(no subject)

[thuviaptarth]

I am in a terrible mood and discouraged about the vid I'm (not) working on, so let's resurrect this meme:

Pick any section of a vid or a paragraph or any passage less than 500 words from any fanfic I've written and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet of what I was thinking when I made or wrote it, why I wrote it, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the vid or fic, and anything else you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[thuviaptarth]

Pick 15 seconds from each.

[kore]

OOH. OK how about the very opening of each vid? I always love hearing how people choose where and how to begin things.

No Skin (The Inside)

[thuviaptarth]

Ugh! Accidentally closed the browser and lost a long comment. Trying again.

My #1 takeaway from the opening of "No Skin" is that it's a bad idea to make your credits 12 seconds long. Especially when the vid is only 1:44.

My goal for the opening was: Spooky feel, feel of danger, Rebecca as victim, Rebecca as voyeur, voyeurism, being seen, being the seer. The voyeurism of the abductor as danger; the inner eye of Rebecca reconstructing the crime.

This became the opening of the vid fairly late in the process. Originally, I was going to open with tinted and decaying clips of Rebecca, Web, and Paul (Is his name Paul? I can't even remember anymore). I wanted to figure out how to incorporate effects to emphasize meaning. Sadly, elynross pointed out that that set up a vid as equally about Rebecca, Web, and Paul, and it's not. I needed an intro that focused on Rebecca.

(At least I got to do lots of effects work for the credits, splicing Rebecca in and making the footage look like TV footage.)
Those clips were over silence; the audio came later, and at first I was planning to put the text credits over the profiling billboard, with Rebecca's face replacing the face of the profiler before her. But it made her seem too much of a victim. She probably looks like too much of a victim still, but at least with contextual knowledge you know that's not the whole truth: She identifies with the victim, she's seeing what the victim sees, she's reconstructing the crime.

The audio for that bit could come late because I did massive reconstruction work on the song -- not just cutting stuff, but rearranging things so much that the structure of the song is completely different from the original. I wince a the one part where the volume's messed up, but I do still feel proud of the rest of it.

Etheric Messages (Fringe)

[thuviaptarth]

Taking the first 19 seconds as the intro -- you don't even get a clear picture of Olivia's face yet, huh. Contributes to the feeling of unease. What I wanted: A sense of strangeness, mystery, beauty, underlying threat. A sense of entering a strange world. Visual eerieness a contrast to ethereal music. (A lot of people have commented that the music is eerie, which is not what I thought when I first listened to it; I just thought the sweetness of the music would make the spookiness of the visuals more intense.) Floating, with Olivia. Alchemy (fire, water, air, unsuccessful attempts to find earth), because science in Fringe is alchemy: pre-scientific, really, pseudo-science, lead into gold, transmutations. Then preparations for Olivia to undergo an experiment, a journey. I wanted to start with Olivia floating in the tank because that's the first step, the first submersion into the other world. I knew it might make people think the entire vid was a hallucination or dream, but, well, I liked the opening enough that I didn't care. I would use a different clip for the end credits now, though.

Typeface selected to match the music, not the source, and I'm still fine with that.

Re: Etheric Messages (Fringe)

[kore]

I am sorry it took me so long to reply to this, when I got TWO! (I am so greedy.) Stupid sinus infection snot blech.

A sense of strangeness, mystery, beauty, underlying
threat. A sense of entering a strange world. Visual eerieness a contrast
to ethereal music

I felt that way about both vids -- they had this really dreamy quality, not dreamy like misty-woo but the kind of surreal logic in a dream where everything makes sense but it's very enigmatic. -- Hell, the Inside vid absolutely hooked me into watching the series right there, and I think it was your vid and Boom Boom Pow (and a lot of recs) that got me into Fringe. -- Mesmerizing, that's the word I want. Very psychological, interior, which I'm used to seeing in words, but I should think that would be really hard to pull of with external film stuff! //knows nothing about film/vidding, can you tell

Have you seen Continuum? It has Rachel Nichols in it too, she's the HEROINE, and she does a beautiful job. It's on SyFy (my God, I still hate that spelling, after so many years). But we're streaming it on Netflix. It's filmed in Vancouver and has a really pleasantly surprising amount of PoC characters -- and the dialogue's great. The time travel plot seems a little shaky, but hell, I'm mainly watching it for Rachel Nichols being awesome anyway.

Re: Etheric Messages (Fringe)

[thuviaptarth]

Thanks! That was what I wanted. I tend to write a tight third-person (very focused on immersing you in the POV character) and that carried over to vids. Sometimes too much, because I can get so focused on showing what the character sees that I don't show enough shots of the actual character, which is not something that works in visual media. (I know there's that one film noir which worked around a change in actor by showing you strictly what the character would see and never showing the actor's face, but there's a reason nobody followed up the experiment by doing that for more than a few moments in a row.)

I tried Continuum, but it didn't work for me.

Re: Etheric Messages (Fringe)

[kore]

Character studies are AWESOME. Yes.


.....for all its flaws (omg the last ep with the giant guy who was, what, eating girls dumb enough to Internet?) I really wish I had The Inside on DVD. Nichols was so great.

Re: Etheric Messages (Fringe)

[thuviaptarth]

Me too. And really, I would love to have decent versions of all of the episodes -- some of them were so degraded they were a struggle to work with, and every torrent I tried was just the same versions seeded by different people.