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eleanorjaneSo, I've just finished Festivids, which was an interesting experience. Yuletide - and being more involved in the Yuletide community - meant that I left the majority of the work on my vid until after New Year's. Which was a tactical error, albeit - knowing me - an entirely predictable one.
I was matched to my recipient on the Galaxy Quest fandom, which amuses me, as Galaxy Quest is something of a fannish text itself. The recipient asked for 'Don't Stop' by Fleetwood Mac as the song, but didn't give any further details, prompts, or ideas - and didn't post a Dear Vidder letter, either, at least not that I could find.
So all I really had to go on was the song choice, which, I'll be frank, didn't inspire me, because I'm not a huge Fleetwood Mac fan. But I thought about the lyrics for a bit (which were written when Christine McVie was in the middle of divorcing her husband, fellow Fleetwood Mac member John McVie, and sung by Lindsay Buckingham who was, at the same time, splitting with Stevie Nicks), the gist of which is basically "so the past/the present has sucked/is sucking; don't dwell on that, just look to the future". I figured that really is pretty much perfect for Galaxy Quest; there's a fairly obvious redemptive theme to the movie, where the crew work together for the first time in years, and forge new healthy lives for themselves instead of unhealthily living in the past.
The music was a big obstacle, though, because the Fleetwood Mac song goes for over four minutes (a lot to fill from one movie full of scenes that are irrelevant to the vid), plus Buckingham's vocals didn't feel dynamic enough. After a fair amount of searching, I discovered a number of cover versions: Elton John (bland and tedious), a reggae cover (incongruous and terrible), Darren Hanlon (off-key and weak vocals), and Status Quo. Happily, the Status Quo cover (from a 96 album of cover versions that I now oddly want, if only for their cover of Safety Dance (!)) was shorter, more energetic, and had better vocals. Sold.
So next I had to work out what story I wanted to tell in the vid. The instrumental intro would serve as the introduction to the characters in their glory days, and the first verse would lay out the unhappiness of the characters in present-day (although I had to focus on the three leads, for the sake of clarity - ensemble vids are hard, yo).
The first chorus is when the redemptive theme first appears. The lyrics are "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow / don't stop, it'll soon be here / it'll be better than before / yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" - hardly deep philosophy, but for the source it works surprisingly well. I used this first chorus to show the first major transformation; Jason seeing that everything fictional is actually real, and being genuinely excited and renewed by it. (And also annoyingly smug, but that's Jason Nesmith for you.)
One of the problems I faced was the fact that there were significant breaks (about 8 seconds' worth, each time), similar to the instrumental intro, between chorus and the following verse and, musically, they didn't feel like part of either the chorus or the verse. I couldn't use them to keep telling the story, because tbh I just didn't have that much footage. Eventually I decided to use them for clips of the old Galaxy Quest show, like the instrumental intro, and desaturated them to match, hearkening back to the adventures the crew had together. As more of these 8-second breaks appeared I filled them with clips of action sequences from the 'present-day' timeline, similarly desaturated, to underline the crew's teamwork. I decided to resize them to fit the fake 4:3 ratio of the 'historical documents', where I could, to make it look like the action was part of the series rather than the movie.
The second verse was more explicitly about 'if the past sucks, focus on the future' than the first, so I felt it was time to move the story along, looking at the conflicts on the Thermian's Protector as Jason tries to take charge and everyone wants to leave or argue. The second chorus is used for the second major transformation - the other cast members individually getting invested in the struggle, as their goals start to align with Nesmith's. After the second chorus there's a bigger instrumental, which I used for more action scenes in the desaturated "TV" style.
The third verse is more personal; the singer's trying to help someone in a bad place. I wasn't sure what to do with this verse so I left it, and filled in the third chorus, which is the final set of transformations - the group of individuals becoming a team and working together. This is directly followed by a key change and a fourth chorus; again, I wasn't sure what to do with this so I filled in the last scenes next. The last scenes were the happy conclusion, ending in the new adventures of the TV show, interspersed with callbacks to the original series.
One of the tricky parts of this vid was clip selection. Originally I tried to construct the vid using short clips, but I felt it didn't work for two reasons. One, the music - although upbeat - seemed to be structured such that longer clips matched the beat better, especially in the instrumental sections. And two, the story I was trying to tell just didn't work with short clips. There's so many tangled interpersonal relationships between the crew that I just couldn't convey the nuances with short clips, and a friend who was reviewing it for me pointed out that because the scenes are very 'busy' (and they're not shot with tricky focal lengths to put stuff into the background), short clips make it very hard for the viewer to distinguish what's going on.
So, although it went against the grain, I went with longer clips, and by and large I feel it worked better that way.
At this point, I stopped and thought about what I was trying to do with the vid. I'm not just trying to re-tell the story of the movie in 3 minutes, after all. It's the teamwork element that I'm trying to play up. I'm trying to make the point that individually, they are miserable and self-deluding and unfulfilled; as a team, they're strong and capable and happy. I went back to edit a few sequences early on to support that (adding Alexander Dane at home still in his prosthetics, for instance), and then thought about the rest of the story. It became clear that the third verse should be more action-oriented, focusing on the A-plot resolution and getting the job done (after the personal conflicts of the second verse, and then the individual transformations of the second chorus), and that the fourth chorus should be the team victory, to reinforce the message of the third chorus.
(Also, it felt like a nice homage to an older, simpler [though no less eloquent] era of vidding, which seemed appropriate for the source material.)
Another obstacle was my tendency to literalism - too often, I try to match the song lyrics to what's onscreen, at least metaphorically if not literally. This has made my past vids a bit incoherent, because they've followed the song structure too literally rather than following their own storyline. I had to fight this tendency during the making of this vid - for instance, I had to fight not to show Quellek dying in Alex's arms to the line "I never meant any harm to you". For the most part I think I avoided it, and I think the vid is better for it. I also made sure, once the vid had got into the second half, to underline the message of teamwork by minimising the use of clips with only one of the ensemble onscreen at any given time.
I don't know whether I succeeded with the vid in its current form, although I'm happier with it than I expected to be. Looking back, I can see a few things I'd do differently now. I learnt a lot while making this vid, particularly in terms of storytelling and story construction, and I hope it worked for other people.
I was matched to my recipient on the Galaxy Quest fandom, which amuses me, as Galaxy Quest is something of a fannish text itself. The recipient asked for 'Don't Stop' by Fleetwood Mac as the song, but didn't give any further details, prompts, or ideas - and didn't post a Dear Vidder letter, either, at least not that I could find.
So all I really had to go on was the song choice, which, I'll be frank, didn't inspire me, because I'm not a huge Fleetwood Mac fan. But I thought about the lyrics for a bit (which were written when Christine McVie was in the middle of divorcing her husband, fellow Fleetwood Mac member John McVie, and sung by Lindsay Buckingham who was, at the same time, splitting with Stevie Nicks), the gist of which is basically "so the past/the present has sucked/is sucking; don't dwell on that, just look to the future". I figured that really is pretty much perfect for Galaxy Quest; there's a fairly obvious redemptive theme to the movie, where the crew work together for the first time in years, and forge new healthy lives for themselves instead of unhealthily living in the past.
The music was a big obstacle, though, because the Fleetwood Mac song goes for over four minutes (a lot to fill from one movie full of scenes that are irrelevant to the vid), plus Buckingham's vocals didn't feel dynamic enough. After a fair amount of searching, I discovered a number of cover versions: Elton John (bland and tedious), a reggae cover (incongruous and terrible), Darren Hanlon (off-key and weak vocals), and Status Quo. Happily, the Status Quo cover (from a 96 album of cover versions that I now oddly want, if only for their cover of Safety Dance (!)) was shorter, more energetic, and had better vocals. Sold.
So next I had to work out what story I wanted to tell in the vid. The instrumental intro would serve as the introduction to the characters in their glory days, and the first verse would lay out the unhappiness of the characters in present-day (although I had to focus on the three leads, for the sake of clarity - ensemble vids are hard, yo).
The first chorus is when the redemptive theme first appears. The lyrics are "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow / don't stop, it'll soon be here / it'll be better than before / yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" - hardly deep philosophy, but for the source it works surprisingly well. I used this first chorus to show the first major transformation; Jason seeing that everything fictional is actually real, and being genuinely excited and renewed by it. (And also annoyingly smug, but that's Jason Nesmith for you.)
One of the problems I faced was the fact that there were significant breaks (about 8 seconds' worth, each time), similar to the instrumental intro, between chorus and the following verse and, musically, they didn't feel like part of either the chorus or the verse. I couldn't use them to keep telling the story, because tbh I just didn't have that much footage. Eventually I decided to use them for clips of the old Galaxy Quest show, like the instrumental intro, and desaturated them to match, hearkening back to the adventures the crew had together. As more of these 8-second breaks appeared I filled them with clips of action sequences from the 'present-day' timeline, similarly desaturated, to underline the crew's teamwork. I decided to resize them to fit the fake 4:3 ratio of the 'historical documents', where I could, to make it look like the action was part of the series rather than the movie.
The second verse was more explicitly about 'if the past sucks, focus on the future' than the first, so I felt it was time to move the story along, looking at the conflicts on the Thermian's Protector as Jason tries to take charge and everyone wants to leave or argue. The second chorus is used for the second major transformation - the other cast members individually getting invested in the struggle, as their goals start to align with Nesmith's. After the second chorus there's a bigger instrumental, which I used for more action scenes in the desaturated "TV" style.
The third verse is more personal; the singer's trying to help someone in a bad place. I wasn't sure what to do with this verse so I left it, and filled in the third chorus, which is the final set of transformations - the group of individuals becoming a team and working together. This is directly followed by a key change and a fourth chorus; again, I wasn't sure what to do with this so I filled in the last scenes next. The last scenes were the happy conclusion, ending in the new adventures of the TV show, interspersed with callbacks to the original series.
One of the tricky parts of this vid was clip selection. Originally I tried to construct the vid using short clips, but I felt it didn't work for two reasons. One, the music - although upbeat - seemed to be structured such that longer clips matched the beat better, especially in the instrumental sections. And two, the story I was trying to tell just didn't work with short clips. There's so many tangled interpersonal relationships between the crew that I just couldn't convey the nuances with short clips, and a friend who was reviewing it for me pointed out that because the scenes are very 'busy' (and they're not shot with tricky focal lengths to put stuff into the background), short clips make it very hard for the viewer to distinguish what's going on.
So, although it went against the grain, I went with longer clips, and by and large I feel it worked better that way.
At this point, I stopped and thought about what I was trying to do with the vid. I'm not just trying to re-tell the story of the movie in 3 minutes, after all. It's the teamwork element that I'm trying to play up. I'm trying to make the point that individually, they are miserable and self-deluding and unfulfilled; as a team, they're strong and capable and happy. I went back to edit a few sequences early on to support that (adding Alexander Dane at home still in his prosthetics, for instance), and then thought about the rest of the story. It became clear that the third verse should be more action-oriented, focusing on the A-plot resolution and getting the job done (after the personal conflicts of the second verse, and then the individual transformations of the second chorus), and that the fourth chorus should be the team victory, to reinforce the message of the third chorus.
(Also, it felt like a nice homage to an older, simpler [though no less eloquent] era of vidding, which seemed appropriate for the source material.)
Another obstacle was my tendency to literalism - too often, I try to match the song lyrics to what's onscreen, at least metaphorically if not literally. This has made my past vids a bit incoherent, because they've followed the song structure too literally rather than following their own storyline. I had to fight this tendency during the making of this vid - for instance, I had to fight not to show Quellek dying in Alex's arms to the line "I never meant any harm to you". For the most part I think I avoided it, and I think the vid is better for it. I also made sure, once the vid had got into the second half, to underline the message of teamwork by minimising the use of clips with only one of the ensemble onscreen at any given time.
I don't know whether I succeeded with the vid in its current form, although I'm happier with it than I expected to be. Looking back, I can see a few things I'd do differently now. I learnt a lot while making this vid, particularly in terms of storytelling and story construction, and I hope it worked for other people.