31 Jan 2013 09:34 am
Festivids 2012 Reveal!
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frayadjacentIt's festivids reveal day! Or at least, it will be when you're reading this. Or maybe it is much later by now. Anyway, my first ever festivid was "Sons and Daughters", a Whale Rider vid for eruthros.
Happy Festivids!
Title: Sons and Daughters
Source: Whale Rider
Vidder: fray-adjacent
Song: "Sons and Daughters" by The Decemberists (edited)
Length: 2:56
Characters: Pai, ensemble
Content Notes: About the support and empowerment that characters offer each other.
Download: zipped 92 Mb H264 mov, subtitles file included
Streaming Password: daughters
This was the first time I edited a song for a vid, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I discovered editing music isn't as hard as I thought, and I also discovered I prefer audio editing in Final Cut, where I can more easily match up the wave-forms, than in the music editing software I was using (Audacity).
I also made this usinglaurashapiro's shiny source tutorial, another first. I was pleased with that too, though it took a while for me to find export settings in which the final vid did justice to the shinyness of the source. Hence the huge file! Next time I might size down the number of pixels just a bit while keeping a relative high bitrate? It's still trial and error, especially when I'm vidding source other than NTSC 4:3.
The process: choosing the music was hard, as I was torn between this song and "Comes and Goes" by Greg Laswell. (Actually, first I considered "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth", until I realized that song choice would be a dead giveaway to the...five or six festividders who've seen some of my other vids.) I ended up editing both and listening to them six million times each until finally deciding that, lovely and touching and viddable as "Comes and Goes" is, it's kind of generic thematically in such a way that it works for tons of different sources. In fact, I know the song because I saw a Buffy vid to it. Then again, what I liked about it as opposed to "Sons and Daughters", which has a pretty uplifting sound throughout, is that it lent itself to delving into the sad aspects of the film as well. Still, in the end that vid would likely have ended up more or less rehashing the plot; I prefer "Sons and Daughters", which aimed to draw out the community/family support element of the movie. Besides, how could I resist "Sons and Daughters" seaside imagery?
The second half or so of the vid fell into place pretty easily, but I futzed a lot with the beginning. I liked the idea of using the final scene of the community sending the waka on its first trip to sea as a framing device for the whole vid, because that scene so encompasses the entire community supporting each other to build a better future together (it also works well with the lyrics, of course). Beyond that and introducing the characters, I wasn't sure what to do, so I just aimed to focus on the above two elements. In retrospect, I wonder if it might have been a good idea to include a bit of Koro's leadership training for the boys. That aspect of the film might have been a little tough to introduce because it's both empowering -- to those boys, at least to some extent -- but also *disempowering* to Pai and other girls because they are excluded. In the end it could have worked to show that Koro didn't entirely have the wrong idea -- he was trying to build the skills and confidence of a new generation and teach them their history, which is good; he was just approaching it in a patriarchal way. It could have worked along some of the more war-like lyrics. In the end I decided that including those elements might have just been confusing, and to instead show show community-oriented, multi-gendered and multi-generational events such as the childrens' performances during those sections of the song. I'm not a pacifist, but I sort of like the idea that the village's way of "taking up [their] arms" is by supporting and teaching each other.
eruthros.Happy Festivids!
Title: Sons and Daughters
Source: Whale Rider
Vidder: fray-adjacent
Song: "Sons and Daughters" by The Decemberists (edited)
Length: 2:56
Characters: Pai, ensemble
Content Notes: About the support and empowerment that characters offer each other.
Download: zipped 92 Mb H264 mov, subtitles file included
Streaming Password: daughters
This was the first time I edited a song for a vid, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I discovered editing music isn't as hard as I thought, and I also discovered I prefer audio editing in Final Cut, where I can more easily match up the wave-forms, than in the music editing software I was using (Audacity).
I also made this using
laurashapiro's shiny source tutorial, another first. I was pleased with that too, though it took a while for me to find export settings in which the final vid did justice to the shinyness of the source. Hence the huge file! Next time I might size down the number of pixels just a bit while keeping a relative high bitrate? It's still trial and error, especially when I'm vidding source other than NTSC 4:3. The process: choosing the music was hard, as I was torn between this song and "Comes and Goes" by Greg Laswell. (Actually, first I considered "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth", until I realized that song choice would be a dead giveaway to the...five or six festividders who've seen some of my other vids.) I ended up editing both and listening to them six million times each until finally deciding that, lovely and touching and viddable as "Comes and Goes" is, it's kind of generic thematically in such a way that it works for tons of different sources. In fact, I know the song because I saw a Buffy vid to it. Then again, what I liked about it as opposed to "Sons and Daughters", which has a pretty uplifting sound throughout, is that it lent itself to delving into the sad aspects of the film as well. Still, in the end that vid would likely have ended up more or less rehashing the plot; I prefer "Sons and Daughters", which aimed to draw out the community/family support element of the movie. Besides, how could I resist "Sons and Daughters" seaside imagery?
The second half or so of the vid fell into place pretty easily, but I futzed a lot with the beginning. I liked the idea of using the final scene of the community sending the waka on its first trip to sea as a framing device for the whole vid, because that scene so encompasses the entire community supporting each other to build a better future together (it also works well with the lyrics, of course). Beyond that and introducing the characters, I wasn't sure what to do, so I just aimed to focus on the above two elements. In retrospect, I wonder if it might have been a good idea to include a bit of Koro's leadership training for the boys. That aspect of the film might have been a little tough to introduce because it's both empowering -- to those boys, at least to some extent -- but also *disempowering* to Pai and other girls because they are excluded. In the end it could have worked to show that Koro didn't entirely have the wrong idea -- he was trying to build the skills and confidence of a new generation and teach them their history, which is good; he was just approaching it in a patriarchal way. It could have worked along some of the more war-like lyrics. In the end I decided that including those elements might have just been confusing, and to instead show show community-oriented, multi-gendered and multi-generational events such as the childrens' performances during those sections of the song. I'm not a pacifist, but I sort of like the idea that the village's way of "taking up [their] arms" is by supporting and teaching each other.