Chinese fanvids for Guardian and it's got so much stuff on the screen (like text, pop-ups, and emojis) I have to watch like 4 or 5 times to really process everything. When text shows up, I have to stop looking at the visual to read it, and isn't the visual the point? Anything that paints the medium really has to blend in for me to not feel that it's jarring and distracting. Which can be done really well, but excellence is the minority. It's just a case of, where are the eyeballs supposed to be pointing, what is the visual focus meant to be. And adding anything onto the screen can really disrupt that. (Subtitles are fine for me, but those are automatic reading and are always in the same place so they dont interupt anything and don't disrupt the flow of visual information)
But take with a grain of salt since I don't finish more than half the fanvids I start watching.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-24 05:38 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5G41TgifY0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqNEv_Ndv2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjQSO9wEvaQ
FWIW, I don't think they are particularly visually overwhelming, and I think they point to ways to use eyecatching imagery in thoughtful and beautiful ways.
What I do think, though, is that they seem less *fannish* than the vids that normally move around on DW. They are so multifannishly decontextualized, particularly the first vid, that they don't make any coherent fannish statement. They seem to me to have more in common with avant-garde filmmaking than with vidding as a fannish practice. In the vidding tradition I've been working in for the last six or so years, the whole point of using media footage as 'found' source was to create art that interacted deeply with the original media, generally in a fannish mode.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-24 05:57 pm (UTC)But I made it through the third one! It's a multifandom vid for which I don't know most of the fandoms, but I can roll with that. I assume someone who knows the fandom understands the throughline and understands how all these random short clips all go together.
Regarding what you say about fannishness, I agree. With something as short as a vid, I need that touchstone of knowing what I'm looking at or, if a storytelling vid manages to contain its world entirely, that's also fine (and treat it as a very short piece of media like a music video like genghis khan can be). But vids use such shorthand language that if I don't know the source, I don't know what language I'm trying to read in, whereas if I know the source, if you show me a short clip of someone handing someone a letter, I know what's in the letter and why it fits that moment in the vid. Even when people vid to non-visual sources, I've been able to follow along because it's clearly using footage from elsewhere to demonstrate things in a fandom I already know, so if they use a clip of a random woman with her hair blowing in the wind, I know who that's meant to be.
Whereas this, I'm reminded of that remark someone made once about certain Oscar categories, it's not the best cinematography/costumes/etc, it's the most. Those first two vids make me think that someone said "okay which two vids look like they were edited a lot, those are clearly the best, since I can see the work that went into it".
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-24 06:52 pm (UTC)My read is that the throughline in that third vid is purely emotional, in an interesting dual way that I quite like. They're callbacks to the emotional content of the original scenes, as part of an argument that the reason they vid in general is to re-live and intensify the original emotional experience of watching the media... and at the same time I think the selection of clips is supposed to represent the vidder's own emotions, the emotional contours of the journey that is vidding.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 02:59 am (UTC)This!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 03:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 03:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-25 06:30 pm (UTC)If you are viewing this as an excise to challenge yourself to vid in a way that is not intuitively yours I would suggest to check out the vids the judges make to get an idea what they are likely to find appealing as well as the winners of the first round.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-27 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-27 06:32 pm (UTC)