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

[maidavids.livejournal.com]

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

Comments

[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...