In Ing, I was struck right away by the lyric "I had a little fling that we won't be mentioning." My first thought was that this was the SpikeSex, but I quickly realized that that had to come later. No, the little fling was a little fling with being a vengeance demon for a thousand years, which in the time we know Anya is held uncomfortably distant by everyone (but especially Xander). Nobody wants to mention it. Anya, clearly, thinks it's no big deal at all, and talks about it fairly often, but the others are (understandably) freaked out by all the carnage.
Now, if I had just wanted to "tell", I'd have used a clip of Xander telling her to shut up about being a demon, a clip where a viewer very familiar with the context would know that that's what they're talking about. Everyone else would go "buh?" And really, that would be most people, lots and lots of people going "buh?", because very few fans have studied the Anya-Xander storyline with the kind of attention to detail that, say, Spike-Buffy gets. So it would be talking heads and arm-waving and it wouldn't mean anything in particular.
Instead, I used a shot of lots of dead people, people Anyanka had killed, and followed it with a clip of bloody-gloved Anya waving and drinking and smiling, as if to say, "Well, obviously you guys are all bugged by the carnage, but it was just good clean fun to me!"
This is showing, not telling. The viewer and the vidder work together to turn the lyric into a metaphor that matches the clips, and create meaning out of that juxtaposition.
Result: people keep telling me it's their favorite moment in the vid. (:
Re: Aaaand if I'd bothered to read the other comments...
Quick example from my most recent vid:
In Ing, I was struck right away by the lyric "I had a little fling that we won't be mentioning." My first thought was that this was the SpikeSex, but I quickly realized that that had to come later. No, the little fling was a little fling with being a vengeance demon for a thousand years, which in the time we know Anya is held uncomfortably distant by everyone (but especially Xander). Nobody wants to mention it. Anya, clearly, thinks it's no big deal at all, and talks about it fairly often, but the others are (understandably) freaked out by all the carnage.
Now, if I had just wanted to "tell", I'd have used a clip of Xander telling her to shut up about being a demon, a clip where a viewer very familiar with the context would know that that's what they're talking about. Everyone else would go "buh?" And really, that would be most people, lots and lots of people going "buh?", because very few fans have studied the Anya-Xander storyline with the kind of attention to detail that, say, Spike-Buffy gets. So it would be talking heads and arm-waving and it wouldn't mean anything in particular.
Instead, I used a shot of lots of dead people, people Anyanka had killed, and followed it with a clip of bloody-gloved Anya waving and drinking and smiling, as if to say, "Well, obviously you guys are all bugged by the carnage, but it was just good clean fun to me!"
This is showing, not telling. The viewer and the vidder work together to turn the lyric into a metaphor that matches the clips, and create meaning out of that juxtaposition.
Result: people keep telling me it's their favorite moment in the vid. (:
Is this what you meant?