vidding_livejournal_ark2 | It's Christmas and I've finally made a video to Night Before Christmas

maidavids.livejournal.com posting in

Night Before Christmas has been my research area since 1999, and I've collected antique editions of the poem. Since I've been playing more with still images of late, I've taken the opportunity to put many of those images to a version of the Christmas poem by The Trail Band.
http://www.iment.com/maida/keepthissecret/songvids/xmassong.htm#visit

This is a unique video that would be great to spread around at this season. I'm really pleased with how it came out.

There are mp2 (260 MB) and mp4 (36 MB) videos, but this is where the mp2 quality really matters because it holds up so much better over the dissolves.

I'm also starting a data area in which much of the research data I'm building with the New Zealand professor will come out next year to support his pamphlet on authorship attribution. To try it out, I'm using a database that didn't provide any good information for us, but which is fun to play with - a color-coded, alphabetical list of every word in every poem by Clement Clark Moore, Henry Livingston, and Night Before Christmas.

Interestingly enough, the frequent uses Moore makes of words from the Christmas poem almost all appear in his Saratoga poem (a teeth-clenching horror of a poem), written many years after the original publication of Visit from St. Nicholas. Henry, on the other hand, uses many of the words and base rhymes (such as belly/jelly), many years (1787) BEFORE Visit's publication in 1822.

http://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/henry/data/countablepoems/merge/

The last clips of the video are from a letter that Henry Livingston wrote to his soon to be wife, Sarah Welles, in 1773. When we were first researching the authorship, Don found that this letter was the earliest written instance of the term "Happy Christmas." Some 35 years before the poem was ever published in the Troy Sentinel.

Hey, it's better than reading the phone book!

A very Happy Christmas and Holidays, Mary

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cupidsbow.livejournal.com

That's pretty amazing! Happy Christmas.

From:

maidavids.livejournal.com

My thanks, cupidsbow. It seems like forever I've wanted to do that video. SO much harder than just working with moving video. I usually do a vid in a day and this one took two. Back in the days of video tape machines, vids took about 4 hours. Maybe it's all the new twiddle time.

But thank you again for watching, and glad you enjoyed it!

Happy Christmas! Mary

From:

cupidsbow.livejournal.com

Wow, you're a fast vidder. I'm amazed.

It takes me at least three days to cut a 2 min vid, and that's not counting all the prep and SFX and stuff. It usually takes me a minimum of three weeks from planning to final render. 2 days! Holy moly. :)

From:

maidavids.livejournal.com

Two days start to finish is very unusual for me. One day is the norm at least 85 percent of the time.. My plans are a few scribbled notes, if that.

When Caren Parnes came for one of her overnight marathons, I made Sherlock Holmes' Arbiter in two hours before she woke up. And that was millions of tiny cuts.

Because you couldn't twiddle very much on video tape (constantly worked with VCR repair places to keep reliable variations in my hardware for clip replacement; one frame accurate you can live with; three, nope), it was just a matter of keeping possible clips in your head and grabbing them as needed. I'd make a plan very roughly and be ready to toss it while I worked if something better occurred to me, or a new theme suddenly seemed to be evolving. I always described it as living on my toe tips. When I was interviewed for the book by the MIT researcher, I gave him a suitcase of paper scraps, which was my planning in those days. Someday I have to throw those out.

The way I was working in the 1980's, I could actually hold one entire series in my head. Changing series. That was hard. That's why I'd stay in one show so long. I was always reluctant to lose my mental encyclopedia. For Star Trek, things were pretty easy because I used laser disk source. It was still a pain switching disks, but I could spin to the scene I wanted very quickly.

These days I can't hold a show in my head anymore. I have to rely on search. Probably because I don't stay with any one show for the long stretches anymore. Probably because I'm almost 30 years older. Paul has built me a gigantic file server that holds every series I work with. They include audio now, which still seems miraculous. And it makes searching almost painless.

Most of the time I work without a plan at all. That's because changing is relatively easy now. I think of vidding more as sculpture. I zone out and let instinct take over. I really have edited in my sleep. And if I screw up, I haven't lost a lot. The way I work with stills is MUCH harder than working with video because the effects want to unravel as I make changes and I can't let the effects get too far unraveled. Also the effects change my timings so immensely that twiddling the dissolves to make things work to the music is much harder and means a lot more twiddling to get the timings right.

When I was writing movie scripts, I planned obsessively. Took all the fun out but it guaranteed I wouldn't have to throw away major work.

Music videos are more fun just because they can be made on the fly..

I now work with AVID for editing and Photoshop for graphics work. Rendering can be done at any time after I've laid in a clip or an effect, so I frequently render as I go so that I can see clearly what I'm doing. For the Night Before Christmas video, I mentally divided the poem into four parts and polished by part.

Tell me more about how you plan and whether you work left to right to completion or work with whole passes through the whole song over and over again. And what systems are you using?

Best, Mary

From:

cupidsbow.livejournal.com

Thank you so much for sharing this. I find your process fascinating. I do sometimes make videos by the seat of my pants, and enjoy it very much, but that was more typical when I first stared and was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing.

I've been vidding for a few years now, but I feel like I'm only just hitting my stride as a vidder. I know my tools well enough now that I don't have stop and google how to do things every five minutes -- that used to take up a fair bit of time.

It's not the main thing, though. My favourite genre to vid is constructed reality, and I find that just can't be done without a lot of planning. I also don't have a lot of free time to vid, due to work. I mostly make things for fests at the end of the year, and just one or two other projects throughout the year. I love vidding for fests -- I find that having to work from someone else's prompt takes me in directions I'd never have imagined, and that really excites me as a creator.

Here's an example of my work -- it's my most ambitious vid to date, and probably my best known: Movin' On (SPN, Dean/Castiel, PG-15) (http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/377947.html).

The prompt was actually for fiction, but the recipient had ticked the "vids okay" box, so I took her prompt for a race-car AU and made Movin' On.

In the case of this vid, not only did it have multiple sources, but I had to visually invent the red car. The biggest compliment I got when I showed it at a con earlier in the year was when someone said, "I stopped watching Supernatural after season 5, so I didn't know Castiel got a car!" That was such a thrill, that the seven cars I'd used actually fooled them into thinking there was a red car. :)

Anyway, I make a lot of constructed reality vids, and many of them need additional footage than what's in canon. For these kinds of projects, there are several stages:

Planning: I need to have a story in mind before I start to vid, so I know what footage I'll need, and then source both the canon and any additional footage. I need to find music that suits the project, and sometimes, spoken word, or audio effects too. I need to convert footage (and sometimes audio) into something which will cut together -- that can take a week or more, depending on the number of sources, their dimensions and the condition they are in (sometimes I need to do a lot of filtering and repair work to get something useable which matches more contemporary footage -- older stuff tends to be quite degraded and have poor colour). At this stage I also usually start thinking about titles, special effects and so on, in case I need to create extra stuff or learn how to do things. Often it's needed, in order to create the illusion that things are all happening in one 'verse. In Movin' On, for instance, I decided to use the split frame effect, in order to hide that the people and cars were not actually ever in the same shots; I didn't know how to do that, so I needed to google it. Sometimes I use masking to hide things, or add animation, so I need to create the masks or images I animate. I often have elaborate title sequences (because there are so many sources), and I have to create the art for all of that. The look and feel all needs to match the genre of vid I'm making, so I'll often need to find fonts and so on.

cont...

From:

cupidsbow.livejournal.com

cont...

Editing: Once I have most of my audio, source footage and art ready, I can start to edit. I start with the audio, editing the song down. Personally, I think the sweet spot for a vid is around 2:30 mins, so that's what I'm aiming for in most cases. I'll usually mix any other audio in the vid project itself, but I do the first edit of the music on its own and then export it as just one file -- this means I'm less likely to accidentally move music clips on the timeline for the vid. Then I start editing the visuals. This is usually a 4-5 track process: main track, transparency track (for overlays or tricky cross-fading effects), another effects track (for things like the split frames in Movin' On), title track, and a disabled track that I use to hide the "signed" version of the vid while rendering an unsigned version.

I tend to cut from left to right, working from a very rough plan scribbled over the lyrics (if there are any), and listing possible scenes in the different sources. I have a vidding library for major fandoms -- a Word doc with annotations on each episode noting scenes I'm interested in; I add to this with every vid I make in that fandom, and it also includes the settings I used to convert the footage, so I can make any newly acquired eps match previous conversions.

The actual editing is much more of a gut thing, as I'm never sure quite how all the different stuff will cut together, so I try out different stuff, and throw the plan out the window if needed.

Although I mainly work left to right, I quite often jump to random bits of the song and vid those out of sequence, if I get a good idea. I render a lot as I go, to make sure effects are working and the different sources look okay together and don't need additional effects work (like colour correction).

Revising: For constructed reality vids, I often spend as much time in revising (or more) as I did in the initial editing. This is because it's harder to get it to hang together than a regular vid -- you can't rely on the audience reading in associations with the visuals you've chosen, so they have to make sense in context in their own right. I send it out to 2 betas and get them to tell me where it doesn't make sense. And then I tighten it, fix problems etc.

Rendering and hosting: Then I usually need to render multiple copies - unsigned for the fest in HQ; signed in HQ and smaller for downloading. I upload to YouTube and whatever filesharing site I'm using, upload the cover art to my scrapbook, and create the splashpage post on LJ and DW, and more recently AO3.

Then, if I send it out to a con, I often need to re-render to their specifications.

I primarily use Paint.NET and Sony Vegas 11, with NewBlue Titler Pro.

In all, it takes at least three weeks of pretty solid work. I can make a quickie, one-source vid in less time, but it still takes me a few days at least, if I already have all the footage converted.

I am getting faster with practice, and as my library of converted source material grows. But I'm still amazed you can make a vid in a day, especially as your vids are watchable -- I love your Get Smart vid to Secret Agent Man.

From:

maidavids.livejournal.com

I LOVED your description of your techniques. Blew my mind. I love your concept of an intellectual puzzle that you'll dive down to China to solve. The level of work you'll go through to solve that problem is awesome. I've never used more than 3 video tracks to weave something together and your patience takes my breath away. What do you do as a profession? With that patience and ability to hold complexity, I think you could do absolutely ANYTHING.

I've printed out the Youtube address and will bring it up when I'm awake tomorrow. Right now I've awakened to walk the dogs and am still a bit fuzzball.

Everything I do video-wise starts from emotion. I have a gigantic CD collection that's been digitized. Songs that move me deeply go into a projects directory where I listen over and over to all of them and constantly change their names to see which shows attach themselves to which songs. Shows have their own styles of music. Man from Uncle is a lot of classic rock, for me, that I couldn't bring over to NCIS. Songs that don't attach themselves drive me batty. And I play them over and over waiting for them to finally connect. I've been waiting for a Van Morrison song since I ran a conference in New Orleans in 1992 or 3. I stood in a doorway and listened to a group play Boys of Summer over and over again and was completely hooked.

So at one level what I do is create a bunch of videos that I would actually use as an audio set as I wander the room.

A show grabs me for some emotion. Whenever I switch to a new show, it's all about having to pull that emotion out and stuff it into a video before anything else. I know that I'm losing interest when I'm choosing songs for intellectual or humorous reasons rather than emotional.

My notion of planning has more to do with underlying structure. Whenever I wrote a short story, I could outline it the way you would do a sentence in fourth grade. Music videos held those same structures for me and I could outline a song in the same way I would a story. But once it got to that stage of the intellectual dominating the emotion, I usually knew I wasn't long for that fandom. When I'm awake I'll try to list the songs that I find hold up the most for me.

Scripts. I desperately wanted to leave IBM Research because it was 180 miles each way to drive from the house. We had to keep an apartment in NY. I thought I'd never get my husband to leave there but then a manager we couldn't stand transferred to the group Paul had escaped into and I knew I had a chance. We got out on the last great early retirement deal. And it really was great. One of the things we got was retraining money. Paul never used his, just went to work right away. I took a class in editing from the editor of The Pawnbroker, then took a class in screenplay writing. I was completely and totally hooked. What I loved was the box. Music videos I love because you work within a small box. Screenplays are identical. Their structure is absolutely rigid, something I didn't believe until I went to see The Fugitive with a stopwatch.

The structure breaks down into 4 parts of 15 scenes each, giving you 60 scenes at 2 pages per scene, or 120 pages and 2 hours for the movie. You start with a single sentence summarizing the movie, then 4 sentences, then build the 60 descriptions and work them out until you have a narrative description of every scene. Then you switch to dialog mode and turn the narrative into crisp dialog with exciting descriptions. The whole process takes 6 weeks and that's exactly what it took for my first script.

The next thing was getting an agent. Turns out that query letters are mini scripts. They, too, have a fixed format and, like the script, you deviate at your peril. Agents get so many scripts that if you do ANYTHING wrong, it gives them an excuse to toss you. So you need to be rote enough to get through the door. THEN you have the chance to excite them.

From:

maidavids.livejournal.com

Cont.

It took me many weeks to write that query letter. My script was about a vampire whose family fears he'll be outed by a scandal rag, so first I wrote the newspaper articles to produce the scandal rag. Tilted it onto a page and cut out an empty space for my query letter and worked within that. I followed form perfectly, trying to be brief and clever. Sixteen agents asked to read the script. Six offered to represent it. I went with John Grisham's NYC literary agent, who subcontracted me out to Writers & Artists for a 2 year/no way out contract.

I did write another script that they liked better than the first, but I was still hearing nothing about either of them. One of the agents I'd turned out became a best friend and he offered to get the Forever Knight people to read a TV script for me. We contacted my NYC agent and got permission for him to represent me for a TV script. Then he got Parriott to agree to read a script between seasons. Once I got the go ahead, I started planning the script.

TV is VASTLY different than movie. Whole different structure. But easier in that you have all the previous seasons to use as models. I did 2 things to prepare: first, I transcribed between 5 and 10 episodes. Word for word. I'm a speed typist which helps immensely. I used a stopwatch and that gave me the range of structure for each part of the script. As long as I worked within that timing, I figured I'd be safe. Then I purchased a bunch of scripts for the same episodes. That gave me the exact words they used for everyone for descriptions. Because I had both the planned speech and the transcribed speech, I could tell how a particular actor preferred to say lines and could adjust to be natural for the actor.

Then I went through the exact same process I'd used for the movie script, working down from the single sentence. My friend expressed my script to Parriott on Tuesday and Parriott contacted him on Thursday to ask about my credits. Unfortunately, he was looking for a Canadian writer to meet the balancing act the contracts required of major people for an episode, and an American didn't help him. He had also tossed all the characters I'd used, though I didn't know that until the new season started.

I really don't like writing fiction because I love the script form so intensely. Whenever I start to write novel-form, I find myself slipping back into script-form. I use writing to deal with emotions. And a music video lets me deal with that emotion faster than a story does. A friend lost her son this past year and she wrote me that one of my Sherlock Holmes songs was wiping her out and she was playing it over and over again. She was using it for what she emotionally needed just then, and that's how my videos have been used from the beginning.

I never use credits on any of my videos because they're not about me. They're about emotions. And I want nothing to get between that emotion and the viewer. Not even me.

I'm very excited about watching your video and will write by tomorrow evening. I never watch other people's videos, and yours will be the first I've watched in decades. But your style is so different than mine that I think it's safe for me to watch, so I'm thrilled. Thanks for that wonderful description of your working style. You've given me such great pleasure with it.

Best, Mary

From:

maidavids.livejournal.com

Paul tried to download your larger video and finally succeeded, though he was only able to get the video without audio. He'll try again when he gets home this evening. We live in a very restricted computer environment as Paul is extremely paranoid about potential viruses. I've seen him just sit at the computer and watch people trying to attack our computer systems. Gives him great pleasure that they can't get in. We've never had any problems from outside sources so, whatever he does, seems to work. I, however, live in a VERY restricted world as a result.

But, I HAVE seen your video, and that tells a lot, even though I can't judge the beat choices. I did recognize Smoky and the Bandit before your credits, so that pleased me a lot. Because I knew you were using different cars, I was able to tell that they WERE different but if I hadn't been expecting it, I"ll bet that would have slipped right by me. Only once did I notice a blue car morph into a red car. I applaud your choice of spit scenes. And the use of that pure white line between the pieces was wonderful. Simple and elegant. Using that same white line surrounding the small rectangle of eyes was brilliant. Maintained a theme, had a purpose, and didn't distract from the idea you were transferring. There were two transitions I would have argued ardently against if I'd been your beta as they didn't have a purpose, didn't maintain a theme, and did distract. But only 2 is pretty darn good!

I was distracted by all of your textual graphics. Whatever mood I was in, the graphics jerked me out of. I understand that they were a shorthand to explain the cleverness of your work, but they diminished it instead of added to it. I guess what might have worked for me was if you were able to end with a blast of full screen transitional color change and come out on the other side with something like a fade to black and then a scrolling graphic quick STORY of what you were accomplishing and the identity of your sources. On the other hand, I'm saying this without hearing the music, and don't have good judgement of how I'd react to the graphics set to the music.

All in all, what dazzles me most was your cleverness in the use of the split screen and the boxed overlays. They enhanced the storytelling perfectly.

Take a bow. Well deserved.

Best, Mary

.

From:

cupidsbow.livejournal.com

Thank you! I'm about to get on a plane, and won't have reliable internet at the other end, so can't respond more fulsomely, the way I want to. Just wanted to let you know why I went silent mid-conversation. Have a great holiday season.