Eunice

The good, my stomach seems to be calming down a bit. Also, my DW squee had faded a bit, but then there were Those New Pictures which have had me high as a kite all morning OMGSQUEE. I think, the big problem with long hiatus is that there is too much time for people who work on a show to blather on with their Opinions and Thoughts, and for us as fans to engage too much in analyzing and debating over it and offering far too much weight to What They Say, on account of there's no new canon to do it with.

The reality is that producers/actors/writers say dumb stuff all the time, much of it contradictory not to just each other but themselves. Authorial intent is crap to begin with, it's bigger crap on something like a tv show where, by the time everyone who's got something to do with it is done contributing...from the biggest muckety muck producer on high down to the lighting guy, there are so many authors that not a single one can lay claim to the truth of How It Is. We hope that all of that works together to produce something coherent...but there's never going to be One Correct Reading. And by the time we're done with it and our own fannish appropriation through fic and meta and vids and discussion it's something else all together again.

It's way too easy for me to get caught up in what they might be producing based on what they say when this opinion or that is just one more in a big sea of them (I do this all the time, which is why I try to avoid interviews and commentary when my curiosity doesn't get the better of me, or when David Tennant might do or say something adorable). What They Say is something I'm free to get angry at, to disagree with, to roll my eyes at, to squee in agreement, or to just plain dismiss in exactly the same way I do with commentary by my fellow fans. It may be an interesting (or infuriating) start point for a discussion, but it's not any more valid than how I see it. And what makes it to the screen is where the action really starts. Which leads to more than enough to be either angry and annoyed or joyfully squeeful at all on it's own. The rest of it..it's interesting and important for different reasons. But when it comes down to actually watching and enjoying (or not enjoying) a show for me, the text is the thing. And I have no problem making the text my personal bitch if that's what's called for (somewhere around here I have a half finished essay on why I still 'ship Ten/Martha...someday I may even get around to finishing it, heh). So, anyway, I can still be annoyed or dissapointed in or wary of What They Say and hold on to my squee. Because it's mine. It wasn't handed down on high to me. It was always mine. Power to the Squee...or something.

In more frustrating news, I started a new vid a few days ago and it is utter crap. I'm trying to remember that time I trashed my entire project file on that vid that I turned out quite pleased with much later, but had to dig out of the trash and entirely recut from scratch, so that I don't do that again...but I am so close. I'm in that phase where I'm terrified I've forgotten how to vid, and that anything I do is just going to be a boring retread of something someone else has done, or will do better, especially since I still seem to be incapable of vidding anything that's not Doctor Who, and really does the world need yet another Angsty Ten Vid? I might go ahead and start up the project files for the Seven and Ace vid that's been bubbling in my brain since I started watching them, and work on both vids at the same time. But there, I have concerns about the source quality and how am I going to work around that, since DVD releases for most of Seven aren't available and what is better source is going to make the other source look worse. Argh. Maybe I'll take up knitting instead.

I remain woefully behind on my TV, which makes me behind on LJ because of the number of cut-tags I can't click on without getting spoiled. I should really make time to sit down and catch up. My seventh Doctor torrent continues to poke along, taunting me with the possibility of more Ace someday. I have a couple of vid projects brewing, one being a possible collaboration with Myrtle, but none of them have moved passed the idea stage quite yet. In other words, I am boring as hell lately.

But, I have a question for the vid people because I'm thinking about the way I mark up songs when I'm vidding. Okay, so you all know one of my biggest vidding hurdles was defeating the silent oboe in favor of the actual beat, and one of the things I use to help with that is the marking up of songs before I start. With math. And I'm wondering if anyone does something similar, or how y'all make your plans of attack for the music you use. Once I'd had enough beta sessions involving color coded charts, and people sitting with me and literally pointing things out on waveforms enough that I started to get it, is when I started doing this...and the number of times my betas were sending drafts back with LOLOBOE scrawled across them in red ink reduced dramatically.

Goes like this, I pull the music on the timeline and turn on the waveform. After listening to it several times, and watching the playhead move across the waveform, I find somewhere in the song where the backbeat is the strongest and clearest and lay down markers on the peaks where the 2 and 4 are. Then I take the number of frames between them, and this is my starting point. Half that is the approximate length of a single beat. Twice that is the approximate length of a measure. Write it down. Assuming there are no tempo changes (and there's more math involved with dealing with those, division and multiplication, argh), I now know about how long a beat and a measure are, and I can go back and find all the 1's, even when the guitars or whatever are going nuts and masking them on the waveform with confusing masses of bunched up peaks. Lay markers on all the 1's. Listen and watch through while counting the markers to make sure I haven't screwed it up completely, go back and start again if I have. Once that's settled and I have my magic numbers and markers, what I've found is that I can then concentrate on adjusting by a few frames when I lay clips to ease the flow between dark and light clips, and on the overall structure of the song, and on playing with the melody or lyrics, and deciding how I want to use the beats, rather than focusing all my time on trying to figure out where they are. Since I tend to jump around a *lot* on the timeline, especially when I'm first starting, this is incredibly useful because I can jump between points in the song without losing the thread. There's still a lot of fiddling that goes on, it's just that I've noticed when I do this everything ends up in approximately the right place, which makes refining much easier. Nowhere near perfect, but easier.

So, am I completely insane or do any of you do similar thingies?

I'm holding off on starting the deadline for the next vid drabble, first 'cause I have too much other stuff I actually need to get done to carve out obsessive vidding time today, and second because that was freaking *insane* and the thought of doing it three days in a row without break is kind of beyond me. But, it was a really good excercise and very much helped put a crack in my current state of blockedness, so if not tomorrow, then after the weekend I will set the 24 hour start point for sweetestdrains request.

snagged from fandom_me

What the heck, I'm bored...also I have adapted this meme for vids on account of I can't write fic for shit. This may go very quickly since I only have 6 solo vids released right now...so feel free include the collab vids with Myrtle, or about characters I've talked about having plans to vid (though obviously d and e wouldn't apply in that case).

1. Comment to this post with the name of a character that I have vid. Or geeked out about.
2. I will comment telling you the following:
a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to vid (or want to vid) him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits.
c. One of his/her worst traits.
d. How easy/difficult I find it to vid the character.
e. The sequence/clips where I feel that I truly captured the character*.
f. My plans (if any) to vid the character in the near future.

Not only can I not make this vid not suck, I can't even get it to make sense. It's just a godawful mess of suck. And y'know, it's frustrating as hell that it takes me forever just to get to a decent, solid vid that nearly anyone who was halfway competent could make in a fraction of the time. I joke about vidding like a glacier, but it's honestly embarrassing that it takes me this long, that I really do have to spend that much time to get anywhere near something I would even hand over to a beta. I feel like I should be wearing a dunce cap in a corner.

I have officially dropped into the yearly post VVC funk. One of the pitfalls of being surrounded by, and focusing on, amazing vids and wildly talented vidders is the inevitable crash when you start comparing yourself to the field. This is entirely unproductive and pointless, of course, but it's a hard thing to kick out of sometimes. Learning from your mistakes and picking up ideas and techniques is a good thing...doing it without tacking on "because I suck" is kinda tricky.

One of the hardest things about learning anything is that the more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know. I remember the first vid I ever made (which, what the hell was I thinking, Another One Bites the Dust...to Buffy. With a random barn door transition. *facepalm*) and it was all, "Oh my god, you can put CLIPS...to MUSIC...who KNEW?" And I sort of miss that clueless and giddy glee. I also really don't, because it's actually much more satsifying and fun to me this way. I think I'd get bored with vidding very, very quickly if there wasn't something new to learn, some goal to push for. And it's thrilling to watch other people hit new levels, and do cool new things, and to watch with awe at an insanely well crafted vid that hits right there.

Remembering it's not a race is a bit harder. I can only make the vids I can make, at the level I am, and that's okay. No vid I ever make is going to be good enough for me, and that's okay too, because it's what keeps me wanting to learn, and what leads me to that insanely addictive rush of understanding something I didn't understand before. That's really what I'm here for. I get that, and on good days I even feel it. And then there are those days you watch a vid that is so amazing your first reaction is the urge to chuck your computer out the window and give up forever. Or you see a newbie sail right past you in skill level on their first or second vid and wonder just how dumb you are.

I'd like to find a balance...using that desire to be better to push myself into growing and learning as a vidder without letting pointless jealousy or comparisons stop me in my tracks. I want to be able to look at one of my vids and think "That's the best vid I could make, at the time I made it." and be proud of that and what that means. Because that is cool no matter how far there is left to go. I'll let you know if I figure out how to do that.

Since I'm likely not going to vid myself today, now is the perfect opportunity to actually do full write ups of the VVC discs (instead of just watching them endlessly and never taking the time to do the actual writing part) like I say I'll do every year and then never do. I already have some scribbled notes and it's just a matter of sitting down with my DVD player and getting it done. I even justified buying the Very Big TV by telling myself I'd use it in this goal. Mostly I"m writing this post so that I really, really, really can't get out of it because now I've said I'll do it in public.

*wanders off to couch with notebook*

I'm going to do a full review of my VVC discs once I get my big screen TV to watch them on, but I wanted to do a specific rec of Women's Work by sisabet and Lum because it is so powerful to me on so many levels and I'm going to try, and probably fail to be articulate here in explaining why. It's disturbing, yeah. Very. And it's angry. I love it for that. I love that it expresses so clearly that feeling of helpless feminist rage I have every time I stop and really look around at how far we are as women from being fully recognized as people in so many ways. How deeply ingrained it is and how so much if it is what I can't do anything about except try to survive it.

I should say that I like Supernatural. Quite a lot actually, even though I generally don't post much fannishly about it. And I'll absolutely still be watching come the new season and talking about all the things I like about it with other people. Thing is, this vid stopped (if it ever was) being about Supernatural for me very shortly in to it and became a distillation simply of what's wrong with the images of violence against women, especially the sexualized images of violence against women that we're all just soaking in constantly. Because it sells. And there's nowhere you can go to avoid it. Why Supernatural? I don't dare try to speak for the vidders, but I'll say if I was going to make an angry feminist commentary on women in media...right now I'd use Doctor Who. Why? Because I love it. And I'm gonna say it again. There's nowhere to go. Nowhere. That thing we love, whatever it is will inevitably be problematic when it comes to women because our society is. We're incredibly good at repurposing text in fandom. It's what we do. I love that about us. We have the power to take the best bits and weave them into something new that really is just for us. And I love the shows we love for giving us more than enough material to do that, sometimes in just incredibly awesome ways. But sometimes you have to step back and go "Damn, that's fucked up." This vid does exactly that. Damn. That's fucked up. And we live there.

You know how I said my goal for this year is to improve my cutting? Right, so I have stuff I'm rolling around in my head trying to get a handle on and since up until recently I had a sad habit of wandering off and cutting to a silent oboe and driving my poor betas to beat their heads against the wall and create color coded charts and big neon signs with pointing arrows helpfully labelled WTF, THE BACKBEAT IS RIGHT THERE YOU FREAK....well, I'm not sure I'm anywhere near getting this right. So I open my thoughts to you smart people to help me get a handle on them.

Right, so assuming a typical pop/rock song with a standard 4/4 thing going on you've got your ones and your threes and then your twos and your fours, with the twos and fours forming the backbeat. What I'm trying to get at is how using that affects choices of cuts and motion in order to do stuff more deliberately instead of flailing around until things look right. I'm watching tons of vids and going over old beta chats and reaching tentative conclusions. Feel free to mock me in comments and explain how very wrong I am with an LOLSILENTOBOE.

Cutting on the ones and threes gives a softer transition between clips...drawing them together as more of one piece maybe allowing them to be read as one continuous statement except maybe the ones also act as a sort of pause, an indrawing of breath before speaking...and maybe that's to do with phrasing? Cutting on the twos and fours gives a harder feel and is all about impact and emphasis drawing specific attention to the juxtaposition of this clip and that one either for contrast or as a sort of exclamation point. And then maybe your motion follows that, internal motion that echoes a two or a four is going to draw more attention to itself than motion on a one or a three. So if you cut on the one and throw strong motion down on the two etc. you're making your argument *within* the clip, but the other way around you're making it in the way the clips are placed in relation to each other? With, of course, tons of overlap taking into account that we're working within the larger context of the entire song and all that phrasing and structure stuff that makes my head hurt.

Am I anywhere near on the right track here? I am an admitted moron about music, so I'll not be even the slightest bit insulted if you point out all the ways in which I am wrong. And you'll notice I haven't even mentioned syncopation because it makes my brain go 'splodey, but feel free to attempt to explain or discuss where that fits in if you are far cooler than me.

Why is it not next week yet? I've started to move from excited about Vividcon to impatient. There are people I haven't seen in a whole year and they will be HERE, but they are not here now. Considering I still have to clean my apartment (oh god do I ever have to clean my apartment) and buy an air mattress for pre/post con crashing this is a good thing objectively but I don't care because there's a whole week to wait. I suck at waiting.

Also, right now at this very moment there are a slew of new vids by so many amazing vidders that are finished and just waiting to be seen. I want to see them! I don't get to see them until next weekend. Knowing this turns me into a grabby handed whiny two year old.

So, talk to me about vids please. What do you love best about vids and/or vidding? If you are a vidder, what do you want to work on most this year as you make new vids? Me, I want to reach a point where I'm comfortable with my cutting, and directly related to that, get a much better understanding of musical structure so that how I cut uses the music and becomes integrated with it in ways that I don't think I'm approaching yet. Now you.