Perfecting an Art
An Essay On Vidding
By: Big Mama G
DISCLAIMER: Everything I discuss herein is entirely of my own personal
opinion. No names are mentioned, even for positive examples. This is not a
‘let’s stroke our egos’ or ‘let’s point fingers’ essay. This is an essay about
the vidding process, what I believe to be things that make bad videos, and ways
to improve an artist’s work.
Introduction
I have always seen vidding as an art form. Just like art, we are making visual
representations of something about our fandom. Whether that representation is a
‘ship, a theme, or simply eye candy is no matter. All vidders strive to
entertain others for the roughly three and a half minutes they have a viewer’s
attention. Just like art, however, there are those who can paint masterpieces,
those who can sketch comics, and those who struggle making a stick figure. A few
of us are born to be vidders and know what to do the first time we make a vid
(but we don’t talk to those people, you know). The rest of us are constantly
working to improve our skills one vid at a time. If your first vid looks a lot
like your twentieth vid, you’re either one of those Mozarts of the vidding world
or you have not been working to improve your craft. Drawing a stick figure one
hundred times will still net you a stick figure. The only way to work up to an
individual’s full capacity to make art is to move on to drawing three
dimensional images. In the United States we say that making art is an inborn
talent and some have it, others don’t. If that is the case, then how come so
many adults in Japan have the ability to draw nicely? Because they are taught
how to draw and work constantly over a long period of time to improve their
skill.
I have been thinking about all of these things and I realized that many of us
can’t or are not trained to spot mistakes or inconsistencies. I have taught one
person how to vid from the ground up and have slowly given them advice,
criticism, and encouragement and they have greatly improved over the course of
several vids. I have also helped one vidder get started and met someone who made
very few mistakes their first time out. In return, I have learned a great deal
about vidding. Because I had to find mistakes and understand what was going
wrong to help them, I learned not only how to find mistakes in my own work, but
how to express in words what they are exactly and ways to correct them.
In writing this essay about what I’ve learned, I decided to go all out and do
research on vids. I went on YouTube, searched the keywords ‘Harry Potter slash’
and randomly watched videos. I have watched dozens of bad fanvids and my mind’s
eye is hurting. But I came up with ten mistakes I saw over and over again, a
general idea of what one can do to get better, and some thoughts about vidding
and fandom. In fact, I went overboard and researched my own work.
The following lists and thoughts are entirely opinionated and I am by no means
an expert on video making or an expert on anything, really. I just see what I
myself like and I see what makes people like some videos and not others.
Ten Common Mistakes in Vid Making
1.) Talking head syndrome. This is when you see the movie
characters talk and have a conversation but we don’t know what they are saying
because of course it’s a music video. Using clips of characters talking is fine,
even encouraged when you construct your video. In fact, it’s almost unavoidable.
But watching a scene of Harry, Ron, and Hermione talking at the library for ten
or more seconds is not desirable. This mistake goes along with mistake #8
further down. It is very distracting to watch the things because we have seen
the movies and know what they are talking about, which distracts from the theme
of your video. It’s okay to have clips of characters talking, but don’t overdo
it.
2.) Reallllyyyy slllooowww clllipppsss. This is where you slow down a
small segment of clip so much that it looks ridiculous. Beginners tend to do
this because they more than anyone else have trouble finding clips for their
vids and want to extend the small scene to fit several seconds because they
don’t know what else to put. Slowing down and speeding up clips is a very tender
process. Slowing down a clip a little bit can make a seemingly uninteresting
clip a smart clip choice. A little bit of advice: Try to NEVER have overly slow
or overly fast clips in your vid. Even if the clip you put after it doesn’t feel
right, it’s better because viewers would rather see a doesn’t-fit-quite-right
clip that goes with the music than watch Harry frown for ten seconds. It’s
psychological, I think, because when we hear the music we expect the clips to
flow with it and not suddenly slow down.. Which brings me to my next topic:
3.) It’s a techno song, but it looks like a love ballad. A fast song with
slow moving clips, or a slow song with clips going way too fast. You want your
vid to have momentum, to move the way your music does. The more experienced you
get the more able you will be at timing your clips to correspond with the music.
This is the reason that beginners should probably do slow or medium-paced songs
for their first vid. This is also one of those problems that affects some
vidders and not others. Some vidders are naturally able to synch music and
motion while others have to consciously work hard to keep their vid flowing.
Every vidder has their strengths and weaknesses.
4.) Flickers. A term I use to describe the following phenomenon: When you
create a movie (I’m talking movie maker here, I’m not sure if it’s true on all
video editing software) and watch it, you see a nanosecond flash of some other
scene and the result looks like a flicker. This happens when you cut a clip at a
certain point and a piece of whatever frame came before it or after it is still
attached to the clip you cut out. The movie files do not have certain stop and
start points and that little .01 second of clip can look pretty ugly on your
finished vid. On my “Cup of Coffee” vid someone said that the flash of clown in
there was spooky. Confused, I watched the vid and realized she was talking about
an accidental flicker I had kept in the vid. It had Harry standing before the
Bogart/Clown and the next clip was of the clown and it got mixed in with the
shot of Harry I originally wanted. It’s kind of liking knitting a pretty sweater
and you see that one thread has unraveled. That one flub breaks the pattern.
5.) Look maw, it’s slapstick! So you want to do a video that’s quirky. So
you take a funny scene like Draco waggling his eyebrows and repeat the clip five
times to look like hectic eyebrows. This is what I call slapstick, manipulating
scenes for humorous effects. Now, sometimes you can use slapstick to your
advantage, like if you want a really funny vid and you have the infamous Harry
playing with his wand scene and you do that five times to look like… going for
the euphemism here, “polishing his wand”. Now, some people will like that kind
of stuff, others will not. But using slapstick in normal circumstances is a
killjoy and will more often than not cause your viewers to moan (in pain, not
pleasure). Use with extreme caution and always ask yourself “Can I be just as
funny without manipulating a scene to do it?”
6.) I think I’ve seen this before… Clip repetition is no one’s friend.
The surefire way to get the viewer to think that you are not creative is to use
the same clip twice in one vid. Double goes for using the same clips for the
entire chorus each time it occurs. Now, this isn’t the same as using the same
scene or even the same event. It’s perfectly all right to use the Buckbeak
slashing scene several times… just don’t use the same shot. Okay: Harry walking
away from Draco, then later on in your vid Harry fixing to walk away from Draco.
Not okay: The walking away scene four times during a vid, each time the artist
sings “And then I walked away.”
7.) Literally? Sometimes a vidder can be guilty of being too literal.
What do I mean by this? For example: You’ve decided to vid the song “Up Where We
Belong” and you decide it would be wonderful to have Harry ascend to meet Draco
for the remembrall fight. Now, sometimes it can be clever to use a really
literal scene. For this topic, all I can really give by way of advice is to
think about what you’re doing and decide if it’s appropriate. Chances are that
if you are doing “Up Where We Belong”, you will not want to use that remembrall
scene because your song is bordering on the cheesy side already and there is no
need to make it even cheesier.
8.) Am I watching the movie or a fanvid here? Ever watch a fanvid and a
single scene goes on for about half a verse or so? It always has me go, “Wow,
that was a good clip for that one line… five minutes ago when the clip began.”
Dragging out a scene is very common. A viewer will get impatient quickly if one
of these is in a vid and sometimes it can be a deal breaker.
9.) There was a clearance on special effects. So you have a shiny video
editor and it has all kinds of effects/transitions/borders/doodads that you’d
think would be SO cute in your fanvid! What to do? The answer: Try not to use
them at all. Yes, those cookie cutter transitions on movie maker or the cool
borders from Sony Vegas are tempting, but they will make your vid seem silly. In
fact, your best bet is to be as simple as possible. It’s great to use black and
white to designate something that happened in the past. Not so great to use the
color spectrum effect to have Snape’s face change into several colors. He does
that just fine dealing with Harry’s stupidity, you know. Abusing special effects
is common and can give your video a cheesy and overdone look to it. Flashing
twenty times to indicate a really fast pop beat will not make your vid look hip.
Instead it will hurt your viewer’s eyes and make them stop watching to regain
their sight again. These video makers come with all of these effects to sell
their product, not because people actually need them. All a good vidder needs is
the movie clips and a small bag of trusty transitions/effects that are simple
and move your vid along.
10.) The definition of ADHD- And I will always love you….Oh look, an
owl! This is probably one of the most controversial things in this little
list because it is entirely subjective. You’re watching a vid and the song says
one thing and you’re feeling an emotion when a strange clip is inserted and you
don’t know how in the hell it fits. Example: Most of the vid is going pretty
good until you a hear a lyric that says “The moon will protect us” and they put
a clip of Harry bumbling as he asks Cho to the ball. Now, the vidder may well
understand why it was put there, or they may just have put anything at all
because they didn’t know what else to put. I actually came upon this in a video
summary during my research: “The song and the plot of the fanvid have nothing
common, I just love it!” The song, students, has EVERYTHING to do with the
fanvid, even if the song doesn’t even contain WORDS. Song choice should be the
most important aspect of vid making. Sometimes I search through dozens of songs
and find not one to vid and other times a song comes on and like a bolt of
lightening I get inspired for a vid. No matter how it happens, the song is
integral to the vidding process. Never vid a song you hate for a request unless
you owe the requester money.
A Few Bits of Advice
* Find someone to beta your vid. As an English major, I can tell you that
the hardest thing to do is to proofread your own paper. We often don’t see our
own mistakes, mostly because we know what we mean. Find someone to ’proofread’
your work, preferably someone you never talked to or someone you trust to tell
you the truth. You don’t need a cheerleader who says “It was great!” and nothing
else. On the flip side, don’t use someone who will tell you every damn mistake
you’ve made. The healthy way to critique is to tell them a couple of things you
like about their vid and a couple of things that you didn’t like. That way you
don’t break someone’s spirit.
* Make little ‘tester’ vids. You’ve got a vid idea and you shy away
thinking that it may be a little overzealous or for some other reason. You don’t
want to vid the whole thing because what if it is a stupid idea or something. So
make a small vid, maybe 30 seconds to a minute in length, possibly using the
part of the song that you feel is going to be the best part of the whole thing.
Then find someone who will look at that small bit and tell you if they liked it
or not. Then find someone else. Get a few opinions and then decide whether to do
it or not. In fact, if the opinions are negative and you still think it’s a
great idea, do it anyway. Even if no one else likes it, you like it and maybe
your next one can be the Next Great Vid.
* Vid a song without words. I think the turning point in my own personal
vid making was when I made a vid out of an instrumental song for the Smallville
fandom. Instead of focusing on the words and finding clips to go with the song,
I was suddenly using my imagination and telling an easy story with a certain
feeling to the thing. What’s even better was I became conscious of the music
itself and used the music’s rises and falls to arrange my clips to fit the mood.
Now when I make my vids, I no longer place clips according to when a voice cuts
off or when singing starts. Instead, I sometimes don’t even look at my computer:
I close my eyes, tap the beat and by instinct quickly cut my clip according to
what the music does. It’s a great way to discovered skills you never knew you
had and expose any patterns that you are guilty of. What’s the best thing about
it? There is almost zero possibility of making the ADHD mistake because the
viewer has no words to attach the clip to. It’s like abstract art, you can just
throw yourself into it like an artist dipped in paint throwing themselves at
canvases.
* Sell it. You worked hard (I hope) on your fanvid and you’re damn proud
of it. But due to poor presentation no one seems to watch the thing or comment
on it. In my research I stumbled upon the most amazing vid and it had only three
lonely comments. I began to wonder why and I saw that, for one, their tags were
simply “Harry Potter videos” and I guessed that they may not have posted about
the vid to a community, forum or website. Always make sure that the title of
your vid is eye-catching because it may be the only thing casual browsers of
vids may see. If you title your vids by the title of the song you used, shorten
long titles up and if the title of the song is short or doesn’t fit the vid you
made, don’t be afraid to make up a title. Vid summaries are the second most
important thing. Long or short, summaries all need to have at least three things
in common:
1. They accurately describe what you are presenting in your
vid.
2. They are original and unique.
3. They are grammatically accurate. No one will take “pleaz
watch my vid u guyz!!! XDXDXDXD” as a serious summary.
* Know that being popular doesn’t mean that your fanvids are good. Upon
researching I viewed a few of the more popular vids and was surprised to see
that they often made one, two, all ten of the above mistakes. On the reverse
side, I viewed vids with little or no comments, originally intending to find
some of the worst vids on earth there. I stumbled across a wonderful vid that
made no mistakes and the whole vid had a wonderful mood and feel to it, like I
was transported right into a H/D fanfic where there was a coming war. Most vids
that were good fit into the semi-viewed range, about 500 or so views and a few
comments. Like I said in the disclaimer, I’m not writing all of this to make
people popular or to point fingers (mostly because when you point one finger,
four others point right back at you). I’m writing this because I see what I like
and I’ve had two other fandoms in which the best vidders make none of the ten
mistakes. Just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean that we as vidders
should be lax about it.
* I think I suck, I’m quitting. Don’t give up! NO ONE is going to get it
right the first, second or even twelfth time. Heck, sometimes we don’t even KNOW
we make these mistakes or we know but we treat it lightly. After I did all the
research, I did a little personal research and studied my own vids. What I found
was humbling and it was quite scary that I wrote this little essay and I’m just
as guilty as anyone. First vid: Seven flickers, a repeated clip and an ADHD
clip. Second vid: an dragged on scene, ADHD clips, a repeated clip and lots of
flickers. Even a vid I thought was good used cookie cutter transitions and had a
couple of glitches. But I’m not quitting, because I know that each vid I do gets
better and better because I catch mistakes before they happen and have others
tell me if something is wrong. The best thing I ever did was tell myself, “You
are not infallible, but you’re not a hopeless loser. Keep trying, you’re having
fun and maybe one day you’ll reach that Mona Lisa you’ve been trying for, maybe
you’ll just make a few people smile.”
* What else can I do to get better? Like always, keep trying. Practice
may not make perfect but it’ll get you there faster than staying static. There
are lots of tricks and tips for those who want to get better, but here are a few
things that come off the top of my head:
Random Musings
Problems I see in the fandom in general
I’ve vidded for three fandoms now and two of them were television shows
(Smallville and Supernatural). The biggest problem I see in the Harry Potter
fandom is not lack of talent or creativity, but hackneyed ideas. Understand that
there are only (at the moment) four movies out there and thousands of fanvids.
Your job as a vidder is to make something unique and to use what little footage
is available in which to do it. The Harry Potter fandom also doesn’t respect
vidders the way the other two fandoms I’ve vidded for do. Most likely because
the main medium for their fandom is video and ours is book. I think this is a
shame because there IS talent out there and people who do amazing things with
the movies… they just get swallowed up by the sheer number of vids out there.
It’s very hard to become a well-known vidder in the Harry Potter fandom. In
fact, I’d be hard-pressed right now to easily name five. But I could name a
dozen well-known Harry Potter authors. We’re in the minority, people, but we’re
not to be shoved in the closet.
The two different types of vidders
I’ve always had a private belief that there are two types of vidders: Those who
want to tell a story and those who want to show emotions. Now these are broad
categories and some people have qualities of both, but there are symptoms of
each type. A vidder who wants to tell a story often picks songs with very direct
lyrics and will often have big summaries of their videos. These are very
interesting because it’s like reading a fanfic and is quite enjoyable. Vidders
who want to show emotions often pick songs with dubious meanings and will tend
to have shorter summaries because there is not much to explain. It is more
dangerous to be this type of vidder because not everyone will be able to
experience the emotions you are trying to convey. Both types of vidders can make
wonderful (and horrible) fanvids.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember is to enjoy yourself. Often it is veteran
vidders who struggle the most. They have done enough so they can’t use the
newbie card and they often struggle with making the next vid better than the
last. You should always aim at improving, but don’t be so caught up in making
your vid perfect that you start to hate it. Vidding is supposed to be fun and
interesting. When the joy is gone, a vidder is done for. If you can improve a
little bit each time and still have that same drive you had when you first
started, then you, my friend, are exactly where you need to be.
