Leverage Vid - Two Fingers, My Friends

[eleanorjane]

Finally, this vid is done and I can salvage what remains of my brain. My first-ever vid, in fact, so feedback is much appreciated!

Leverage - Two Fingers, My Friends
Music: “Everything’s Cool” by Pop Will Eat Itself
Pairing: Gen
Footage: Leverage season 1.

Although Leverage is all about the cons and the banter, many of the characters are damaged goods. As Sophie says. “We’re all addicts, Nate - we’re addicted to our pasts.”



Download: zipped AVI file (41.4 MB)
Streaming: here.

Anyone know a Leverage fandom or vidding community where I could/should be sharing this? ;)

(I am so nervous now, I can't even say. Argh!)


Pop Will Eat Itself - Everything's Cool

These eyes see only what they wanna see
These ears hear only what they wanna hear
These minds think only what they wanna think
These lies, these lies

You won't find no answers in this head
What you see is what you get
Watch as all the lights go out
Down and out, out for the count

Take your places, choose your sins
Everyone loses, noone wins
I have seen the future and this is how it begins

[CHORUS]
In chaos and riots, the screech of machines
No right and no wrong and no in between
Fall one by one, the queen to her fool
Dos dedos mis amigos - everything's cool
Everything's...

These arms hold whoever needs to be held
These hands take whatever they wanna take
These words fake whoever needs to be faked
These lies, these lies

Look for clues inside the baby's head
Hear the words yet to be said
Cue the music, fade to black
No such thing as no payback

Take this line, know where it ends
No return, no make amends
Is this the future or this is how it will end?

Comments

[strikesoftly]

Here via the Leverage community (on LJ, incidentally). This was awesome!

[eleanorjane]

Thankyou very much!

[cupiscent]

I have comments! But they're sort of lengthy... I dunno, do you want concrit? Or at least length personal opinion. I feel like I should ask. In any case, it will have to wait because a) I've had quite a bit of beer tonight and b) I have to get dressed and go out gothing. POP WILL EAT ITSELF REPRESENT. But I will definitely send you lengthy stuff tomorrow. If you want. Um.

[eleanorjane]

Absolutely! :)

[cupiscent]

Random stuff to start with:
1) They played "Everything's Cool" at the goth night. PWEI represent indeed. *G*
2) I spent half the first time I watched this going, "Who IS she?" And then I realised it's Insane Jane from Coupling ahahahaha.

Grains of salt with which to take my thoughts:
1) They're just my thoughts. The way I make/like vids isn't necessarily the "right" way.
2) I don't know the show, the characers, the stories, the dynamics, etc. Objective/subjective vid-making is a whole separate philosophical debate, whatever. I'm just saying, when I come back and watch this after having seen the show (and ange is sending me a DVD, I think) it's entirely possible I'll be all, "Forget everything I said! This is brilliant! OMG! BRAVA!"

Actual thoughts: (well FINALLY)
1) The opening's pretty damn awesome, with the marching feet and yay. (Actually, the whole thing is good. I'm getting nitpicky below because I feel that you're vidding at a solid level already, miles better in terms of phrasing and imagery and syncing than some of the things that were hitting the SW vids comm, so I'm starting to get my perfectionist on.)
2) You have some awesome moments of sync. I'm not sure if these are mostly at the beginning or if I just get distracted by other things from spotting them later, but the across-the-desk blonde tumbling and the sideways-glance from Crazy-Jane are beautifully aligned with the music.
2a) The devil's in the details when it comes to sync, though. I'm not sure if it's a crunching error, or if you were a touch too anticipatory in your aligning of clips, but the big explosion that launches the song? Is half a moment ahead of the beat.
3) My biggest point of comment, however, is about pacing. I feel like this is a fast-paced song, but a slow-paced vid. You've mostly placed one clip per four-bar phrase. My personal instinct is to have one per bar. Or, rather, to hit every first beat with a synced moment or clip break. I don't necessarily mean having more clips in there. My favourite trick to hit the beats while keeping the whole phrase in one scene was to cut up the clip and jump around, doing my best to trim it to just the really emotive moments. (I freely admit, however, that my vids always tended towards the frenetic, sometimes unhelpfully so. See grains of salt. *G*)
4) Love your construction elements, with the greyscale (backstory?) shadows to the chorus. What I really loved was the couple beats of pure black before the first one, but you then didn't repeat that before the others. (Especially the blonde-girl's one, because you have that omg scene where she's being a human shield, but then between that and the greyscale section you go into other, less dramatic scenes of her.)

I think that's all I have. I am completely out of practice at thinking about vidding, but I hope maybe something in there was helpful? Make more! in any case. Because yay vids and this was really quite lovely and nothing improves like practice, in my experience.

[thedivinegoat]

I just want you let you know I've bookmarked this, as I'm working on two Leverage vids, and I don't like watching vids for fandoms I'm working on whilst I'm working on them if that makes sense. ;-)

[eleanorjane]

Makes perfect sense :) I look forward to seeing yours!

[melannen]

Oooh, that song just worked so well for Leverage! Especially the way you did it. I loved the way you cut the motion to the music, especially in the instrumental parts, and the way you used black & white to carry through all the characaters, and I am bad at talking about vids, but this was wonderful!

[eleanorjane]

Thankyou so much! I'm glad to hear it worked :)

[zvi]

Did you do something unusual to encode the vid? I've tried to play it with Totem and with VLC, and it just shuts them down. I've played other vidders' divx files, so I'm not sure what the difference is here.

[eleanorjane]

Hrm :( I don't _think_ I did something unusual - I exported from iMovie in .m4v and then reencoded to xvid in ffmpegx, since MPEG Streamcode didn't want to do it for me. But this is my first vid, so I don't really know what's 'normal', as such. I'll try doing a re-encode, though, and perhaps try another format.