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Show And Tell - Just A Game I Play, When I Wanna Say
A problem with reading wank because you are bored (if you are me) is then beginning a post that you absolutely *need* to do and then finding every single statement you make as being very provocative and possibly wank-inducing and then you start trying to tone it down a bit and then you start thinking about possible comments to your post and you get angry in advance about this fictional comments that will probably never exist.
This is also my problem with watching daytime talk shows. I get geared toward the wank and then I see it in everything. Dude - this chick in my office? Trying to start a total flameware. UPS guy? He hates Buffy. I can tell. It's the way he wears his shorts - damned Andrew-luva.
::is paranoid::
And I am trying to formulate a post about Showing and Not Telling in vidding because we should be talking about that. This idea comes up all the time in fic discussions and it equally applies to vidding (and not so coincidentally with what I am currently working on *and* a vid I am betaing... and another vid I want to beta when it is ready, and another vid I want to have made so I can beta and... wow - this applies to A LOT). So we should be discussing this.
And I want to discuss this and talk about it but I read too much wank and it has dissolved my brain and now I am all freaked out about starting a vidding talk and I AM NEVER freaked out about starting a vidding talk.
I freak out over strawberries. I freak out over everything - but not vidding conversations. Well, not in the bad way.
But I don't because - I have no reason.
So, let's talk about showing and not telling in a vid.
What am I talking about for starters? To tell you the truth, I don't even really know. Sometimes I just talk to hear myself think. Or type. Or something.
But there is something here - so bear with me. Let me use an example:
Right now I am at a point in a vid where I want to get a particular message about Chloe across (betas please feel free to skip this next part). I want to show that her fascination with Clark is more than a sexual reaction - it is because she so deeply needs to *know* things and this need prompts her to actually push him continuously (and causes him to not want to be around her) and in effect, betray him. The facts that she likes Clark and he has a secret are not mutually exclusive - one of the things that *attracts* her to Clark is his secret (pre-Pariah).
So I know this - this is one of my starting points in the vid - but how do I *show* this? IMO, the show has addressed this many times -- there have been arguments with Clark and Chloe each season (except for the current season) about her not respecting his boundaries and pushing him continually to tell her whatever it is he isn't telling her (and what he isn't telling anyone, but this isn't about Clark).
And here I have the dreaded "Talking Heads" - yes I can show a series of scenes where Chloe and Clark discuss just this issue. And that is what it will be - talking heads with some emphatic arm movements. Now if the viewer knows the source - they will get what I intend.
But it is still just a series of head shots. Head shots of very pretty people, but this is boring. So now it is up to me to be creative. To try to figure out exactly *how* I am gonna show Driven!Chloe and connect that to Clark and then connect that to her own feelings of loneliness and alienation. Because somehow if she can figure out him or have him - one way or the other, it might make everything better. And then she learns otherwise (but that is later). And this is the part of vidding where you get all of these people moaning and groaning and posting: Vidding is hard.
Because it is.
And there is a way to do this in a vid - to avoid just the talking heads and to use the lyrics to guide us to pick just the right action-y moments of a character and then translate that into a mood and then use this combined with the motion of the camera to create a feeling and THEN to use the mood and the feeling to cut between two disparate images that are actually related and show the PING moment where the audience might possibly get what you are saying.
If this makes any sense at all. I apologize for the disjointed quality of this post. I am slowly working my way back and you know - as long as nothing dissolves into wank we should all just pat ourselves on the back.
Because I wanted to talk examples and now I am facing a mind that is a complete blank. So, um. Yeah - examples. Talk about em in comments.
ETA: The call for examples was more of a call to discuss other vids and how they accomplish Showing and Not Telling. I was just using the Chloe vid thing as an example and also - my brain, so fried. I apologize for the confusion.
I will try to address this topic one day and be much more prepared.
This is also my problem with watching daytime talk shows. I get geared toward the wank and then I see it in everything. Dude - this chick in my office? Trying to start a total flameware. UPS guy? He hates Buffy. I can tell. It's the way he wears his shorts - damned Andrew-luva.
::is paranoid::
And I am trying to formulate a post about Showing and Not Telling in vidding because we should be talking about that. This idea comes up all the time in fic discussions and it equally applies to vidding (and not so coincidentally with what I am currently working on *and* a vid I am betaing... and another vid I want to beta when it is ready, and another vid I want to have made so I can beta and... wow - this applies to A LOT). So we should be discussing this.
And I want to discuss this and talk about it but I read too much wank and it has dissolved my brain and now I am all freaked out about starting a vidding talk and I AM NEVER freaked out about starting a vidding talk.
I freak out over strawberries. I freak out over everything - but not vidding conversations. Well, not in the bad way.
But I don't because - I have no reason.
So, let's talk about showing and not telling in a vid.
What am I talking about for starters? To tell you the truth, I don't even really know. Sometimes I just talk to hear myself think. Or type. Or something.
But there is something here - so bear with me. Let me use an example:
Right now I am at a point in a vid where I want to get a particular message about Chloe across (betas please feel free to skip this next part). I want to show that her fascination with Clark is more than a sexual reaction - it is because she so deeply needs to *know* things and this need prompts her to actually push him continuously (and causes him to not want to be around her) and in effect, betray him. The facts that she likes Clark and he has a secret are not mutually exclusive - one of the things that *attracts* her to Clark is his secret (pre-Pariah).
So I know this - this is one of my starting points in the vid - but how do I *show* this? IMO, the show has addressed this many times -- there have been arguments with Clark and Chloe each season (except for the current season) about her not respecting his boundaries and pushing him continually to tell her whatever it is he isn't telling her (and what he isn't telling anyone, but this isn't about Clark).
And here I have the dreaded "Talking Heads" - yes I can show a series of scenes where Chloe and Clark discuss just this issue. And that is what it will be - talking heads with some emphatic arm movements. Now if the viewer knows the source - they will get what I intend.
But it is still just a series of head shots. Head shots of very pretty people, but this is boring. So now it is up to me to be creative. To try to figure out exactly *how* I am gonna show Driven!Chloe and connect that to Clark and then connect that to her own feelings of loneliness and alienation. Because somehow if she can figure out him or have him - one way or the other, it might make everything better. And then she learns otherwise (but that is later). And this is the part of vidding where you get all of these people moaning and groaning and posting: Vidding is hard.
Because it is.
And there is a way to do this in a vid - to avoid just the talking heads and to use the lyrics to guide us to pick just the right action-y moments of a character and then translate that into a mood and then use this combined with the motion of the camera to create a feeling and THEN to use the mood and the feeling to cut between two disparate images that are actually related and show the PING moment where the audience might possibly get what you are saying.
If this makes any sense at all. I apologize for the disjointed quality of this post. I am slowly working my way back and you know - as long as nothing dissolves into wank we should all just pat ourselves on the back.
Because I wanted to talk examples and now I am facing a mind that is a complete blank. So, um. Yeah - examples. Talk about em in comments.
ETA: The call for examples was more of a call to discuss other vids and how they accomplish Showing and Not Telling. I was just using the Chloe vid thing as an example and also - my brain, so fried. I apologize for the confusion.
I will try to address this topic one day and be much more prepared.
Aaaand if I'd bothered to read the other comments...
Re: Aaaand if I'd bothered to read the other comments...
See, what I want to show is much more complicated than just Chloe investigating Clark -- and normally I wouldn't use a vid in progress as an example, because that sucks. But my brain is fried and I just can't think of anything else that is *not* a vid in progress.
At this moment - I can't even remember my own finished vids. So I want to discuss how we do this - Show and not tell - and use vids as an example and yet I am at work and (the afore-mentioned brain fry) and so I post anyway and get a lot of people thinking about a vid I'm making (which is very nice of them) where I wanted to talk about vids that have already done this.
All in all, it has restored my faith in LJ. Cause vidders are just nice and pleasant people.
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?
Re: Aaaand if I'd bothered to read the other comments...
Re: Aaaand if I'd bothered to read the other comments...