Question: Preparing to vid.

[paraka]

Hi everyone,

I have a general question about how people prepare themselves to start a vid. When I first started vidding, if I had a vid idea I'd open up my editing program and just start inserting clips (not always with the best results :S). I'm getting into the habit of writing notes now before I even open an editing program. I try to think of what the storyline is going to be, and then divide the song up and make notes about what clips/scenes as well as what story arcs go where.

I'm still new at it though, so I was wondering what other people do in preparation, and if you have any advice for pre-editing work that can be done.

Thanks!

Comments

[maidavids.livejournal.com]

Completely agree that you can build the video from detailed notes or just wing it and, even if you start with detailed notes, you often find you need to change as you go. Even my earliest videos from 20 years ago were done with very detailed notes. I had this huge bag of scrap paper, and somewhere in it were the notes for almost every vid I've done. When Caren Parnes would come to vid with me, she also brought great notes for us to start from. Once I got into digital vidding, I used the computer for all of my notes. Even if I don't put a plan up with my video, there will always be a rough one on my home computer corresponding to each video.

I tried building one video with notes on how I was taking notes, to try to show what my current process was like. Forever Knight, Dust in the Wind
http://www.iment.com/maida/keepthissecret/songvids/plans/dustinthewind.htm

Even if you don't feel you win by making notes, viewers like to know what episodes the clips are from, and notes can make that information available to them.

Working without notes makes me think of sculpting in clay. You can push and prod the video until it meets some inner vision you have.
Best, Mary

[sabaceanbabe.livejournal.com]

Heh. I started out with completely detailed outlines, as in how many seconds a musical phrase or a lyrical sequence lasts and a description of the clip and which ep it's from. As I make more vids, though, I've totally gotten away from that. The last two I've made, which I think are my best, there was no real planning at all -- I'd simply play the song, just listening to it, and the images came. The strongest ones got put in right away, others I had to think about a little more, but I already knew in my head where the vid was going and what I wanted to show.

Kinda backwards from your experience. :)

Vidding is a creative endeavor, though, and for me creativity is too organic a thing for a strict outline, which is one of the things I've learned this year (I only started vidding this January, so I'm a newbie, too). I probably should have taken a cue from the way I write, which is that I have a general idea of where I want to go, but then I just sit down at the keyboard, take a deep breath, close my eyes, and let the words flow.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Normally a vid starts for me when I'm listening to a song and realise it could be about a character or a theme on a show. It often takes the form of a dumb one-liner, "Buffy's a waitress." Then there's a long period in which I'll just listen to the song and think about whether it really is a good match to the concept and how. During this stage the concept will often change substantially. Then I'll start having more specific ideas about what visuals to use, where the climax of the song is and what will go there and how to start, how to set things up. As I get more ideas for what to put in different sections of the music and what the overall pattern will be I'll start to think about cutting down the song, figure out the beat structure and what can be omitted or transposed. I don't start clipping until I've edited the song because I can't really determine the structure until then. I don't do outlines or storyboards, possibly because transposing mental pictures into text is difficult to do accurately (I wish I could draw). I've also found that until I'm at the stage when I can hold the whole structure in my head I'm not really ready to vid it. This is probably a very inefficient approach though.

[keerawa.livejournal.com]

I spend lots of time on the bus. Commuting time = vid planning time.

As I listen to songs on my iPod, every now and then, one will start screaming: "I'm a vid about so-and-so doing such-and-such in that fandom over there!" If my head space is sufficiently free of other vid and plot bunnies, I'll listen to it, instead of locking it up in a small dark space for later.

Typically a few lyrics or instrumental moments will jump out at me with appropriate clips. Then I'll start filling in around those over a week or so, eventually coming to conclusions like, "Oh, this whole verse is actually about his fear that he's a danger to his friends."

By the time I actually get a chance to sit down at a computer and start audio editing and clipping, I've got it mostly set out my head. Oddly enough, I usually lay down the clips from beginning to end at that point, even though they didn't occur to me in that order.

Of course, some parts don't work out like I'd hoped, or the clip I was thinking of doesn't actually exist, so that's the messing about part. And I OFTEN end up completely vidding parts of the song that I later cut. (Thank you betas!)

I still tend to think of vidding as telling a chronological story; that's a bad habit I need to break.