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

[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.