December meme: vidding two-fer

[arduinna]

Still catching up, and these two make a nice pair. Cutting them because combined they're a little long.

gwyn asked: How did you start vidding, what prompted you to make that first vid and say to yourself, we could do this? How did you start vidding with therienne? Was it like a magic moment of creation for you both, or did one of you have to convince the other?

Hah. therienne totally started it. We'd both been learning to appreciate vids more after shoshanna talked us through a vid tape vid by vid, and we'd started going to Escapade where we soaked up not just the vids but the Vid Review, which blew our minds -- we learned about vid POV, we learned about vid narrative, we learned about all kinds of things. But we were learning to be better vid watchers, not to turn ourselves into vidders.

Then two things happened at the 2000 Escapade:

First, we saw Lynn's SG-1 vid In Your Eyes, which blew us both away. That was the year that killa and lapillus also did In Your Eyes for Highlander, which was also amazing -- I still have that bridge in my head, with the cutting that I couldn't believe they'd managed to pull off, because wow. So maybe on some level it was also the clear evidence that it was possible to come at a song/idea from different angles and produce two amazing, completely different things? But we both reacted hugely emotionally to Lynn's vid, and therienne walked away from that wanting to be able to do that.

Second, astolat had a similar "I want to do that" epiphany, but being astolat, she pulled out her laptop and started ordering computer parts on the spot to build a vidding computer. *g* So clearly, it was possible to just... do that!

So those were the emotional and technical pushes, but they didn't result in anything, not yet. A couple months later, when I was hanging out at therienne's one night, she put on a new CD she'd just bought and said she thought one song would make a great vid: Kryptonite, by Three Doors Down. I listened and went "ooo", and we thought maybe Sentinel, then no! Invisible Man! YES! and we started talking it out, verse by verse, then writing it down, until we had a complete outline accounting for every lyric.

Then we stared at that, wondering what to do with it, and said, "Snady! She is awesome and she loves us, she'll make this for us!" and emailed her our wonderful idea. No, seriously, we did that. Good lord. So, you know, obviously she said no, very kindly and supportively, and we were stuck again.

And I think that's the point at which therienne decided that if astolat could build her own system, well, so could she, and started ordering parts. It took a while, (and a lot of research -- thank god for everyone on the Vidder list willing to post their specs and processes, so other people could learn what to do!), but she got there in the end, down to buying Adobe Premiere to work on.

My part in all of that was to smile and nod encouragingly. "You go for it!" I said, every time I went over. "Oh, cool, more parts came, that's good! Is that a hard drive? Oh, power source! Right. Good!" "You'll have a good time, doing that vidding stuff. I'll just be over here reading." You know the vid Pressure? The friend who brought the soda and sat there reading a stack of zines while the vidders worked? That was going to be me. I was no good at hardware, and Premiere looked terrifying, and I am not a visual person anyway. Vidding? Don't be silly.

And that was how it stayed for most of a year -- therienne built the system and figured out a pass-through device (while we both fretted over how camcorders were starting to have copy protection built into them, and what a nightmare that was, and which one was going to be actually usable for this, and man, it's seriously only been a bit more than a decade since we had to hook a VCR up to a camcorder which in turn was hooked to a... something that was connected to the computer, to capture source. Wow.) Snady came out that summer to teach therienne some of the finer points of what makes a good vid ("faster cuts. no, faster. no, faster." "And it would have been better if you'd had this clip at the beginning." *therienne moves clip* "...") while I sat there supportively soaking it all in, but still declaring that I'd be the beta, not the vidder.

Then 9/11 happened, and after too much watching of the news, therienne started vidding in earnest as a coping mechanism. I was "betaing" live basically every time I went over, until I was suggesting clips and moving things around and realized that um, actually, I was vidding with her. And that is how I started vidding! There was never a single moment for me; it was a long, slow, inexorable slide, dragged down by fanpair. Heh.

That first vid took 18 months to finish, one way and another. So the 3-4 months it can take us now seems very speedy by comparison. *g*

And for marycrawford: talk about a vid that you (with or without Therienne) wanted to make, but for some reason, it didn't work out. A head-vid can be a beautiful thing too, so help us see it!

Oh, hm, there are a few that one or both us us really wanted to make, but either they never happened or they flopped. Usually it's a technical issue (oh, unmade Peacemakers vid, how I still mourn you), or something where we finish it and it just doesn't work (Dead Zone, sigh), or it was something that was relevant to a single season and once the next season started up, it was too late (SGA, woe).

But there was one, very early on, that we wound up ditching and never went back to, partway through the timeline. We had a song for Stargate SG-1, for a Jack/Daniel vid with a heavy focus on Jack. We both loved the song, and we'd talked out the lyrics and had a good idea of what we wanted to do. We started right after Escapade; this was going to be our second vid, and we were planning to bring it to the first-ever Vividcon, which had started being planned at Escapade. So we knew we only had a few months, compared with the year and a half Kryptonite had taken. But we could do it! We had the technology! We went through the source carefully, took notes, started clipping, and had been vidding in Premiere for several weeks so we had a decent amount down on the timeline.

Then I showed up one Saturday, ready to get to work, and therienne looked at me and said, "We're not vidding SG1 anymore. Here, listen, isn't this a great Sentinel song? Let's vid this instead!" while I boggled at her, because what the hell!! We'd been working on this for weeks, maybe months, already! We had notes and clips from four and a half seasons of show! We couldn't just *switch*! It was a good vid! But she was absolutely insistent that she couldn't work on the SG1 vid anymore, for Reasons she couldn't tell me, so we made Black Cat faster than we'd ever made anything. (Please note, this was our second vid, and our first had taken 18 months. So.)

(And I was so cranky about having to vid something that fast that I... added a second vid of my own, because somehow that made sense to me, and so my tiny little Speed Racer vid for Bobby was born, tucked into the corners of that TS vid. We've seriously never vidded like that before or since.) (Although I'm cracking up at myself now, because in my memory, this was, like, three weeks. But looking at epguides, I suspect it was more like three months, maybe even four, which seemed insanely short to me at the time. So, uh, we probably have vidded that "fast" since then, really. *kof*)

Anyway, so, the SG1 vid. It was to a Grey Eye Glances song, "Something to Live For" (you may need to click the song link to make the player appear - this is embedded from MySpace and is a little odd):

I'm all nostalgic for this vid again listening to it. The song was perfect for Jack, on a path with a lot of heartache behind him, wondering about his life and his choices, and just sorta wanting to know if it's all worth it -- and it is, because he totally has Daniel to live for. <3

I don't remember the specific shape of the vid we'd worked out anymore; I have 5+ more years of canon in my head now, and the tone of things changed drastically right around the time we stopped vidding.

But it was going to include losing his son Charlie, his ex, some of the successes and failures he'd had along the way, and a whole lot of Daniel giving him a reason to keep going, and something to aim himself toward.

I mean, seriously:

He drew a road to nowhere
And I found myself following blindly along
Never asking where it led
Not knowing my home
Was the road I was on

If that isn't Jack following the path Daniel laid through the Stargate and into the universe, with Daniel at his side, I don't know what is. ♥

Sadly, the Reasons for stopping turned out to be that therienne got spoiled for Daniel's death in Meridian, which at the time was going to be permanent, as far as anyone knew -- it sort of killed any ability to make a "yay, Daniel is Jack's happy ending in the future" kind of vid, what with crushing our hearts into dust and all. So we never could bring ourselves to go back to it, even after Daniel came back.


---

Full list here, with one spot still open!

Comments

[laurashapiro]

I am completely gobsmacked to learn that Kryptonite was YOUR FIRST VID.

Jesus Christ on a bus, ladies. Put us all to shame, why don't you.

[arduinna]

Well, yes, but. 18 months! 48 solid hours of Snady hand-holding and teaching in the middle of it!

It didn't come out of the blue, or anything. *g*

(Okay, but we are both pretty damn proud of that vid. <3)

[laurashapiro]

I understand. My first vid took about 6 months (and I'm sure it would have been 3x as long if I'd had two other people working with me on it!).

Anyway, you should be proud for sure!

[sholio]

This is fascinating! I had no idea Kryptonite was your first vid. I had that one in my watch-on-repeat folder for a looong time. :)

Augh, the mention of Meridian spoilers takes me back! :D It's just sort of nostalgic now, rather than ripping out my heart -- well, actually by the time Meridian came, I was out of my first flush of fannish love for SG1, and had kind of drifted away from the show, but that was the big nail in the coffin that killed my love for it. I didn't need to see the episode to know that I was done with the show. Funny how things change over the years ...

It's also really interesting to think about putting together a computer just for vidding, when now any decent computer can do it. I think it was about 2002 or maybe even 2003 when I made my first vids -- AMVs -- on our new iMac, using an old copy of Premiere that I am pretty sure I copied off the school computers when I was in college (so circa 1998 software!). At that time I was just making vids for my own fun and to burn on CD & send to my sister, so I didn't really care about getting clean source; I ripped from my own anime DVDs and used clips from fansubs. And it was so INCREDIBLY slow; I'm sure it would kill me now, because I remember how much of it was just waiting for every little thing to render, or for the program to finish loading, and it had a tendency to create jerky video or corrupt files if I had ANYTHING else running at the same time.

Unfortunately I don't think I copied any of those early AMVs when I finally ditched my last computer that was capable of running that old version of Premiere, although I think they are still on a backup hard drive that I have around here somewhere.

(I was still using that version of Premiere as recently as 2006; my early SGA vids were made in it, before I ditched it and went to vidding in iMovie ...)

[arduinna]

I had no idea Kryptonite was your first vid. I had that one in my watch-on-repeat folder for a looong time. :)

*beams*!

actually by the time Meridian came, I was out of my first flush of fannish love for SG1, and had kind of drifted away from the show, but that was the big nail in the coffin that killed my love for it.

The first three seasons were the golden years for me; fourth season brought a change in tone I wasn't thrilled with, so I was already coping with not loving it as much as I had, even as I still loved it to bits. Meridian was just so awful and hard to deal with.

And it was so INCREDIBLY slow; I'm sure it would kill me now, because I remember how much of it was just waiting for every little thing to render, or for the program to finish loading, and it had a tendency to create jerky video or corrupt files if I had ANYTHING else running at the same time.

Oh, god, yes. The vidding computer we were using was literally "the vidding computer" -- the only things on it were vidding-related programs, browsers to look things up, and FTP to upload. Because that was the only way to be sure that we didn't accidentally have Word or something open in the background, and start crashing or destroying things.

And we still have little moments when we go to render or output a vid, and we can just... sit there for a few minutes, and we're done. Back when we started, exporting a vid for a con meant setting it up, checking everything compulsively because you *did not* want to do this more than once, hitting the button, and walking away to have dinner and watch an episode of something, in hopes it might be done when the ep was over. Every time I get impatient when a complicated vid is taking 5-10 minutes to completely render, I remind myself of that. *g*

I admit, though, I'm spoiled; we just sort of kept assuming you needed "a vidding computer" even when we knew it wasn't true, and kept things as high-end as possible, continuing to build things for the best vidding bang for the buck. I think vidding on a non-optimized system would drive me crazy. *g*

I was still using that version of Premiere as recently as 2006;

I would probably happily still be vidding on our first software (buggy and crashy though it was, holy cow), but therienne is very keen on having updated systems, so she's been dragging me along with her. I admit, the modern versions of Premiere are just lovely (and FCP was, too, before they went to X, which we looked at but couldn't cope with so switched back to Premiere).

And oh, rescue those AMVs, if you can find them! I hate to see things vanish.

wow

[talking_sock]

I remember Sandy helping... but also forgot Kryptonite was your first. (Do remember it well though! Also, I still see your Poe vid when I hear the song, even though I never saw the show, and only have the song on my ipod because of the vid. Huh.)

Didn't realize In Your Eyes made such an impact; I'm honored.

[marycrawford]

I am so charmed by Therienne shutting down the vid For Reasons so that she wouldn't spoil you. It's just, awwwwwwwwwww you guys. <3

But all the same, woe, because it sounds like would have been awesome!