December meme: Why one vid, why??
Dec. 10th, 2013 09:24 pmFor ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cesperanza: Why one vid a year, why??? How do you know what fandom? Is it compulsion? a list? the song?
Sometimes it's two! One year it was three! ... Okay, that was the first year we made anything, and it was a fluke. *g*
But yes, okay, most years it's one vid. We don't do it on purpose. It's more a combination of things: we're hugely deadline-driven, we're entirely song-driven, and we have limited vidding time.
We basically only vid for cons, which works out to "we vid for Vividcon"; I think we've released two vids at Escapade in 12 years, and everything else has been Vividcon. It's also really hard for us to vid for a con we're not going to be at; we want to see the reaction. So years that we don't go to a con, we may very well not produce anything, despite making the attempt; there's just not enough push to finish if we start having problems.
We can't start until we have a song; neither one of us understands how people decide on an idea and then go looking for a song that matches it. We do have a small pile of songs we've collected over the years that we want to make a vid to someday, but mostly we get inspired by things we hear during the year. We send things back and forth to each other, and at some point something sticks. But because we're deadline-driven, we usually really only start *focusing* on songs in February or March, when we start thinking about that year's VVC. It's completely normal for us not to have a song, and thus no idea for a vid, until March and sometimes even April. (We start getting twitchy if we don't have anything by April.)
We never know the fandom till we have the song. The odds are extremely high it'll be something we're currently invested in, but we watch a lot of stuff and it could be any of it. We generally both gravitate toward the same fandom for a given song; sometimes we don't, but one person's idea will match it better, or they'll have a better story idea, or whatever, so that fandom takes over pretty fast. I think there's only ever been one where we went back and forth on the fandom almost up till the moment we started vidding (Haunted, which could have been a Dead Zone vid instead of Odyssey 5 - but I think we made the right call there).
We also do sometimes hit the barrier of one of us loving a song, or loving it for a particular fandom, and the other one just not really feeling it. Those vids tend not to get made, just because it's easier for us to vid together, and generally there's *something* we can agree on out there. We're lucky in that our fandoms overlap to a ridiculous degree, as does our idea of what makes a good vid song for us to work with.
So once we've got a deadline and a song/fandom/idea we're both on board with, we start vidding. But we do our vidding attherienne's place, which has always meant I have to physically be there. So between our offset work schedules and the fact that I'm a raging introvert who needs lots of down time, that means that most of our vidding happens on Saturdays. On top of that, we're usually only good for about six hours of vidding in any given day (flat-out or broken up into chunks, doesn't matter -- it almost always adds up to six hours max). At six hours a week, it takes a lot of weeks to get a vid done! (Okay, it takes us a lot of weeks. I know other people can produce an entire vid in six hours, but we're slow.)
We do ramp up more as the Vividcon deadline approaches; I start going over both days on the weekend, and in the last couple of weeks, I go over after work more and more as well to get in at least an hour or two of tweaking things and working out technical issues. By the final week, I'm there basically every day for at least a few hours, more if I can manage it. But by the time we're done and uploaded, we're both so burned out that we don't want to see each other for a while, and then we get out of the habit of vidding. And then it's Yuletide, so it's writing time, and vidding gets punted till the next year.
A lot of years, we have more than one vid in mind, and will even start working on more than one. This past year, we had three going at once. It was very ambitious! But as the deadline approaches, we have to decide which one gets the most focus, and put the others aside. Some years we can still manage to get two out; most years, it's just the one. (If it's two, it's likely to be one more complex/involved one and one much simpler one. The one year we produced two complex ones -- Jerusalem and Walking on the Ground -- nearly killed us.) We don't forget about the ones we put aside; some stay on the back burner. But some were really only viable for the particular season we were in, and we never really touch them again.
So we sort of only vid for 4-5 months out of the year, a few hours at a time, usually on just one song (or narrowing down from several to one as we go), and then we take a really, really long break before we start up again. *g* Despite our repeated best intentions to not stop this time, which we say every year before we collapse from VVC deadline stress.
---
Full request list here, still open!
cesperanza: Why one vid a year, why??? How do you know what fandom? Is it compulsion? a list? the song? Sometimes it's two! One year it was three! ... Okay, that was the first year we made anything, and it was a fluke. *g*
But yes, okay, most years it's one vid. We don't do it on purpose. It's more a combination of things: we're hugely deadline-driven, we're entirely song-driven, and we have limited vidding time.
We basically only vid for cons, which works out to "we vid for Vividcon"; I think we've released two vids at Escapade in 12 years, and everything else has been Vividcon. It's also really hard for us to vid for a con we're not going to be at; we want to see the reaction. So years that we don't go to a con, we may very well not produce anything, despite making the attempt; there's just not enough push to finish if we start having problems.
We can't start until we have a song; neither one of us understands how people decide on an idea and then go looking for a song that matches it. We do have a small pile of songs we've collected over the years that we want to make a vid to someday, but mostly we get inspired by things we hear during the year. We send things back and forth to each other, and at some point something sticks. But because we're deadline-driven, we usually really only start *focusing* on songs in February or March, when we start thinking about that year's VVC. It's completely normal for us not to have a song, and thus no idea for a vid, until March and sometimes even April. (We start getting twitchy if we don't have anything by April.)
We never know the fandom till we have the song. The odds are extremely high it'll be something we're currently invested in, but we watch a lot of stuff and it could be any of it. We generally both gravitate toward the same fandom for a given song; sometimes we don't, but one person's idea will match it better, or they'll have a better story idea, or whatever, so that fandom takes over pretty fast. I think there's only ever been one where we went back and forth on the fandom almost up till the moment we started vidding (Haunted, which could have been a Dead Zone vid instead of Odyssey 5 - but I think we made the right call there).
We also do sometimes hit the barrier of one of us loving a song, or loving it for a particular fandom, and the other one just not really feeling it. Those vids tend not to get made, just because it's easier for us to vid together, and generally there's *something* we can agree on out there. We're lucky in that our fandoms overlap to a ridiculous degree, as does our idea of what makes a good vid song for us to work with.
So once we've got a deadline and a song/fandom/idea we're both on board with, we start vidding. But we do our vidding at
therienne's place, which has always meant I have to physically be there. So between our offset work schedules and the fact that I'm a raging introvert who needs lots of down time, that means that most of our vidding happens on Saturdays. On top of that, we're usually only good for about six hours of vidding in any given day (flat-out or broken up into chunks, doesn't matter -- it almost always adds up to six hours max). At six hours a week, it takes a lot of weeks to get a vid done! (Okay, it takes us a lot of weeks. I know other people can produce an entire vid in six hours, but we're slow.)We do ramp up more as the Vividcon deadline approaches; I start going over both days on the weekend, and in the last couple of weeks, I go over after work more and more as well to get in at least an hour or two of tweaking things and working out technical issues. By the final week, I'm there basically every day for at least a few hours, more if I can manage it. But by the time we're done and uploaded, we're both so burned out that we don't want to see each other for a while, and then we get out of the habit of vidding. And then it's Yuletide, so it's writing time, and vidding gets punted till the next year.
A lot of years, we have more than one vid in mind, and will even start working on more than one. This past year, we had three going at once. It was very ambitious! But as the deadline approaches, we have to decide which one gets the most focus, and put the others aside. Some years we can still manage to get two out; most years, it's just the one. (If it's two, it's likely to be one more complex/involved one and one much simpler one. The one year we produced two complex ones -- Jerusalem and Walking on the Ground -- nearly killed us.) We don't forget about the ones we put aside; some stay on the back burner. But some were really only viable for the particular season we were in, and we never really touch them again.
So we sort of only vid for 4-5 months out of the year, a few hours at a time, usually on just one song (or narrowing down from several to one as we go), and then we take a really, really long break before we start up again. *g* Despite our repeated best intentions to not stop this time, which we say every year before we collapse from VVC deadline stress.
---
Full request list here, still open!
