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thuviaptarth) wrote2021-02-03 01:51 pm
Thousand Eyes, Song Choice, and Pacing
I'm interested in how you pick your vid songs and moods in general, because Thousand Eyes was such a fascinating, and I think brave, choice, because it took such skill and confidence to navigate the pacing. It's one of those vids I love more every time I watch it. I want to know everything about how you made it.
First, sorry for the delay!
Second, thank you so much!
Third: wow, this is even longer than I expected.
This is hard to talk about because most of the decision doesn't take place consciously for me.
I've come to realize that, even though it's usually the lyrics that crystallize the realization for me, that make this song snap into focus as the right vid song, this realization only happens after I've already determined that the sound of the music is right; that the sound fits the mood that I associate with the source, or that I want to evoke in the vid. When I am deliberately looking for a song, I'll put together a playlist of songs or albums with a certain kind of sound and then listen for the right lyrics; sometimes I'll search for songs by keyword, but that's not as successful. But for most of my vids, I didn't deliberately seek out a song/topic; the topic associated itself with the song as I was listening to music as part of the normal course of my day.
With "Thousand Eyes", what made me think "This is a Mei Changsu vid" was the instant association of a line with an image: the line was "It feels like thousand eyes" and the image was the Lin family memorial tablets of the Lin family overlaid with the image of the Chiyan army. Part of the association was the memory of something Hu Ge said in an interview: that Mei Changsu isn't just Lin Shu; he's Lin Shu plus the spirits of the 70,000 Chiyan dead.
(It's pretty unusual for me to have that clear and specific a visual image that early. Most of the time I associate a character or a set of scenes with the lyric and then discover the specific images on the timeline.)
But the line only hit me because the music already sounded like Nirvana in Fire to me: the deceptive quietness, the epic scope, the whirlwind action. The idea of MCS as the storm came after the idea of the beloved dead as the thousand eyes, but the feel of it was implicit in the feel of the music all along.
In a presentation this year, absolutedestiny suggested an app or website that let you overlay source/trailer footage on YouTube with the audio of a separate YouTube music video, to get an idea if the song would work. This fascinates me, because it seems like a great idea, but … I almost never wonder if a song will work. I know when I listen it that either it is right or it is not. ("Right" subjectively, of course--other people have made vids I love to songs that I personally could not have vidded to that source.)
For vidding I also like songs with a lot of internal contrast and variation. About 40% of my vids have been made to songs that, instead of following the usual ballad structure, have a second half or long outro that is dramatically different from the first half. This isn't so much a deliberate choice as … I just really like songs that do that in general, and some of them turn out to be vid songs. But the advantage for a vid is that it makes it easier to maintain viewer interest over the course of the song because the style of the music--and therefore the style of the visuals--changes so much.
(I had to rewatch the vid to talk about this and was delighted to discover that YouTube has fixed the bug that was messing up the audiovisual sync, and I no longer need to cringe when people are linked to that version.)
So … pacing. I'd say it wasn't a brave choice, because I was never worried about the slowness? I had been thinking for a while about cutting more slowly, giving people more time to absorb expressions or feel reactions. I think the standard pace of cuts has accelerated over the time that I've been vidding, irrespective of the pace of songs, and I know I personally have a weakness for crowding in too much information into too short a time, even when the vid would be better served with more time to breathe. And, as with sound, the key to pacing is variation: even very fast songs have slower bits and even very slow songs have faster bits; I tend to drift from vids as much when they're cut too fast for the music as when they're cut too slow.
For "Thousand Eyes" in particular: I wanted to show off the beauty of the cinematography; I wanted the viewer to slow down and look around and like it. But I was also concerned about needing to convey a lot of information to people who I assumed would be unfamiliar with both the source and its visual and cultural conventions, because I did want it to be a recruiter vid. I needed to be sure people would recognize the Emperor as a kind of king or authority figure, even if his throne isn't visually demarcated the way a European throne would be, and even if they didn't know the hat with a bead veil was the equivalent of a crown; I needed people to recognize that the memorial tablets were commemorating the dead. The deliberate pace gave me time to linger on setup shots and/or intercut more symbols that are familiar to a Western audience (kneeling, gravestones).
The music also does a lot to keep the viewer's attention, even in the slower first half. While it's obviously quieter than the second half, the percussion has always felt suspenseful to me, maybe ominous, in an understated way.
I actually never got the pacing for 2:17-3:20 where I wanted it to be; in the final version it's still too slow. The pacing had to be faster than the first half and slower than the climactic bit, and I never quite nailed it. I often reach a point in long vidding days where my sense of pacing gets really messed up and I can't tell what's too fast or too slow, but my time/pacing sense gets reset the next day, after a break. For this vid it felt like I was stuck in that zone for two solid weeks.
That section was by far the hardest for me in terms of both pacing and content decisions; I kept reworking it and reworking and finally gave in and posted what I had, because none of the changes were making me any happier than the previous versions. It is the part that is the most different in the download than the version I showed at VVC--the storytelling is better, but the pacing is worse, I think. The version at VVC also had an additional measure cut, which I probably shouldn't have added back in, but see above re: my besetting weakness of always wanting to stuff more into a vid. In retrospect, I think I should have framed that entire section with Liyang's walk; cut the major confrontations faster; and probably leaned a little more away from the plot and a little more into the character interactions, particularly the slashiness. I'd originally intended to have more MCS/JY slashiness, because I thought that would probably be the most effective at recruiting people, but later on I felt I needed more time spent on plot (and MCS' plotting!) and on making sure the audience could tell the unfamiliar characters apart.
Despite this, people have singled out the pacing of this for praise more than for any other vid I've made, even in the longer version. I assume this is because the pacing of first half and climax-to-end do work well, the latter in a particularly showy way.
I'd love to hear about how other vidders think about song choice and/or pacing, if they feel like posting.
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I don't think it's so much that different shows support different pacing, although that may be true, as that different songs do. Especially for shows with more than, say, 16 hours of footage, there's bound to be a lot of different types of scenes and a lot of things you can do. The NIF vid I saw most often when I was looking for NIF vids, for example, is Mayday, which makes it look like nonstop action! And
Completely agree on how beautiful NIF is and how the acting makes you attend to every detail! I have seen very few other shows on its level.
Also, I have watched your vid a few times and never found a place to comment on it so here's some thoughts just about the vid! The way I see it, I really love how you combine the fact that MCS is the storm that has arrived at Jinling but also he has been carrying the weight and wounds of riding this storm himself for 13+ years. I also love the shots of the faces of the people who love him realizing it's him and how he lets go of the sleeve, letting go of himself as this person they love because he has to concentrate on other things.
Thank you! It took me a while to figure out how to handle the opening "Undo this storm" section. At first I thought I should try to convey what the storm was, but there aren't actually a lot of scenes showing the chaos and (sound and pacing) the ones that exist are completely wrong for the music. Then I realized that, since it is in many ways a show about aftermath, I could show MCS feeling the weight of the tragedy rather than experiencing the events. All of the clips are ones where he looks pensive, of course, but also contextually they occur in the aftermath of him remembering or dreaming about the death of his father and the Chiyan Army.
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