Vidding is HARD and Other Natterings (and I think this is the first time I have ever used that word)

[sisabet]

So, interesting stuff resulted from my poll. You can still vote in it if you want but geez - once I post this it will be 3 posts back and who even knows if I will remember it exists tomorrow.

I am not known for my attention span.

But it was fun checking in on it yesterday and watching the numbers move. I was not expecting "Two Words" to win actually - but it got out front early on and was soon the odds on favorite. That's good to know. I'm also less likely to tinker with its encode so I'll be posting it soon. Not first - sorry - first vid I repost will be SOS with 1 vote! ONE! MUAHAHAHAHAHA! But that vote came with a request from sdwolfpup to also rec the vid somewhere and the thing that you have to know about me is that I am a big ole whore. I am.

Also? I think that I should open my brand new website with my Lord King Bad Vids. I was gonna put title cards on them last night but I was really tired and not all that capable of operating title cards last night and renenet made me go to bed. And Cappy is visiting this weekend so who knows when I'll get around to it. But I need to do that soon.

And I need to finish that due South vid cause I cannot start another project with it on my hard drive.

I just realized that this post is going to be about that part of the process - my least favorite part actually - Finishing the vid.

I love the pre-vidding stage. I *live* in the pre-vidding stage - listening to the song, feeling the movement and connecting it to either a story or a character or an emotional arc or something and in my head it is perfect. And I can vid ANYTHING I want to vid in my head. In my head I have vids for fanfic. I have vids for things that never happened. If I am listening to a song? I am vidding it in my head.

In many many ways - before a clip is ever laid and something unrealized becomes an actuality - that is my favorite part. This is why my To-Vid list gets longer and longer and I keep listening and looking for new ideas. It is a way of reveling in a song and a concept and there is no small measure of the thrill of the hunt in there as well. The ole "I Love This Song, Now What the Hell Is It About?" and all.

Finishing a vid means it is over. It means this is all you can do - and sometimes that is really hard to admit. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try and how much reassurance you get - you never get to the moment where you feel right with the vid. Sometimes you do - and that feeling - feeling like, wow, this is it! I did it! This is what it is supposed to be! Well, that is an incredible feeling. So you want to feel that all the time - but when you don't know what the issue is - only that there is an issue, how do you fix it?

How do you make the vid into what it is supposed to be when you aren't even sure what that is? And I know what this means. I do. It means I have a severe flaw in my concept and I need to sit my Usually-Relying-On-My-Subconscious-Self down and make her think about what and why she is doing. And she is a whiny little bitch who hates to talk and likes to point and go "Oh! Shiny!" or in this particular case "Bear!" and then I feel like I should just throttle her but that isn't right because she can't help that she has a communication delay. It isn't her fault that I hate to actually think and I have infected her with that.

A lot of times - she hangs out in the previd stage and kind of runs around ala Vanna White with the source in my head and she will connect this and that and this and she is just as cute as a button doing that. And if she is really firing on all cylinders - all I have to do is sit down at the computer and basically do anything but think.

But then you get to the end and sometimes her little A into B into C has taken a turn into M and how do you make that work? Or? She totally has y = mx + b, where m is the slope of the line and b is the y-intercept, except she has NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS. She doesn't think linearly and I can but I don't like to do it because it is hard.

So what happens is I get frustrated and it gets compounded because vidding is where I go to relieve my frustrations and now it just makes it all worse. I am stuck here and I can't start another project (JOY! I LOVE STARTING PROJECTS) because I have to finish this and it all spirals down into an abusive cycle of me being very very mean to my Usually-Relying-On-My-Subconscious-Self and faulting them for behaviors that I have previously rewarded.

So - while vidding for myself, my own personal gratification as a method of artistic release - while this is why I vid, I think my motivation for actually finishing a vid is much more complicated. I think the impetus is still realizing some sort of artistic self satisfaction but the process is just too fraught for that to be it. I mean - if I was just doing this for fun, I'd never finish a vid, y'know (and no one is allowed to point at the pile of unfinished projects on my harddrive. I have issues finishing things - we know this)? And if I was just doing it for artistic satisfaction, I'd not worry about comments or reception or posting it. I think that it is all wrapped up and intertwined and possibly looks like Scully's tattoo only cubed. And multidimensional.

And Vidding is HARD and I can't do it when I am cranky and tired.

Actually - this probably speaks of the entirely freeing nature of the Lord King Bad Vid. You have both the knowledge that heavy thinking is not only not required, but actively discouraged and that *someone* out there will love your LKBV as you do.

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

All I can say is that vidding is way too HARD for me, and I have near-infinite admiration for anyone who can do it at all, really.

[sdwolfpup.livejournal.com]

*holds sword over her head*

By the power of Greyskull, I have the power!

(So I went to yahoo to see what follows "by the power of Greyskull" because "I have the power" doesn't sound right and I found out that there is a He-Man.org (http://www.he-man.org/), proving once again how awesome the Internet is.

I love the pre-vidding stage. I *live* in the pre-vidding stage

Man, me too. My To Do list is much, much longer than I will ever actually be able to complete. Or want to complete; some vids only work in my head.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

You realize that you didn't have to search that, right? All you had to do is say "By the power of Greyskull" to me in chat and I would totally go "I HAVE THE POWER! OMG!" cause my brother watched that every afternoon. To this day when a show does a really quick scene change? I sometimes hear in my head "HE-MAN!"

Pre-vidding is really my favorite place ever. Vidding is pretty nice as well - but previdding is so much fun that the idea and concept has to be just amazingly intriguing for me to abandon all of that fun for vidding. Cause at that point the actual vidding is more fun than the previdding which should be impossible considering how much fun previdding is but isn't! Cause it totally happens and Angel is a puppet.

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen enough of your vids to vote, but I love SOS. SDW and I watch it every time we watch vids, and we sit there and shake our heads sadly and go, "Oh, John." And there are tears. And it is awesome. So I will look forward to being able to have it on my very own hard drive.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Well then vote! Hee - you don't have to have a large base of vid knowledge to work with, the point of the poll is "What vid do you personally want to download asap" which is possibly something I should have communicated in that post.

But really, at this point? The fact that I can still string together sentences is nothing short of amazing.

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

Hee! Well, I will tell you that SOS, Paradise, and Cowboy are three of my favorite vids ever. I already have Cowboy downloaded, and in fact watch it somewhat frequently when I'm in a bad mood (and I blame you for the fact that I sometimes beg my co-worker to let me listen to that song on his MP3 player on Friday afternoons when I need to wake up), so I definitely think you should prioritize Paradise and SOS. :)

[barkley.livejournal.com]

Yes! I came to this realization yesterday as I spent yet another night tinkering around on the last four seconds of this vid like I've been doing for the past month now. Actually some days I find it hard to even fire up the project just to look at it for some unknown reason. I am afraid of finishing it, and yet I really, really, really want to have it finished.

And the idea list, it keeps growing. I found myself actively searching out a song the other day for a vid that doesn't even exist in my head (except for vague idea of wanting to make something about this character.)

[wolfling]

I'm kinda at that point with one vid right now, ironically it is the vid I started for the LKBV thing. Somewhere along the line I started taking it really seriously and obsessing over it and it just kind bogged down to a stop with about a minute to go.

So now I'm in that place where I want to work on it and finish it, but every time I contemplate doing so, my back brain goes "but it's harrrrd" and tries to present me with something shiny to distract me.

Like another vid idea. Or, lately, a new fandom.

So yeah, so totally get what you're talking about here.

[dualbunny.livejournal.com]

I don't know how you can ignore PeaceKeeper like that. ::sniffle:: Buffy!

And that whole post made sense. Big sense. Only sometimes I get a little grumpy when no matter how many times I listen to a song, it's right and not-right at the same time. But I leave it in the folder anyway, 'cause ya never know. Someday I might be riding in the car, and that moment when the jolt hit me might come back, and I might figure out why the heck I put it in the folder in the first place...

[sdwolfpup.livejournal.com]

Only sometimes I get a little grumpy when no matter how many times I listen to a song, it's right and not-right at the same time.

OMG yes. Yes yes yes. That upsets me, because I often really badly want the song to be right but it just quite doesn't make it.

*commiserates*

[dualbunny.livejournal.com]

If only you could let them go after trying to squish them into the right vid over and over again in your head. But I can't. Well, ok, I let one go. But it's totally on probation.

And the Spuffy one I'm trying to clip for now, may actually be one of those, but mostly because sometimes I'm not sure the show I was watching, was the show they were making. And that may become an issue when I try to pretend there wasn't any difference. ;D

[luminosity]

Pre-vidding is NOT my favorite stage of vidding. Not at all. Because in pre-vidding, I could be lying to myself, and I hate that. It may *feel* like it'll work in the pre-vid stage, but it might not really work. (For whatever value of "it" it is.) That part's the lighter and the spoon and the rubber hose.

My favorite part of vidding is laying out a series of clips and making the fall correctly on the timeline. Doing, like, 30 of them in a row and having them all work. That's the RUSH. ...as I continue with the "how cool is heroin" metaphor

The reason that's my favorite part is because *then*, I'm vidding with the right side of my brain, and that's where all the fun stuff is.

[sweetestdrain]

When I think of Wesley/Illyria, two vid-associated phrases come to mind. The first is Just cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there. Makes sense, right?

And the second is... Why isn't anybody calling?

The power of LKBV, man.

Being at Mountie school has stuck me in the pre-vidding stage indefinitely. I'm really enjoying finding vidsongs all the time instead of my previous state of sitting in front of a blank timeline going Oh shit I need a song, but I also miss the process of actually constructing a vid. I want to learn new things! The vids in my head get more and more elaborate, and it's killing me to know that I can't DO that yet. Sigh. Still, I know what you mean.

Caffeine rambling. And omg, something I found that reminded me of a topic the other day... have you seen this fic?

[anoel.livejournal.com]

Hi, just wanted to say that I friended you because I love your vids and reading what you have to say. Especially the vid talk like in this post. I'm not surprised by the poll because so many of those vids are ones I loved like Two Words, Closer, WTIN and 66 (I adore that vid). And I cannot wait to see the dS video. Glad to see you have a brand new website now.

I'm with you, the finishing part is the hardest part. Especially when you get stuck or feel like you've been working on the video forever and just want to be done. But the pre-vidding stage is *heaven*. For all the reasons you mentioned. It's just the pure freedom and creativity of finding all the connections between the music and the clips, between the clips themselves and making a new creation out of them. As long as I have a way to interpret what the song is saying, where I'm not just sitting there saying "Huh? What does this mean?" (to the show, relationship, etc) but I can see, the little meanings or the big meaning and I'm just trying to piece them all together. Like a puzzle.

At first laying down the video is fun, to see that it's actually happening, what I see in my head but then I find the little kinks in my plan and like you said, I have to actually have to think about how it's going to realistically work (I love the equation metaphor. Since I can't always do exactly what I want to do in my head (unfortunatly). It can be a perfectionist thing for me, if I do it and it's not perfect then I feel bad so I'm afraid to start it and finish it at all. But some ideas are too good for it, some ideas just call to be finished and once I spend all my time working on something, I hate to not finish it. But usually things don't go far enough for that end drive to take place so I'm left with many undone ideas and projects.

Vidding is haard. But it's too fun to stop and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

[heresluck]

WORD on the pre-vidding stage. As frustrating as it has been to not be able to vid for the past fifteen months, there's also been something really cool about the wallowing in song choice and planning parts. I keep thinking about how when the new 'puter is set up I'm going to be able to do a ton of audio editing, which is one of my favorite parts of pre-vidding.

And then eventually I will have to confront the part where having a fantastic song and n idea and a plan doesn't mean that the idea is any good or that the plan will work. Gah.

But I think I may have officially hit the limit on new ideas I can hold in my head. So it's good that I'm going to start actually vidding again soon so I can start deleting vids from my mental hard drive space...

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

But then you get to the end and sometimes her little A into B into C has taken a turn into M and how do you make that work?

Oh god, sing it, sister. I swear this feels like it happens on every project. And you have NO IDEA how you got to M, is the thing. For me, even when I vid from a spreadsheet (not that often anymore), and even when the spreadsheet is, like, *completely* filled in (a rare thing indeed), I still wind up in M territory every time, often with side visits to Q and Y. How the hell did I get there, and what do I do *now*?

Betas rule. But sometimes even they can't get you back to C, especially when you can't figure out your own damned thought process. To be honest, I'd be a better vidder if I were more willing to rip out the M and the Q and get firmly back to C, but what usually happens is I'll keep the M and pour on a lot of distracting shiny bits and hope nobody notices. Because I am *lazy*.

I do love the part where you haven't laid down a single clip yet. The vid is and always will be perfect in your head. Sometimes it's so intimidating you don't even want to start.

But if you didn't, you'd miss the "I Love It When A Plan Comes Together" part, which IMO is even better.

more LKBV

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/community/amv/140180.html

Re: more LKBV

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Ain't life grand?

[sol-se.livejournal.com]

I know *exactly* what you mean. I love pre-vidding & starting projects. I have about a dozen videos in my head right now all planned out, but I have the hardest time actually *finishing* one. Sometimes it gets to be like pulling teeth.