arduinna

More Saturday reportage, although some of this will be short as I seem to have fallen down on taking notes for the afternoon.

First up:

Panel: What's My Motivation?
Moderator: Joyo
Description: There are lots of reasons not to make an idea into a vid. Probably more than there are to make it. And yet, we vid.

My favorite part of this panel was right at the beginning, when

joyo was asking about how long people in the room had been vidding -- first how many people had made their first vid within the last year, for which a few hands went up, then asking how many people had been vidding for decades -- and her eyes were scanning the crowd and right then she spotted Kandy Fong, and was all "oh, yes! right here!"

I just. I love so much that Vividcon encompasses this unbroken sweep from the woman who invented vidding to newbies who just started yesterday, today, tomorrow. ♥ It's amazing. (And not just the personal history, which is what really gets me, but also the sheer depth of technical expertise we wind up collecting every year at this one tiny con. Man.)

Okay, on to the panel. I have zero notes for this, but I've seen a couple other writeups and I remember a few highlights. The the overall tenor was supportive of whatever motivation gets you through a vid: it's all good.

There are two parts to vid motivation: what motivates you to start a vid, and what motivates you to finish it. These can be very different things. *g* Starter motivation is often easier; you get a great idea, you hear a great potential vidsong, something happens in your canon (either happy-making or angry-making), and suddenly you want to make a vid.

Finishing a vid is a lot harder, and mostly what we focused on.

Joyo had done a survey in advance, but decided after collecting the data that she was going to riff off some of the results, rather than going over charts and whatnot. One of the things that had surprised her was how many people said they vidded just for themselves, with no external pressure (like deadlines). She's never made a vid just for herself, without that extra push to get it done and posted/submitted.

I pretty much haven't, either;

therienne and I have never posted a vid that didn't premiere at a con first. (Seriously, it's 2013 and we are still basically 100% con vidders. It's kind of ridiculous, but we need the deadline to work against -- even just to get us started.) And despite the survey results, a lot of the room seemed to feel the same way; most make vids for something, whether a con, Festivids, other exchanges, presents for their friends, etc.

Even those who don't need some kind of external deadline generally make their vids to share, going all the way back to Kandy's initial motivations for making her first proto-vids: she wanted to share them with her Star Trek club because she thought they'd like them. There may sometimes just be something you need to say for yourself that makes you sit down and vid, but most often, it's for sharing.

But "I want to share something" isn't always enough, given how much work goes into a vid. So why keep going?

The general consensus was an emotional connection to the vid (which was also brought up as crucial in Song Choice - if you don't have an emotional connection to the song, you're not going to enjoy vidding it). Any kind of emotion can spark a vid, and get you through part of it, but some are harder to maintain than others.

Joy in the source is possibly the easiest -- as long as you don't start disliking your source before you finish your vid, or conversely disliking your vid, which may color your joy in the source.

Anger can be maintained, but outrage is harder (both of those were kinda fascinating to me, as I can't imagine sitting in anger long enough to make a vid; if I'm that angry, I need to walk away from the source. Mind you, I vid slow as molasses, so I'd be talking about a couple of months of sustained anger that made me want to create.) If you want to make an outraged vid, you kinda need to vid fast.

If you start to lose your connection to the vid, revisit the source -- rewatch your favorite (... or most anger-inducing, I suppose!) episodes, watch the movie again, to remind yourself of what it was that drew you to the vid idea in the first place. Listen to the music on its own, away from the vid (go for a walk, listen in the car or in the gym, etc.)

Also if, like many of us, you vid as a way of dealing with other external things, try recreating the situation that sparked you to vid in the first place: family crisis, a work or school deadline that you were procrastinating about, etc. Even if you can't recreate the exact thing, thinking about an imaginary situation can trigger some of the same "okay must vid now" response in your brain.

As an aside, I was hugely amused at the widespread sympathetic/amused reaction that things like "if you vid to procrastinate from other things" got. Heh.

Oh, another suggestion was to put the stuck vid aside and work on something else -- always have several vids going at once, so you can shift gears when you need a break from one, without actually stopping, since for a lot of us, once you stop completely it's hard to pick it back up again (very very true for me -- all our good intentions to keep vidding after the VVC deadline every year just drift away until the next March, when deadline panic starts to loom again).

It was a fun panel - lots of commiseration on all sides from people in much the same boat, with a lot of useful brainstorming.

Next up:

A Matter of Perspective, vidshow/panel combination

I was a little confused by this combination, actually; the vidshow had nothing to do with the panel, to the point that the vids in the show never even got mentioned in the panel, so I'm not really sure why they were paired. I guess the idea was to cover as many meanings of "perspective" as possible, but for me, that's too broad a theme. I would have preferred if the two parts were connected.

Vidshow VJ: Greensilver
Playlist: On Google docs -- there are almost no links, though, sorry!
Description: Perspective is everything. This vidshow pairs vids within fandoms draw contrasts between different points of view, such as both sides of a relationship, opposite sides of a war, and different perspectives on a character, event, or universe.

There were six pairs of vids, each focused on a different character (or set of characters) in a particular fandom: Merlin (Arthur & Merlin; Morgana), X-Files (Mulder; Scully), Stargate SG-1 (Jack; Daniel), The Wire (Michael, Namond, Randy, & Dukie; Ellie Carver), Smallville (Lana; Lois), and Doctor Who 2005 (Doctors; Companions).

And, hm. I think one of the problems with doing something like this is it often requires some context to understand the parallels being drawn, at least without help from the blurb in the program book (in this case, the blurbs were just the character names involved). The only paired vids that really resonated for me here as a pair were the Stargate vids, because I've spent so many years deeply invested in Stargate and in Jack and Daniel in particular.

For most of the rest, it felt more like just watching a couple of vids from that fandom; I was missing the connections I was supposed to be making.

Aaaannd I timed this exactly wrong, and have just lost the streaming playlist. Ah well.

Moving on to the panel, then!

Moderators: Greensilver & sweetestdrain
Description: This panel will cover the basics of vidding within a set perspective: how to establish a vid's point of view through song choice and clip choice, and how to use POV in worldbuilding, conveying emotion, and building arguments. We'll also discuss how to work outside single-character POV (ensemble perspective, dual POV, vidder/meta POV, and the ever-tricky POV switch) without losing a clear sense of narrative voice.

This is more what I was expecting from a "perspective" show/panel pair, if only because for a while now I've been considering offering to do a panel like this. *g* So yay, I was glad to see this; the only thing that could have made it better would have been a truer connection to the vidshow, where each vid in the show demonstrated a different kind of POV and how different POVs have different strengths to do different things. It would have been great to be able to talk about those, with short clips from them to remind us and demonstrate to anyone who hadn't been to the show.

I generally feel pretty confident about POV and how to use it, but it's always good to see how other people approach it, too.

I took absolutely no notes here, so at this point things are kinda hazy. But the turnout seemed pretty solid, and the conversation touched on a lot of stuff. Things I can remember off the top of my head:

We talked about the different possible kinds of POV (some of the followup comments are things I more or less remember from the panel; some are me rambling on as I write this up):

Single-character first person ("I")
- In these, the narrator and the focus are the same character; someone is telling a story about themselves. Easiest when the lyrics have useful "I" phrases in them. Usually a character study of some kind.
- It's crucial to set up several early shots of your POV character on "I" or "me" words in the lyrics, so peole make the connection.
- This can also include a lot of second-person material, where the narrator is talking to the "you" character, but the focus is still the narrator. If you do that, you also need to make sure to show the "you" character on the "you" lyrics
Single-character second person ("You"; sometimes "he" or "she")
- Looking through the narrator's eyes at the focal character of the vid. (Er, which doesn't mean the narrator can't be on screen; it's helpful if they are. *g*) Again, make sure to show the "you" character on any "you" lyrics. Can be a character study, shippy, etc.
Dual POV, where the POV moves between two characters, either once or multiple times
- Lots of people at the con were calling this "dual POV slash vid", but dual POV can be anything, from gen character studies to romantic vids of all stripes. It can even be a compare/contrast vid across two fandoms (like this Sherlock-Doctor Who vid to "I Can Do Anything Better Than You").
- ~15 years ago, received wisdom was that you don't switch POVs in a vid, because the audience will be lost; if you absolutely have to, you switch once, make it obvious when you do, and stick like glue to the new POV for the rest of the vid. (Basically, you had either single-POV, or ensemble; anything else was very risky.) This has long gone by the wayside as audiences have gotten better at reading vids, but it's still crucial to make your POV switches clear and time them properly -- make sure there's a lyrical or musical break to support it.
Ensemble, or multiple-POV vid
- These can be either vids where the "I" moves from person to person across multiple people, or vids that step back and look at a group of people as a whole.
Vidder/meta POV
- This is getting a little squishy for me, because to me this sounds like basic omnisicent, but I think maybe this means something more Doylist? Where the vidder is standing outside the universe making a specific statement about that universe?
- Okay, wait, looking at heresluck's post about this, she included "audience POV" here, which to me is a different thing -- that's your basic omniscient, where the audience is looking at what's going on (with the vidder as part of the audience), rather than looking through the vidder's eyes at what's going on. So to me, a vidder POV would be something like Lierdumoa's "How Much Is That Geisha in the Window?", where she's specifically presenting the audience with her viewpoint; an audience POV would be something like Starships, where the audience is cheering on all the awesome starships. ... That may well be too fine a distinction, since really any vid is seen through the vidder's eyes first and foremost, but it's how I differentiate them, anyway. They may or may not be "meta" vids, where the vid is providing some kind of external commentary on a source (or on fandom).

Establishing POV is done a few ways:

Song choice will often give you the structure for your POV; if it's a song that's all about an "I", you're probably looking at a single-character first-person vid -- but not necessarily, as it could also be an ensemble first-person vid, depending on what you want to do with it. Basically start with the song's pronouns, and work from there.

Clip choice is crucial; you want to hit the POV character's face on "I" (or "s/he", if it's a third-person song), and if the vid is about a relationship, you want to hit the other character's face on "you" (or again, the alternate s/he in third-person). And if possible, keep that up throughout the vid, although you don't have to stick with faces once you've established who's who; more distant shots will work as well. Just don't put someone else's face on "I" unless you're changing POV.

Changing the POV in a dual or multi-POV vid has to be done carefully. Wait for clear breaking points in the lyrics -- ends of verses, choruses, before and after bridges -- to switch, just like waiting for the ends of scenes or chapters in fanfic for a POV switch.

There were some clips of vids shown to illustrate different ways of using POV (e.g., asking the people at the panel to identify the POV of a particular clip), and one of the more interesting to me was a Supernatural clip (I think?) for changing POV. Most of the room caught the POV switch in the clip and were impressed by how clear and obvious it was; some didn't (including me), and that may have come down to context (and clip length). Those of us who don't know the fandom were trying to parse a *lot* of information at once, and the POV switch wasn't clearly enough indicated for us to twig to it instantly in the midst of everything else. People who know the show didn't have to do as much work to grasp what was going on on screen, and the POV switch was more obvious to them.

There was also a clip of a Star Wars vid that had a great POV-switch mechanism; POV-character Leia ran into a scene, and Han ran out of it, carrying the POV with him (as the vid then stayed on shots of his face for several clips to solidly establish him as the new POV character). Motion like that can definitely be a strong indicator, but you also want the followup face shots on "I" or other identifying lyrics to ground the audience.

As an aside, I was very chuffed when someone mentioned Kryptonite as an example of clear POV switches in a dual-POV vid. <3

I always feel like I could talk about POV for hours, but I'm well and truly out of memories of what else actually got discussed at the panel itself, so time to move on with this. *g*

Next up:

Panel: Fancy Credits
Moderator: Dualbunny
Description: A how-to tech panel on creating sleek, shiny, dazzling credits using AfterEffects, Premiere, and Photoshop.

This was an hour long, and everyone there would happily have sat through two more hours, I think; one hour is barely enough to scratch the surface.

I only took a few notes here, most of which are specifically "how to do a thing in AE", which aren't going to mean a thing to anyone who doesn't have AE, but I'm writing them up anyway so I can find them later. *g* Mostly I just listened and watched, though, hoping to get some visual familiarity with the interface, which is similar to Premiere and FCP, but different enough that any time I open AE I just flail and gingerly poke a few buttons.

I will say though, that having done that poking and flailing, Dualbunny's demo made more sense to me than demos I watched before I had any exposure to AE. So, progress!

Dualbunny talked mostly about AE in relation to Premiere, because that's what she uses (and they're really well integrated), but you can use AE with almost anything, I think. We didn't touch much on Photoshop at all.

She mentioned that a lot of stuff is possible in Premiere, but clunky and a little painful, and if you can learn to do it in AE, it's smoother, faster (... I disbelieve, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing so AE is still very painful for me), and can do a ton more, so you'll wind up having way more flexibility in what you can do.

Okay, so my tiny handful of technical notes:

Keyframing works differently in AE than in Premiere (or FCP, which handles keyframing basically identically to Premiere).
- Incredibly usefully, my notes do not expand on this at all. Well done, me.
New Composition - match video settings
- ... Seriously, these are crappy notes. I think this means that when you open AE and pick "new composition", you want to make sure that you match the video settings of your vid. Which also means, make sure you know the video settings for your vid.
Use the Text button to add text (I actually knew that one already *g* \o/)
- Select the text and shift-drag it to resize it; this will scale it up (testing this, this is trickier than it sounds, and sometimes it needs to be ctl-drag. Also you need to drag exactly the right part of the text selection, which I haven't quite figured out yet, I only manage to hit it randomly)
- You can also use the Character window/palette to change the font size (among other things)
Okay, then my notes completely skip over most of what DB was actually doing, because I was too busy watching. (My next note is "right-click on keyframe, keyframe assistant, ease into motion"). But I remember the gist:
- She made a path, I think using the pen tool, and started animating the text along the path in different ways -- ease in, ease out, ease in and out. The path was a curve, and she showed us how to get the text to climb up the hill and then fall off the the other side, which everyone enjoyed quite a bit (and which led to the general consensus that next year, VVC was going to have a lot of roller-coaster-y credits that tumbled over like that *g*).
- She played around with a lot options here; different ways of animating the text, different ways of coloring the text, ways of making the text seem to vanish or visibly fade in. I did not write down a single method she used, go me.
- But as someone else added, there are also a lot of text presets over in the effects window/palette (to get animated text effects, first you have to look in the Animated Presets list). Using those may do what you want (I can vouch for that; it's how we cobbled together our Ramalama credits, although we still have no idea what we're doing), and will also give you a starting point on figuring out how the animation works, since you can move through the timeline to how the preset works.
VERY IMPORTANT: AE sometimes defaults to Draft quality. Make sure it's set to Best for output.
- Looking at a composition, I actually have no idea where this setting is. It's not under File->Project Settings, or under Edit->Preferences->Output. More research is required...
The main takeaway was: You can't break AE by poking at things to see what they'll do, and the more you poke at it, the more comfortable you'll get.

Also, the web is full of tutorials; if you want to do something, just search on some keywords, and odds are good someone out there has made a video tutorial you can follow.