Vividcon report part 3: Friday afternoon panels

[arduinna]

The Friday afternoon panels were all connected: a two-hour Song Choice panel, and a one-hour Audio Editing panel. I had no intention of missing any of that, even if it meant giving up an afternoon of vids.


Panel: Song Choice
Moderator: absolutedestiny
Description: Song choice is really important - some vidders claim it is the most important part of a vid. This two-part panel is all about making us better at finding, picking and using our vidsongs. The first session focuses on finding great vidsongs, building up a repertoire of songs for vids-to-be and learning what kind of songs are good or bad for your own vidding style and personal taste. The second part will be about making the best vid for the song you've chosen - whether your song is perfect or merely mediocre - and will draw from the experiences of vidders who've had to wrestle with their song. [Note: This panel will not cover the technical aspects of audio files or audio editing but it will cover reasons to (or not to) edit your song.]


First, you should go read this great writeup by heresluck, because I'm just going to riff off her post, since she said all that way better than I could.

A lot of this panel was pretty familiar ground to me, but it was framed in different ways (like the Pyramid of Awesome) that helped to either strengthen connections I'd already made, make new connections, or make me aware of connections I'd been making/using without realizing it.

A few things surprised me, though, like the fact that some people make vids specifically to expose people to the music, in a "more people should know about this band" kinda way. Which is fascinating to me, as for me the music, while a crucial component, is completely secondary to the visuals.

I'm going to expand on one section of heresluck's post, the "How to find songs" part, to list some of the resources suggested at the panel. This was mainly aimed at finding songs when you already have a fandom/idea, but some of this works just in general to expand your musical base:

• Make a list of stuff you [something, wow my writing sucks]
  
• Ask other vidders
  
• Look for fanmixes for your fandom/character
  
• Use Pandora or similar
  
• Use Ask Metafilter, if you're a MeFite
  
• Gifsets with lyrics on them
  
• Listen to your own music in new contexts (literally: if you usually listen to your collection at home, put it on a mp3 player and go for a walk, bring it to the gym, listen in the car, etc.)
  
• Google lyrical terms related to your concept
  
• Listen to a wide variety of music (don't get locked into the one or two genres you always listen to)
  
• For your own music library, make lists of kinds of songs you have -- dance, themes (romantic, angsty, comedy...)
  
• Use CD Baby and Noise Trade

I don't think we ever did (or heard) a breakdown on how many people tend to vid fandom & idea first, song second, and how many vid song first, fandom & idea second, but the general impression I got was that a lot of people get their ideas first, then go looking for a song. Which always impresses the heck out of me. My vidding partner and I tried that, once. We spent a year or two trying to find the right song to vid the idea we had, then eventually just kinda gave up. We work the other way around; we can't make a vid unless a song has grabbed us first.

Also, quoting heresluck quoting other people:

sisabet said something that really resonated with me: “Now that I make fewer vids, I may only ever make one vid for a particular show. I have to ask myself, is this the vid I really want to make for this fandom?” Or, as luminosity put it: “Is this the hill I want to die on?”

This is us! This has always been us. We vid so slowly; 17 vids in 11 years, which is, like, a single year's output for a lot of people. There are only two fandoms we've vidded more than once -- Invisible Man twice (in the same year, and never since): Joan of Arcadia twice (in the same year, premiered at the same vidshow). So we need every vid to count, if we can pull it off.

So song choice is obviously kinda crucial for us, but we also tend to just flail at it. I get half our songs listening to the radio on my commute -- but the station that I used to get most of them from shut down. So I was all over this panel, as a way to go about finding songs in different ways.




Panel: Audio Editing
Moderators: heresluck and nestra
Description: An overview of a few key concepts from music theory and principles of music structure aimed at helping vidders edit audio more effectively.

Once again, I'm going to point you first at heresluck's writeup of the panel, which is hugely informative and helpful, and which I'm going to riff off.

She mentions a lot of people nodding along with what they were saying, which surprised her because she'd been expecting people with minimal or no experience to show up. Me, I was one of the people nodding, because some of this was familiar. But that's because audio editing is something I really have to work at, and so I go to every audio panel I can at VVC, any time they're offered. After years or repetition, I've finally absorbed things like "don't cut in the middle of a measure" (... I have not yet internalized measures, but I know now that if I cut and it sounds weird, go forward or backward a few beats and try again, so hey, progress), and a few of the other concepts mentioned.

But none of it is natural to me yet; audio editing is alien to me and something I think of as a last resort if I just can't get a song to work at all, and I approach it with gritted teeth and the knowledge that the edits I make are likely to be audible no matter how hard I work on them, and that I'll probably just give up and go back to the original unedited song and do the best I can with it as is if it's not just a matter of cropping out the beginning or end of a long song.

This year may have been a tipping point for me (she said cautiously). The crucial point was someone saying that when they edit audio, a lot of time they wind up with a little "click" sound that they can't get rid of and it drives them out of their mind; there's no click in the original audio, it's there in the edit, and argh.

Which is when someone else brought up zooming way the hell in on the waveform to do precise edits (laying the tracks you want to edit on top of each other and carefully lining up the downbeats), because if you're not careful to cut both bits to match the downbeats so you have a smooth wave, you get a tiny bit of repeated audio that results in a click -- and then, happily for my brain, explained that further as "it's kind of like a stray frame".

LIGHTBULB.

And then a waveform got drawn in on the big pad of paper on the easel, showing what that meant and where to try cutting for precision, which was also kinda mind-blowing. Premiere (and FCP) doesn't let you zoom in far enough to see waveforms in that much detail, and suddenly the things people had been saying made so much more sense.

This is the sort of panel I love Vividcon best for; the ones where I go in hoping to learn something, and come out feeling like a whole new part of my brain is engaged. It was like the Color, Motion, and Light panels I went to years ago. ♥

I'm also going to quote a large chunk of h.l's writeup this time, as much for my own ease of reference as anything.

We tackled structure first. Obviously the easiest thing is to cut an entire self-contained chunk of the song: a repeated chorus, a verse. To trim more or differently, the basic principle is to cut things in half -- which is what the VM credits editor did: the credits version uses half of a verse and half of a chorus. Figuring out the musical patterns that characterize a song is the first and most important step toward editing the song, because the editing choices need to preserve rather than disrupt those patterns. In this song, the lyrical lines and musical phrases map onto each other, for the most part (one of the panel attendees cleverly spotted an exception right in the first two lines); each line is eight beats, each verse and chorus has four lines. This pattern is not universal, but it is typical -- like, the single most common pattern in pop music. (And not just pop music either; a similar pattern is found in Beethoven's violin concerto and in fact vast swaths of Western music generally.) These verse and chorus units can usually be split in a couple of different ways; the VM edit uses the first two lines of the first verse and the first and fourth lines of the second chorus, which, again, isn't going to work for every song but is a pretty reasonable starting point: first two, last two, or first and last are likely to work; using the middle two will almost never work because doing so inverts the underlying musical pattern. The bigger picture is important too: using half a verse but the whole chorus (or vice versa) is likely to sound unbalanced -- but there are ways around this: consistently using half a verse and a whole chorus creates a new pattern, based on but not identical to the original, that sounds intentional and therefore okay. But using half a verse, then a full chorus, then a full verse, then half a chorus... in most if not all cases, that is just going to sound weird, even if the individual cuts are made with laserlike precision.

This is EXACTLY the sort of information I was hoping for. \o/ Patterns! I understand patterns! *cheers*

Comments

[treewishes]

I don't understand the song choice dilemma, because I hear a song and consider what fandom would fit it, not the other way. Wanting to vid a fandom and then looking for a song makes no sense to me, because I know the songs that I know, and there are no other songs :)

But the audio editing info I get totally. I think years of playing an instrument and reading music clarifies that for me.

[arduinna]

Yeah, that's exactly how I approach vidding. The other way seems overwhelming: there are millions and millions of songs! How on earth are you supposed to find the right one! But the panel also went into things like taking the time to consider the song thematically, stylistically, and lyrically to see if it's a good vidsong for the kind of vids you're comfortable making, which is helpful for anyone.

I really regret that I can't read music. My mother's generation was taught automatically in school, as part of their general music education; me, I learned to kinda sorta follow the placement of the notes on the bar as a general indicator of whether my voice should be rising or falling. It's not something that I need on any sort of regular basis so it's never been worth spending the time learning (and trying to remember), but man. If I'd learned that as a kid, music theory would make more sense to me, I think.