POV question from the very, very new.

[carla-scribbles.livejournal.com]

I'm working on my first full-length vid and I've just come hard up against a narrative issue.

I scrapped my first version of my first draft yesterday after a friend pointed out (correctly) that the POV was incredibly unclear and I was trying to get across too much information without actually explaining the significance or context of any of it. I've put together a new intro, which I think does establish my POV character much more clearly, but the problem is that now a significant amount of the information I want to convey is stuff that she's being deliberately shut off from for much of the duration, and I am hanging up badly on the question of how to include it without losing the thread.

(It doesn't exactly help that this is in a fandom literally next to no one has ever heard of, and which has a lot of plot. I don't know what came over me. I blame the song, and Hermione Norris.)

Does anyone have any ideas about how I can resolve this, or recs for vids that deal with similar POV issues?

This is my first version and this is the new intro, if anyone's interested.

Thank you so, so much.

(cross-posted to vidding @ dw, and I'm not sure how to tag this.)

Comments

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

Just watched the first version of your vid. I think the relevant question is, who is your audience? Is this a recruiter vid? (i.e. aimed at people who don't know the source?)

[carla-scribbles.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent question and I am not entirely sure what the answer is. *sighs* I've basically been making it for myself, which is one of those things that sounds like good advice when people say it to you, but is sort of less so when it comes to questions like "does this make any sense to normal humans?"

And I'm really not sure what this one wants to be when it grows up. I haven't really been thinking of it as a recruiter, and being given to eating things bigger than my head, I want it to be a bit more... complex?... than a simple narrative overview, but at the same time my friend's response made me realize that I'm going to have to make SOME gestures in the direction of transparency. (I realize that I may have picked the worst POSSIBLE starter project, between the obscurity and the sheer amount of plot. But I seem to be committed to it now.)

And I could go on for at least a bit about why I picked the PoV I did, other than that "it's what I heard in the song," but I don't know how much of that you want to hear...

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you got a lot of great feedback below, and I agree with everything obsessive24 said. Sorry that it took me so long to get back to this!

I think your instincts are excellent, and the only clip that gave me pause was the character we saw on the very first "me." That should be your POV character. Otherwise, as someone who knows nothing about this source, I was not lost in the least, and was immediately drawn in to the characters' expressions, relationships, and the mood of the song and the visuals. In other words, the first version is working beautifully for me as a recruiter vid. Change that one clip, and I would say you're on the right path.

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

[This is a giant wall of text that could probably be more focused. Hopefully some of it will be helpful.]

One thing I've found useful, sometimes, is getting away from the idea that a vid necessarily has to have one POV, and that if it does it has to map directly to the "I" in the song. This is definitely not to say that a confused POV isn't a significant problem, but you can have more of an omniscient narrator telling one person's story, and that can work really well. It's worth considering, at least.

I'm assuming the POV character for this vid is supposed to be the woman in the very first clip? I have to say that neither version of the intro (they're both beautiful, btw) seems to me like the vid is about her. The first one I think "oh, the main character is the young girl with curly hair," and then I start thinking it might be the older guy or both of them, and around 0:20 it gets confusing.

And in the second version, I don't get any immediate sense of "oh, it's about this person" but I ended up thinking it was about the older guy, because of that shot of him lying awake in bed. That kind of shot, to me, establishes a POV really strongly. So...it sounds like possibly your problem is that you're making a vid about the older woman, but a lot of the things that happen to her aren't actually happening to her onscreen, they're things that other people do that affect her indirectly? Because, yeah, that's really hard to vid, especially if she never finds out about them. My advice--and I don't have a huge amount of vidding experience, so this is just a feeling--would be to cut back to your main character more regularly and more often, so it's like "her, other person A, her, B, her, A and C, her, etc." and the audience, even if they don't know the characters, understand that she's the focus.

Also, I noticed toward the end of the first version, you start casting that guy as "he," and that comes out really clearly and works well, I think. That's another way to handle needing/wanting to spend a lot of visual time on non-POV characters, to link it tightly to the lyrics and/or to an individual verse, so the main character remains the framing device. And for the instrumental section at the beginning, focus much tighter on the POV character, since without words a viewer is just going to assume that whoever they're seeing a lot of is the focus. Especially very internal clips like the guy lying awake in bed, or the clips where he's the only person in the room.

And finally, POV issues aside, I wouldn't worry too hard about whether it makes narrative sense to people who haven't seen the show. I've loved a lot of vids where I had absolutely no idea what was going on. As long as it looks good and the emotions come through, anyone can watch it.

[carla-scribbles.livejournal.com]

No, giant walls of text good. I like giant walls of text. I also communicate largely through giant walls of text. I may be about to produce one.

And *nod*. I think part of the problem is that I'm coming to this from a writing background? So in my head POV is kind of a sacred concern and not to be fucked around with. (I think the first draft was trying for something more like omniscience, or her-as-omniscient, but that one is kind of -- all over the place.) And yes, you have it exactly right -- she's fairly... reactive, for the first third of the narrative, which is the part that's been vidded thus far. (Which obviously raises the question as to why I chose her for the POV -- the simple answer being that she's the only one alive and functioning by the end, really, and I'm very interested in her as survivor.)

I think, actually, what I was trying to do in the first draft was tell the story of the family's implosion THROUGH her, or have her telling it. Which I don't know if that's workable at all. And he does tend to perspective-jack the whole damned thing when I'm not looking.

I can definitely try focusing the intro in on her more tightly -- the one thing this damned thing is not lacking in is reaction shots of her -- I'm just really kind of flailing around trying to work out how much I can show of the other characters, and her husband specifically, and in what context, because part of the point is that he's increasingly isolating himself from her, for example.

(And, really, the fact that there are seven metric fucktons of plot in the damn thing does not help.)

And I keep swinging wildly back and forth between making it narratively transparent and making it... what it kind of wants to be in my head, which might be a bit more complex. (I kind of need to figure out how to actually storyboard this thing -- I have an outline in my head up through the bridge, or at least I did before I started trying to nail the POV down, but I don't know how it shakes out.) I really should have picked something less complicated and more known for my starter vid, but I seem to be stuck with this one.

And thank you, by the way, for the wall of text, it is a lovely wall of text.

[obsessive24.livejournal.com]

I love the musicality in this. Looks like it's shaping up to be a fabulous vid!

Okay, so the way I'd approach this, which may not be how you'd visualise it, but here's my two cents for what it's worth: I don't even think it necessarily matters whose POV it is when the music starts. The first 24 seconds for me is primarily about mood-setting, about introducing the overall context and the characters on a superficial basis on the assumption that you will come back to them and dig into these things in more detail.

What's really important, methinks, is fixing your character POV the moment the vocals come in. For me that's the most transparent cue as to who the narrator is. Even more important than putting that character on all the "I" moments in the lyrics.

So for me, the revised version is much clearer in terms of who the narrator is (I assume the woman with blonde bob), but honestly, I think I like the original intro better because it seems so expansive and poetic, with the flower opening and lots of lovely imagery and really taking your time with the mood of it, as opposed to the revised intro, which feels a bit all-business because your attention as the vidder is so focussed on setting out who the narrator is, and it shows.

So here's my suggestion of how to "fix" the narratorship in a very quick and dirty way for the original version of the vid, which may be some ways off your vision, but in my experience it should work quite well. :)

- leave the intro as-is (on the assumption that this is scene/mood-setting, not total info-dump, and that you will come back later in the vid to elaborate on the characters, themes and plot introduced here)

- 0:24 - replace the clip of the man with a clip of the blonde woman by herself. Doesn't even matter what it is or what context, the most efficient method of fixing narratiorship is that SHE has to be the person you see the moment you hear the lyrics, preferably displaying body language that also sets the tone that you wish for the vid to have. Right now, using the same convention, you can almost make the argument that the guy is the narrator, so I think that's an unintended effect. :)

- While I get the first verse is primarily about her view of the man (her husband, I'm assuming), and you've done most of the work by fixing her POV by introducing it when the vocals come in, you do also need to call back to her periodically to enforce that initial fix. So in the current version from 0:24 onward into verse 1, I don't see much of *her* at all. It's all about her husband. Which it is, but I think there also needs to be at least a few character shots of her sprinkled through there to keep reminding the audience that while the verse is about the husband, it's still her who's doing the talking. If you want to get quite clinical about it, try putting the clips of her in the natural "first words" of each line of lyric. E.g. the clip currently at 0:27, where she's lying in bed and you get that very nice, thoughtful face shot? Move that to 0:30, as the next lyric opens. Stuff like that.

Give it a try and let me know if it works. :)

[carla-scribbles.livejournal.com]

First of all: thank you so much for this comment. Seriously. There may have been a certain amount of bouncing and squeeing when it landed in my inbox. I have been fretting like crazy about my editing and musicality particularly, and it means so incredibly much to hear that they work at all for anyone else.

Second of all, let that be a lesson to me to not, uh -- like a total idiot, I may have dumped my entire 3GB clip database when I started Version 2.0, on the theory that doing so would force me to reapproach the source from the ground up, or something? So I need to start taking about half an hour between having wild flashes of inspiration and actually acting on them, because I've just spent more time than I really needed to reclipping and rejigging the opening. *sighs* Ah, well, if that's the worst mistake I make over the course of this vid, I'm probably doing better than I could be.

I think version 3.0 (http://www.sendspace.com/file/3geekg) might, so far, be an improvement on version 2 at least, and I am keeping this comment very firmly in mind as I go once more into the first verse.

And again, seriously, thank you.

[obsessive24.livejournal.com]

Haha. Good luck with the recovery portion of the program! I don't think you have anything to worry about musicality and editing-wise. You obviously get it in a fundamental sense. The rest is just how much hard work you're willing to put into it. ;)

I was looking through my own vids trying to find something that illustrated my point, but couldn't find anything very relevant. However, today quite out of the blue I found something that I thought did have quite a good analogy to the structure of yours, so I'm dropping the link (http://obsessive24.livejournal.com/301558.html) in case you're interested. I think there is a connection in how the narrator is the girl, but the first verse is about a man, and how the POV can still be fixed on the girl even though visually she's the less important element in the segment, by just continuing to draw the eye back to her in a few key moments.

[carla-scribbles.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. I'm a bit speechless. And yeah, I think I've managed to recover about half of everything (although I've spent most of these last two days alternately cursing my own name and going "AAGH DAMMIT that flower is withering two frames off the beat, I can HEAR it." Mostly as an excuse to avoid the fact that I have three storylines I could be fitting into my second verse, and room for two, and the one that's essentially a footnote to the actual plot is the only one that involves any actual shots of my POV character... is this why vidders drink?

-- but oh. Oh. Oh, breakthrough. I'm not telling the story ABOUT CASS, I'm letting Cass tell the story about her family. Oh, okay, I KNEW that, I just didn't know it.)

And that vid is stunning. Wow. And yes, I definitely see what you mean about the first verse -- it's definitely about Mal but River is there, watching, and he's kind of included in her consciousness. I'm not sure I can do precisely the same thing here, because so much of the verse is about him isolating himself from her, but in this latest draft I'm trying bracketing it with shots of her, like quotation marks, and we'll see how that works, I suppose?