vidding advice, tools, and canon-compliance

These are all questions from thirdblindmouse, via the vidding meme.

What's the best vidding advice you've ever come across? (goodbyebird also asked this)

To watch and study vids that I love, and figure out what makes them work for me. In my early days of vidding I did this often, and for a few vids I even watched the whole thing basically frame by frame and took down notes. That was how I realized, for example, that Bachelorette's intro goes through all the themes explored in the rest of the vid, basically giving an overview of the vid in the first 20 seconds. And that Nicky uses a fade to black between each section of the vid -- and nowhere else, I believe.

I don't do this as much anymore, except that I recently studied shati's vid "Boulevard of" while making "Become You", because I wanted to emulate both some of her cutting techniques, which I love, and the way she continued to revisit specific moments in the show throughout the vid as a way to drive home the themes.

I also remember reading the advice to read vid meta, which I would do anyway because it interests me. It helps with excitement and inspiration as well as learning tricks of the trade.

Do you use any tools, like clip notes or storyboards?

It depends on the vid. For example, my next vid in Xena Vid Series from Hell has a complete timeline of clip notes -- an extended marker describing what will go in each section. And I believe it does not yet have a single actual clip on it. Conversely, my current WIP, an Orphan Black vid, has no markers and a ~70% full timeline because the structure of the song is such that it's kind of obvious -- to me anyway -- what goes where, and because I've been able to import all the episodes directly into Premiere, which has changed my workflow quite a bit from what I usually do.

I used to always storyboard but I haven't done that in a while.

I also keep a vidding journal -- a trick I learned from kiki_miserychic -- where I scribble down ideas as they come to me. I carry it everywhere! It is an excellent tool and I highly recommend it. It occurs to me that I could also use a notes function in my smartphone for this, but personally I like having the written journal.

Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your vids being canon compliant?

Hmmm. I'd say I keep my vids compliant with my head-canon, which generally would not directly contradict canon or even stray much from it. But part of being in fandom for the last few years is that I've gotten much more comfortable with the general taking liberties with canon, especially if femslash is involved. So I might do it someday?

Actually, I for a couple years I had "Fire Door" saved as a Veronica Mars AU-ish vidsong. The idea was for a season 1 AU of sorts where in the end Veronica rejects both Logan and Duncan, along with all the other 09-ers. But I didn't envision it taking liberties with canon so much as a criticism of canon. At any rate, it's now and forever a Tyra vidsong, and I'm quite happy with it that way.

ETA: it occurred to me that another way to interpret the question is whether I use clips in their canon context, which is maybe a more useful way to think about this for vidding -- as opposed to writing fic, which this meme was originally designed for. And for that, I am very much happy to use clips out of context, but they'd still be supporting my reading of canon, as opposed to going totally AU. In fact when I am clipping/vidding I sometimes get too visual and don't consider the context of the clip enough. If it's not a well-known clip that's fine, but for famous moments it's almost impossible to divorce the clip from its context. I'm better at this than I used to be but my first vid or two contained some very famous clips in moments where they didn't work at all.